Eventually David’s flashlight revealed a large, open space about ten meters in front of him. As John neared it, he was able to rise up to his full height. When he stopped next to David and Sarah, he faced the entrances of three chambers that comprised a suite.
“It’s hard to tell,” David said, “but I think we’ve descended to street level, maybe even lower.”
The chamber that opened to the left of the corridor was filled with clay amphorae. The dust-covered pots jammed wooden shelves that spanned the walls from the floor to the ceiling. Spider webs sagging with age looped from handle to handle and enshrouded the bas-relief images decorating their bellies.
“That was no doubt the wine cellar,” David said.
Another chamber, larger than the first, lay to the right of the corridor. It contained simple furniture, suggesting it used to be a bedroom. The rotted wooden frame of a bed was recognizable in one corner, as were a nightstand, a high-backed chair, and a dressing table. On the dressing table sat a mirror whose glass had flowed so much over time that images reflected in it were severely distorted. What must have once been a rug made a large rectangular stain on the floor.
Behind the headboard of the bed, visible only because the wood of the headboard had decomposed, was a hole in the wall big enough for a person to crawl through. John shined his flashlight on the hole. The scratch marks around its circumference suggested it had been carved meticulously by hand with a stone, dull knife, or eating utensil.
“Someone was trying to escape,” David observed, “and hiding her efforts behind the bed.”
“Maybe one of Wyrich’s mistresses,” Sarah suggested.
“Or an unenthusiastic witch,” John said.
The third and main chamber was directly ahead. John took a deep breath and followed David through the entrance. Would they find treasure in there—or ghosts? He wasn’t sure which would unsettle him more.
As soon as David stepped out of the way, the first thing John noticed confirmed his worst fears. Sprawled on the floor, just inside the entrance, was a complete human skeleton. Its jaw had fallen slack in a macabre grin, and its eye sockets were staring vacantly at the ceiling.
“The cutter,” David said. “May I introduce Jakob Langenbach.”
“How can you be sure?” John asked.
David bent over the pile of bones and removed something from the dead man’s right fist. He held it up for the others to see: it was a large, faceted red gemstone. “The missing third of the Tavernier ruby,” he said. He put the stone in his pocket.
The skeleton lay on its back in what John judged to be a choreographed position: its legs were pressed close together, its right arm rested straight at its side, and its left arm was stretched out perpendicularly to its frame, apparently pointing toward the center of the room.
A dagger had settled inside its rib cage, leaving no doubt about how the man had died.
John surveyed the chamber. All the surfaces—walls, floor, and ceiling—were tiled over and painted with various pagan themes. The room was cubicle; each surface had the exact same number of tiles: twenty by twenty made four hundred.
Johannes Cellarius was in this room.
John spent a minute studying the pagan images. They were drawn in heavy black outlines, almost like old woodcuts. Some were filled in with color, but the color had faded over time. Fairy crosses and pentagrams were common themes, as were crescent moons, stars, and planetary disks. Vegetation was highly stylized. Animals, mostly cats, frogs, and snakes, paraded across the checkered surfaces.
Naked maidens ceremonially drew down the moon. Crones encircled steaming cauldrons. More brooms appeared than John would expect in a decorative illustration, and there were more representations of Satan than he would want.
Cellarius gazed at these illustrations.
And then there were the Baphomets. The largest covered the far wall, opposite the room’s entrance. In an unlikely but nevertheless convincing illustration, the head of a goat sat atop the body of a human female. The creature had long, curved horns, satanic wings, and a pair of breasts swollen to fetish proportions. It sat cross-legged, with a serpent coiled in its lap.
“Now there’s something you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley,” Sarah said.
John looked at her, then back at the image. “Or in an underground tomb.”
Blumenfeld allowed Gebhardt to walk a few paces ahead, his .45 Colt revolver drawn. He checked each row of pews, scanning the length of wooden seats as though expecting to find people lurking in them, perhaps even happily grinning people clutching handfuls of gemstones. Instead, he found the place empty.
To Blumenfeld’s relief, he reholstered his gun.
She went to the altar to get one of the long brass candlesticks that stood on either side of it. Returning to the church entrance, she jammed the candlestick between the wooden door and its stainless steel handle, rotating it so that it crossed the doorframe and blocked the effort of anyone trying to open the door from the outside.
Then she and Gebhardt approached the open sarcophagus and took in the scene at a glance. A crowbar lay on the floor next to the tomb, and the tomb’s lid lay in several broken pieces a few feet away. Little deductive reasoning was needed to figure out what had happened.
Gebhardt leaned over the side and sniffed the air. “It’s stale, but it’s moving. Wherever this leads, it breaks the surface at the other end.”
Blumenfeld took a quiet step backwards, reached behind her back, and removed a pistol hidden beneath her suit jacket. The pistol’s barrel was outfitted with a silencer.
Gebhardt was still looking down the staircase. “I’m ready if you are,” he said. He was about to climb over the side and begin his descent when she stopped him.
“Hold on just one second.”
When he turned to face her, he saw the pistol in her hand. He looked into her eyes. His expression first registered shock, then confusion, then anger. Then fear.
“Frieda …”
“Your search has ended, my friend,” she told him. “You have finally outlived your usefulness. And your days of harming little girls are over.”
Gebhardt reached for his shoulder-holstered gun, but Blumenfeld fired three times in quick succession. The pistol jumped in her hand each time she pulled the trigger. The shots sounded like dull, abrupt sneezes.
Gebhardt’s legs buckled. He fell on top of one of the neighboring sarcophagi, rolled off, and landed face-down on the floor.
Blumenfeld grabbed her former partner by the ankles and dragged him to the front of the altar, out of the way and beyond the view of anyone entering the church—or emerging from beneath it. Not a bad place for a sacrifice, she thought, stepping in disgust over the prostrate figure.
She saw something glinting on the ground next to his neck. It was the amethyst crystal pendant he had “found.” She unclasped the chain, wiped it clean of blood on his shirt, and hung the pendant around her own neck.
Then she rehooked the “no trespassing” rope and returned to the sarcophagus. Descending the stone staircase, she cocked an ear and listened.
Deep within the rock, John and his two companions inventoried the main chamber with roving flashlights. A large stone slab squatted in the center of the room, resting low to the ground on sandstone boulders that served as table legs. The slab, the room’s obvious centerpiece, resembled a crude altar.
Lying on top of the slab, covered with a heavy blanket of dust, were a double-bladed flint knife, various goblets and dishes, a corroded ball-peen hammer, and a large iron pot. Resting on the floor next to the slab was a solitary straw broom.
John saw something that looked like a box. He reached over and brushed the dust off the top, then stepped back, startled.
“What is it?” Sarah asked.
“A Bible.”
Surrounding the altar was a circular array of nine sandstone monoliths that reminded John of Stonehenge. They seemed to grow out of the floor. On close inspection, they turned out to be r
emnant rock left untouched when the chamber was cut. The slender stones, each about three feet high, curved and pointed toward the altar as though mimicking a human rib cage. They were topped with candles glued into place with their own melted wax. The wax was dyed black.
David walked from monolith to monolith, lighting candles. They sputtered with dust and the reluctance of waking after a long sleep. The flames grew slowly and filled the room with a soft, flickering glow. The flashlights went off.
Here and there on the floor were clay amphorae, and when John knelt down to inspect them he found the now-familiar Michelangelo signet engraved on their bellies.
Sarah blew the dust out of several of the goblets on the altar, then lifted them to her nose.
“Can you smell anything?” John asked.
She shook her head. “Maybe a trace. Oils, herbs, incenses. It’s hard to tell what they used to contain.”
David brushed cobwebs from some of the monoliths and exposed fairy crosses carved on their surfaces in bas-relief. “Now we know what the fairy cross really stands for,” he said. “It’s intended to parody the Christian cross.”
“And the Bible,” John said, pointing to where it sat on the altar, “was no doubt being read backwards or upside down.”
“Then it’s pretty clear the purpose of this room was …”
“… satanic worship,” Sarah finished for him.
A large, awkwardly shaped object hanging from the ceiling caught John’s attention. He went to the side of the altar and looked straight up. Above him was a crudely fashioned bell, its metal sides hammered together from many individual pieces, each one so tarnished now that it was impossible to guess their original composition.
The bell hung from a rope wound out of raw hemp. The rope, in a high state of decomposition, ran through an iron ring embedded in the ceiling, then across the ceiling to the near wall, where it passed through another iron ring before running down the wall to a spool. The rope looked weak enough that a mere tug would reduce it to dust. John took one quick step backwards, to get out from underneath the dangling hunk of metal. He glanced again at the ball-peen hammer on the altar and understood its purpose.
He looked at the others. They were scanning the room, searching vainly for inspiration. He studied the image of the Baphomet again and felt for the sheet of folded cardboard tucked beneath his shirt.
Sarah asked, “So where are the lost Tavernier stones?”
Before John could open his mouth, an answer came from the entrance to the chamber in a throaty female voice:
“You are about to figure that out for me.”
THIRTY-FOUR
PISTOL IN HAND, THE heavy-set woman with the long nose and iron-gray hair who had sat in their pew that morning stepped into the chamber, smiling as though having found things exactly as expected. She surveyed the skeleton, the monoliths, the Baphomet, and finally John and his companions.
“Allow me to congratulate you,” she said. “To get this far is quite an achievement.”
Her accent was thick, but her grammar was sound. John guessed from her inflections that she was from somewhere nearby, somewhere in the Rheinland.
“I see you have found Mr. Langenbach.” The woman nodded toward the skeleton on the floor. “His resolution is no longer a mystery.”
She stepped farther into the room. The three backed into a corner. John looked at the 9mm in the woman’s hand. Its silencer, a dark gray cylinder that effectively doubled the length of the barrel, gave it a deadly appearance.
He heard David mutter, “If you have any religious strings left to pull, now would be a good time.”
The woman walked around the altar and approached the three. Her eyes scanned Sarah’s figure, resting uncomfortably long on her hips and breasts. “Nice to see you again, my dear.” She raised her hand and stroked Sarah’s hair, tucking a lock behind her ear, combing a few loose strands into place. She caressed Sarah’s cheek with the tips of her fingers. As she lowered her hand, she allowed it to graze Sarah’s breast.
“What do you want from us?” Sarah demanded.
“Fair question. I want to know which one of you is going to find the lost Tavernier stones for me.” She waggled her pistol in Sarah’s face. “Is it you, my dear?”
Sarah only stared blankly at her.
She aimed the pistol at David. “You?”
“Yes,” David answered. “Kill me—or any of us—and you’ll never have them.”
The woman shook her head. “No, I happen to know that is not the case. I did not achieve my status by allowing amateur liars to fool me.”
“I may be a liar,” David admitted, “but I’m no amateur.”
“I’m not talking about you, I’m talking about him.” She swung the pistol’s barrel over and pointed it at John. “This fellow here knows exactly where to find the stones.”
“I don’t know any more than you do,” John countered.
“You lie.”
“I tell the truth.”
“Look at me and tell the truth.”
John didn’t. He stared at the floor. He couldn’t bring himself to peer into those eyes.
“You see?” the woman said to David. “He knows where they are.”
“We need to conduct a systematic search of the three chambers,” John insisted. He was sure the woman wouldn’t shoot them. They needed to stall long enough to create an opportunity to disarm her.
“We don’t have time for that,” the woman said.
“We have all night.”
“Do you want to get shot, young man?”
“If you shoot us, you won’t recover the stones. Ever. You want to stand around and wait? We can wait too; we have no place else to go. Think we’ll get hungry? So will you. Think we’ll get tired? How long can you keep that gun raised to our heads? There’s nothing you can do. Nothing.”
The woman bit her lip. She looked around the room as though searching for an idea. Finally she noticed the spool on the wall and the rope that threaded up and around to the bell. She grabbed the spool’s handle with her free hand and wound it down a few turns. The bell lowered to within arm’s reach. Turning back to the altar, she picked up the ball-peen hammer.
John watched the bell sway under the threads still holding it up. He glanced at Sarah; her eyes were shut, and she appeared to be gritting her teeth.
“There is something I can do,” the woman said. “I can let everyone know you’re here. Imagine what the residents of this town will do to you when they catch you in this chamber, in the middle of the deep, dark night. So, for the last time, where are the lost Tavernier stones?”
The three were silent.
The woman lifted the ball-peen hammer above her head and struck the bell.
John covered his ears. The metallic clang resounded through the chamber. Its throaty echoes pounded on the tiled surfaces and beat mercilessly on his eardrums.
“Now all you have is a few minutes,” the woman hollered above the din, “if you want to tell your grandchildren you found the greatest treasure in history. Minutes, that’s all. Solve the puzzle—before townspeople flood this room.”
She struck the bell again. And again.
Gerd Pfeffer, who was already making his way through the darkness to the church with an empty satchel slung over his shoulder, stopped and listened for a few seconds. The ringing sounded distant and muffled, as though it came from deep inside the earth.
“Verdammt!”
Barclay Zimmerman ran out of his hotel room and into the Marktplatz. Throughout the town of Oberstein, lights were coming on as people woke to the sound of the ringing bell. It was past midnight, and some of the people spilled onto their front porches and balconies, rubbing their eyes in confusion. Then it seemed to dawn on them, and Zimmerman heard voices carrying anxiously from house to house, penetrating the calm night air: “Jemand läutet eine Glocke!”
Somebody’s ringing a bell!
Men trotted across lawns, buttoning their shirts as they ran, as thoug
h they comprised a minuteman unit that had been ready for such an event for the past three centuries. A mother appeared on an upstairs balcony, snatching her curious children into her arms. “Oh, mein Gott, nein,” she said. “Nicht so etwas.”
John thought his eardrums would burst. The old woman continued hammering the bell in a tantrum. Her eyes darted from David to John, John to Sarah, skeleton to bell, all the while gleaming like headlights at the front of a driverless vehicle.
It’s time to put a stop to this, John decided. He removed the sheet of cardboard from under his shirt and unfolded it, then went around to the other side of the altar and stood next to the skeleton. When the woman saw what John had in his hands, she stopped hammering.
The bell continued to vibrate with a low hum. When it finally became still, the sudden contrasting quiet made the atmosphere in the chamber tense.
John held the cardboard up to the candlelight. It was perforated with holes that channeled square and rectangular patches of yellow glow onto his face and chest. He unceremoniously kicked the skeleton out of the way. Loose bones scattered across the floor, making hollow clicking noises as they rolled and tumbled. The dagger fell out of the skeleton’s ribcage and came to rest at Sarah’s feet. Sarah looked down at it, then up at the woman. But the woman was watching, shaking her head.
Positioning himself where the skeleton’s ribcage had been, John held the cardboard grille at arm’s length and aimed it at the wall toward which the skeleton had pointed, the same wall that was decorated with the large drawing of a Baphomet.
He hesitated.
Everyone stood motionless, waiting to see what would happen next. What happened next was John lowering the cardboard and calmly tearing it into pieces.
The Tavernier Stones: A Novel Page 26