The Tavernier Stones (31 page)

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Authors: Stephen Parrish

BOOK: The Tavernier Stones
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“Do you like Czechoslovakian food?” he asked.
She looked up at the stranger smiling down at her. “Huh?”
“Do you or don’t you?”
“How the hell should I know?”
David was sharp. David swelled with confidence. David thrived on pipe dreams.
John, on the other hand, was a different breed. He wasn’t necessarily the best-looking guy around, but he thought about what he was going to say before he said it, and he treated women with respect.
And he liked her. Without a doubt.
 
John was thinking about Sarah, a hundred kilometers to the west, in Lancaster. But he happened to be lying naked in Annette’s bed. Next to him, also naked, was Annette.
Still breathing heavily from exertion, he adjusted the blanket to cover his exposed skin. Annette chose to be immodest. She sprang up and tried to tickle him playfully. When he failed to respond, she lit a cigarette and paced the room.
The sight of her ample breasts had, just minutes before, inspired John to babble inanely about her looks, her intelligence, her value to mankind. Now they were just mammary glands. At least, he thought with relief, he had finally—successfully—copulated with a woman.
On the wall of the bedroom was a framed copy of Cellarius’s Palatinate map. This didn’t surprise him; everyone had them now. Annette had stopped in front of the map and was studying it while she smoked her cigarette. John found himself wishing he had enough experience in these matters to exit quickly and gracefully.
“Pretty sloppy,” Annette said.
“What do you mean?”
“He drew one of his point symbols poorly. Come here and look.”
He pulled the blanket up to his neck. “I don’t have to. You don’t know what you’re talking about. Cellarius didn’t use point symbols. He always drew pictorials.”
“Not here he didn’t.” She removed the frame from the wall and brought the map over to the bed. “Look at the church, at the steeple. The two pieces of cross aren’t even perpendicular.”
“It’s a perspective view.”
“Well, if it is, the perspective’s wrong.”
John sat up and looked. She was right. Idar-Oberstein was drawn from the perspective of a viewer high above the town and slightly southeast of it. But the cross representing the steeple of the Felsenkirche was drawn as though viewed from the northwest. The obtuse and acute angles that resulted from looking at right angles obliquely were thus reversed. Why had he never spotted this anomaly before?
“It’s a point symbol,” Annette argued. “There’s no other way of classifying it, regardless of Cellarius’s reputation. And the horizontal beam of the cross should be tilting the other way. So, as I said,”—she adopted a defensive tone—“it’s
sloppy.
”
“Or intentional,” John muttered in a voice that was already far away.
Annette took a deep drag from her cigarette and exhaled it slowly. “Why the hell would he do that?”
Downstairs, the front door suddenly banged open.
“Oh my God,” she said. “Get up! It’s my husband.”
“Your
what
?”
“He wasn’t due back until tomorrow. You have to go.
Now
.”
“Go? Where?”
“There.” She pointed at the window.
John shook his head vigorously. “I’m not jumping out the window. We’re on the second floor.”
“There’s a tree right outside. It’s easy.”
Annette raised the window, and a breeze sent curtains billowing into the room. Footsteps could be heard at the bottom of the staircase.
“I mean it, John. He’s an Armstrong employee. Mid-level management. Heart-attack tenure track. Prone to high temper.”
John threw off his blanket, went to the window, and looked out. There was, in fact, an oak tree in the yard. And one of its branches was indeed within jumping distance of the window. But he didn’t know if he could reach it in his intoxicated state. And even if he could, there weren’t any lower branches he could climb down to once he landed on it.
He looked at the lawn below. It would be an ugly fall. “Others have passed this way before,” he said, “haven’t they?”
The footsteps were at the top of the stairs.
Annette shoved his clothes into his arms. He stepped onto the window frame and perched.
The doorknob clicked.
He jumped with all his strength, letting go of his clothes in flight, and caught the branch with his outstretched arms. The window slammed shut behind him.
His body swung like a pendulum for a few seconds, the bark burning his fingers and palms. He tried pulling himself up to the top side of the branch, but the alcohol had sapped his energy. Instead he dangled, swaying from the effort. He tried again, throwing his right leg up as hard as he could, but almost lost his grip and only managed to scrape the inside of his knee.
He knew then that the only direction he would be going was toward the gravitational center of the earth. And that the earth’s outer crust would get in the way.
Muffled conversation leaked from the bedroom. A man’s voice grew increasingly louder, and John could hear Annette pleading in response. There was a rolling crash, as though a piece of furniture had been kicked over. After that, a long silence.
Then the snarling and lathering of dogs.
John looked down. His clothes littered the ground. The dogs—there were three of them—swept in from different directions, their bodies low to the grass, their shadows appearing as grotesque, cartoon-like figures racing for the trunk of the tree.
Now he knew he had to hold on as long as possible and pray for a miracle. Maybe the husband would go downstairs and Annette could reopen the window. But even if she did, he was already sure he wouldn’t be able to work his way back into the bedroom.
His grip was weakening. Below him the dogs milled anxiously, panting and drooling, watching his every twitch. Light spilling from the downstairs windows glowed in their eyes and stretched their fidgeting shadows across the lawn. John didn’t know the breed, but they reminded him of the cover of a book he had once read:
The Hound of the Baskervilles.
As he shifted to get a better grip on the branch, the dogs whined in anticipation. One of them, shorter on patience than the others, tore viciously at his scattered clothes.
Then, insult upon injury: John heard the squeak of bedsprings coming from the other side of the window. Annette was going at it again, this time with her husband.
He tried to think of a prayer, but he couldn’t come up with one suitable to the occasion. “Dear God, I’ve just had carnal knowledge of another man’s wife, and for that I am truly sorry. To tell you the truth, I didn’t even know she was married. I’m about to plunge to the ground, land in a crumpled heap, and get chewed by a pack of wolves.
Now would be a good time for you to intervene
.”
Hanging by his fingertips, he opened his mouth to yell at the window but stopped short; he would rather die than beg for help from a man whose wife he had just … go on and say it … fucked.
“At least, dear God, please let me get dressed first.”
One of the dogs began to howl, and the others joined in. Their chorus rent the night air. The impatient one dug his claws into the trunk and tried to climb. But he only fell back, rolled once on the ground, and howled even louder.
John bit his lip and choked out a verse from the Bible: “‘And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church.’”
Why, here and now, of all places and times, would he utter such a thing?
The dogs quieted, their tongues lolling. They knew the moment was near.
John’s mind went blank. There was nothing left to think. His palms were on fire and his fingers felt like they were coming apart at the joints. It was only a matter of seconds before he had to let go. At that moment he experienced the sudden clarity of thought that always seemed to come, like the eye of a storm, during high states of emergency.
“‘When it is evening it will be fair weather,’” he cried, “‘for the sky is red.’”
He made one last effort to hoist himself up.
“‘And upon this rock I will build my church.’”
His hands slipped from the branch.
 
Frieda Blumenfeld finished her conversation with Mannfred Gebhardt, turned off the music, then spent several minutes studying her copy of the Palatinate map. So, she thought, Gebhardt hadn’t outlived his usefulness after all. Not yet, anyway.
Outside, the dogs had stopped barking. She went to the window and opened it. The sun was coming up. It was going to be another warm, beautiful day.
She continued the verse from Matthew: “And the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”
 
Barclay Zimmerman made sure all the theater’s doors and windows were closed and locked before carrying his suitcase to the waiting taxi. “‘And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven,’” he spoke under his breath, from the back of the cab.
The cabbie smiled into his rear-view mirror. “We’re only going to the airport, sir. It won’t cost that much.”
 
Gerd Pfeffer was just going to bed after having pulled an all-nighter studying the Palatinate map. He wasn’t at all concerned about getting up in time for work; he was taking a leave of absence, effective immediately.

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