The Tavernier Stones (34 page)

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Authors: Stephen Parrish

BOOK: The Tavernier Stones
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Some of the facial expressions were highly exaggerated. Some were outright grotesque. Fingers stretched far beyond their natural means, lending a surreal quality to poses and gestures. The perspective was awkward throughout; more than a century would pass before artists of the High Renaissance learned to arrange space realistically on their canvases.
The central panel of Christ being raised on the cross was the eye-catcher of the group. The Savior, a bloated figure swathed in deathly pale flesh, gazed down at his tormentors with an expression of bottomless sorrow. Disciples wept, soldiers jeered, women clutched one another in supportive embraces; all participated in a dynamic tableau that had rightfully earned the anonymous painter a reputation for being years ahead of his time.
John felt, as he did every time he viewed an image of the crucifixion, that the artist was saying far more than words could possibly convey.
“A-
hem
.” Someone behind him cleared his throat loudly and pointedly. John turned to find the ticket salesman beckoning with an impatient finger, ordering him to leave the altar. He returned to his pew.
More people entered the little church. They whispered in respectful silence among themselves, the whispers contributing to a low, sibilant din.
“The elevation” still mystified John.
Somebody
must have been familiar with the term, but nobody had been willing to surrender any information. Were people merely keeping clues to themselves? It couldn’t mean the mountain itself—the one into which the church was built. The feature was too big; there was no reasonable way to measure a man’s length from it or to know what point to measure from. But Cellarius’s clues all pointed to the church, and the church was in the rock. It was the only elevated, intact structure in town.
John felt a sudden urge to just give up and go home, and he responded briefly to the impulse by actually rising a few inches from his seat before plopping back down again. What business did he have, anyway, lurking in the house of God, searching for treasure? And what business did he have scheming to remove that treasure, should he find it?
He knelt on the pew’s padded floor beam and covered his face with his hands. A shiver ran through him, all the way down to his Anabaptist roots. Adventure was one thing. Stealing from a church was altogether another.
The nave was filling up again. Someone sat down to his right, and immediately afterwards he felt the presence of someone to his left. Probably he should go back to his room and study some more. He removed his hands from his face and turned toward the right to excuse himself. The person sitting next to him was David Freeman.
“What the hell are
you
doing here?” John demanded.
“Shh. Don’t swear in a church, goddammit.”
John looked to his left. The person flanking him was Sarah Sainte-James. She made the sign of the cross and winked.
“So,” John said, turning back to David, “you found me.”
“Yeah, we left Philadelphia yesterday and arrived in Germany this morning. Got the stuff yet?”
“Would I be sitting here if I did?”
“As religious as you are … maybe. Maybe you’re begging forgiveness before skedaddling to Rio with the loot.”
“Hardly. How did you know I was in Idar-Oberstein?”
“Sarah knew a travel agent with the right contacts. Apparently, only one John Graf boarded a flight out of Philadelphia in the last few days.”
“Oh … how did you know I was in the church?”
“I can read a map, same as you.” He stood up. “We’re due for another review session. I assume you have a hotel room waiting for us.” As he turned to leave, he fixed a stern glare on John. “And next time you schedule a field trip, make sure you apprise your partners in advance, okay?”
Sarah waited until David’s back was turned, then smiled warmly at John. As she passed him, her arm brushed against his, the touch lasting a second longer than chance contact would suggest.
 
David and Sarah took a room next to John’s in the Pearl Hotel. That afternoon, the three got together in John’s room and spread his research materials on the floor.
“This is everything I’ve collected since I got here,” John said. “You can go through it if you like.”
“Have you been through it?”
“Six or seven times.”
“And you found no mention of—”
“An elevation? No.”
“Where are the local maps?”
“Here.” He dug them out of the pile.
“I’m going to look these over,” David said.
“You won’t be the first.”
They spent the rest of the afternoon poring over the materials, occasionally muttering expressions of impatience and frustration. John was happy for the company; getting nowhere was a lot easier with companions who weren’t getting anywhere either. At one point, David asked him, “Did you ever come up with anything new about the grid pattern on the Palatinate map?”
John didn’t glance up from his work. “No.”
“Nothing at all?”
He looked straight at David. “Nothing. At all.”
“Too bad.”
“I have a question,” Sarah said. “We’re working under the assumption the legendary chambers beneath the church really exist, and the stones are somewhere in the chambers. But why were the chambers cut to begin with? The church wouldn’t have created them for witches, and witches couldn’t have made such an effort without the church knowing. Are we rationalizing their existence for our own convenience?”
Glad for the interruption, John picked up a brochure about the Felsenkirche and scanned it until he found the relevant passage:
“‘The castle above the Felsenkirche,’” he recited, “‘now mere ruins on the peak of the rock, constitutes what remains of the former residence of the Earls of Oberstein. In the mid-eleventh century, two brothers named Wyrich and Emich shared power over the region. Both sought the hand of one Bertha of Lichtenburg, but Emich, the younger of the two, eventually won her affections. Wyrich, upon hearing of their wedding plans, pushed his younger brother out a castle window to his death on the rocks below.
“‘Later, Wyrich confessed his crime to an abbot, who instructed him to build a church on the spot where Emich died. According to legend, living quarters were cut out of the rock beneath the church to make a prison for Bertha, and perhaps other mistresses, but the existence of such chambers has never been verified.”
John handed the brochure to Sarah, then picked up a book and thumbed through it for more information.
David studied John’s face. “I don’t mean to be insensitive,” he said, “but those marks look like dog bites.”
John laughed nervously. “It’s just an outbreak of acne.”
“It looks more like an outbreak of rabies.”
“Did you see these pictures?” Sarah asked. She was engrossed in the brochure. “The paintings behind the altar are magnificent. We should have stayed longer and taken a closer look.”
“Glad you think so,” David said. “They didn’t do anything for me. Dammit, John, those
are
dog bites, aren’t they? What the hell happened to you?”
“This one here,” Sarah continued, “the one in the middle,
The Elevation of the Cross
, is really moving. In the face of Jesus, you can see agony and serenity at the same time.”
“Splendid. Come on, John. Out with it. What happened?”
John held his breath. He looked up slowly from the book he was reading. “What did you say?”
“I said, out with it.”
“No, I mean Sarah. What was the title of the painting?”
“
The Elevation of the Cross
,” she repeated.
David snatched the brochure from her hands. “Holy shit.”
TWENTY-NINE
 
“SLOW DOWN,” JOHN SAID. “We can’t be sure that’s the solution.”
“No, we can’t,” David acknowledged. “But it fits, and it’s inside the church, and it’s all we have at the moment. As soon as the sky gets dark, we go back to the church. And we dig.”
John looked outside at the gathering dusk and realized they would be carrying out their new plan within the hour.
As though sensing hesitation in the others, David fished a copy of the solved cipher from the mess on the floor and held it up for them to see:
Extend in the vltimate prone po
ƒ
ition
From the foote of the elevation … … ba
ƒ
keth in fairie lighte
Of Apollo’s reƒplendent apogee
On the feƒtivall of his higheƒt aproche
Then drink from the Sieve of Eratoƒthenes
Sing more songes than Solomon
And deƒcend to treaƒvre
For the gates of Hell ƒhall not prevayle
 
“The text that’s missing is missing between the words ‘elevation’ and ‘basketh,’” he argued. “There’s room for the phrase ‘of the cross’ as well as several more words telling us what basks in fairy light.”
“What
does
bask in fairy light?” Sarah asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe the painting itself. If I’m right, we measure a few feet away from the wall on which the painting hangs. We dig into the floor. We find the lost Tavernier stones. We go home and sleep the carefree sleep of small children.”
“And if you’re wrong?”
“We go back to the drawing board. We’ve lost nothing.”
“That floor is made of stone, you know,” John said.
“I suspect it’s just covered with tiles. We pry a few of them up and the going gets easy.”
“Into solid rock?”
“It’ll be weathered. Or we’ll break into the chambers Sarah keeps reading about. If the treasure’s there, it’ll be accessible. If we find the digging impossible, that means the treasure isn’t there. We either find the lost Tavernier stones or we eliminate a possibility. Either way, we make progress.”
John looked at Sarah, who only raised her eyebrows; then back at David, whose eyes gleamed with confidence. There was no refuting his logic.
 
They left their rooms as the last light was dying in the sky. John couldn’t help feeling like a gunslinger. He followed his two companions out of the hotel and the three walked down the Hauptstrasse abreast, as though playing in an old Western.
Storefronts were dark. Drop-down aluminum gratings shielded plate glass windows from thieves. Streetlights just coming on held the impending darkness at bay but failed to temper a mood of inaccessibility reinforced by all the security in place.
A pick was strapped to John’s back, and a shovel to David’s. Both wore jackets to cover the implements despite the warm night air. Sarah’s purse was full of hand tools. She regarded the two men with a smile and said, “You guys look like a pair of hunchbacks.”
The Hauptstrasse was dormant: a distant car horn, a train chugging out to a neighboring village, and a child crying in an apartment above one of the shops were all that competed with the echo of three pairs of feet making measured but resolute steps toward the Church in the Rock.
Here and there, a light came on behind a curtained window; otherwise, Oberstein showed no signs of nightlife. The town had drained quickly of tourists as dusk had gathered, and the town’s workers had hurried home on their heels; the streets were all but deserted.

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