The Tavernier Stones (36 page)
Read The Tavernier Stones Online
Authors: Stephen Parrish
“Let’s not panic,” Sarah said. “We’ve spent all of two hours in the church, and most of the time it was dark. I suggest we come back tomorrow at noon, sit in a pew like good Catholics, and wait to see what happens. Tomorrow is the summer solstice. Whatever is supposed to happen at noon on the summer solstice will happen tomorrow while we’re sitting in a pew.”
“Tomorrow is also Sunday,” John reminded her. “And a mass is scheduled from eleven to noon. The church will be full.”
“So much the better. There are lots of other people searching, and more than a few of them have gotten far enough to identify Idar-Oberstein as the likely location. Tomorrow we’ll see how many show up in the church. We need to keep our eyes peeled for anyone who looks interested in more than the mass.”
“Better safe than sucking hind tit,” David quipped. He looked directly into John’s eyes. “Or any tit at all.”
Gerd Pfeffer was in his pension on the Kirchweg, reading about Eratosthenes. The sieve was the piece of Cellarius’s puzzle that continued to give him problems.
Pfeffer was also doing his best not to reach for the telephone and check up on his wife. His insecurities prompted the desire to do so; his ego dampened it.
There was something cartographically odd about Eratosthenes’s world map. Rather than draw his parallels and meridians at regular intervals, he drew them so they would pass through major geographical features. A parallel went east-west through Alexandria, for example. He called it “the Parallel of Alexandria.” Others went through Rhodes and Thule, but none appeared at ten degrees north and south latitude, or twenty degrees, and so on.
Likewise, the meridians: one ran north-south through Alexandria, but none appeared at equal distances east or west of it. Thus there was no systematic geometric grid on which to locate
all
geographical features.
all
geographical features.
Cellarius himself had done something similarly odd on his Palatinate map. Although he spaced his parallels and meridians at regular intervals, he didn’t space them discretely north of the equator or east of a prime meridian. He didn’t even label them. The result was an arbitrary graticule superimposed on the terrain, as if Descartes himself had happened upon an ungridded map and wished to study its sinuous features as analytic functions. Pfeffer suspected this aspect of the map was somehow related to the Sieve of Eratosthenes. But how?
He snatched up the telephone and dialed his home number. No one answered. Sometimes the only way to affect justice, he decided, was outside the context of the law.
Meanwhile, Frieda Blumenfeld perched on her second-floor balcony, waiting for Mannfred Gebhardt to show up. If she stood on her toes, she could just see the Volkspark and the rose garden next to it, for which Rosenstockstrasse was named. The garden’s sculpted hedges and grand old oak trees shaded colonies of mosses homesteading its flagstones and shallow steps.
She watched as Gebhardt approached on foot. He passed the rose garden, oblivious to the roses and to her presence on the balcony above him. His gait was carefree; when he reached her house, he sprang up the front porch steps with uncharacteristic flourish. And there wasn’t the usual hesitation of several seconds before ringing the doorbell. He must have gotten laid, Blumenfeld reasoned.
She went downstairs to the living room while Hannelore showed Gebhardt in. As he entered the living room, he handed her a tan envelope. She noticed he was wearing an amethyst crystal pendant.
“What’s in the envelope?” she asked.
“The genealogy report you asked for.”
She handed it back. “What does it say?”
“She already had one son named Richard, who was five years old when she was convicted. The Weinbrenner name is, in fact, still common in Idar-Oberstein. The baby she was carrying at the time, also a boy, was adopted by an Anabaptist clan in the Palatinate, most of whom eventually emigrated to America.”
“Really.”
“Pennsylvania, America, to be specific. Weinbrenner named the baby before she died. Rather than use her own last name, she gave it the name Graf, apparently in honor of the father’s profession. Johannes Graf began a dynasty of sorts in central Pennsylvania, a dynasty that thrives to this day.”
“Interesting. Thank you. Now,” she rubbed her hands together briskly, “some wine. To celebrate my last day of poverty.” She opened a cabinet and scanned the rows of bottles.
“You still haven’t told me why you needed the information.”
“I was curious. As I am about that pendant you’re wearing.”
Gebhardt shrugged. “Just something I found.”
“In Idar-Oberstein?”
He inspected his fingernails. “Could be.”
“You know, a twelve-year-old girl is missing down there.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes. Her picture was in the paper. Erika. Pretty little thing. Looks remarkably like someone else you knew … intimately. The whole town is acting as though the witches have returned.”
“You don’t say.”
“As a matter of fact, Erika went missing right around the time you were there doing your genealogy research.”
“Forty thousand others were there too, Frieda.”
“So they were.”
“What do you say we just focus on our mission tomorrow and leave my personal life off the agenda?”
Blumenfeld smiled. “Forgive me.” She removed a bottle from the cabinet. “I’ve been saving this Pouilly-Fumé for a special occasion. Of course, it really should be consumed with some oily fish. Herring or mackerel. Or,” she turned to Gebhardt, “do you just order ‘white wine’ with your ‘fish’?”
“I wouldn’t mind sampling…a glass of that.”
“One ought to eat the foods that are famous in a given wine region whenever one drinks that region’s wine. You haven’t lived until you’ve tasted fried eel from the Gironde with a Bordeaux. Heaven! And here we sit in Mainz.”
“I notice you only poured one glass.”
“Oh, my dear Gebhardt, you wouldn’t appreciate this. Do go downstairs and get yourself a bottle of something from the Mosel.” She chuckled. “Give me one more day, and there’ll be some poisoned wine down there you’ll have to be careful not to grab by mistake.”
In his hotel room on the south side of the Marktplatz, Barclay Zimmerman recalled Tavernier’s famous words once more:
No. 4 represents a diamond which I bought at Ahmadabad for one of my friends. It weighed 178 ratis, or 157¼ of our carats.
No. 4 represents a diamond which I bought at Ahmadabad for one of my friends. It weighed 178 ratis, or 157¼ of our carats.
Accompanying the note in Tavernier’s travel account was a drawing of a smooth, irregularly shaped diamond. Next to it was a drawing of the same diamond in its new incarnation, after Tavernier had it cut. Now shaped like an egg with a large natural at one end and covered with numerous flat, polygonal facets, it weighed 94½ carats and was reportedly flawless, or “of perfect water,” in Tavernier’s words.
… which I bought at Ahmadabad for one of my friends …
That’s as far as the record would go. Stones purporting to be the Ahmadabad, including a pear-shaped specimen weighing almost 79 carats, were eagerly sought and traded by collectors hoping reliable provenance would someday come to light.
Zimmerman was convinced the genuine Ahmadabad was somewhere within walking distance of where he stood. The alternative was unacceptable.
He looked out his window at the Marktplatz. He could see the Felsenkirche towering high above. Tucked under his arm was a
Chicago Tribune
newspaper. Its front page article named the Felsenkirche as the probable location of the lost Tavernier stones, based on a reference to the Bible found in Cellarius’s code. It pointed out a glaring discrepancy in Cellarius’s depiction of the steeple.
X
, the newspaper claimed, marked the spot.
Chicago Tribune
newspaper. Its front page article named the Felsenkirche as the probable location of the lost Tavernier stones, based on a reference to the Bible found in Cellarius’s code. It pointed out a glaring discrepancy in Cellarius’s depiction of the steeple.
X
, the newspaper claimed, marked the spot.
Zimmerman watched the crowd in the Marktplatz. It seemed to grow by the minute. The whole world was about to converge on Idar-Oberstein.
John waited in his room for David and Sarah to return from what they called “window shopping.” Despite his insistence that his knowledge of German made him the best shopping companion, David had stubbornly refused to listen, and he and Sarah had left without him.
He paced the room, which was only long enough to allow four steps in one direction before he had to turn around again. After a few minutes, he realized he was behaving like a caged animal, and stopped.
He looked at himself in the full-length closet mirror. His hair had gotten shaggy in recent weeks. And a cigarette dangled from between his fingers, an innovation adopted only yesterday, renewed from the “wild oats” period of his youth. He watched his image in the mirror as he took a drag without inhaling and blew the smoke back out in a thin, bluish-gray stream. It was like a scene from a movie. He was not sure he recognized the man in the mirror.
When he finally heard two pairs of feet coming up the stairs, he went into the hallway to greet them. David and Sarah were both smiling.
“That took you long enough,” John said.
“We got distracted.” David reached for Sarah’s hand and held it up for John to see. She was wearing a large diamond ring.
“You’ve got to be kidding.” John stared at David in disbelief. “You robbed a jewelry store?”
“‘Robbed’ is a strong word. We found the most feebleminded salesman this side of the Atlantic and couldn’t pass up the chance.”
“Don’t you realize how stupid that is? We’re looking for the greatest cache of gemstones in history, and you risk it all to steal a lousy ring?”
Other books
In the Arms of a Marquess by Katharine Ashe
The Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook by Dinah Bucholz
Her Officer in Charge by Carpenter, Maggie
Fugitive Prince by Janny Wurts
Captive of Gor by John Norman
Vendetta by Michaels, Fern
Miss Dower's Paragon by Gayle Buck
Go Long! by Ronde Barber
Death Before Time by Andrew Puckett
CARLOTA FAINBERG by Antonio Muñoz Molina
