The Tavernier Stones (40 page)
Read The Tavernier Stones Online
Authors: Stephen Parrish
There was no point wondering if his wife had any inclination to dial. The phone, an old Princess model still popular in hotels and pensions, sat motionless and silent on the table as though deep in hibernation. It wasn’t going to ring.
Pfeffer dressed in all black clothes. He blackened his face with a military camouflage stick, set his alarm for safety’s sake, and laid down on the bed to wait for dark.
He knew where the image of the fairy cross had landed, but he didn’t know where the treasure was. The image was supposed to have pinpointed an entrance to the chambers beneath the church. Instead it had stopped above a coffin. Still, he predicted that if others had solved the puzzle, they would go after the treasure tonight.
Therefore, so would he.
Mannfred Gebhardt rode from Mainz to Idar-Oberstein in Frieda Blumenfeld’s BMW, with Blumenfeld at the wheel, staring straight ahead at the road, her mouth clamped shut. Had she intended a successful, uneventful evening, one that would end with the two of them splitting the loot, separating the lost Tavernier stones into two piles, one for her, one for him, she would have spent the time underway bending his ear in preparation, scolding him for his deficiencies, warning him not to outlive his usefulness. Instead she was silent.
Which meant she had some other dénouement in mind.
So did he.
Barclay Zimmerman loaded his 9mm handgun. It had been easy to get. All you had to do was ask the town drunks. For five euros, enough to help a drunk make it through the night, you could have any information you needed.
Zimmerman found a group of them huddled over a case of beer at the train station. Half an hour later, he was in a dingy apartment overlooking the Nahe River, examining German police surplus handguns and miscellaneous lots of ammunition. Fifteen minutes after that, he was the most recent in a long line of owners of a Heckler & Koch P7 and two clips of 9mm ammo.
Twenty minutes later, he was back in his room.
Feinstein deserved a bullet. And no one would complain, not the Philadelphia law enforcement community, nor the gemology industry, nor even Sarah Sainte-James. Sarah deserved far better treatment than Feinstein gave her.
Still, Zimmerman had to admit, they looked natural together when they came out of the church. They looked like a pair.
Freeman, he reminded himself again.
Freeman
.
Freeman
.
Back in his own room in the Pearl Hotel, David calmed himself by practicing the magic trick that would get the lost Tavernier stones through airport security and past the customs officials. Occasionally he glanced up at Sarah, who was still leafing through research materials. Their eyes met once, briefly, communicated nothing, then drifted apart.
He was hungry. It was what he hated most about hotels; you couldn’t just go into the kitchen and make yourself a snack like you could at home.
The trick he practiced was a standard production box, using a shoebox he had found in a pile of boxes behind the hotel. He pulled a table away from the wall, set the shoebox in the middle of it, and placed its lid on the near side, next to the edge.
He held up the box for an imaginary audience to confirm it was empty. He did the same with the lid, to prove nothing was attached to it—nothing visible to the audience. Then he fitted the lid to the box.
Displaying the closed box from every angle, he shrugged to the imaginary audience as if to say, “It’s just an empty shoebox.” But when he set the box back down, opened it, and reached inside, his fist came out filled with diamonds.
Or would, if everything went as planned.
It was a simple trick, but most tricks were, and it would get non-metallic objects through airport security and
anything
past customs.
anything
past customs.
He only needed some black felt to finish preparing the contraption, and he had already bought it from a craft shop downtown. He would sew a bag out of the felt and attach it to the lid.
Now all that remained was to go out and find some really big diamonds to put in the bag.
In his room across the hall, John ground out a half-finished cigarette, then immediately lit another. He was smoking too much; the cigarettes made him feel dizzy and left a filthy taste in his mouth.
He missed Pennsylvania. He missed Rebecca. For the first time since leaving the farm, he even missed hooks and eyes.
He retrieved a piece of folded-up cardboard from the bottom of his suitcase and unfolded it carefully on his bed. It was full of square and rectangular holes. When open and flat, it had the same dimensions as Cellarius’s last map.
It was the clue John was still withholding from David: Cellarius had not, in fact, placed hills on his Palatinate map arbitrarily. Instead, he had centered terrain peaks on grid squares numbered 9, 13, 19, 21 … corresponding to the prime numbers greater than 1005, the number of Solomon’s songs: 1009, 1013, 1019, 1021 …
John had drawn a duplicate graticule on a sheet of cardboard and cut every one of those squares out of it, creating fifty-four open windows. When held up to the light or laid down over some other pattern, possibly another map, the sheet acted as a locator grille.
Locating what, he did not yet know.
He heard David and Sarah’s door open, followed by muffled conversation in the hallway. He quickly folded the cardboard sheet back up and stuffed it into his shirt.
There was a knock at the door, and he opened it.
David and Sarah were holding hands. “It’s time to go to church,” David said.
John picked up a bag of tools from the floor next to his bed, swung it over his shoulder, and followed them down the hall to the stairs.
“‘Yea, they made their hearts as an adamant stone,’” he quoted into the darkened stairwell. “‘Therefore came a great wrath from the lord of hosts.’”
THIRTY-THREE
THE STARS WERE OUT in such numbers, they seemed to have gathered to witness a spectacle. The night sky was a navigator’s dream. It struck John that after years of working with maps, he saw the world through a cartographic lens: azimuth, grid coordinate, navigation by the stars.
Breaking into the church was by now routine. They had arrived via the Burggasse rather than the Marktplatz to avoid surveillance; no one could stake out every approach. David made picking the gate lock look easy, and there was no bantering among the three while he worked. They trudged silently and businesslike up the tunnel steps.
In contrast to the teeming, restive ceremony they had attended that morning, the interior of the church felt lifeless and hollow. And yet watchful.
It was the paintings, John decided. They were all portraits: angels, apostles, holy family. And of course they all had eyes. And even the eyes that were averted seemed to watch the three visitors loiter in the center aisle, as if to say, “Well?”
The three visitors continued to loiter there, treading a wash of silence rippled only by their own shoes scuffing on the stone floor.
They had wrapped their flashlight lenses in red cellophane to reduce the risk of detection, but they had not anticipated the effect the tint would have on the mood in the nave. The red glow and the roving circles and ellipses reminded John of artificial theater lighting. He experienced a brief moment of stage fright before an unforgiving audience of portraits, coffins, and painted glass, inanimate objects that had witnessed so many scenarios played out on the altar’s stage in centuries past that they were surely dubious about tonight’s performance.
Finally Sarah said, “Well?”
David walked around the front left pew and approached the sarcophagus. John followed him and placed his bag of tools on the floor next to it. Sarah, clearly not wanting to be left behind in the aisle, hurried to keep up with the two men. All three stared at the cipher engraved on the sarcophagus lid:
“What the hell does it mean?” David asked.
“I don’t know,” John said. “But it looks like witchcraft to me.”
“It’s an amulet,” Sarah whispered, “to guard against sorcery. It’s never been deciphered.”
John reached down and removed a crowbar from the bag.
“I don’t think we’ll need any of that stuff,” David said. “Here, take the other end, help me lift the lid.”
It took them several minutes of jerking and straining before they discovered that a natural seal had formed between the two pieces of sandstone. David picked up the crowbar and used it to work his way around the lid, loosening the weld caused by centuries of chemical deposition.
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