The Tavernier Stones (6 page)

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Authors: Stephen Parrish

BOOK: The Tavernier Stones
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“Very nice,” Sarah said.
“Here’s another one. It’s called Finger Palming. You pinch the coin gently between the middle knuckles and palm of your right hand to hold it in place, and you turn the hand over as though to transfer the coin to your left hand.” He demonstrated. “Your left hand makes a grasping motion, as if it took the coin, and your eyes remain focused there to reinforce the idea, as before.”
“I’m wetting my pants.” Sarah transferred her brush from the right hand to the left without any effort at sleight of hand.
“This is the most important one, the so-called Classic Palm, the epitome of the palmer’s art. You hide the coin in the
center
of your palm without any help from your fingers.” He raised his right hand to show the quarter; Sarah didn’t bother looking up. “The trick is to keep your hand as straight as possible, without any tension or unnatural angle that would give the secret away. You almost have to convince yourself the hand really is empty.”
“I could just shit.”
“I’ve been sleeping with a quarter in my palm. This morning, for the first time, it was still there when I woke up. But that’s the right hand; I still have to work on the left.”
“Why don’t you practice palming while washing the dishes?”
“Somebody once told me that if you can type fifty words a minute with a coin palmed in each hand, you’ve mastered the art.”
“Or you could do the dishes. Since the drain is clogged, you wouldn’t risk losing the quarter.”
“The neat thing is, there’s no difference between a coin and any other circular object, like a diamond ring.”
“You could paint. You could paint the apartment with a coin palmed in each hand. In fact, since the rooms are so narrow, you could do both walls at once, holding a brush in each hand and a coin in each palm.”
David let his shoulders slump. “Am I to understand the dishes need washing? Is that what this is about?”
“No, the dishes are washed, thank you. You are to understand that if I weren’t here, they wouldn’t get washed. That’s what this is about.”
“Sure they would. I couldn’t stand a dirty kitchen. But why do women always blame men for not doing what’s already done? You complain about the laundry, for example, yet you do it. Why should I then concern myself with it? Do you really want me to take my clean clothes out of the closet and wash them again, so I can say I did the laundry?”
“Very well,” Sarah said, putting her mirror down. “What about dusting? The apartment has not yet been dusted.”
“And it needn’t be. Dust is perfectly acceptable. Dust gives the place character. Besides, what if somebody looked in the window and saw me doing it?”
“And vacuuming? Does dried mud on the carpet give the place character?”
“No, but I have an answer to that. Vacuum cleaners are designed for women, not men. When they are made so men don’t have to bend over constantly to use them, maybe men will use them more often.”
“It was men who designed them, you know.”
“The same goes for washing dishes and all that other kitchen work: the countertops are too low.”
“And the cobwebs on the lamps in your workshop? Are they too low for you?”
“Cobwebs keep the place free from flies.”
“It looks to me like you’re trying to grow new lampshades. By the way, when do you think you’ll get around to investing the ten seconds it will take to change the bulb on the bedroom ceiling?”
“If it’s so easy, why don’t you do it, and save yourself the trouble of nagging me about it?”
“You know, David, even in the Polak jokes the bulb gets changed. It may take three or four of them to do it, but at least the job gets done.”
He raised his hand to silence her. There was a news report on the television about the seventeenth-century cartographer who had floated to the surface of a bog. As was true of many people, the story of Cellarius’s disappearance and rediscovery had captured David’s imagination. The media delighted in showing pictures of the corpse.
The news camera panned the bog where the body had been found, but of course it was gone. All there was to see was a phalanx of detail-hungry reporters, some craggy birch trees, and a few anonymous spectators waving to the camera.
The body was being stored in a low-temperature chamber at the University of Hamburg and was unavailable for view. A news team had nevertheless perched outside the room and focused its lens on the door. The sign merely read
Privat
. Viewers could only imagine what was on the other side.
Coverage shifted to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D. C. Dr. Cornelius Bancroft, curator in charge of the institution’s mineral and gem collection, filled the screen. The news camera scanned the curator’s figure, from his tennis shoes to his ponytail, as though to point out an incongruity.
“Hey,” Sarah said, “isn’t that—”
“Shh!”
Dr. Bancroft was explaining his theory: that the ruby found in Cellarius’s fist was one of the lost Tavernier stones of popular European folklore.
David caught his breath, sank deeper into the beanbag chair, and stared at the screen. The lost Tavernier stones were almost as legendary as the Holy Grail. Prospectors, treasure hunters, and quacks had been searching for them for over three hundred years.
Bancroft based his theory on a comparison of the ruby’s color and clarity with those of a similar stone described by Tavernier. But opponents of the theory, whom the TV news reporter also interviewed, were quick to point out that the
cut
did not match any of the drawings made during Tavernier’s seventh voyage—the entire account of which, at any rate, was commonly understood to be a hoax.
Bancroft countered that the ruby must therefore be a
recut
. “Finally we have a direct link,” he said, “to the largest cache of gemstones in history.”
David was well acquainted with that cache. Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, a seventeenth-century Marco Polo, had made six journeys to India during his career as a trader and brought back hundreds of precious gems. He described his journeys in his memoirs, which contained painstakingly made drawings of enormous jewels in the Indian royal treasury—jewels like the 280-carat Great Mogul diamond, the 242-carat Great Table diamond, and a flawless 285-carat ruby—that were never documented again.
At the age of seventy-nine, he came out of retirement to become the Duke of Prussia’s ambassador to India, and thus embarked on his mysterious seventh voyage to the Orient. According to history, he never arrived.
But according to legend, he did: he bought the Great Mogul, the Great Table, and dozens of other priceless stones, and was robbed and killed on the way home to his barony in Switzerland. Somewhere in Europe, perhaps buried like pirate treasure in an oaken chest, a hoard of incomprehensible value awaited the first person who could identify and piece together the relevant clues. The hoard had been studied, glorified, and intensely hunted since its disappearance in 1689.
The same year Johannes Cellarius vanished from his Hamburg studio.
Bancroft produced a glass model of the 285-carat ruby reproduced from Tavernier’s drawing and compared it to a hastily made plaster model of the ruby found with Cellarius in the bog.
“One of the facets on the bog ruby could possibly be the same as this one on the Tavernier stone.” He oriented the glass model so the camera could get a clear shot of a trapezoidal facet. “Enough of the stone was cut away, in fact, to make one or two
additional
rubies, at least one of which might retain some more of the original facets. Such a stone could also be extant. It’s just a matter of finding it. Unfortunately, it might be in someone’s private collection, unavailable for study, or even in another bog somewhere, for all we know.”
“Bancroft, you asshole,” David blurted out. “You don’t know a ruby from rhubarb.”
The news report continued with harsh criticism from the community of academic mineralogists, especially those at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Tavernier was neither robbed nor killed, they said; he died of pneumonia on his way to a diplomatic post, his travel bags empty of gemstones.
David turned off the TV and paced the room.
Sarah put her brush down and looked at him sympathetically. “You should call him,” she said. “He was like a father to you.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” He ran his hands through his hair, then picked up a fistful of plastic beans from the carpet and studied them as though they were jewels. “The lost Tavernier stones. Christ, do you suppose?”
“The reporter didn’t seem to think so.”
“What the hell does he know? Bancroft knows. He’s uncovered the first irrefutable proof the stones really exist.” David let the beans spill through his fingers. They bounced and scattered on the carpet. “Where’s the nearest public library?” he asked her. “Do you happen to know?”
“What do I look like, Shakespeare?”
He needed to learn as much as he could about Cellarius. The media kept referring to a particular map, one the cartographer completed just before disappearing. Given the likelihood that what Cellarius was working on when he died had something to do with his death—a likelihood supported by evidence he took to his grave—the last map was as good a place as any to start.
Start what?
Start nothing. You know goddamn well what.
You started it before but couldn’t finish it.
That was then. This—this is altogether different.
What angle will you try this time?
Whichever one it takes.
SIX
 
THE BLANKET OF NIGHT covered all four time zones. Whereas the East Coast already slept, the western zones were just clearing away dinner plates or getting ready for bed. The blanket of night provided scant protection from mundane hardships of the day, and it failed utterly as a buffer against impossible daydreams.
In Guymon, Oklahoma, a widowed grandmother put her small granddaughter to bed and wondered, childlike, about the prospect of finding large gemstones, about the difference such a windfall would make in their arduous lives. She tucked the little girl—her legal ward and the principal drain on her social security check—under a thin white sheet, leaving only her frowsy face and delicate fingers exposed to the ogres of the night.
In Gallup, New Mexico, a grade-schooler complained bitterly about being sent to bed so early. After testing every excuse in his kit, he sighed gloomily and resigned himself to mere anticipation. Searching his gravel driveway for rubies would just have to wait until tomorrow.
A Bakersfield, California, jeweler locked up his store for the night and headed home, vowing to someday carry a line of wares that would attract the carriage trade. Despite his ambitions, the jeweler knew in his heart that his best customers would always be high-school seniors.
The blanket of night continued its smooth glide around the planet until Wednesday morning dawned in Western Europe, where fortune seekers woke to the news that had broken in America the day before. The lost Tavernier stones, the greatest treasure in history, a legend on par with the Ark and the Grail, had finally relinquished a clue.
The race to find them was underway.
 
Kommissar Gerd Pfeffer woke with a dry, sticky mouth, a ringing in his ears, and a dull pain in his sinuses, the result of the previous evening’s debauchery. He stared into his bathroom mirror at the stubble on his chin and the razor poised to shave it off. The image had appeared in his mirror every morning since around the time he turned fourteen. But the fourteen-year-old would not have recognized the man with veins on his nose and bags under his eyes.
A gang of neo-Nazi skinheads had set fire to a Turkish boy during the night, after first dousing him with kerosene. Early that morning, a Herbertstrasse beat cop found a whore sprawled dead in her window showcase, blindfolded with a necktie but otherwise exhibiting no clue how she died. There was even one from the Rheinland about a new Satanic cult that sacrificed virgins by throwing them from the top of the Loreley.

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