The Tavernier Stones (2 page)

Read The Tavernier Stones Online

Authors: Stephen Parrish

BOOK: The Tavernier Stones
6.85Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
The young Polizist had been watching him closely while he examined the body, and as Pfeffer inspected the ring, the young man suggested, “Jesus Christ?”
Pfeffer shook his head. “He would put his own initials on a signet ring, don’t you think?” Squatting in the spongy grass, he surveyed the scene for a moment, then asked, “Have you turned him over?”
“We dug him up and laid him there, otherwise he hasn’t been touched. I was waiting for you to arrive before I moved him. You know how bent out of shape the anthropologists get when they find anything disturbed.”
Pfeffer thought the way the dead man clenched his left fist was odd, as though he had been holding something dear to him when he died. Furthermore—and this had been fermenting in the detective’s subconscious the entire time—there was just the hint of a smile on the man’s face. But surely that was only Pfeffer’s imagination, or one of those ironic effects of the retarded rate of decay in the peat. People did not, in fact, smile as they were being stabbed. They didn’t. Really.
He looked into the man’s eye sockets. They had obviously sunken since his death, but it was nevertheless obvious they had been deep-set to begin with and had done their share of glaring at lesser intellects. Pfeffer shivered as he experienced the sensation the cavities were looking back.
“Open it,” he ordered.
“Excuse me?”
“The fist. Pry it open.”
The Polizist motioned for another officer to step over and help him. As they gently lifted the arm, the young man said, “Sir, if I may, are we doing this out of curiosity?”
“Call it professional intuition. I want to see what he held onto for dear life.”
“But the anthropologists—”
“Open it.”
Getting the fingers to uncurl required the use of pocketknives. The glinting red object that rolled onto the ground before the fist clamped tightly closed again caused the remaining officers to collide with one another as they evacuated their tarp shelter and pressed in for a closer look. It also sent a buzz into the roadkill gallery, whose frustration over a dearth of news had only festered under the drizzling rain.
If Pfeffer hadn’t known better, he’d have guessed the thing was genuine.
The drizzle increased to a steady downpour, and the young Polizist, studying the corpse, blurted out something spontaneously: “‘Eternal is the soil in which he was laid, and from which he was made.’”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Nothing. Just an English poem I read once. Come to think of it, it was Irish.”
Pfeffer took another look at the bog man’s leathery face. His skull had long since decalcified, leaving the outer skin pinched and distorted. His features were already caving in from rough handling and sudden exposure to ruthless compounds in the air.
It
was
a smile, Pfeffer was sure of it. The man had known something profoundly amusing the moment he died, so amusing he was still smiling even after being stabbed in the chest, even after centuries of submersion under the quaking peat.
TWO
 
JOHN GRAF WASN’T COMPILING or editing maps as he normally would be on a weekday morning. Instead, he was reading from the
Lancaster Intelligencer Journal
opened unabashedly on his light table. The newspaper’s front-page headline was one the like of which he’d never expected to see.
His appearance, reflecting back at him from the glass surface of the light table, revealed his Amish upbringing: short but unruly auburn hair, a close-cropped beard, and hands made rough from spending the first twenty of his twenty-seven years on a farm.
He glanced up at the other cartographers occupying cubicles around him; all were reading newspapers. All were captivated by the same improbable headline, not that they would return his glance otherwise. The first impression people came away with when they met John was that he preferred they leave him alone. It was a correct impression. But he could only hope they didn’t come away feeling insulted. His eyes stared frankly and uncritically, and if he made people feel transparent, he compensated by finding no flaws in their vitreous souls. He didn’t analyze, he didn’t judge. Most of the time, he didn’t care.
His closest acquaintances—he had no real friends—considered him a deeply introspective man. The Amish, it pained him to acknowledge, considered him an outcast.
John’s parents and siblings still lived on a farm east of town, but only his sister Rebecca would speak to him, reluctantly. The Amish community had expelled him for committing the offense of enrolling in high school. After graduating, he had compounded his predicament by attending nearby Franklin & Marshall College. His wanderlust attracted him to geography, his passion for maps to cartography.
The city of Lancaster had grown up alongside John and his Amish neighbors. As a result, its architecture, dominated by narrow row houses composed mainly of red brick and mortar, was almost as plain. And like the Amish, it had remained anachronistic well into maturity.
John noted many signs of maturity in the town: wrought-iron fences bent from sheer weariness. Warped wooden shutters shedding their louvers. Rusted mailboxes with ill-fitting lids. The sidewalks, undermined by pioneering tree roots and colonized by stubborn tufts of grass, undulated erratically, forming chains of concrete blocks in tectonic collision, making obstacle courses for small children and large bugs.
The P. Lorillard Building, a former warehouse of the long-defunct P. Lorillard Tobacco Company, stood at the corner of Prince and James. Built in 1899, it served as an elegant example of Beaux Arts classicism with its three-story-high pilasters and large blind arches. Now it was home to North Star Maps, the most prestigious custom mapping firm in the country. The cartographers who worked there were proud of their building; some even believed they could still smell the lingering aroma of drying tobacco leaves.
A newspaper headline normally would not have distracted John from his work, not even a coast-to-coast news flash printed in enormous bold type. Even those he saved for after work, to read while he ate his frozen dinner of Salisbury steak, mashed potatoes, and “dessert” (
peel back cellophane cover before microwaving; perforate foil with tines of fork
). But today all the staff was buzzing about the front-page news. The body found one week ago in a bog north of Hamburg, Germany, had been identified by University of Hamburg historians. They used the victim’s distinctive signet ring as their primary clue and were aided by his clothing, a forensic analysis of his remains, and ultimately his portrait.
Yes, his portrait. It was here, reproduced on the front page of the newspaper, from an original in sanguine chalk.
The man had been—and still was, most of him—Johannes Cellarius, a noted seventeenth-century cartographer, son of a Polish wine merchant who broke with a long family tradition to join a prosperous guild of European mapmakers. In 1689, at the peak of his career, he disappeared without a trace. Historians respected Cellarius for upholding vigorous standards during an era when mapmakers still relied on the hearsay of excitable voyagers and decorated their maps with fantastic beasts that allegedly roamed the unexplored lands.
John turned the page and read on.
The signet ring found on Cellarius’s right middle finger was solid gold—in fact, 22 karat. It was set with an oval slab of chalcedony. The image engraved in the chalcedony, one that would stand out in relief when pressed into wax, was of one woman helping another place a basket of grapes on her head. Copied from a detail on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the image was known as the Michelangelo signet.
University of Hamburg historians were able to ascribe Cellarius’s breeches, stockings, and shoe buckles to the seventeenth century; he had dressed himself on the morning of his death in the manner of a middle-class craftsman of the 1680s. Forensic scientists suggested a date of death that was in close agreement with the date of the craftsman’s disappearance.
But as far as John was concerned, the picture nailed it. The newspaper had printed a photograph of the corpse’s head side-by-side with a reproduction of the chalk drawing. The prominent forehead, protruding brow, and deep-set eyes that were so conspicuous in the drawing were unmistakably shadowed in the photograph. Despite three centuries of metamorphosis in the bog, the resemblance was striking.
It was Johannes Cellarius. There was no doubt about it.
Judging from the drawing, Cellarius had the gentle, pampered face of royalty; the long, wild hair of an eccentric intellect; and the passionate eyes of an artist. To John Graf, it was as though Don Quixote had quit his windmills and settled down to engrave roads and rivers.
Who would have thought a seventeenth-century cartographer would make the front page of a modern newspaper? Some of the other cartographers at North Star were now running upstairs to the library to dig up anything they could find about Cellarius. But John remained at his light table. Let them scramble for stuff. He was an avid map collector, buying facsimiles whenever he couldn’t afford the originals, and he probably had all the master’s work in one form or another at home. He continued reading the article.
By some accounts, Cellarius had been done in by the jealous husband of his lover, the Palatinate beauty Hildegard Weinbrenner. The eleven perforations of his chest and abdomen—from blows delivered by what the autopsy suggested was a pickax—attested to violent murder. The last map Cellarius completed, its ink barely dry when it was discovered in his studio after his disappearance, was one of Hildegard’s homeland, the lower Palatinate—modernday Rheinland-Pfalz.
But that wasn’t the end of the story. Something was clenched tightly in Cellarius’s left fist, and when the German police officers who were called in to investigate a possible homicide pried open the fingers, a large red gemstone rolled out.
It was a ruby. It weighed more than 57 carats. Some said it ranked among the best ever examined.
There was a brief controversy over the stone at first, started by a Hamburg jeweler who suggested it was only red spinel, like the so-called Black Prince’s ruby garnishing the British Imperial State Crown. From biblical times to the Industrial Revolution, all red stones, including spinel, were popularly known as rubies.
To end the controversy, a team of mineralogists flew in from the University of Heidelberg. It took them only minutes, using a refractometer and a spectroscope, to declare the ruby genuine. The newspaper article included a close-up photograph of the stone; in the background, slightly out of focus, were three beaming technicians in lab coats.
John felt the presence of someone behind him. Annette, a woman who occupied the cubicle across the hall, was looking over his shoulder.
“Now that’s what I would call gruesome,” she said.
He glanced at her, then back at the newspaper. “When I’ve been dead for three hundred years, I hope I look every bit as good.”
Annette was a frequent visitor; John’s workspace served as her break room. He had disciplined himself not to peek across the hall while she leaned over her light table, because the profile of her breasts constituted his greatest professional distraction.
“We really ought to step out together sometime, Amish boy. When do you think that might happen?”
When God forgives the serpent for deceiving Eve, John thought. Normally he would banter with her, but he was in no mood today.
“I know you like girls,” Annette continued. “I saw you with one once.”
“No, you didn’t. You couldn’t have.”
“Yes, I did. But don’t worry, your secret’s safe with me. She actually looked pretty good—from the eyebrows up, anyway. Cute bonnet.”
“You must be talking about my sister.”
“Ah. Back to work I go!” She hurried across the hall and returned to her seat.
John watched her lean forward to peer into her computer screen, then he forced himself to turn away and focus on the newspaper instead. He wasn’t going to get any work done today. Of all historic figures, the one he admired most, the one whose creative style and work ethic he most emulated, had made a return appearance. In the flesh.
 
John’s house on Nouveau Street was within walking distance of the P. Lorillard Building. The house was equipped with a window air conditioner, but John had tested it only once. It blew a gale of icy wind in his face, and he immediately shut it off. The only other gadget in his otherwise austere quarters was a microwave oven he used to heat up his frozen dinners. He didn’t feel he had a choice; he couldn’t so much as bake a potato.

Other books

Blazing Earth by TERRI BRISBIN
In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje
The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel by Phillips, Arthur
Secured Secret by Charity Parkerson
Bootstrap Colony by Hechtl, Chris
Chasing the Skip by Patterson, Janci
Hand of Fate by Lis Wiehl