The Tavernier Stones (25 page)

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Authors: Stephen Parrish

BOOK: The Tavernier Stones
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“You the only skinny guy in it?”
“Nah. There’s another one four blocks down.”
“What’s cooking? Smells like spaghetti.”
“Spaghetti.”
She kissed him on the cheek, then went sighing into the living room and sat on the couch.
John realized that since he would be working with Sarah, he would be sitting next to her. And that doing so was going to make it hard to concentrate. He had been in a high state of agitation all day: fifteen minutes in front of the mirror was, for him, about fourteen minutes and fifty-five seconds longer than usual. After deciphering the code, he had spent two days digesting the message that emerged, then had finally—hesitantly—called David and Sarah to share his success with them.
David, however, was in jail again, this time for shoplifting in a museum, of all places. Sarah admitted as well that their progress on the treasure hunt had reached a standstill; that she and David had been spending their discretionary time casing jewelry stores.
“Casing them … to buy something?” John asked.
“No. Casing them … to borrow something.”
“Oh.” He spread his work out on the coffee table and handed her a copy of the cipher.
Extend in the vltimate prone poƒition
From the foote of the elevation (Extend in
the vltimate prone) ba
ƒ
keth in fairie lighte
Of Apollos re
ƒ
plendent apogee
On the fe
ƒ
tivall of his highe
ƒ
t aproche
Then drink from the Sieve of Erato
ƒ
thenes
Sing more songes than Solomon
And de
ƒ
cend to trea
ƒ
vre
For the gates of Hell
ƒ
hall not prevayle
 
“The line breaks are mine,” John explained, “and might be a little arbitrary. The text was all run together. This part here, in parentheses, is the repeated string I told you about on the phone.”
“I don’t want to be a party-pooper, but none of this makes any sense to me.”
“It didn’t to me, either, the first time I read it.”
“And now?”
He shrugged. “It grows on you.” He sat next to her on the couch. “‘Extend in the ultimate prone position’ probably means to lie down flat—that is, to measure a man’s height horizontally from something.”
“A short man or a tall man?”
“I can only assume we need to measure a distance equal to Cellarius’s height. Yesterday, I called the University of Hamburg Medical School. I told them I was a journalist; seems I’ve been doing a lot of that lately. Anyway, Cellarius was of average height, about one meter seventy-seven.”
“I’m impressed.”
“I don’t think we have to be extremely accurate here, because any container large enough to hold the lost Tavernier stones will be large enough that a shovel sunk within several inches of its center will strike it.”
She was impressed.
John had been consciously disciplining his eyes to look only into hers, or at the papers before him, but now he allowed them to wander momentarily down the length of her figure.
He had only known one girl in his life, and the knowledge had been superficial, to say the least. During a wedding at an Amish farm, to which one of the young men had brought a bottle of whiskey, a girl hitched up her skirt in the barn and offered herself to any and all comers. John, succumbing to peer pressure, took his turn in line. But when he got his pants down and knelt between her legs, he couldn’t get it up. The girl tried to help by fondling him, but it only made matters worse. She giggled and told
everyone.
It was during John’s “sowing of wild oats” period, a time when youths were permitted to let loose and yield to primal urges before kneeling for baptism and officially joining the church.
He cleared his throat. “As for the ‘foot of the elevation,’ I assume we have to identify a high point of some kind, maybe an outcrop. We probably won’t understand the instructions completely until we visit the general location.”
“And where, exactly, is the general location?”
“Somewhere in the Palatinate, I hope. Somewhere on Cellarius’s last map. Idar-Oberstein, in all likelihood. Unfortunately, this part of the code is where the corner of the map was torn off. From the foot of
what
elevation? We don’t know. I’ve scoured the map, and all the modern maps of the area I could lay my hands on, and there’s nothing labeled “the elevation,” or “
die Erhebung
,” or anything similar. Maybe the damage to the map was intentional, to make the solution more difficult. Maybe Cellarius tore it himself.”
“Why would he give a clue, then take it away?”
“I don’t know. I’m just speculating. I still don’t have a clue why he made a treasure map to begin with.”
“Well, speculate some more. This is really interesting. I didn’t know you spoke German.”
John couldn’t resist showing off a little: he explained how the Vigenère worked, how Cellarius had encrypted his message, how his own sleuthing unveiled the keyword,
carminea
. She inched a little closer to get a better look at the pages he was holding. Twice her knee touched his. Both times he felt the adrenaline.
“I don’t understand something,” she said. “If he was German, why did he write the instructions in English?”
“Actually, he was Polish. I think in order to make the code as inaccessible as possible, Cellarius chose from the languages he knew the one that was most foreign to Germans. He spoke German, Latin, and Dutch, all more accessible than English in the seventeenth century. And he spoke Polish too, but since he left Poland as a young man, he might not have been comfortable with it anymore. He was comfortable in English because he went to school in England.”
“Will others be able to do what you did? Are we ahead now?”
“I doubt whether many will get this far. Since a part of the text is missing, an analytic decipherment is pretty much out of the question. The polyalphabetic encryption, the absence of word breaks, the unconventional spellings, the Latin letter substitutions—these make the thing even harder to solve. You have to guess the keyword, there’s really no other way. All it takes, though, is one person to solve it and make his solution public, and the whole world will know what we know.”
Dinner was ready, and John served it. Sarah watched him carry bowls of noodles and sauce to the table and fill her glass with iced tea. The admiration in her eyes meant more to him than the “sleuthing” he had just finished bragging about.
He wished now he had used the candles after all. He had brought them out, put them back, brought them out again, and put them back again. He wanted to bring them out yet again, but it would look like a quick fix, so he didn’t. The kitchen lights were awfully bright.
When it was time for Sarah to go, he followed her to the door and silently warned himself not to utter anything stupid. She turned in the open door frame and faced him. He didn’t know what else to say, so he said, “We’re going to need David.”
“Then we’re going to have to get him. Right now, there are some very thick iron bars preventing him from coming to us.”
He offered his hand and she shook it. He noticed the signet ring on her finger.
“That’s interesting,” he said.
“It’s … borrowed.”
“Oh. Hey, I’ll walk you to your car.”
“No, don’t. Let’s say goodbye here.” She hugged him and planted another kiss on his cheek.
“You smell real good.” He winced: “Sorry, I guess that was a stupid thing to say.”
“No, it was a perfectly okay thing to say.” She put her hand behind his neck, pulled him close, and kissed him briefly on the lips. Then she turned and stepped into the Pennsylvania night.
“Don’t be a stranger,” he said, in a voice he thought too low for her to hear.
She heard it and looked back over her shoulder. “I don’t intend to.”
TWENTY-THREE
 
ROUND ABOUT THE BEGINNING of the ninth century, Charlemagne ordered grapevines—
red
grapevines—planted on the grounds of his Ingelheim palace. A dozen centuries later, the Charlemagne Vineyard, among others, still cultivated Spätburgunder and Portugieser grapes in its chalky clay soils. Some of the few red wines made in Germany were coaxed from those grapes and earned Ingelheim its treasured nickname:
der Rotweinstadt.
In dark cellars beneath the Charlemagne estate’s half-timbered buildings were great oaken casks filled with fruity young vintages. The cellar master, a human mole if ever there was one, spent his days underground, checking color, bouquet, and flavor to decide readiness for bottling. As necessary, he topped off the casks to compensate for evaporation, otherwise exposure to air would prematurely oxidize the wine.
The estate cached its collectable wines in those same dark cellars. The centuries-old treasury enjoyed a reputation as one of Europe’s most valuable: more than fifty thousand bottles lay on their sides in racks lining the cut stone walls. Estate personnel were careful not to disturb the dust and cobwebs, so important were they to the image and salability of aged wine. For like other rare commodities, the price of an old bottle of fermented grape juice was largely due to the mystique associated with it, and some vintners were better at creating mystique than wine.
The Charlemagne estate offered guided tours, which included historical discourses and a walk-through of the famous cellars. On Saturday, the thirteenth of June, Frieda Blumenfeld placed herself and Mannfred Gebhardt first and second in line.
In the darkest, coolest room of the Charlemagne cellars, a room bedecked with dust and festooned with sagging cobwebs, one illuminated only by candlelight and only when necessary, dwelt the estate’s lone sample of Château Aliénor d’Aquitaine. It rested on a warped wooden board in a cabinet shielded from groping hands by a rusted iron grille.
The sample, the tour guide explained, had already been in stock when he began his career with the Charlemagne estate more than thirty years before. In fact, no one, not even the cellar master, knew where it came from, and there was no record anywhere of a purchase. The amphora contained what experts believed to be the last vintage the Aquitaine winery sealed without a cork.
The tour guide led his group into the small room and dramatically thrust a lighted candle toward the grille; its iron bars cast flat, linear shadows across a crusty earthen pot. The tourists, including Blumenfeld and Gebhardt, craned necks, stood on toes, squatted, and did what they could to catch glimpses as the candlelight flickered briefly and tantalizingly through gaps in the grille.
Blumenfeld noted that the amphora was about thirty centimeters tall and as much as twenty centimeters in diameter across the widest part of its belly, which tapered gracefully down to its base. A pair of handles fastened to the belly rose almost to the level of the mouth. The mouth looked just wide enough to admit a small fist; it was fitted with a lid and sealed with wax.
An image of one woman helping another place a basket of grapes on her head stood out in bas-relief on the amphora’s belly. The signet, about four centimeters by four centimeters in area, appeared face-on when the high-arching handles were in profile.
The guide allowed his group to soak up the image for a minute or two, then he ushered everyone from the room and locked the door. He next directed them to an exhibit a few meters down the hall, one that illustrated and interpreted the history of poisoned wine. The exhibit, he informed them proudly, was the only one of its kind in the world. No one doubted his word.
Blumenfeld took Gebhardt by the sleeve and led him back to the door that separated them from the amphora of Château Aliénor d’Aquitaine. She wistfully touched the padlock with her index finger.
“I have to have it,” she said. “I absolutely have to have it.” She looked at Gebhardt. “You don’t understand, do you?”
“Haven’t you been paying attention to all the security?” He shook his head at her. “No one can set foot on this property without alerting dogs.
Big
dogs. Besides, there’s nothing but vinegar inside that amphora.”
“When one collects wine, one collects history—no matter the chemistry. Imagine the grapes from the seventeenth century that went into making the contents of that amphora. Imagine the people who toiled over those grapes, people long since rotted in their anonymous graves. Imagine the flavor trapped inside—imprisoned, as it were, like a genie in a bottle.”
“That’s poetic, Frieda. But the wine couldn’t possibly be drinkable after all this time.”
“As a matter of fact, it could. It depends on the quality of the vintage, the variety of grape, the processing techniques, and of course the care taken in storage. It may not taste very good, but then again it may.”
“After
three centuries
?”
“Reds can live much longer than whites because they contain tannin, which acts as a preservative. The more tannin, the harsher the wine, and the longer it can—and arguably should—be aged before drinking. People don’t have the patience anymore to age wine, however, nor the cellars in which to store the bottles properly. So most red wines nowadays are made to be consumed as soon as they’re bought. But this one,” she tapped the heavy wooden door, “was designed to go the distance.”

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