The Tavernier Stones (26 page)

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Authors: Stephen Parrish

BOOK: The Tavernier Stones
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“You should get a job here as a guide.”
She glanced down the hall at their fellow tourists, all engrossed in another lecture, delivered by the man who presently held the job of guide.
“There’s something intrinsically romantic about an old bottle of wine,” she continued, “much more so than about, say, an old coin. We may hold the coin in our hand and think in wonder of the years that have passed since it was struck, or of the many other hands it must have passed through to reach ours. But wine is different: it was bottled, corked up—imprisoned—and we need not merely look at it in wonder. We may open it, release it, and taste the effort of the grapes from all those years ago. A bottle of old wine is more than an artifact, it is an event.”
Gebhardt smiled agreeably.
“You really must affect at least a modicum of familiarity with wines, Mannfred. It is one of the hallmarks of an educated man. But of course, you are a beer drinker. I forgot.”
“I’m not breaking into this building to steal that clay pot.”
“Well, let me put it to you this way: if you broke into this building to steal that clay pot, you would accomplish something worthy of my gratitude.”
“Frieda, if the amphora were in your possession, you would not be any closer to solving the puzzle.”
“No, I suppose not. So impress me another way. Tell me what ‘basketh in fairy light’ means.”
“I don’t know what it means. I don’t know what the hell ‘fairy light’ is. The corner of the map was torn off right before that phrase. You knew this would be a tough line to crack. Why did you give it to me?”
“You’re right, Mannfred. It
is
a tough line to crack. I worked on it myself and didn’t come up with anything either.”
“So my assignment is to spin my wheels?”
Blumenfeld made a
tsk, tsk, tsk
sound. “I called the University of Hamburg Medical School yesterday. Cellarius’s height was one meter seventy-seven. That’s the uninteresting part. Here’s the interesting part: the man who answered my query said it was the third such call that day. Your special talents may eventually come in handy after all.”
“Did the man say who the other callers were?”
“An American journalist and a homicide detective. He didn’t have names. To tell you the truth, I doubt either caller revealed his true profession. The closer we get to the stones, the more competition we’re going to encounter.”
“That’s the reason you have me,” Gebhardt said.
Indeed, Blumenfeld thought. And the reason I have you is exactly the same reason I’m worried about you.
“By the way,” Gebhardt said, “there
is
something about the ‘fairy light’ we need to keep in mind.”
“Namely?”
“’Basketh’ is the third-person form of the verb. That means it refers to someone or something else basking, rather than directs the seekers to do so.”
Blumenfeld smiled. “Good insight. Thank you. Now figure out what ‘fairy light’ is.”
“What about ‘Apollo’s resplendent apogee’? That was
your
assignment, as I recall.”
Blumenfeld looked over at the tour guide again. His pale face almost glowed in the dim corridor. He was listening to himself talk and enjoying every word.
“That one’s easy,” she said, “unless I’m missing something. Apollo was, among other things, the sun god in Greek mythology. An apogee is the highest point in an orbit. So it must mean we’re supposed to do whatever it is we’re supposed to do at noon on the day we’re supposed to do it.”
“What difference does it make what time of day we dig for treasure?”
“I wish I could say. It might just be superstition. Then again, these might not be instructions on when to
dig
, but rather when to
look
. In other words, maybe there’s another clue yet to be revealed, and it can only be revealed … at noon.”
“That would be inconvenient,” Gebhardt said. “I do my best work at night.”
The guide was rounding up his scattered tourists to lead them upstairs to the hydraulic presses. Blumenfeld and Gebhardt ambled over to where chattering people were gradually coalescing into a manageable herd.
“The secret to any successful partnership is to never outlive your usefulness,” Blumenfeld told her young partner. “I suppose if we find the stones, I’ll be able to buy that amphora outright from this estate. You don’t know anyone who would care to taste-test it for me, do you?”
Gebhardt shook his head slowly and deliberately.
“Too bad. I may feel inclined to break it open anyway in celebration, to release the seventeenth-century toil and travail imprisoned within. To reunite them, you see, with old friends.”
As the herd of tourists went up the stairs, one member asked the guide, “What’s the best color for red wine?”
“Ruby,” he answered without hesitation. “Fine red wine is exactly the same color as a top-grade ruby.”
TWENTY-FOUR
 
ON SUNDAY THE FOURTEENTH of June, Gerd Pfeffer put on a jacket and tie and visited St. Jacobi Church.
He entered one of the wooden confessionals, latched the door behind him, and knelt down on a padded stool. In the relative darkness he could hear murmurs coming from the other side as the priest gave penance to another confessor. After a few moments there was some rustling, then the distant sound of a door opening and closing. Finally a panel slid open before his face, revealing an intricately carved screen. Behind the screen was the vague shadow of a man.
“Forgive me, Father,” Pfeffer began, “for I have sinned. It has been a long time since my last confession.”
The shadowy figure remained silent. Pfeffer could only imagine the expression on his face. He heard what sounded like a soft chuckle.
“What sins have you committed, my son?”
“Lust, Father. And a whole lot of it.”
“Lust … for a woman?”
“No, for treasure.”
“Ah. From what I hear, you’re far from alone.”
“Far from alone? Funny you should put it that way, Father. I’ve never been lonelier in my life.”
The figure on the other side of the screen leaned closer. “Gerd, you only come here after you’ve shot someone. I dread the day you tell me it was your wife.”
“No, Father. My gun is silent forevermore.”
“I’m happy to hear that. God is happy too.”
“Tell me something, Father: how many songs did Solomon sing?”
The priest replied without hesitation. “
He spake three thousand proverbs: and his songs were a thousand and five
. First Book of Kings, chapter four, verse thirty-two.”
“I bet you were first in your class at the seminary.”
“As a matter of fact…I was.”
“You could do me a special favor and not share this conversation with anyone else.”
“But my son, are you not aware of the sanctity of the confessional?”
Pfeffer received his penance and took a seat in the west gallery under the imposing Arp Schnitger organ. With four thousand pipes, sixty registers, and four keyboards, it was the largest baroque organ in northern Europe. It occurred to Pfeffer as he recited his Our Fathers and Hail Marys that he really ought to visit the church more often, even without having shot someone.
The priest exited the center compartment of the confessional, found Pfeffer in the west gallery, and joined him in his pew. He was short and bald with a thick white beard. His eyes brimmed with the confidence and security possessed by men who knew their place in the world and happened to occupy it.
Pfeffer silently handed him his notebook:
Extend in the vltimate prone po
ƒ
ition
From the foote of the elevation …
… 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 priest read the text carefully. “‘And descend to treasure,’” he quoted. “Sounds like you’re going to do some digging.”
“I hope the message is as straightforward as that.”
“‘For the gates of hell shall not prevail,’” he continued. “Sounds like you may be digging into solid rock.” He turned and smiled mischievously.
“Father, if you ever decide to leave the priesthood and become a detective—”
“You,” the priest interrupted, “will be the first to know.”
 
Barclay Zimmerman wondered what he was doing running a two-bit X-rated movie theater in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia. No, that wasn’t true; he knew exactly why he was doing it. What he wondered was why he didn’t strike a match and turn the building into something more useful—say, a pile of carbon.
He sat in the back row of the theater, pencil in hand, notebook resting on his lap. There was only one patron watching the movie, a freaky-looking guy sitting a dozen or so rows up.
Wriggling flesh filled the screen. Individual figures were largely undifferentiable amid squirming limbs, bobbing heads, and wobbling breasts. Actors ad-libbed their lines for the most part—grunts and moans being hard to script. But Zimmerman was only vaguely aware of the distraction, as though the people next door had turned up their television too loud.
“On the festival of his highest approach,” i.e., Apollo’s highest approach, could only mean summer solstice. At noon on that day, the longest day of the year, the sun would be higher in the sky than at any other time of the year.
But wasn’t one day the same as another—as far as the sun was concerned? It rose in the east and set in the west. It didn’t change course, did it?
No, it didn’t. But the earth was tilted on its rotational axis, so as the planet revolved around the sun, the path of the sun
appeared
to change. Its position in the sky was a function of the date and the observer’s latitude.
Zimmerman had the date: summer solstice was going to take place June twenty-first, and the event, being a natural one, was independent of any calendar manipulations that might have occurred since Cellarius’s time. Man could move Christmas if he wanted to, but he couldn’t move the equinoxes and solstices.
Zimmerman unfolded a map of Germany and found Idar-Oberstein. During summer solstice, the sun would be directly above the Tropic of Cancer at 23.5 degrees north latitude. Idar-Oberstein was about 49.7 degrees north of the equator, or 26.2 degrees farther north than the Tropic of Cancer. Therefore, the angle of the sun on summer solstice would be 26.2 degrees less than vertical, or about 64 degrees above the horizon.
Assuming the premise about Idar-Oberstein was correct, something was going to happen there at noon on June twenty-first while the sun shined down from 64 degrees high in the sky. Something that presumably had been happening at noon on every summer solstice for the past three hundred years.
Whatever it was, it was somehow related to prime numbers: “Then drink from the sieve of Eratosthenes” was the follow-on line in the cipher. Since one could not literally drink from a sieve, Zimmerman interpreted the “drink” part to be figurative. The Sieve of Eratosthenes was a mechanical method of separating the prime numbers from the rest of the natural numbers.
Eratosthenes was a third-century BC Greek cartographer distinguished by having been the first to measure the circumference of the earth. A prime number was any natural number, greater than one, that was divisible only by one and itself. The “sieve” Eratosthenes invented was really a grid: he made it by laying out the natural numbers, typically in rows of ten, and striking out those divisible by some number other than one and itself.
Zimmerman didn’t think the sieve method itself was significant. Just that whatever was going to happen in Idar-Oberstein at noon on the summer solstice was going to involve prime numbers. And he didn’t have a clue what it was.

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