The Tavernier Stones (27 page)

Read The Tavernier Stones Online

Authors: Stephen Parrish

BOOK: The Tavernier Stones
7.55Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
He brushed the hair out of his eyes and looked up at the screen to gauge the progress of the movie. They were still going at it. He couldn’t tell which limbs belonged to which torsos. Normally a movie would end soon after a climax, but in these kinds of movies …
The theater’s lone patron, sitting halfway toward the front, had an unnaturally rigid look about him. Zimmerman hoped that, if the man was doing what he appeared to be doing, he didn’t leave anything on the seat cushion.
He ran upstairs to the projection room and checked a wall calendar. Summer solstice was just seven days away.
 
That afternoon, John drove to Philadelphia and picked up Sarah at her house on Volta Street. She stepped squeamishly into the front passenger seat, taking care not to rest her arms on the arm rests or touch any other part of the dilapidated vehicle. For his own part, John was fighting down a rising panic over what the oil temperature gauge on the dashboard indicated.
“What’s causing that noise?” Sarah asked.
“You mean the grinding noise? Like the engine’s about to fall apart?”
“Yeah, that noise.”
“The engine’s about to fall apart.”
“Oh. Has it always made that noise?”
“No, it didn’t when it was new.”
The car limped into Chinatown, where John parked it on Race Street. The two then walked to the condemnable brick building between Watts and Juniper that served as a police dispatch station and makeshift jail. Upstairs, they stood and waited until David was brought out. He brushed past them without acknowledgement.
“You’re welcome,” John said, when they were back on the street.
“I take it you want me to thank you for picking me up.”
“It’s the courteous thing to do. We could have left you up there.”
“You came to get me because you need me. I was happy where I was. The food was … exotic.”
“Then why are you leaving with us?”
“They made me. There’s a funny rule in these parts that you can’t stay in jail if you don’t belong in jail. After two nights in these luxury accommodations,” he jabbed his thumb at the soot-covered building, “they released me for lack of evidence, the stolen ring being on Sarah’s finger, not mine. So tell me,” he inspected each of them in turn, “why are the two of you picking me up together?”
“You’ve been missing staff meetings,” John answered.
“Are we conducting one now?”
“Hop in,” John said. “We’re going for a walk in the park.”
He drove to the west entrance of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where the three walked down the steps into the Azalea Garden. They bought soft drinks from a vendor and sat on the bank of the Schuylkill.
“Have you been reading the papers?” John asked.
“No,” David answered. “I suppose you’re going to tell me the press got the keyword.”
“A newspaper in Little Rock, Arkansas, broke the story this morning, and it’s all over the media. Within hours, everyone in the country will know the code.”
“Do you have a quarter?”
“Why?”
“Do you have one or don’t you?”
John produced one. David handed him a crayon and told him to make a secret identifiable mark on the quarter. John wrote the letter “J.” Without looking at it, David wrapped the quarter in a handkerchief and asked John to verify its presence by feeling it through the cloth. Then he removed a ball of yarn from his pocket and dropped it into one of the empty soft drink cups.
“Abracadabra,” David said, opening the handkerchief to show that the quarter had vanished. “Any idea where it’s gone?”
“No doubt into your pocket,” John replied.
“Wrong.” He gave John the ball of yarn and told him to unravel it. John did so. A small matchbox, secured with rubber bands, appeared at its center. Inside the matchbox was the quarter—letter J and all.
“How did it get there?” John asked. Although he didn’t really care; after spending time alone with Sarah, David’s presence seemed like an intrusion. He hoped David wouldn’t detect the attraction. The
mutual
attraction.
“Simple. I put it there right after you marked it. I’ve been practicing this trick for two days. The jailers figured I wouldn’t be able to hang myself with a ball of yarn or dig my way out with an empty matchbox—both of which occurred to me, nevertheless. You know, it’s customary to applaud the magician at the successful conclusion of his magic trick.”
“Well done,” John said unenthusiastically.
“Thank you.”
“I must admit, though, that I find magic tricks rather frivolous at this particular time.”
“Right. I figured you might. But ponder this rhetorical question: how are we going to get the lost Tavernier stones back into the United States, if and when we find them?”
John sat quietly next to David and Sarah on the riverbank, gazing out at the slow, serene waters of the Schuylkill, pondering David’s rhetorical question. That he and David had begun to polarize, perhaps beyond repair, was obvious. He didn’t think David was taking the project seriously anymore. And he felt that David himself knew it: that he had exhausted his contribution to the extent of his expertise and was waiting for John to come up with a solution. John wondered whether a collaboration was such a good idea after all. But then, there was the girl. Get rid of David, and you get rid of the girl.
It was the girl who broke the awkward silence.
“I’ve been wondering,” she said, “why Cellarius bothered to make a treasure map, if in fact that’s what it is.”
David shrugged exaggeratedly and said, “When you bury treasure, you leave a record of where you buried it.”
“But why?” Sarah insisted. “If he buried the treasure, or if someone else buried it and he happened to know where, he didn’t need to document the location. He had nobody to leave treasure
to
. Why go through the trouble of making a map and enciphering mysterious instructions? What would the point be, other than amusement?”
John plucked a weed from the grass and stuck it in his mouth. “Maybe,” he speculated, “Cellarius involved himself with the cutter and the distiller’s wife long enough to know how and where they hid the stones. They killed him, but not before he recorded—as a kind of insurance policy, or as a study in irony, or even because he knew in advance he was doomed—clues on his last map. Think of it as a note in a bottle. Maybe the map and ‘mysterious instructions’ were, as you suppose, solely for his own amusement. Maybe he was just … being a cartographer.”
“You just pronounced a lot of maybes,” Sarah said. “
Maybe
we should go to Idar-Oberstein and start poking around.”
“No,” John said, “it’s too early. We’d only be wandering aimlessly.”
David laughed. “He’s right: we can wander aimlessly here as well as there, and save ourselves the price of a plane ticket.”
“Wandering aimlessly may accurately characterize what
you’re
doing,” John shot back. “It’s not what
I’m
doing.”
“Oh yeah, I forgot. You’re the cartographer. You not only know where to go, you can tell
me
where to go, too.”
“Guys, guys,” Sarah said. “We have a job to do.”
They sat quietly for a minute. Finally David said, “Okay. Let’s review what we’ve learned since the last time.”
He sat up in the grass and raised his knees to his chest. “We’ve deciphered Cellarius’s message, and it speaks directly to the existence of treasure. We no longer have to worry about following a path that can only lead to a dead end.”
“We have a likely motive,” John added. “Cellarius’s wife died during Louis XIV’s invasion of Holland.”
“And evidence of a theft,” David continued, “the last-minute confession of two Germans hanged in Florence after Tavernier’s disappearance. The lost Tavernier stones exist—or at least they did at one time. We have to work under the assumption that they weren’t all recut, that they’re stashed somewhere.”
John plucked a fresh weed to replace the one he had chewed. “The question is, where?”
“I still think we should go to Idar-Oberstein and have a look,” Sarah said. “Measure Cellarius’s height from whatever landmark we find called ‘the elevation,’ and start digging.”
“We aren’t sure a man’s height is the measuring stick,” David said contemptuously. “And if it is, we aren’t sure the man in question is Cellarius. We have no idea what ‘the elevation’ means. We don’t know what basks in fairy light, how prime numbers come into play, or the significance of a thousand and five, the number of Solomon’s songs. There are too many things we simply don’t know. Until we make more progress—a
lot
more progress—we would be wasting our time and money traveling to Germany. And we would be cutting ourselves off from some valuable research resources.”
“Columbus was wrong,” Sarah countered. “He sailed for the West Indies, not the Americas. Edison was wrong, too. He once tried bamboo as a filament for his light bulb.”
David stood up, brushing the loose grass from his backside.
John allowed his eyes to rove briefly above Sarah’s knees. The way she sat in the grass with her legs crossed and her skirt bunched up in her lap exposed the insides of her thighs. And for an instant, as she shifted to a more comfortable position, he glimpsed the white flash of underwear. He looked up at her face and was startled to find her watching him.
“Beautiful, isn’t she?” David asked.
“Yes,” John answered—before realizing David was showing them a wallet-sized photograph of Hildegard Weinbrenner’s oil portrait. David’s curious smile told John he was aware of the fauxpas.
“The source of the Prairie State ruby,” David said. “This is the woman who passed the stone to her son, who passed it to his son, and so on, until it ended up in the Field Museum.”
“Do we know anything about how
she
came to own it?” John asked. “I mean, it matters little how it got from Hildegard to Chicago. What matters is how Hildegard got her paws on it in the first place. If we can dig that up, it might help us find the rest of the stones.”
“If the information isn’t in the library system of the University of Maryland, it doesn’t exist. I trust my people. I went to school there, you know.”
John knew. He was sick of hearing about it. David was not a product UMD could boast of, so he ought not to have been boasting of UMD. John would have liked to compare the merits of attending a large, prestigious university, a degree from which served as an entry ticket to a successful career, with the merits of attending a small liberal arts college, one where students got lots of attention from faculty who were not burdened by Publish or Perish. But he knew he would be wasting his time.
“I have another question,” Sarah said.
David sat back down in the grass. “God help us.”
“Why would Cellarius go after Tavernier, a correspondent of his, rather than the king himself?”
“Louis XIV was untouchable,” John replied patiently. “He was far too powerful for a lone adversary to take a shot at him directly. I suppose Cellarius could have wormed his way into court and tried an assassination, but obviously he considered it too difficult, or else he didn’t aspire to martyrdom. At any rate, given the king’s love for gemstones, the route Cellarius chose seems pretty fitting.”
“Okay, why did the seventeenth-century trio—Cellarius, Hildegard Weinbrenner, and her boyfriend the cutter—bury the treasure at all?”
The men were silent. Finally John suggested, “To wait for the smoke to clear. If there truly was a connection between the stones and Louis XIV, agents of Louis might have come looking—might have traced them to the cutter, Jakob Langenbach. Besides, why is any treasure buried?”
“Why indeed?” Sarah asked. “I’ve got another one.”
“Jesus.” David mockingly covered his ears with his hands.
“Why would they recut only one stone? Why not all of them?”
“For all we know,” David said wearily, “they
did
cut all of them. And if they didn’t, maybe the Tavernier ruby was a test. They wanted to wait, as John said, for the smoke to clear before doing the rest.”

Other books

State of Alliance by Summer Lane
The Laws of Attraction by Sherryl Woods
The Other Girl by Pam Jenoff
Divertissement by Madeleine Oh
Mystic Hearts by Cait Jarrod