The Tavernier Stones (32 page)

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Authors: Stephen Parrish

BOOK: The Tavernier Stones
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There was a stationary lump under the covers on the other side of the bed that could only be his wife.
“‘And whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven,’” he whispered. The lump didn’t move.
Before coming to bed, he’d checked the wine cellar again and discovered a pattern; his wife and Mr. Dick hankered after Burgundies. If only they were bottles of poison instead.
As he was about to climb into bed, he did something he hadn’t done since childhood. He knelt down on the floor and prayed: “‘And whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.’”
And what, Pfeffer wondered, would happen after the stones were loosed from the earth? What would he do then? Were there more cartographers out there soaking in bogs?
TWENTY-SEVEN
 
THE MEDIA, ALREADY UNABLE to keep up with new revelations about the lost Tavernier stones, had other news to report, news just as exotic: antique pottery was disappearing unaccountably from museums, galleries, and archeological inventories worldwide. Curators and collectors were stashing their pots in secret hiding places as though preparing for a foreign invasion.
Bible sales spiked, and one publisher’s King James version rose to number four on the
Amazon.com
bestseller list. The religious right hailed the miracle as a portent of the Second Coming.
A new political party formed in Italy, as if the country needed one. Calling themselves
“
Pythagoreans,
”
members consulted the mystical properties of numbers, especially primes, and abstained from eating beans. The wire services had a field day with it.
Poster printers kept churning out Cellarius’s maps, unaware that soon, very soon, they would sell no better than last year’s pin-up girls.
 
Frieda Blumenfeld thought her native country was most beautiful in June. The great oaks and lindens that reigned over Germany’s arboreal kingdom shimmered in emerald green. Poppies, violets, and dandelions speckled the roadsides like dabs of fresh oil paint, and rape and lavender checkered farm fields with broad rolling quadrangles of gold and lilac. Her native land should have been a Mecca for impressionist painters. It wasn’t, but it should have been.
The most beautiful day of the year, give or take the weather, tended to be the longest: the summer solstice, one glorious spin of the earth during the third week of June, when all vegetable matter unabashedly bared its chlorophyll to the sun. After which the days grew shorter again; the trees, flowers, and crops spent the next several months preparing for a dearth of light and heat. As far as Blumenfeld was concerned, winter really began in July.
While she and Gebhardt were packing the trunk of her BMW, she found herself wondering almost rhetorically why she chose to live in the city. It didn’t take her long to remember: the upper crust lived in the city, the peasants lived in the country. She would rather be rich and surrounded by pavement than poor and bare-foot in the grass.
“Idar-Oberstein will be crowded,” Gebhardt warned. He dropped a crowbar and a large coil of rope into the trunk.
“So much the better. We don’t want to stick out while we’re casing a church.”
What she didn’t express was her concern that Gebhardt’s mere presence could jeopardize the plan. True, he was clean cut and even a little yuppyish, and therefore didn’t stand out physically. But his background and political views were known throughout the Federal Republic. Nor did it help that Blumenfeld herself was an ex-con. The closer the two of them got to the finish line, the more anyone watching the race would be able to scrutinize them.
She inspected the contents of the trunk. Besides the crowbar and rope were a pair of shovels (did he think she was going to dig too?), several large burlap bags (a little optimistic, to be sure), and even an air hammer equipped with a makeshift muffler. They had tested the air hammer the previous night: Gebhardt busted up some old bricks in Blumenfeld’s cellar while Blumenfeld stood outside in the lawn. All she could hear was a low rumbling, which faded away as she crossed to the other side of the street.
“Excellent,” she said, closing the trunk. “Have you prepared yourself to be as useful as possible?”
He patted the bulge behind his jacket’s left front pocket.
“Excellent.”
 
John took an MD-11 to Frankfurt, then boarded a train to Idar-Oberstein. The train chugged energetically around steep, round-topped hills that were dense with needle-leaf forests. There was no mistaking the Felsenkirche as the train rolled into town. John thought its photographs failed to do it justice; the church loomed prominently above the center business district like a floating apparition against a backdrop of gray stone.
The closer he came to Germany, to Idar-Oberstein, and to the Felsenkirche, the closer he felt to Johannes Cellarius.
Oberstein was well named. The town crouched under a sheer rock wall that leaned unsettlingly over the Hauptstrasse. The Felsenkirche was fused into the rock, 165 feet above the street. White with gold trim, it presented one stubby, unpretentious steeple as a fist might present its pinky finger.
John asked the taxi driver in halting
Hochdeutsch
if he knew of a place called “the elevation.” The driver shook his head.
Some of the people walking on the sidewalks were carrying picks and shovels. Were they treasure hunters—or just ordinary gem prospectors? But then John remembered reading that the gem mines around Idar-Oberstein had played out long ago. The older residents of the town, those sitting on benches or loitering in small groups on the sidewalks, appeared to have been transported directly from the seventeenth century: the men wore plain peasant clothing with drooping, broad-brimmed hats, and they gazed at passing tourists with stony expressions, their suspicious eyes peering out of chiseled and weathered faces.
John checked into his hotel, just to drop his luggage off. It was still early afternoon. He was tired and battling the strange psychological weaponry of jet lag, but he planned to spend the rest of the day visiting the town.
The front desk clerk stared curiously at her new guest’s arms and face, no doubt wondering about the dog bites. Anyone with that many blemishes was surely suffering from a malady she didn’t want to catch. John had removed the Band-Aids on the plane and examined his wounds in a lavatory mirror. They could pass for a bad acne problem, he had decided. A
really
bad acne problem. Thank God for the beard.
 
In Philadelphia, it was the top of the morning, and David and Sarah were trying to reach John by telephone. Since parting with him uncomfortably on Sunday, David had been preparing another stone switch, including the cutting and mounting of a freshly crystallized piece of cubic zirconia.
Today was the big day—to borrow some jewelry, as Sarah liked to put it. But David was edgy about John’s sudden invisibility, so he was on the verge of changing his mind about going out. Also, for reasons he couldn’t articulate, his heart wasn’t in the job anymore.
Despite his disagreements with John, and despite his jealousy of John’s budding relationship with Sarah, he was willing to admit that alone, he and Sarah would never find the lost Tavernier stones.
“Try again,” he said to Sarah. “Give it a good feminine ring. If he thinks it’s you, he’ll answer.”
“I tell you, nobody’s home.”
Nevertheless, she dutifully dialed the number again. Then she held the receiver up so David could hear it ring. And ring, and ring.
“So he’s out for a walk,” she said, hanging up. “Or he’s shopping or something. Be patient. He’s never gone for very long.”
“I know. That’s what worries me.”
“Are we on today?”
“No, it doesn’t feel right. I want to wait until we have a chance to talk to John.”
“That salesman is expecting us.”
“He’s not going anywhere. Neither is his stone, it’s too big. We can put the job back on the schedule anytime we want. I just don’t think I can work today with all this shit on my mind.”
“Then I can get out of this,” she said, beginning to remove her miniskirt. “All dressed up and no place to go.”
“I was wondering who it was you were dressed up for.”
She stopped and asked, “What is that supposed to mean?”
He closed his eyes and shook his head. “Nothing. Sorry.”
“David, remind yourself who it is that makes me wear this crap.”
“You’re right. Of course. Sorry.”
“Why don’t you do something relaxing, like practice one of your magic tricks? Or cut something on the lap?” She finished removing the skirt and went into the bedroom to put it away. Then she came back in cut-offs and a T-shirt and made herself busy in the kitchen.
David got up wearily, shuffled over to a corner of the living room, and lifted the lid of his footlocker. He fiddled for a while with the magic paraphernalia inside, listening to Sarah banging pots and pans. There was always fiddling to do, what with pockets to sew into handkerchiefs, double walls to glue into paper bags, false bottoms to build, ropes to core, cards to mark, and sometimes bunny droppings to clean up.
“You haven’t seen Zimmerman lurking around, have you?” he called toward the kitchen.
“No, why?” Sarah called back.
“Just a feeling. The last time I spoke to him, he seemed confident he was on to something.”
She joined him at the footlocker, wiping her hands with a dish cloth. “He’s the least of your worries.”
“He wants the stones.”
“Only one of them.”
“Believe me, when he sees the entire lot, he’ll want all of them.”
“I know the man, remember?” She waited until David made eye contact. “He only wants the one. It’s all he needs in the world. That, and a haircut.”
David kicked the footlocker, then picked up the phone but dropped it again without dialing. “Where the fuck are you, you worthless Amishman?”
“He’ll turn up. He’s seldom ever been farther than walking distance from home.”
“Well, maybe he walked off the deep end this time.”
Sarah stared at the phone for a moment. “You’ve just given me an idea who to ask.”

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