Read The Copernicus Legacy: The Forbidden Stone Online

Authors: Tony Abbott

Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Action & Adventure, #General, #Fantasy & Magic, #Historical, #Renaissance

The Copernicus Legacy: The Forbidden Stone (7 page)

BOOK: The Copernicus Legacy: The Forbidden Stone
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Chapter Fourteen

W
ade stared at the bloody glass and his head buzzed.

Murder. In this room.

“If this was not a robbery . . .”

“If this was
not
a robbery . . .” Dr. Kaplan swung around to Lily. “Bernard Dufort’s fall in the elevator in Paris. Are the police still saying it’s an accident? Can you look it up? Becca, can you translate?”

“Instantly,” Lily said, tapping her tablet. Becca stood next to her.

Wade leaned over the dusty table at an angle. The first line was in Greek, not a single word of which he understood, but he knew what it looked like from his astronomy books.

 

 

This was followed by two lines in code.

 

Lca Ayulc himab ds lca Cyzb ir Gzjrauhyss

Rixxio lca nsihis, rixxio lca wxyea

 

He recognized the first word of the coded part as
The
. “Dad, Becca,” he said, digging in his backpack for the celestial map. “Do either of you know any Greek?”

She shook her head. “Baklava and spanakopita. That’s all.”

Roald snapped to attention. “I only know one line of Greek. Heinrich taught it to me. To all of us in the group. It was a famous quote from . . . wait . . .”

He pulled out his student notebook and went directly to the end. He read the words on the table. “I can’t believe it . . . or maybe I can. This is it. I wrote the quote in here. Heinrich began his semester lectures with it. It means, ‘Let no one untrained in geometry enter here.’ But it’s also . . .” He closed his eyes. “I’ll remember it in a minute—”

Becca looked up from Lily’s tablet, her face pale. “Paris police no longer think Bernard Dufort’s death was an accident. There was a fire in his apartment in Paris, and the elevator cables at the newspaper office may have been tampered with.”

Wade felt his breath leave him. Uncle Henry was murdered in this room. Maybe the man at the cemetery did it. And now, a second murder? “Dad, we should talk to the police. The paperweight is evidence they don’t know about. It’ll help them catch the killer—”

The traffic grew suddenly chaotic on the street below. Horns blared. There was shouting, a screech of tires. Becca went to the window. Wade peeked out through the curtains next to her. A long black limousine had stopped awkwardly in front of the building and traffic was backing up behind them. Four men emerged from the back.

“The guy with the bruise!” said Becca. “We need to get out!”

“Someone memorize the message,” said Darrell.

“I have a better idea,” said Lily. She stood over the table and snapped a picture with her phone. “
Now
let’s go!”

“Hurry!” Dr. Kaplan tugged Lily and Darrell to the door.

Everyone dashed out of the room except Wade. He took one last look at the writing on the table, then ran his sleeve across the top. Frau Munch’s coded message, whatever it meant, existed now only as a photo on Lily’s cell phone.

“Get over here!” Becca hissed from the top of the stairs.

He jumped down the steps after her and found Frau Munch standing guard in the lobby and pointing to the back door as if she could see it. The front door thudded. It burst open. Wade flattened against the wall and watched several thick-necked men push across the tiny lobby and straight up the stairs.

Did they follow us from the cemetery—

Becca pulled him roughly out the back door and into the alley. The sun was setting, and the cold night air closed in. She hurried him into a long passage of black brick. He stole a look over his shoulder. No one yet. They came out a block behind Unter den Linden. Taking a quick right, Dr. Kaplan hustled them into a crowd of young people bubbling with conversation. They mingled as far as the next street, then turned at the corner of an avenue of high-end shops, Charlottenstrasse, where Lily made a noise that sounded like a squeal.

“Are you all right?” asked Darrell.

“Just . . . the . . . shops . . .”

A sudden series of screeching tires made them jump, and they ducked under the arched opening of a restaurant. Dr. Kaplan froze when he looked inside at the tables.

“Dad, what do you see? Dad!” said Wade. “Is someone—”

“It’s not that,” he said. “It’s just that . . .” He scanned the streets in every direction. “A lot has changed, but I think the Blue Star is not too far from here, if it still exists. I need time to sit and figure this whole thing out—”

A motorcycle raced down the street, zigzagging among the pedestrians. The kids turned their faces toward the windows.

“It’s still there, I found it!” said Lily, holding up her tablet. Roald nodded at the picture. “We can walk to the Blue Star in about half an hour. Down Charlottenstrasse . . . a right, two short lefts, straight . . .”

Pulling themselves together, the kids and Dr. Kaplan made their way from street to street. It was nearing 6 p.m., and Berlin’s early nightlife was already a glittering mass of crowds and smoke and music and traffic.

“Maybe we should stay off the big streets,” Wade said.

“Good idea,” Darrell added.

Roald quickly reworked Lily’s internet directions to keep them off the main routes as long as possible, though even the narrower side streets were packed with pedestrians. They skirted across several well-lit open parks, then through a modern department store that reminded Wade of an airport mall, brimming with customers even at night.

“There’s been so much building since I was here,” Roald said, glancing right and left to get his bearings. “I hope the place is open when we get there . . .”

Thirty-three breathless minutes after they started, they found themselves crouching under the bare trees of Lützowstrasse, staring across the street.

Buried in the shadow of its larger neighbors, its windows steamed over and dim, stood the Blue Star, forlorn, in bad repair, possibly harboring a dangerous clientele. But an amber glow from inside signaled that it was open for business.

“Hard to believe it’s still alive,” Dr. Kaplan said as they made their way warily down the sidewalk. “It was gasping for life twenty years ago. We helped Herr Hempel mop the floor and stack chairs at the end of the night. Or early in the morning. We talked forever . . .”

Two motorcycles snaked by close and fast.

“Spies,” Darrell grumbled, huddling into his collar. “Spies everywhere.”

Wade herded them forward. “Let’s get off the streets. Now.”

Looking both ways, Roald pushed them straight through the heavy doors and into the depths of the tavern.

Chapter Fifteen


W
illkommen in den Blauen Stern!”

Wade liked the look of Christina Hempel from the instant she flashed her cheery smile and repeated her welcome in fairly articulate English.

She was a woman in late middle age with big red hair and big everything else. When Dr. Kaplan explained how as a student of Uncle Henry’s he had known her father, she grew more animated, giving them a table by the window with a view of the street in both directions.

“Heinrich Vogel’s favorite table. He still comes once a year to commemorate his wife’s birthday,” she said. “Alas, Frieda passed away several years ago now.”

Roald’s expression fell. “I’m so sorry to be the one to tell you. Heinrich also passed away. Just two days ago.”

Frau Hempel put her hands to her face. Tears rose instantly to her eyes. “Oh no. Father loved him so. How?”

Wade’s blood ran cold when he thought of
how
. “We’re still finding out,” he managed to say. “But I didn’t know Uncle Henry was married. Dad, did you?”

His father seemed to retreat into himself for a moment. “No. I mean, yes, but I never met her. He married later in life.”

Frau Hempel wiped her cheeks. “Oh dear. This is too sad. Yes, Frieda Kupfermann was her name. She passed some years ago. And now him. So sad.” She left menus on the table and disappeared behind the counter.

Wade sat quietly, looking out at the street and saying nothing, though he couldn’t stop his thoughts from circling his uncle’s death.

Death? It’s not regular death. It’s murder
.

No one else said anything either until Lily opened her cell phone. “I’m emailing the photo I took of the table in the apartment to my tablet, so we can see it bigger.”

Wade unfolded the celestial chart on the table. “The first word of the dusty message is ‘the,’ so I’m pretty sure the code number is still four.”

“Here, use this,” his father said, handing him his student notebook. “I wrote down the decryption alphabet on the plane. We should be keeping all the information we find in one place.”

“Good idea.” Slipping a mechanical pencil from his backpack, Wade studied the computer photo, noodled around on a blank page of the notebook, and decoded the first line of Frau Munch’s message.

 

Lca Ayulc himab ds lca Cyzb ir Gzjrauhyss

 

. . . became . . .

 

The Earth moves in the Haus of Kupfermann

 

“Kupfermann?” said Lily. “As in Frieda Kupfermann, Heinrich’s wife? I wonder what
that
means.”


Haus
is ‘house,’” added Becca. “Could Uncle Henry want us to go to his wife’s family’s house?”

Wade liked how Becca called
his
uncle
her
uncle. “Maybe that’s it. But ‘the Earth moves’? What do you think, Dad?”

His father surfaced from his thoughts. “It might be that. I’m not sure.
Haus
is a term that in German can mean any number of things.”

“A shop, for instance,” said Lily. “Like
Alsterhaus
and
Carsch Haus.
Those are German stores I read about.”

“Or a hotel,” Roald went on. “There are also twelve ‘houses’ in astrology. I’m sure Heinrich knew them, even though they were not by any means scientific and none of them are named Kupfermann. I’ll ask Frau Hempel what she knows. Keep working.” He left the table.

Wade decoded the second line more quickly.

 

Rixxio lca nsihis, rixxio lca wxyea

 

. . . became . . .

 

Follow the gnomon, follow the blade

 


Gnomon
?” said Darrell. “
Gnomon
’s not a word. Do it again.”

Wade did. Twice. “It still spells
gnomon
.” It was not a word he or anyone else knew. He wondered about the old saying that two heads are better than one to figure out a problem. Sometimes it probably worked pretty well. But four different heads all chattering about a bunch of dusty words made his own head feel like imploding.

“I can look it up,” said Lily.

“No, keep the code on the screen. I’ll try again.” Wade started decoding again when his father returned to the table.

“Frieda Kupfermann was the last one in her family,” he said. “Their real estate was sold years ago, and there’s no longer any Kupfermann house in Berlin. She did say that Heinrich always joked that Frieda’s name amused him.
Frieda
? I don’t get it. I suppose we could try decoding it, but our hostess didn’t know any more than that.”

“It still says, ‘Follow the gnomon,’” said Wade.

“Gnomon?” said Dr. Kaplan, pushing his glasses up and leaning over Wade’s translation. “It says ‘gnomon’?”

“I told him he did it wrong,” Darrell said.

“Is it a real thing?” asked Lily.

“Absolutely. The gnomon is what you call the blade of a sundial. It’s what casts the shadow that points to the time—”

“Sundial?” Becca practically exploded. “Are you kidding me? There was a sundial at the cemetery! Didn’t you all see it? At that old tomb near the service. It had vines all over it and there was a sundial in front—Lily, you must have gotten it on your video.”

Lily sent the video from her phone to her tablet. When it came up on the screen, she froze the image of the tomb.

The crumbling sundial stood leaning in front of the old mausoleum, and because of its sunken angle, its blade pointed directly into it. Over the heavy-looking iron doors on the face of the tomb was its occupant’s name, carved in elaborate old Gothic letters. Several of the letters were in shadow, and some had worn away. It took them a long moment to decipher the carving, until Lily enlarged the image and they all realized at once.

K . . . u . . . p . . .

The name on the tomb was Kupfermann.

Wade blew out a cold breath. “The house of Kupfermann is his wife’s tomb. Is that it? He wants us to go back there? He wants us to follow the way the blade of the sundial is pointing? Why? What’s in there?”

All eyes turned to Dr. Kaplan. He stared at the translated message, then stood up. He walked across the room, walked partway back, then turned again.

“Dad?” Darrell said.

His stepfather flicked his finger up as if to say, “Hush!” and closed his eyes. A full minute went by before he released a long, slow breath. Then he sat and flipped over several pages in his notebook, searching. He stopped. “My German isn’t as good as yours, Becca. I know
Mann
means ‘man.’ What does
Kupfer
mean?”

Becca stared blankly at him. “Um . . .”

“Copper,” said Lily. When everyone turned to her, she said, “What? There’s a translation site.”

“Copper man?” Darrell said. “Is that more code?”

Looking from the star chart to Wade’s decoded message to the lights of cars zipping past outside the restaurant, Roald flipped three more pages in the notebook, stopped, stood up, and began rocking on his feet.

“Kupfermann. Copper Man. That was the joke of Frieda’s name.”

Wade could practically hear the gears meshing one after the other until his father finally spoke. He said one word.

“Copernicus.”

Darrell frowned. “Uh . . .”

“It’s where the Greek quote comes from,” Roald said, looking at a page in his notebook. “Heinrich wanted us to remember it because the quote also appears at the beginning of
On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres
, the treatise by Nicolaus Copernicus that describes how
the earth moves
around the sun.

“In the first message, Uncle Henry says ‘the Magister’s Legacy.’ Copernicus’s students called him Magister. Heinrich is saying that Copernicus’s legacy—whatever it is—needs protecting. I have no idea what it could be, but the gnomon of the sundial at his wife’s tomb is pointing toward it—”

The bell rang over the doorway, and two stone-faced men entered. They didn’t look like students. They wore dark suits and had obvious bulges near their armpits. They sat down on the other side of the doorway with a clear view of the darkening street.

One of the men started pawing his cell phone while the other glanced at a menu.

Or pretended to.

BOOK: The Copernicus Legacy: The Forbidden Stone
6.6Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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