The Amber Room (12 page)

“All that doesn't sound like the makings of a kiddie's fairy tale.”

“Some of the stories scared me,” she agreed. “Some of them were awful. Really gave me nightmares. But some of them were beautiful.”

“There's so much I don't know,” Jeffrey said quietly. “So much to learn. It's like a treasure trove. You make me feel so
enriched
.”

She turned back from the window to give him a look of pure gratitude. “There's something I've wanted to speak with you about for a very long time. I wonder if maybe now is the time.”

“We won't know unless you try.”

“Do you know what it means to tithe?”

“Sure, I know the word. Ten percent of what you make.”

“Ten percent that is dedicated to the Lord's work.” She hesitated, and in that heartbeat's span was transformed into a shy little girl. “I was wondering if you would like to tithe with me.”

The way she said it brought a burning to the back of his eyes. “It sounds fine, Katya.”

“You don't have to if you don't want to.”

“No, I'd like that. Really.”

“I just thought.” Again she paused and searched, her cheeks touched with a rosebud of blooming red. “I thought it might be a nice part of joining our lives together.”

He reached across for her hand. It was on his tongue to ask her, but he checked the words at the very last moment. Not then. Not there.

“I was thinking maybe we could find something, a project or a need the next time we're in Poland together, and dedicate our work together on it to our Father.” Violet-gray eyes peeked out from beneath the protection of long, dark lashes. “Do you like the idea?”

It was hard not to say what was on his mind, hard to hold to his original plan, hard to bring out the simple words, “I like it very much, Katya.”

She looked at him with eyes that were never spent. Katya held his hand with both of hers and blessed him with her gaze for the remainder of the trip back to London.

CHAPTER 10

The farther from the main highway Kurt traveled, the more treacherous the road became. Four lanes dwindled to two, then the asphalt gave way to brick. Ice and snow packed between the stones created tiny, unseen deathtraps. Wrecks littered the roads, usually where slow-motion Ossie plastic cars met Wessie speed machines too intent on showing off to pay attention to the road and the weather. Kurt's neck throbbed from the tension of trying to keep a fixed appointment time under impossible conditions.

Kurt slowed for a truck entering a factory gateway, corrected a momentary skid, slowed even more. Near the Arnstadt city limits the road became flanked by the Karl Marx Industrial Estate, the high nameplates over each entrance now crudely whitewashed out. Chemical works gave way to cement factories, then to steel mills and a power station. On the other side of the street, high-rise workers' barracks marched in endless rows. Not a tree could be seen in the more than seven miles of factories and tenements.

He passed through the utterly charmless town and started climbing hills along a bone-jarring road. The radio kept him company with a mixture of American sixties' pop, Wessie rock, and a clear-speaking, carefully neutered Wessie announcer. Every trace of the old regime had been wiped from radio and television. No one listened to the Ossie musical groups anymore. No one talked about them. No one even admitted that the music had ever existed.

Kurt had eyes the color of dried mud. His face was as scarred and battered as a building site, marked by early bouts with various poxes. He tended toward gray in everything he wore—gray suits, ties, striped shirts, socks, dark gray shoes. It left him looking like a lump of angry mold.

Kurt considered himself an out-of-work spy, which he was,
but not with the dangerously glamorous past as he would have liked. His spy trips abroad, the ones he referred to in mysterious half tones when chatting up bar girls, had been as overseer to trade missions visiting industrial fairs; they had been boring as only a trade fair could be for someone who had not the first clue about the subject on display. The other East German delegates had immediately pegged Kurt for a stooge, and shunned him throughout the trip. His only company had been other Stasi stooges, most of whom spent their time either shopping or drinking or touring the local porno houses. Kurt had found their company worse than being alone.

The fact that Kurt treated every trip abroad as an all-important mission earned him kudos from the home office and a reputation among traveling technicians as the ultimate pain. His presence on a technical trade mission meant that each morning at breakfast, every mission member had to submit a report on the previous day's activities—what they had learned, whom they had visited, what technology they had managed to pry loose from suspicious Western salesmen. But the Stasi bureaucrats liked Kurt's thoroughness. While his efforts never granted him his sought-after position as either an embassy staffer or a Western-based agent, they allowed him to travel at least twice a year to the West. In a country as tightly controlled as East Germany, this freedom was nothing to sneeze at.

But for Kurt it was not enough. He had always wanted to be an international spook, always seen himself as made for a dangerous life. He took whatever self-defense courses were offered. He wore a full-length black-leather overcoat long after warm weather transformed it into a mobile sauna. While shaving he practiced heavy-lidded expressions, and imagined himself squeezing information from a suspect with his gaze alone. He refused to marry, avoided any long-term connection that might close the book on overseas assignments. He slaved nights over correspondence language courses, though he had
no aptitude for foreign tongues, and proudly slaughtered both Russian and French and Spanish—for some reason, English had always baffled him. Every report he submitted featured a tone of overblown intrigue.

Yet Kurt was never allowed to make the transition to full-time international spy. The hierarchies were distinct and separated by light years; international spies were normally chosen while still in university. In later life, the transition was possible only with that most treasured of possessions—a Party patron. Someone so high and so mighty that rules could be completely ignored, stomped upon, transgressed, and leave the receiver unbruised by having done the impossible.

Kurt had no such connections. He was too harsh in attitude, too abrupt in speech, too lacking in the ability to fawn and grovel. Kurt rose within the national hierarchy by sheer brute ability. His dream for a last-minute transfer remained unquenched. His bitterness knew no bounds.

Kurt's contact was standing where he had promised, beneath a glaring sign sporting a death's head, a crude picture of an explosion, and the ominous words: “Deadly Danger of Bombs and Mines. Do Not Enter.” Kurt pulled into the narrow gravel pathway and stopped. The man was barrel-chested and short and powerfully muscled. He was dressed in the lightweight clothes of one who has learned not to feel the cold—denim overalls and unbuttoned jacket and a battered construction helmet. He thrust out one grimy hand, said in greeting, “The money?”

“It's here,” Kurt replied, climbing from the car.

“Let's have it, then.” When Kurt handed it over the contact counted carefully with stubby, blue-cold fingers. He pocketed the bills and said, “There's only ten minutes of light left. Let's go.”

Kurt cast a nervous glance back at the sign. “I don't see why we can't talk this over in the car.” When the man did not stop, Kurt swore under his breath and started up the gravel slope.

“Talk all day and it still wouldn't be clear,” the man said, pausing by a second sign that proclaimed, in bold red letters,
Lebensgefahr
, Life-Threatening Danger. The man went on, “Yeltsin made his little speech and walked off with almost half a billion marks. Those fools in Bonn should have come up here and checked it out before handing over the money.”

“Checked out what?” When newly elected Russian Premier Boris Yeltsin made his first official visit to Germany, he stated at the opening press conference that he knew where the Amber Room was buried. The news captured the headlines of every newspaper and magazine in Germany, and many in the rest of Europe. Yeltsin said that his researchers, in their investigation of newly uncovered postwar files, had unearthed clear evidence of where the Nazis had stored the most precious of their plundered treasures.

Yeltsin promised that he would disclose this site in return for additional emergency aid to his ailing nation. The Bonn government took his proclamation in stride, determined to allow nothing to upset relations so long as Soviet troops remained stationed on German soil. They replied that, in celebration of Yeltsin's visit, they had already decided to give an additional four hundred million marks in emergency aid.

Yeltsin's lackeys then identified the site as the caves bored into the Jonastal, the Jonas Valley, outside Arnstadt. The caverns had been dug during World War II by prisoners brought from the neighboring Buchenwald concentration camp.

After the first flurry of activity and official investigations, there had been nothing from Bonn except stony silence.

Kurt's eyes cast another glance at the sign's warning. “Shouldn't we find a safer place to talk?”

The man snorted. “We've had droves of fat Bonn politicians come parading up here for months. Not to mention trucks and bulldozers and backhoes and even sonar equipment. I doubt if you'll find anything they haven't.”

“So why the signs?”

“The same reason all the Wessie fat-bellies left
empty-handed.” He pointed to veined white cliffs rising above frozen pines. “Yeltsin said the treasures were buried in a cave. And then one of the researchers in Moscow admitted that it wasn't the Amber Room that was mentioned in these records they found, but other treasures the Nazis hauled off from that same area around St. Petersburg. Hah. We
know
that. Everybody within fifty kilometers knows that.”

Kurt showed exaggerated patience, hoped the man would come to the point before his feet froze to the ground. “So why isn't everybody out digging?”

“Because we like living more than we like golden caskets.” In one sweeping motion he took in the tall pines rising up between them and the steepest cliffs, and the bone-colored stone looming up beyond them. “Look. The SS brought Buchenwald prisoners up here, had them dig caves. Not cave. Caves. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe. Nobody knows, see? Not how many, not even where. Some were used to store bombs from the munitions factory in Arnah. Why? Because bombers can come and find a building and bomb it. Harder to target a seven-kilometer-wide cliff face.

“Some caves for bombs, and some for treasures. At least, that's what the legends say. My father used to talk about the truck convoys that came through Arnstadt after the night curfew forced everybody indoors. Truck after truck after truck without lights, grinding through our city, all headed for the Jonas Valley. Official propaganda said all the trucks were full of bombs, and there was less danger of air raids hitting the trucks at night. But there were stories. Still are. Too many to be just smoke, for my mind.”

He stabbed the air with an angry gesture. “But which caves were for bombs? And which for treasures?”

The faint breeze stopped. In that moment of utter stillness, snowflakes drifted down from a leaden sky. Kurt searched the cliffside. “So why don't I see any cave openings?”

“Because when they pulled out, the SS set off dynamite charges along the crest of the cliffs,” the man replied. “See all
those hills of rubble behind the pines? Man-made avalanches, the lot. Covered over all the cave openings.”

Kurt nodded. “So you don't know where to dig.”

“Not so fast. See how white the cliffs are? Chalk. Softest stone there is. The Nazis' dynamite shifted the
mountains
, not just the openings. The caves are rubble.”

The man lifted his white construction helmet, wiped at the stress that knotted his brow. “While the Wessies were all crowding around down here, making speeches for the press and getting in the way, we pounded steel rods fifteen meters long into the cliff face at likely looking places. Three men getting paid five times normal wage and sweating bullets, holding the rods in place, while two men with hammers took turns banging the rods in five centimeters at a time, and all the while waiting for a bomb to turn the rod into a giant's spear.

“They found three caves. In two and a half weeks. Three caves from how many, a thousand? All empty as far back as they could go, which wasn't far.” He shook his head. “We cleared out the openings with shovels and a backhoe, a bottle of schnapps between each team before they started and another two when they stopped. They sent in bomb demolition experts with maybe fifty kilos of lead clothing and equipment per man. The experts got in about ten meters, and the rock overhead shifted a little—they shift all the time, these cliffs. They're permanently destabilized by the dynamite. There was this little rumble and a little puff of dust out the cave mouth, then screams and six men in lead blankets came running out so fast they didn't hardly touch earth.”

Kurt was truly sorry he had missed that. “What happens now?”

“They stop, what else? You can't bulldoze a cliff filled with half a million tons of forty-five-year-old unexploded bombs in caves that could shift any minute.”

“Buried forever, then.”

“Until we develop something that can see through solid rock, that's my guess.”

“If it's here at all.”

“Oh, something's here. They didn't go to all that trouble just to hide some bombs.” The man shook his head. “Raise a tombstone to the Nazi treasures, let the SS have the last laugh; that's my answer. There's already been enough blood spilled over whatever's buried there.”

Kurt drove back into the worn-down drabness of Arnstadt and called Ferret from the safety of one of the new telephone boxes the Wessies were planting in every city square. “It's impossible to tell,” he reported.