The Amber Room (21 page)

“I heard the receptionist tell someone on the phone that they're taking reservations six months in advance.” She smiled up at him. “We have two hours until our meeting. Would you rather spend it complaining or taking a look at the city?”

They walked down the riverside pathway with traffic thundering alongside. Beyond the road towered Dresden's medieval city walls, granting them an astonishing view into what Dresden once had been—a royal city, a seat of power and palaces and parliaments. With each breath, Jeffrey felt himself intoxicated by the scent of living history mingling with the diesel fumes and construction dust.

Only a small portion of the city remained intact after the Allied bombing during World War II. The surviving buildings now lay beneath blankets of grime and neglect, the tall roof-statues stained so black they appeared carved from coal. Yet they still bore witness to a city that once had been a treasure trove of art and architecture, of power and wealth.

They entered the wall through lofty gates built to admit mounted cavalry with lances raised in royal salute. Behind
rose the skeletal remains of the Frauen Church, over seven hundred years old when destroyed in the war. They walked on, passing one of the five inner-city palaces that remained out of almost two hundred royal residences. Beyond them rose the royal opera house, erected from stones still blackened by the firebombs that had consumed it in 1944. The first act of the new city council had been to rebuild it as a beacon of reassurance to a cowed and battered populace. Jeffrey and Katya joined the quiet throng of German tourists who braved the cold to read the council's proclamation. It promised a future of hope, a city with renewed purpose, and opportunities for growth and improvement in their own lives. Jeffrey searched the faces around him as he listened to Katya translate the words and saw how deeply these grim-faced individuals wished to believe.

Everywhere were the signs and sounds of renovation—jackhammers and rumbling trucks and tall cranes, warning signs and dust clouds and great crews of men scrambling over war-torn surfaces. More ruins gave way to a palace that Jeffrey took for the grandest of all the old buildings until he caught sight of the one rising behind it. Beyond that loomed yet another. Each was grander and greater than the one before.

They escaped the snow within a street-side cafe. Jeffrey listened as Katya gave their order to a waitress who looked poured into her dress. He watched her walk away, wondering how she managed to breathe. He turned back to find Katya watching him. “Was I staring?”

“You know you were.” Katya forgave him with a smile. “She's grown into that outfit. The shoes and dress are all pre-unification. See the dyed cork heels and fake-leather straps? Very Communist chic.”

“She's kept the dress because she can't afford a new one?”

Katya shook her head. “Denial. It's a universal feminine trait. As long as she can get the zipper up, she's still a size eight.”

When their lunch arrived, Katya nodded toward a young
man seated at the next table. She told Jeffrey, “Buy him an ice cream, please.”

The young man was small and slender to the point of evident hunger. Dark eyes were planted at definite slants in leathery skin. The face was all hollows and sharp angles. “What for?”

“Buy him an ice cream, Jeffrey. If you won't, I will.”

“You'll have to, anyway,” Jeffrey replied. “I don't speak the lingo.”

Katya motioned to the waitress and spoke to her at length. The waitress gave them both an odd look, then moved away.

“He's a Russian soldier,” Katya explained.

“How do you know?”

“Lots of things. The plastic belt. The quietness. He doesn't even move his eyes. When the waitress went to his table, he pointed to the menu to order, and when the waitress brought him a coffee he looked crushed. He couldn't read the menu and didn't know how to ask for something to eat. It's probably his only leave. And his only money. I read that the soldiers in some barracks are selling their boots for food. The officers are so ashamed they're keeping the enlisted men locked inside the compounds for weeks at a time.”

The waitress brought over a large metal boat of ice cream; the young man made enormous eyes. Katya leaned across the gap between their tables and explained with her hands that it was a gift. The young man bowed almost to the seat and smiled openhearted thanks.

“Watch,” Katya whispered. “Watch how he eats.”

The man became totally locked into his ice cream. It
consumed
his attention. He ate each little mound in turn, taking tiny slivers with his spoon, making it last and last and last. Each time he felt their eyes he turned and gave them another genuine smile.

“That look makes me want to cry,” Katya said.

“My little Samaritan,” he said.

“I feel so sorry for him,” she said, turning away. “He is
hated here. He lives in a hell called an enlisted men's barracks, and when he leaves here, what will he go back to? What hope does he have?”

When they left the cafe, snow flurries opened to reveal frantic scurrying clouds, then closed into curtains swept sideways by the wind. They followed the example of others and huddled up against the nearest building as they walked.

The Semper Gallery, their meeting point, proved to be the last bastion of old Dresden. Beyond it was all garish modernism and broken pavement and traffic. Buildings were glass and concrete and steel and tasteless. The contrast to the Semper palace could not have been starker.

They crossed a wooden bridge over a swan-filled moat, then passed under a multistory arch formed as a gilded crown and colonnaded pedestal. Inside were acres of carefully sculpted gardens, all brown and empty and waiting for spring. Scaffolding covered two thirds of the surrounding ornate palace, over a thousand feet to a side. The sound of construction followed them everywhere.

Katya pointed through the falling white veil to where two leather-coated individuals watched them. “Frau Reining said they would be wearing red scarfs.”

It was only when they were a few paces away that Jeffrey realized the second person was a woman. Her face was all angles and hard lines, her expression stubborn and suspicious.

Her pockmarked companion spoke with a voice roughened by a metal rasp. Katya translated it as, “He wants to know if you are the one.”

“The one what?”

“Let me tell him yes, all right? I don't feel comfortable with this pair.”

The uneasiness he felt from their gaze hardened into genuine dislike at the thought of Katya's fear. “Tell them the question is out of a third-rate spy movie, and it's too cold out here for games.”

Katya hesitated, then spoke in a soft voice. The man stiffened, then turned and stomped off. The woman watched him go, then turned back to Jeffrey with a smirk and spoke a few words.

“I don't understand,” Katya said.

“What did she say?”

“End of drama.”

“This is ridiculous. Tell her we're leaving.”

Before Katya could speak the woman held up her hand, pointed to where the pockmarked man reappeared through the colonnaded atrium. With him scuttled a little figure bundled within a shapeless greatcoat. On closer inspection, Jeffrey decided the man looked like the embryo of a giant mole.

When he spoke, the man had the gentle lisp of an ageless Pan. “I hear that you are an honorable businessman, Mr. Sinclair,” the little man said in greeting. The act of translating those few words was enough to give Katya's voice a colorless tone.

Jeffrey bridled. “No one has said the same about you.”

Katya glanced his way. “How do you know that he can't speak English?”

“I don't know, and I don't care. I don't even know what we are doing here.” He looked down at her. “Can we please get out of this snow?”

“Don't you want to know what he's got to sell?”

“Look at these people, Katya. Tell me how you think they came up with something of value.”

Katya hesitated, then turned back to the trio and spoke in her lilting German. The strange-shaped man replied in sibilant tones. Katya translated, “This place is a most appropriate spot for our meeting, as the palace resembles greatly the former home of what I have to sell.”

The pockmarked man's dull stare rankled almost more than Jeffrey could stand. He turned sideways and asked, “Is this guy all there?”

“I don't know, but his German is very precise, very educated.”

“They give me the creeps.”

Katya nodded, waited for his move. Snow dusted her hair with a faint, damp frosting. “Tell him he has one minute to get this over with.”

The little man showed no irritation. “What we are selling is currently being sought by three different governments, all of whom believe it is in their territory—Lithuania, Russia, and our own German government. We know they all are racing down false trails. We know this for a fact, Mr. Sinclair.”

“What is it?”

“We are not selling the article,” the little man continued in tones as gray as his skin, “but rather the article's location.”

Jeffrey took in the bottle-bottom glasses pinched onto the smidgen of nose, the peach-fuzz hair, the sloping forehead, and decided this was the strangest human he'd ever seen. “You want me to buy directions to an antique?”

“We will supply you with a sample of the merchandise, which will leave no doubt in your mind whatsoever,” the other replied. “Payment will be required only after you have received the sample. We seek nothing in advance.”

That slowed Jeffrey down. “You don't?”

“We are most serious in this endeavor, I assure you, Mr. Sinclair. We have unearthed a hoard of world renown. And for this we wish to receive a mere two million dollars.”

Jeffrey laughed out loud. “Come on, Katya. Let's go back to the ship.”

The man's lisping voice stopped him. “Naturally, we are leaving ample room for you to add your own percentage.”

“Tell the man it's been swell,” Jeffrey replied. “But I deal in antiques, not fairy tales.”

The unlined, snub-nosed face remained expressionless as he spoke. Katya translated, “He wants to know if you have ever heard of the Amber Room.”

CHAPTER 19

“What did they look like, these three?” Alexander asked.

“The little man looked like a skinless frog,” Jeffrey replied. “Flanked by his and her linebackers.”

Katya laughed out loud. “They did not.”

“That guy with the pox,” Jeffrey persisted. “If he was any dumber, you'd need to water him twice a week.”

They were seated in Alexander's spacious living room, the night's bitter chill kept at bay by a carefully tended fire. Their return trip from East Germany the day before had been long and tiring but uneventful, their arrival most welcomed by Alexander. The gala was weighing heavily upon him. Together they had put in a full day's work on final details, then Katya had pushed aside the old gentleman's objections and insisted that he allow her to prepare dinner.

“The man wasn't dull,” Katya replied. “He was careful.”

“He was dumb,” Jeffrey stated flatly. “Who would we be that he needed to go back, get the little guy, sneak him out.”

“Habits of a lifetime die hard,” Alexander observed.

“And he didn't have the pox,” Katya said.

“Whatever. His face looked like somebody had drilled for oil. About a thousand times.”

“You didn't like them,” Alexander said.

“I didn't like any of it. This isn't antiques.”

“But they wanted nothing up front,” Alexander said.

Jeffrey shook his head. “I don't understand what they're trying to pull, but whatever it is, it smells.”

“As soon as that man opened his mouth, you were angry,” Katya said, smiling now. “If you had been a dog, you'd have broken your chain and gone for his face.”

“I wish I had,” he said, liking the image. Chase the guy down a few blocks, come trotting back with a mouthful of
trousers. “I can't believe we went all the way to Dresden to meet those clowns.”

“Yes, well, despite your impressions, there may be something to this,” Alexander said. “In my experience, it is the offbeat character who takes the wild risk. He has nothing to lose, you see. All the normal channels for gain and ambition are closed to him. He walks along gray paths, neither legal nor criminal, skirting the edges, looking for those chances that others have missed.”

Jeffrey thought that over. “But how could a trio like that come up with something hidden in Poland?”

Alexander's gaze snapped to full alert. “That is what they said? Why did you not tell me?”

“I thought I had.”

“It wasn't them,” Katya said. “Frau Reining said it when she called to set up the meeting.”

“And what did she make of those people?”

“She only met the woman,” Katya replied with evident amusement. “But she would have sympathized with Jeffrey.”

“Why does that make you smile?” Jeffrey asked.

“It's so unlike you,” Katya replied. “The suave and debonair man of the world with his hackles up and his teeth bared.”

“I didn't know you thought I was suave.”

She nodded. “Sometimes I can hardly believe you can be so polished and not let it go to your head. You—”

“Yes, well,” Alexander interrupted, “this is all perfectly fascinating, but I am still not clear on how Frau Reining entered into this picture.”

The touch of Katya's gaze lingered upon Jeffrey long after her eyes had turned away. She described Frau Reining's contact with the woman and finished with, “Frau Reining is positive the woman is Stasi.”

“Former Stasi,” Alexander corrected, not disturbed by the news. “That might explain how they gained access to secret information. Did she say anything more?”

“I don't think she was very interested in knowing anything else,” Katya replied.