The Amber Room (6 page)

“You don't mean according to whether or not it makes money?”

“Of course not. Listen to me, Jeffrey. A man can rebuild an entire nation, but if his eyes and ears and heart and mind are tuned to the clamor of his fellowman, his works are empty of eternal blessing.”

“So what happens if you can't find God? Do you just stop working?”

“Not at all. You must do three things
while
you work. First, you must earnestly seek the Lord and never, ever believe that worthy action is a substitute for a daily walk in faith. Second, you must always dedicate your efforts to the Lord and seek His acclaim only. And third—can you guess what the third action is?”

“Love.”

“The most crucial element of all,” Gregor agreed. “Without love, your greatest effort is but dust blowing in the wind.”

“It's great talking with you like this again,” Jeffrey told him.

“Make Christ your teacher, search for a knowledge of divine love,” Gregor replied. “And give your darling fiancée my heartfelt best wishes.”

CHAPTER 5

Erika found her former colleague, Birgit Teilmacher, fairly comfortable in her position as file keeper in the Dresden archives' new location—an abandoned underground bunker system left over from World War II. Birgit had served as secretary to the director of the women's prison, and anyone who held such a job was both Party member and Stasi informant. But no one had time to investigate secretaries—not yet, anyway. Birgit's punishment for the moment was simply to be relocated and forgotten.

Erika entered the concrete-walled room with, “How does it feel, spending eight hours a day underground?”

If she felt any surprise at the unannounced visit, Birgit masked it well. “I wish it were only eight. They've got me doing the work of five people down here.” She inspected the other woman's solid girth. “You haven't been sticking to your diet.”

Erika shrugged off her knee-length black-leather coat. “It doesn't pay for people in my new profession to be too petite. Gives the jokers ideas.”

“Set it down over there.” Birgit motioned to a corner filing cabinet. “You really should get another coat. That one makes you look as feminine as a tree trunk.”

“It so happens I'm attached to that coat,” Erika replied. “It's the only thing I have left from my old life.”

“You should have chosen something else.” Birgit hefted a vast sheaf of papers. “I'm kept busy these days making records of change. Know what these are? Statistics on abortions. These are the latest hospital records. Abortions are up by over five hundred percent since the Wall came down.”

“People get to choose between a new child and a new car,” Erika replied. “The new car wasn't available before.” She took a seat and asked, “How are you?”

“Enduring.” Birgit's features took on a thoroughly bleak cast. “What other choice do any of us have these days?”

The Ossies were coming to resent the Wessies and resent their economic invasion in ever-stronger terms. Companies that had been the lifeblood of small Ossie communities were being bought up for pennies, with the new owners showing nothing but horror over the factories' condition. The best machines were stripped and often taken back to Western factories, or so the rumors went and the pulp newspapers accused—accusations most people were only too happy to believe. Ossie management and workers had been fired wholesale, with the remaining few required to retrain under Wessie technicians. Wessie workers, brought in at breathtaking salaries to work the best jobs, showed with every word and gesture their scorn for the East—people, land, factories, the lot.

Other companies, now controlled by the West-dominated behemoth called the Treuhand, had been declared wasteful or polluting or decrepit or junk and closed down overnight. A land that had never known even half a percent of unemployment now had forty-three percent of its work force on welfare—at a time when rents had risen by six hundred percent and food prices had jumped almost twentyfold.

On the other side of the vanished border, the West German government leaders faced a nightmarish dilemma. They knew beyond the slightest doubt that unless the situation in the East stabilized before the next election, they would be ousted. Their only answer was to spend as much as possible as fast as possible, and haul the new eastern states up by their bootstraps. Yet in the first two years alone, unification had cost the German people five hundred billion marks—over three hundred billion dollars. Inflation had been capped only by introducing a temporary income-tax hike and by raising interest rates to twice the highest level they had been since World War II. A nation of Wessies listened and wondered at
the black hole called former East Germany that was bleeding their wealth.

But the Ossies themselves felt they were seeing only the tiniest trickle of all this wealth. Their wage levels, when they could find jobs, remained frozen at forty percent of that of Wessie workers on the same jobs—and Ossie prices were now at Wessie levels. The Porsche 928s and Mercedes 600s they were seeing with increasing frequency on their newly repaired roads bore Wessie license plates and were driven by their new Wessie bosses.

The Ossie tabloid press took great glee in throwing out infuriating little snippets about who was really growing rich on all this supposed rebuilding. They greeted the Ossies each morning with the news that there was now a five-year waiting list for the hundred thousand dollar BMW 850i. That the West was seeing a boom for new luxury housing like nothing in the country's history. That Cartier jewelers sold more gold and diamonds and emeralds in the former West Germany than in the rest of the world combined.

While this went on, they stood helpless in the face of public shame. Every day, another lake in former East Germany was declared dead from overpollution. Each night, commentators monitored reports on another twenty thousand, thirty thousand, two hundred thousand Ossie employees who had been fired from jobs found to be totally profitless, totally without value to the new German federation. The Ossies sat in their little rooms and felt themselves growing smaller, their lives ever more meaningless. They watched, helpless and failing, as their entire way of life was slowly strangled away.

The Ossies knew what was happening. Years of Communism did not make them dumb, only bitterly suspicious. To their eyes, everything pointed toward the fact that the Ossies were being doled out crumbs, like beggars at a rich man's table.

And daily their resentment grew.

“It was one of the things we learned best, wasn't it,” Erika replied. “How to endure.”

Birgit did not deny it. “They arrested everyone who worked at the Berlin prison. Everyone. Right down to the,” she hesitated, then settled on “guards.”

“I heard,” Erika said, probing softly. “It worries you, does it?”

Birgit shrugged. “So what is this new profession of yours?”

“Driving a taxi.”

“Where?”

“Best not to say,” Erika replied.

“A different name, I suppose.”

Erika nodded. “And here you are,” she said, “down in a hole.”

The Dresden archives used to be kept partly in the Stasi's city headquarters, partly in the Communist Party building, and partly at City Hall. Nowadays, however, the Stasi building was a cultural center, the Communist Party building housed the new regional Ministry of Economics; and the City Hall's archives were being scrutinized by imported Wessie investigators.

This investigation was no easy task. The one product the Communist regime had produced in greatest amounts was paper, and nothing had
ever
been thrown away. Wessie investigators for one region, when asked to give an approximate date for completing their inquest, laughed and took the reporters on a tour of the two hundred
rooms
filled with uninspected files. They then told the reporters that more than half the people who should be charged with criminal offenses would escape trial by dying of old age.

There was also a rising tide of Ossie resentment over how many were being hurt, and how badly. The public was now permitted to inspect their own Stasi files, and surprises were frequent and harsh. One woman discovered that her husband of twenty-six years had been a Stasi informer since their engagement. The governor of the state of Thuringen
was deposed on accusations of having informed for Stasi, although more than two-thirds of the populace thought he had done an excellent job. A new Ossie member of the German parliament was found to have informed for the Stasi after graduating from college over twenty years ago; the shame of this discovery caused him to commit suicide.

Initial studies suggested that over a third of the Ossie population had informed for Stasi at one time or another. Out of a population of eighteen million, almost six million had at one time or another fed the Stasi's endless appetite for information. Did this mean they all would be threatened with exposure and punishment? Would all families and friendships and working relationships be seared by the light of this new day?

“How can we be treated like criminals?” Birgit was not a large woman, but her wiry form crackled with an energy that made the room seem too small to contain her. “I did what I was told. I followed orders. I pledged my life to the Party. Is this what I deserve?”

“Let us hope you never have to ask those questions of a Wessie judge,” Erika said.

Birgit deflated. “I have nightmares.”

“Don't we all.”

“Not of the past. Of the future.”

“What is there for us to fear of the past?” Erika leaned across the desk. “I am working on a way out.”

Birgit inspected her former colleague. “You mean money.”

Erika nodded. “A lot of it.”

“Enough for me?”

“Perhaps.”

Birgit inspected the paper-clouded desk, the rough walls with their plastering of clammy concrete, and asked quietly, “What must I do?”

“Are we safe here?”

Birgit gave a humorless laugh. “These walls are half a meter thick. There are seven meters of earth between us and
the road overhead. Why would the Wessies bore holes just to bug the archives? They haven't even bothered to give me new ventilation.”

Erika said, “I need help locating a certain man. He changed his name after the war, of that we are fairly sure. He was born and raised here in Dresden. Where he moved afterward, I don't know.”

“That's all?”

“I have his name. An old picture. His rank in the army during the war.”

Birgit grimaced. “Gestapo?”

“No. Transport corps.”

“Ah, of course. For movement of treasure. That's it, isn't it?”

Erika remained silent.

“Of course,” Birgit repeated. She raised her eyes to the bare bulb overhead. “I could try and find fingerprints, match old records. Everyone had to have prints taken for the new identity cards issued back in the late forties. He was born here?”

“Yes. And lived here until enlisting. The records would still be here?”

“Here or Berlin. You'd be surprised how many survived the bombings. Leave that with me. I still have a few friends.”

“How long will it take?”

“As long as I need,” Birgit replied. “How much do you pay?”

“Four thousand marks now, more later.”

“How much more, how much later?”

“A lot more, hopefully not long from now. We are all feeling the pressure these days.”

“It would be nice to receive more now.”

“It would be nicer still if we had it.”

Birgit examined her. “Can I trust you?”

“You know who I am, you know,” Erika hesitated, then finished with, “you know.”

“Let me see your new identification,” Birgit demanded.

Erika thought about it, then reached into her shoulder bag and handed over the green Wessie identity card. Birgit examined it carefully, compared it with the professional taxi license Erika also supplied, and made note of Erika's new name and address. “First-class product.”

“It ought to be. It cost enough.”

“But it will work only so long as you don't try to leave the country.”

Erika nodded. This was well known. Stasi had issued over thirty thousand false West German passports during the last year before the Wall fell, as well as about the same number of American passports, and it had proven immensely difficult to determine who owned them. In the early weeks of transition, many files had been lost to a sudden spate of fires. Other paper piles had been fed to the compost heaps of newly avid gardeners, and honey had been discovered coating hard disks in several central computers.

The Wessies were aware of the traffic in false papers, as many Ossies sought to grow new faces and leave behind old lives. The Wessies instituted a policy of checking ID papers at all border crossings. Before, this had been done on a random basis only. Nowadays, even the border guards on trains were equipped with hand-held computer links into which every name and ID number was punched.

“We will need to cross only one time,” Erika replied. “I hear the Dutch border is full of holes.”

“You think you will make enough from this to disappear forever?”

“Forever is not my concern,” Erika said. “A year or two of comfort is as far as I care to look just now.”

“Four thousand marks,” Birgit said thoughtfully. “Think of what comfort four thousand Wessie marks would have brought under the old regime.”

“Under the old regime,” Erika replied, “I would not have been asking.”

“No, I suppose not.” Birgit toyed with her pen. “What if he's dead?”

“Then,” Erika replied, “we spend our remaining days dreading every knock at the door, every ring of the phone, every unmarked letter in the post.”

Birgit nodded, expecting nothing else. “I will see what I can do.”

CHAPTER 6

The day of Alexander's return from Cracow, Jeffrey received a call from Frau Reining, an East German attorney based in Schwerin. She had first contacted them the previous summer, while defending families who had been victimized by the former Communist regime. Since then, she had become a valuable ally in their hunt for rare antiques. The line rained a constant barrage of static as Jeffrey yelled a hello.