The Amber Rooms

by Ian Hocking

  ‘No. Let Kamo get them for you, and be sure to let him know that only a man of his skill can perform this indispensable service. That will help quieten any concern that lingers about why you risked so much to rescue him.’

  His kissed her hand. His lips were cold.

  ‘Draganov, I need you to promise that Count Nakhimov and his family will be granted protection.’

  ‘From whom? Kamo?’

  ‘No. A man called Soso.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘A Georgian cut-throat. Koba. Sometimes Soselo. Ivanov. David. The Milkman. The Priest. Real name Josef Visarionovich Djugashvili.’

  ‘Ah, I know him. Don’t be worried about. After all this, I will pull his claws personally.’

  ‘As for tomorrow, if I call you, you will come?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Saskia remembered her bloodstained handkerchief. It was crumpled. She took it. Inside there was a cigarette paper with the pencilled message: Find me outside the Ministry of Justice.

  ‘I can get rid of that for you,’ said Draganov.

  ‘No. I will, thank you.’

  ~

  Within the hour, Saskia had returned to Kamo. He had not moved from his position in centre of the room. Her dress still draped him. Saskia settled alongside and closed her eyes on his greasy hair and dreamed that she was once more in the Alexander Park, carrying Pasha from danger.

  ~

  She awoke on the balcony overlooking the department store Gostiny Dvor. It was silvered with streetlight. She was breathing heavily. Had she sleepwalked? She still wore her shift, but nothing else. The wind hurt. She looked down at her hand. It was gripping the iron rail.

  She noticed a pain near her collarbone. She probed it with her finger and found a mosquito. It flickered into the night before she could kill it. The bite itched.

  Another gust of wind struck her.

  Someone lit a cigarette across the street.

  “The flames of victory light our country.”

  Dawn commenced.

  She watched the dust shift in wavelets. Two winds met in St Petersburg. One came from the Gulf of Finland, across which Lenin, so Saskia imagined, looked from the stoop of a villa. The second came from the south, direction Novgorod, and was too local to have stirred the reddish hair of Soso in Baku, or Tiflis, or whichever Caucasian town he was ghosting through.

  There was a language where sky was “the sea above”.

  She felt Kamo behind her.

  ‘The future is a mountain, is it not?’

  Kamo was in a philosophical mood. Perhaps it was a facet of the character he had adopted as part of his disguise. She wondered how he would answer that question, since he had crossed the calendar line many times himself, sailing under the trade winds of anarchy.

  ‘Kamo,’ she said, feeling the hair moving at her temple, ‘I want you to obtain tickets for a masked ball tonight at the Summer Palace. I’ve tried and failed. I want you to pay back my effort in rescuing you.’

  Saskia thought about the mosquito, which carried her blood.

  ‘How did you feel,’ Kamo asked, his voice quiet, ‘when you crossed the border from our calendar to the Gregorian?’

  ‘One travels in time thirteen days. Thirteen days into the West. It is nothing more than moving from one salon to another. A door opens. One walks through. There is a new sky.’ She realised that she was cold. ‘Mountains.’

  ‘A new sky,’ said Kamo. Saskia did not flinch when she felt his rage radiate. One hand gripped the hair at the back of her head and pulled. The other clamped her mouth. She gritted her teeth and breathed through her nose, which felt too narrow for the job. ‘You want me to pay back your efforts? You talk of mountains, whore. The debt your owe me is the mountain. Do not dare to suggest I am obligated to you. Is that clear?’

  Saskia nodded.

  Kamo held for a moment longer, then relaxed. His hands slipped to her hips and he rested his chin on her shoulder.

  ‘My sweet Lynx,’ he said, ‘you bring out the worst of me. Who will pull out your claws, I wonder?’

  ~

  Saskia and Kamo used the main staircase to leave the building. Saskia held Kamo’s arm. Their steps were slow. Kamo wore smoked spectacles and a homburg that was low on his brow. Saskia had acquired a grey wig. As they crossed the foyer, Saskia looked at the frosted door of the superintendent’s office. It was closed.

  Outside, on the Nevsky Avenue, Saskia made eye contact with Robespierre, who was across the street. He glanced at something to her left. Saskia did not turn, but watched the passenger window of a cab as it passed. She saw the reflection of a man leaning against the telephone pole on the corner.

  In Armenian, she said, ‘Okhranniki, twenty yards on our left.’

  Kamo grunted.

  Saskia made eye contact with Robespierre again. With his eyebrows, he indicated a taxi near the Gostiny Dvor rank. Before she could smile, he looked away, stepped on his cigarette, and stepped onto a horse bus. Saskia longed to tell him, for the last time, that he was a good man.

  ‘The taxi with the white sash.’

  ‘I was beginning to get worried.’

  Saskia felt her scalp sweat beneath the wig.

  ~

  The coach’s interior was luxurious, which satisfied Saskia because the coach and its driver had cost the remainder of her money. Kamo sat on the rear-facing seat. He did not help her lower the blinds or, in shadow, pull the cases from the small rack. He watched her.

  ‘When we’ve merged into traffic,’ she said, ‘open the rear window and pull the sash inside.’

  ‘As you wish.’

  ‘Are you going to change?’

  ‘Directly,’ he said, tasting the arm of his glasses. ‘Directly.’

  With her legs braced on the rocking floor, Saskia opened her case and examined the costume. It might have been a huge, red parachute. The metaphor suited her vertigo. She stripped to her corset while Kamo rubbed his left eye, the one that had been damaged by the bomb.

  ‘Does something worry you?’

  ‘Silence, woman.’

  ‘Very well.’

  The new costume had a fitted corset. Saskia removed her own. At this, Kamo said, ‘You’re not like the others.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘If you were lost, a hundred ships would be launched to your rescue.’

  She smiled crookedly. ‘Don’t you mean a thousand?’

  Kamo stood. He could not reach his full height, and he bent over her. His humour had gone. ‘I have never forced myself upon you.’

  ‘Should I thank you?’

  He pursed his lips. ‘Some men have laughed at me because I would not.’

  ‘If laughter is so important to you, perhaps you should.’

  Kamo put his hand to his wounded eye once more. As he kneaded the lid, Saskia felt an absurd pity. Once, he had been a spoiled boy in a seminary, bewitched by the older student assigned to help him pass some exams. And now this: brigandage, escapology, and casual talk of hurt.

  Softly, he said, ‘How are we meant to get the money out of there?’

  ‘You’re standing in it. Now get dressed. I don’t want these blinds to be down for much longer. It will draw attention.’

  As Saskia completed her transformation and sat down, she discovered a note in her hand warmer. She could read it in the gloom, but she lifted the window blind and turned the paper against the light. Its words had been written in a trivial substitution cipher.

  The boy passed his viva voce, and will become a student at the Lyceum. His examiners were particularly impressed by his discussion of the St Petersburg Paradox. His father thanks his tutor. I remain,

  Your good man.

  Saskia did not weep. It would have revealed too much to Kamo.

  ‘Give me that,’ he said, taking it. But his eyes moved haphazardly over the text. ‘What language is this?’

  She looked through the window at the people. In one hundred years they would be dead, but she would be alive, i
f being alive meant anything.

  Chapter Twenty

  As a woman who had overheard a thousand conversations about St Petersburg throughout the Russias, she knew that no commentator passed through St Petersburg without remarking, with the pomp of private insight, that the city was an attempt to impersonate the face—and, by association, the bone structure—of its European cousins: the polyglot, intellectual Vienna; the lynchpin Berlin; Peter’s favourite, Amsterdam; and Paris, which could never be bettered for taste. Last of all, Saskia thought, there is Venice, as she passed her invitation to a footman who was dressed in white, clownish pyjamas, a stove-pipe hat, and black mask. Her invitation read, Carnevale Veneziano a San Pietroburgo, 1908. Tonight the cliché would be celebrated.

  ‘Goda del nostro carnevale, signora,’ said the footman, opening an arm towards the façade of the Great Summer Palace of the Tsars. It was lit with theatrical lime-jets and oil fires and the last of the spring sunshine. Its northern square, through which Saskia had galloped not four days before, throbbed with activity.

  Saskia took a breath to correct his Italian, but held it. Instead, she looked upon the crowd and let Kamo take her arm and move her into its swirl. Most guests were costumed in the Venetian style. Others were dressed as courtiers from the reign of Catherine the Great. One short man was dressed as a Roman centurion, though his cloak was golden. Another as a pirate. There was a highwayman. And the clowns. Clown after clown.

  ‘We will go immediately to the Amber Room,’ said Kamo, pulling her.

  ‘We will not.’ She scanned the crowd. ‘Midnight is our time, not before.’

  ‘Is it clockwork? Do we meet someone there, is that it?’

  Kamo’s face was obscured by his mask: a skull missing its jaw. She could, however, see him biting the inside of his cheek.

  ‘You could say that,’ she replied. ‘We will wait until dinner is called, eat, and recover the money. Smile.’

  Kamo squeezed her arm. ‘How will we move it? Money is heavy, worse than books.’

  ‘It has been arranged. Relax. Enjoy yourself.’

  ‘What is my role in this, Lynx?’ he asked.

  Saskia turned to him. His tone was so soft, the question placed so wearily, that she wondered whether he had guessed her true plan.

  ‘You are the finest infiltrator in St Petersburg,’ she said. ‘How else would we have made it to this ball?’

  ‘I wonder,’ he said. ‘Perhaps my presence is a bulwark against further interference as you proceed to betray the Party.’

  Saskia looked at him.

  ‘You overestimate my cunning.’

  ‘I remember a comment the Pockmarked One made after I told him the story of our first meeting on Turtle Lake. “Perhaps,” he said, “she is a witch who seeks the wisdom of the dead.” He found that funny.’

  To this, Saskia did not reply.

  Polished, black masks complemented the bone white. The latter were commonly gilded, their beauty spots gold in the touches of sunlight. The black masks were seldom without precious stones. Below those masks that covered only half the face, lips were licked. Many half-masks sported probosces that recalled that perfect English expression—Nosey Parker. The full masks were still as skulls and their fixed smiles defiant: lips red and full. The men liked to wear these masks with a headband below their three-pointed Venetian hats. The women tended to carry them on stalks. Their skirts were shorter than usual and their necklines lower. Many wore long, thin gloves with a hook at the elbow in which to hang the hem of the skirt, and they expanded as they spun.

  All about fluttered the whispers of fans, laughter, and conversation. Only the palace servants, who wore no masks, were silent as they carried trays and lit cigarettes and delivered small notes, precise as jewels in clockwork. The occasional flutter of a juggled torch led to an appreciative gasp. Young ladies giggled. It was no difficult task to locate the courtesans. They were slower and employed the conspicuous posture of the huntress, not the prey.

  The evening already smelled of sweat, perfume, cooking meat, and fireworks. The air itself might have been a cocktail mixed to the perfection of collective anticipation: that this night to come, this Petersburg cliché turned authentic, would be somehow unforgettable and unique. This evening might represent the apogee of the season. The Tsar, sadly, was not present. But in his absence there was release. These aristocrats were set for an occasion during which their good names, hidden by a temporary Venetian pall, could not be impaired by mistakes romantic or otherwise. It limited the damage to a level below that of disaster. There might be mishaps and distant shakes of the head. That was the attraction of the masked ball.

  Saskia had a sense of smell beyond that of her fellow guests. She knew that the women were wet and the men hard. She put a finger to her nose and frowned.

  She turned to Kamo.

  ‘Get me a drink,’ she said.

  Saskia stood there, incognito, in a dress of blackcurrant velvet and furlined pelisse and a half-mask that fringed her eyes in gold. Her hat was a sloping disc. Her shoulders carried silver epaulettes and threaded telephone cords that trailed down her arms to her wrists, which disappeared inside her hand warmer. Her choker was black and at its centre was a lobe of amber. She could feel it when she swallowed. The pitch of the merriment was reaching a height, as though the connections between the revellers—their hands, their lips—were tightening to the perfection of gut on a stringed instrument.

  ‘Here,’ said Kamo, putting a glass of white wine in her hand. ‘To courage.’

  ‘To courage.’

  As she lifted the glass to her lips, Kamo stopped her. He linked his arm in hers. Eye to eye, they drank. It was the Bruderschaft, the rite of brotherhood that had become popular among the Outfit since the introduction of its German-born member, Saskia, who never liked the gesture and considered it a poor Caucasian joke at her expense.

  They emptied the glasses.

  ‘Brotherhood,’ said Kamo. In his mask, his eyes were as unreadable as the marbles of a doll. ‘Does the word offend you, sister?’

  ‘Your manner offends me. As for sexist language, we all pick our battles.’

  A blazing arch of fireworks left the roof of the Summer Palace. Saskia had never seen fireworks in twilight. The magnesium light took away colour for an instant. She turned to Kamo, who seemed puzzled by the sudden light.

  ‘The first house has been called to dinner,’ Saskia told him, walking backwards and away. ‘We should eat something.’ In Phrygian, a dialect that the Armenian speaker Kamo would understand, but which would be difficult for eavesdroppers, she added, ‘You’ll need your strength for the money. Think of it.’

  Kamo stared at her. The lower half of his face provided no clue to his mood. ‘I am,’ he said in Russian, and that was an end to their conversation. The spaces within the crowd had compressed as the guests moved towards the many formal doors that permitted entrance to the Summer Palace. A dozen conversations repeated the same thought: that the evening proper was about to begin. That is, it was set to transform once more. Then the talk stopped. Saskia was pushed left and right. The crowd compressed still further until Saskia and Kamo drifted apart at the foot of the Summer Palace. The bass register of an orchestra groaned from its doors. Flames burned with a honeyed intensity from the tall windows. Above, the Tsar’s flag moved in a weak wind.

  At once, they were inside the palace, as if on a tide into a sea cave. The main stairwell rose the full height and depth of the palace. Two flights led to a central landing. From this, four more flights sprouted to the first floor. The risers were marble and the banisters finessed with vases.

  Behind the sound of a polonaise, played by musicians on the landing, she could hear the beating of the candles in the chandeliers. There was a principle, this evening, of natural light. Conversation recovered. Saskia stretched out for Kamo until his fingers—unmistakably the fingers of Simon Ter-Petrossian—locked with hers. The sounds reflected and thundered in her diaphragm. Even the giggles seeme
d basso. Kamo moved to her shoulder. He might see this as a battle, she thought, and their entry a charge. They exchanged inscrutable looks.

  They passed the chamber orchestra. Each musician was dressed in evening wear, and lacked a mask. Not one musician returned the stares of the guests. The air was perfumed. The porphyry pillars sparkled wetly. Beyond them, at the top of the stairs, an emerald flash captured her attention. The intensity of its light was such that she tripped on the next riser. She allowed Kamo to steer her upwards. The emerald light was gone; but Saskia thought about Pavel Eduardovitch and his successful entry to the Lyceum as they passed through a room with mirrored walls, walked around the edge of the Great Hall and entered an anteroom whose fireplaces were covered with green glass. Apropos this light, she thought, Colourless green ideas sleep furiously, but could not source the phrase, despite its familiarity. Saskia tried to think of this as her farewell party. It was difficult. A persistent worry ebbed at her. She glanced at a passing clock. It was nearly nine.

  Here, in the witching light, they approached an oval dining table. Saskia allowed Kamo to seat her in a velour chair. His mouth did not betray his frustration. Her place was laid with many sets of silver cutlery. The crystal glasses were frosted with the Imperial arms. Silver ice buckets held wines of all shades and sugared fruits were arranged in tiers. A pole rose from the centre of the table and upon it was a Venetian mask, trailing red ribbons from its eyes. It reminded Saskia of the bloody tears she had cried in a border town the previous autumn. Kamo took the seat on her right.

  ‘You and your partner make thirteen,’ said the woman on her left. She was dressed as an angel. Her wire wings were draped with goose feathers. Her carmined lips suggested an older woman of fifty or so. Playfully, she said, ‘The first to stand will be unlucky for a year. What have you come as, young woman?’

  ‘She is the Allegory of the Future,’ said Kamo, ‘where superstition will have no role.’ His tone suggested he wanted to end the conversation there, but Saskia did not intend to remain silent throughout the meal. No doubt Kamo feared that she would reveal herself. It was, however, more likely that the guests would find their silence conspicuous.