by Sam Eastland
‘There might be food,’ added Stefanov, removing from his mess kit a piece of Russian army bread which had been steeped in grease and allowed to congeal, forming it into a waxy brick. Contemptuously, he tossed it into Ragozin’s lap. ‘Better than this stuff.’
‘Food,’ Barkat egged on Ragozin. ‘I bet they’ve got everything in there.’ Thoughtfully, he set a strand of grass between his teeth. It hung from his mouth like the tongue of a snake.
‘Shut up,’ Ragozin told him. ‘You know I am starving to death.’
‘The Romanovs could have anything they wanted,’ Barkat assured him.
Ragozin huffed. ‘They’ve been gone a long time.’
‘But who knows what they left behind, eh?’ Barkat broke in.
‘Oh, fine!’ Ragozin threw up his hands. ‘You realise we’ll all probably end up in a penal battalion because of this. Still‚ it would be worth it as long as we can scrounge up something better than the canned pig skin I’ve been living off ever since I joined the Red Army!’
Cloaked in the darkness, the three men set out across the park.
Kirov and Pekkala
Kirov and Pekkala sat in the Emka, which was still in the middle of the road.
‘You’ve been in the Amber Room, haven’t you?’ asked Kirov.
‘Of course,’ replied Pekkala. ‘I met the Tsar there many times.’
‘Then can you tell me why the Fascists would be so concerned with getting their hands on it?’
‘If you had ever seen it for yourself,’ Pekkala told him, ‘you wouldn’t need to ask the question. And if the sight of it wasn’t enough to convince you, then consider that the amber in that room is worth ten times its weight in gold.’
‘And how much amber is in the room?’
‘Seven tons of it,’ replied Pekkala.
‘What are they planning to do?’ asked Kirov. ‘Tear the walls apart?’
‘They wouldn’t have to,’ Pekkala informed him, ‘because the amber is not actually embedded in the walls. It’s fitted into panels, some about twice the height of a man and others which would come up to your waist. Once those had been removed, the room would be an empty shell.’
‘I am beginning to understand,’ said Kirov. ‘We should go straight to the Kremlin. Now that you’ve figured out the purpose of the map, Comrade Stalin will want to know immediately.’
‘Not before I have confirmation from Lieutenant Churikova that my assumptions are correct. There are still many questions which have yet to be answered. Like why those two men would have been transporting the map when it was already too late to get their hands on the amber.’
‘Why is it too late?’
‘The contents of the room, including the amber, were evacuated to safety, along with most of the other treasures in the palace. Everything has been boxed up and shipped east of the Ural mountains. The Amber Room is somewhere in Siberia by now. I heard about it on State radio over two weeks ago, but it’s only been seventy-two hours since the two men who were carrying the painting went down over our lines.’
‘Perhaps they didn’t hear the broadcast,’ suggested Kirov. ‘I know I didn’t.’
‘The Germans monitor Russian State Radio, just as we monitor all of their radio stations. They would have known‚ for sure. And there’s something else I can’t figure out.’
‘What’s that, Inspector?’
‘The location of the Amber Room is not a secret. It has been there for two hundred years. Why would someone go to the trouble of preparing an elaborately coded message to inform the Germans of something they could find out from any art history book?’
‘A pity we don’t have Comrade Ostubafengel to speak with,’ said Kirov, remembering the word they had found scrawled on the back of the canvas. ‘I’m sure he could have told us everything.’
‘Let’s hope Lieutenant Churikova has the answers,’ Pekkala remarked as he put the car in gear and steered them back on course towards the train station.
On their previous visit to Ostankinsky, they had found the place almost deserted. Now hundreds of soldiers crammed the railyard. Some lay sleeping on the ground, using their rucksacks as pillows. Other sat in tight circles, playing cards or coaxing mess tins full of water to the boil over fires made from twigs.
Many looked up when they heard the growling of the Emka’s engine, hoping that some other form of transport might have arrived at last. Seeing only one four-seater car, the optimism faded from their eyes.
‘All the trains must be held up because of the bombing last night,’ said Pekkala. ‘She’s probably still here.’
‘But how are we going to find her in that crowd?’ wondered Kirov.
Pekkala turned to him. ‘I believe I have the solution.’
Five minutes later, Kirov was making his way along the spine of the steeply angled roof, his arms held out to the side and wobbling unsteadily, like a tightrope walker high above the big ring of a circus.
By now, every pair of eyes in the railyard was following his progress.
‘Go on, Commissar!’ shouted a soldier, who wore a filthy greatcoat so long that it trailed along the ground as he walked towards the station house. ‘Jump! Jump!’
Arriving at the centre of the roof, Kirov came to a stop. Slowly, he turned to face the crowd and cupped his hands to his mouth. ‘I am looking for a woman!’
At first, the soldiers simply stared at him in confusion.
Then, one by one, came the replies.
‘Let me know when you find her!’ shouted a soldier, rising slowly to his feet, a fan of playing cards clutched in his fist.
‘I am also looking for a woman!’ boomed another man, raising his rifle in the air. ‘She must report to me at once!’
‘Come down here, Comrade Commissar,’ called a broad-faced man with piggy eyes, his head so closely shaved that his scalp gleamed in the sun. Unlike the others, this man did not smile as he hurled his insults at the figure on the roof. ‘Come down here and. . ’
A shot rang out across the station yard.
Hundreds of men flinched simultaneously. The laughter ceased abruptly.
Kirov waited until the last sliver of smoke had escaped from the barrel of his Tokarev before replacing the weapon in its holster. ‘Her name,’ he called into the silence, ‘is Lieutenant Churikova!’
There was a creaking sound, which seemed to come from directly beneath Kirov’s feet. It crossed his mind that the roof might be collapsing under him.
But the sound was from the door of the station house, which now fell back with a clatter against its crooked frame.
A soldier walked down the three steps of the station house into the dust of the railyard, then stopped and turned. It was Churikova. She squinted up at Kirov, half blinded by the sun behind his back. ‘I didn’t think I’d seen the last of you‚’ she said.
On the ground once again, Kirov led Churikova to the Emka, where Pekkala handed her one sketch after another as he explained what they had learned about the map.
Churikova examined each one, carefully and in silence.
‘Well?’ Pekkala asked‚ unable to disguise his impatience. ‘What do you think?’
It was a moment before she replied. ‘I think you are correct,’ she said at last, ‘but even if you have deciphered this Baden-Powell diagram, the map contained within it has no purpose any more. You must have heard the broadcast on State Radio, reporting that the Amber Room has been removed from the Palace. What’s more, even if the Kremlin hasn’t admitted it yet, every soldier in that railyard knows that the Germans will soon be at the gates of Leningrad. The Catherine Palace lies directly in the path of their advance. Whatever information this map might have provided is useless now. You might as well throw it away.’
‘Before I can do that,’ replied Pekkala, ‘there is someone who will want to hear the opinion of an expert. For that, I must bring you back to Moscow.’
‘Who is this person?’
‘You will know him when you see him.’
‘But I have a train to catch,’ protested Churikova. ‘I must rejoin my battalion.’
Kirov and Pekkala exchanged glances, realising that the results of last night’s bombing raid had either been suppressed by the authorities, or else had not yet reached the Ostankinsky railyard.
Pekkala opened the door of the Emka, gesturing for Churikova to take a seat. ‘Please, Lieutenant,’ he said gently.
Driving back to Moscow, Pekkala relayed the grim details about the train which had been hit.
Churikova struggled to absorb the information. ‘Surely they weren’t all killed, Inspector? There must have been survivors.’
Pekkala thought of what Poskrebychev had told him about the wheel which had been found over half a kilometre from the wreck. He imagined it, smouldering in the dirt like a meteor which had just collided with the earth. ‘I am told that there were none.’
Having crossed
Having crossed the wide expanse of the Alexander Park‚ the three men stood at last before the entrance to the Catherine Palace.
Stefanov tried the doors but found them both locked.
‘Well, what did you expect?’ hissed Ragozin. ‘We should go back at once!’
But Barkat had already climbed in through a broken window. A moment later, there was a rattling as he slid back the bolt. ‘Your majesties,’ he said, swinging wide the double doors, and bowing extravagantly as the other two walked past him into the palace.
In front of them, the grand staircase rose up into the darkness of the floor above. At the base of the stairs, balanced on a short white marble pillar, stood a huge porcelain vase, strangely out of place in the otherwise empty hallway.
The three men went over to the vase, drawn to it like boys towards a pie left on a window sill to cool. Barkat wrapped his arms around the vase. ‘Maybe I can get this into the truck.’
‘You shouldn’t do that,’ muttered Stefanov, but even as he spoke, he wished he had thought of it first.
Barkat grunted. ‘I can’t even lift it!’
‘Let me try,’ said Ragozin, pushing Barkat aside. He had no luck either. ‘This thing is heavy!’ he whispered.
Now it was Stefanov’s turn. Folding his arms around the vase, he hugged the vase to his chest, braced his legs and lifted. The vase seemed to shift, as if it was a living thing determined to stay rooted to the spot. And then he understood why none of them could move it. The vase was filled with water.
‘Why would they do that?’ asked Ragozin.
‘Maybe it had flowers in it,’ suggested Barkat.
‘No,’ said Stefanov. ‘It’s so the vase won’t shatter from the concussion of an exploding shell. My family used to live right by the railroad tracks. Sometimes those trains would make the whole house shake. If the vibration reached a certain pitch, it could shatter a window, or a glass inside a cabinet, or a vase. At home, my father used to fill our only flower vase with water, so that it could absorb the shock. Whoever did this,’ Stefanov tapped a fingernail against the vase, ‘thinks there’s going to be a battle here. Come on. We have to hurry. It’s this way.’
Although Ragozin had brought an army-issue torch‚ there was enough moonlight coming in from outside that they could make their way around without it.
Instead of climbing the stairs, the three men went through a doorway to the right and entered a space which had once been the picture hall. No paintings hung there now and the gaping frames that once contained them lay scattered on the floor amongst handfuls of straw and a pile of empty, musty-smelling suitcases.
Of the furniture that once decorated the hall, only a single sideboard cabinet remained, its drawers pulled out and missing, as if the place had already been looted. On top of the sideboard, looking strangely out of place, sat a broken American-made Sylvania radio, the guts of its wires hanging out the back. Ragozin gently took the radio in both hands and lifted it so that the speaker pressed against his ear. ‘They listened to me on this,’ he whispered. ‘My voice came out through here. I can feel it.’
Thick velvet curtains still hung in front of the windows, moonlight winking through tears in the fabric where Stefanov’s gunfire had smashed through the window and strewn the floor with dagger-like shards of glass.
‘Where is everything?’ whispered Barkat. ‘Where did they put it all?’
Stefanov said nothing. He had heard stories, assembled piece by rumoured piece, about what had become of the treasures of Tsarskoye Selo. In the years after the Revolution, the office of Internal State Security, known to men like Stefanov simply as the ‘Organi’, had taken over one wing of the Alexander Palace, for use as a rest home for their senior officers. In reality, it was just a place for them to bring their mistresses. Things soon began to disappear, not just from the Alexander Palace but from the Catherine Palace as well. In the beginning, they were only small items, like letter openers and fountain pens. Later, whole paintings went missing, along with icons, lamps and even life-size statues, only to reappear for sale in the auction houses of London, Paris and Rome.
They arrived at a closed door.
Stefanov took hold of the brass handle, but remained frozen, as if suddenly afraid to go on.
‘What are you waiting for?’ demanded Barkat.
Stefanov knew that beyond this door lay the Amber Room, which his father had once described to him as the place where the walls were on fire.
At first, Stefanov had dismissed the old man’s description as another figment of his primitive and superstitious mind. But then, one summer evening, when many of the palace windows had been opened to let out the heat of the day, Stefanov had caught a glimpse of what at first he took to be flames, leaping from the walls inside.
The next day, in school, it was his teacher, Madame Simonova, rumoured to be the fiancee of Inspector Pekkala, who had provided the explanation. The thousands of pieces of amber, each one worked into huge panels, reflected the light in such a way that they sometimes appeared to glow like embers.
Stefanov longed to see the Amber Room, but the palace was off limits to all but specially appointed staff, of which his father, the gardener, was not one. And if the chances of Stefanov’s father getting in were zero, his own seemed even less. In spite of this, he couldn’t let it rest. Thoughts of the amber consumed him and it was not long before he had devised a scheme to catch a glimpse inside the room.
The following week, he casually mentioned to his father that the ornamental hedges which lined the base of the Catherine Palace looked as if they needed trimming. Being well aware that this job required the use of ladders, and that his father did not like to climb on ladders, it came as no surprise to him when, a few days later, his father assigned him the task of trimming the hedges.
By ten o’clock the next morning, when Stefanov arrived for work, he had already planned it all out. He would have been there sooner, except it was not allowed to begin work anywhere on the estate before that time, in case the Tsarina was still asleep and might be woken by the noise.
The Amber Room lay nearly in the middle of the palace, on the ground floor, between the Hall of Pictures and the Portrait Gallery. For Stefanov‚ the simplest course of action would have been to begin working on the hedge directly beneath the windows of the Amber Room, but he reasoned that this would soon alert any bystanders to his real motive. Instead, beginning outside the choir anteroom on the left-hand side of the building, Stefanov worked his way across the front of the palace. It was difficult balancing on the rickety, paint-spattered ladder and the repetitive motion of cutting with the shears soon caused the muscles of his forearms to cramp. His only consolation was the fact that the hedge didn’t need trimming as badly as he had conveyed to his father, and the old man had taken his son’s word for it, rather than wait and risk having to do the job himself.
Finally, the young Stefanov arrived beneath the large double windows of the Amber Room, the bases of which stood about twice the height of a man above the level of the ground. Sweat pasted his shirt to his back. His head
was reeling in the still, close heat of that July afternoon. He set up the ladder, careful to position it in such a way that he would, if he looked up from his cutting, be able to see directly into the room.
Slowly, Stefanov climbed the ladder and began his work, blinking sweat from his eyes as he snipped away at those individual branches of the hedge which had dared to grow beyond the level of the rest. The noise of the shears filled his brain, its sound like a clashing of daggers. At first he did not dare look up, petrified that someone might be watching.
Finally, Stefanov judged that the moment was right. At this point, he still had his back to the window. Glancing from beneath the brim of his cap, he scanned the grounds, in case anyone else might be watching. He had been planning this moment for so long that his mind had begun to play tricks on him. The act of simply peering into the room had, in Stefanov’s mind, taken on the magnitude of a great crime, the punishment for which lay beyond his comprehension.
The grounds were empty. Anyone with any sense was sleeping in the shade. Heat haze weaved and shimmered off the crushed stone of the riding path, as if ghostly horses were galloping by.
He began to turn, his movements practised and precise. The great glass panes slid into view. At first all he could see was his own reflection: a damp, dishevelled figure, unrecognisable even to himself. Slowly, however, like someone staring at the ripples on a pond, his eyes began to make out the interior of the room. He saw a desk, a chair, and a table on which he could make out the figures of a chess set. The walls looked dirty and mottled, as if they were covered with a layer of soot. He bared his teeth in concentration, leaning towards the glass until his breath condensed upon its surface. Now he began to see the colours. The walls took on a deep brownish-orange tint, and he could not escape from the notion that they were, in fact, on fire, and that his father had been right all along. Now the colour changed, both lightening and deepening at the same time. The whole room appeared to be losing its shape, expanding into that strange and parallel dimension, of which his father had always been aware. The amber seemed to shudder, as if the light of the sun which streamed into the room had brought the ancient sap to life.