The Amber Rooms sb-3

by Ian Hocking

  As the future pulled, the past pushed: the ubiquitous city smells of smoke, human excrement and foul water; the disease and the pain commonplace; the slow blackening of houses, trees, faces. Underlying it all was the talk in the coffee houses that Europe had climbed to a high pass during the nineteenth century that would open onto the glorious vista of the twentieth.

  Alone, she considered Mont Agel. The wind grew as she stood on the rocking platform. She was obliged to steady her hat with a lace-gloved hand.

  ‘“Know for certain that once”,’ said a voice that made Saskia’s stomach muscles tighten, ‘“struck down to the ground, an oppressed man strives again to reach the pure mountain when exalted by hope.”’

  She turned.

  He was a fraction shorter than her and splendidly dressed. Like all illegals, he had selected his costume ad libitum from the fancy dress shop of the Tsar’s imperial forces. Today he was a naval officer with a white, peaked cap and gold shoulder-boards. His moustaches and beard had bloomed since their last meeting, but his left eye was still bloodshot where it had been maimed by a homemade “apple” bomb shortly before the robbery in Tiflis.

  He was holding a knife in a reverse grip. Its point stopped at the base of her ribs, where it was ready to breach the whalebone. Kamo looked at her with the expression of a man gorging on her appearance. His eyes zigzagged over her forehead, lingered at her throat, her breasts, and her shoes. There he stopped. The psychiatrists of Saskia’s time would have many words for him. This time had only one—Kamo.

  Simon Ter-Petrossian had been given the nickname “Kamo” as a child. It recorded his failure to correctly modify the Russian relative pronoun “to whom”. Something else had happened to Kamo as a child—nobody knew, or told—and it had made him take pride in the details of his murders. The adult Kamo sailed by a star of concentrated, malignant insanity.

  She remembered the dog: Shout. Shout.

  Many a revolutionary would consider himself a master of disguise. Kamo, however, was truly faceless, and allowed each role to possess him. Perhaps it was thanks to his choice of costume, with its echo of chivalry, that Saskia had been treated only to the appearance of the knife rather than its immediate use.

  ‘If you kill me,’ she said, quietly, ‘you’ll never find the money.’

  ‘How could I ever kill you, my Penelope Vailevna?’

  He was a paradox. While he had cut out the heart of a man for little more than a rumour of treachery, he had, that same morning, organised the rescue of a girl who had fallen into a well. He had reached the last inches for the girl with the same fervour that he had dug into the chest of the informer.

  ‘They tried to kill me in Switzerland,’ she said.

  Kamo pushed her against the rail. To an onlooker inside the carriage, this would have seemed the reckless act of a lover. His smile would embellish the effect. But, close up, the tobacco-stained teeth betrayed the actor inside the costume. His insanity burned with a familiar heat.

  ‘Let me tell you something, Lynx. When the Party found out that you had flown to Switzerland, many wanted you eliminated. I proposed that you should be contacted and merely interrogated. That cost me.’

  Saskia had asked him about his childhood only once. That had been as they lay in a deserted coppice somewhere near Gori. It was two days after he had rescued her from the Cossacks of the Kuban Host. She thought this had brought about a closeness between them and the right to ask an intimate question. She had been wrong.

  ‘How kind of you.’

  ‘Listen, Vailevna. Debts must be repaid; information must be disseminated; actions must be underwritten.’

  ‘Call it piracy if it’s piracy.’

  ‘I can tell you truthfully that, if all the funds can be recovered immediately, and every rouble accounted for, there will be no special circumstances surrounding your liquidation.’ Kamo ended this statement with a nod.

  ‘What if there is no money left? What if I’ve gambled it away?’

  ‘No, Penska,’ he said. His wounded eye tumbled. ‘You have no money to speak of. You’ve hidden the funds in St Petersburg. Why else would you be cheating the casino last night?’

  ‘So you saw that.’

  ‘I followed you from Switzerland. I’ve seen everything.’

  Saskia looked at the knife. She reached down and cupped his hand with her own. At the same time, she breathed—shhhh—in his ear, just as she had breathed that night in the coppice wood, when the rage within him threatened to erupt at the temerity of her question: Were you like this as a child?

  Kamo, nicknamed for a relative pronoun, let his forehead fall against hers. She felt the skin relax and the wounded eye close.

  ‘Why should we do this at all?’ he asked. His breath smelled.

  ‘Come,’ she said. ‘We’ll have some breakfast.’

  ~

  The ladies and gentlemen in the restaurant carriage interrupted their own conversations to look at the beautiful young woman and her officer, unmistakably Russian. Saskia knew that the opulence of Russian court life was open rumour in Europe. To travel its empire was to travel backwards in time. The ladies might admire Saskia’s dress, her upright posture and the fascinator she wore in lieu of a hat. The gentlemen would invent sea braveries for the naval officer. How proper was his insistence that he, not the waiter, pull out the chair for his wife. How economical his movement. The sudden ugliness of his wounded eye would only deepen the impression of heroism. There had been a war, had there not? With the Japans. Yes, this man had had a good war. Saskia felt their silent commentary as though it had been spoken.

  Kamo looked self-conscious as he assumed his chair opposite Saskia. Under cover of the mechanical noise of the carriage, and the resumed conversations, he said, ‘So, tell me why you jumped from the train all those months ago. What did it have to do with the gentleman from the government?’

  No preamble, then. Saskia attended to those elements of physiology that would betray her lies, and began with, ‘He would have posted men at the station.’ She divided a croissant with a knife. ‘They would have arrested me. I needed to jump prior to the train’s arrival. Surely you can see that.’

  She remembered clinging to the side of the train as it approached the tunnel. The sting of the sooty air. The cold. And then the shared look of surprise with her pursuer, leaning from the train with a gun.

  ‘Odd that you should jump only minutes after I had.’

  ‘Not so odd.’

  ‘Tell me about this man. His name?’

  Saskia considered lying about this, but there was no true benefit beyond the muddying of Kamo’s thoughts. The cost of the lie was difficult to calculate.

  ‘He introduced himself as Draganov,’ she said.

  Kamo nodded. It struck her as confirmatory. Kamo knew Draganov’s name, then. How?

  ‘When you and I were three hours from St Petersburg,’ she said, ‘I returned to my compartment. Remember?’

  ‘You complained of a headache,’ Kamo said. His words were neutral and his countenance steady. He might have been reading the menu.

  ‘I was intercepted by the tall gentleman whom you recognised as an officer of the Special Section. Will you tell me how you recognised him?’

  Kamo put his hands on the table and laced the fingers at the tips. ‘No, I cannot.’

  ‘He seemed friendly,’ Saskia continued. She made an effort to picture the scene. It made the lie easier. ‘He introduced himself as Draganov. He told me he had been waiting for a chance to get me alone. I tried to interpret this as a proposition and dismiss him, but he was too competent an agent to fall for that.’

  ‘Never mind his competence,’ said Kamo. ‘I have my own opinion of that. What did he say to you?’

  Saskia passed a slice of croissant into her mouth. Kamo had been piqued by her description. That was good. He was falling for the story. She chewed longer than necessary, and said, ‘While you were entertaining those ladies in the lounge with stories of valour, Draganov attem
pted to recruit me as a double agent.’

  ‘His leverage?’ said Kamo. His blink rate had increased. That inscrutable property that nobody, not even his best friend, had fully divined—Kamo’s intellect—was dancing about her story.

  ‘As I recall,’ Saskia continued, in a casual tone, ‘he had no leverage. That is, he did not know the significance of what we were escorting, or that we were escorting anything. It was a routine action for a man who was used to turning agents. He offered me money and protection; a certificate of conduct should I need it; and enough money to retire on the Crimean.’

  Kamo stroked his whiskers. His wounded eye was weeping but the other was bright.

  ‘I wonder at that, my dear. I do wonder. These men of the Special Section rarely risk announcing themselves.’

  ‘This one did.’

  ‘He wished to entrap you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But he must have noticed the absence of your hand. That is a particularly distinguishing feature. And let us also note that he told you his name.’

  ‘No. He told me a name, Ter-Petrossian.’

  His expression frosted. ‘Say that once more and I’ll cut a second cunt in your neck.’

  Touchy, thought Saskia. She was satisfied.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said, dividing her croissant again, ‘why you left the lounge to look for me that day. Surely the ladies had not tired of your stories?’

  ‘You had been gone for several minutes,’ he said. There was nothing defensive in his tone. This was the truth. ‘I was worried.’

  ‘I remember you knocking on the compartment door. Draganov pulled out his gun and told me to be quiet. I was. The rest you know.’

  ‘Not quite,’ said Kamo. He nodded at an approaching waiter and asked for black tea, bread and herring. ‘I find it unusually coincidental that Draganov should let his guard drop at the moment we three were moving from one carriage to another.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Can it be that Draganov invited me to attack him?’

  ‘That is preposterous,’ said Saskia. She thought, Kamo’s inscrutable intellect wins again. I admire him. ‘The man had just apprehended us. Within minutes, we would be in the custody of the police.’

  ‘It would be one way of removing me from the train.’

  Saskia smiled. ‘But that plan would have the effect of removing him as well. You fell in each other’s arms, remember?’

  ‘I remember it.’

  Saskia regarded him carefully. His demeanour remained difficult to read. She said, ‘What did you do to Draganov afterwards?’

  ‘What do you care?’ He looked at her plate. ‘But eat. You’re so skinny.’

  Saskia paused. She ate another morsel, though she was less hungry than she had ever been. She kicked Kamo in the shin with the toe of her boot: she had the centre of the bone, and enough power to hurt her toes. Kamo did nothing to register the blow. His breathing, blink rate, and pupil dilation remained unchanged.

  ‘If Draganov survived,’ she hissed, ‘he will have informed the Petersburg office. He will have his surveillants loose. I need to know. What happened to him? Is he alive?’

  Kamo yawned. ‘You are correct. We should be careful. Draganov did indeed survive the day. After I pulled him clear of the train, he repaid my kindness with a rock, which he applied to the base of my skull. Ungrateful man. Perhaps he remembered how easily I had overpowered him. Either way, he left me to sleep it off.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Do you?’ said Kamo, distracted. ‘Do you?’

  They paused to watch a boy in a sailor’s uniform as he ran down the carriage. The waiters stopped, holding their dishes high, until the boy returned to his nanny at the head of the carriage.

  Kamo turned to Saskia. ‘What about the others?’

  ‘What others?’

  She thought once more of the man leaning from the train, struggling to hold his hat against his head.

  ‘Come. Do you think that the Boss would entrust the safe delivery of such a huge windfall to us alone? There were other agents on that train. You may be certain of it.’

  ‘Like who?’

  ‘Like Judjuna Mikhailovna. Remember her from Tiflis?’

  In every detail.

  ‘Not especially.’

  ‘Curiously,’ said Kamo, and the coldness returned fully to his eyes, an icy precipitate, ‘just after the train pulled into the station, her body was found in a locker by one of our informers. She had been garrotted.’

  Saskia thought of Judjuna. She had been a whore, a traitor, and a teller of interminable stories, but she had once washed the body of an unclaimed corpse because the man had, in life, taken off his hat to her. That had been in Gori.

  ‘And you think I killed her,’ said Saskia, as though supplying a line in a well-worn joke.

  He smiled. ‘Did you?’

  Saskia reached for a butter knife. ‘Tell me what you’re thinking.’

  ‘It is conceivable that she saw me fall from the train and attempted to make contact with you, Penska. Plenty of time remained before the train reached St Petersburg. One wonders whether, in that period, she was taken.’

  ‘By the opposition?’

  ‘Not necessarily.’

  ‘Who, then? Don’t be conspiratorial.’

  Kamo chuckled. Saskia kept her eyes on the plate, and she could feel Kamo looking at it, too. Did he see her reflected in the knife blade, just as she saw him? Was his uninjured eye that good? Saskia thought not.

  ‘There is something else you did,’ he said, ‘in those two hours before leaving the train in such a singular fashion. You bribed a guard to permit you access to the luggage.’

  ‘Did I?’ asked Saskia.

  Damn. Don’t look up at him.

  ‘Once there, you changed the recipient and destination of the rose.’

  The rose was their codename for two dressers, each with secret compartments jammed with cloth-wrapped roubles. The rose contained more cash than had ever been stolen in the history of Russian crime. It was enough money for Lenin to fuel the Party for years.

  ‘Why do you think this of me?’

  ‘Many investigations were conducted during your winter holiday, my dear. Some are still ongoing.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant. Why should I want to change the destination of the container?’

  ‘Leverage,’ he said, but his certainty was fading. ‘Fear that the situation was beyond your control.’

  She looked at him. ‘Did you kill the guard after he’d told you about me?’

  ‘No. He cooperated. A worker is a worker is a worker. Fortunate that you passed him the new luggage label inside an envelope.’

  ‘So,’ said Saskia, ‘you want me to tell you what the label read.’

  ‘Ah, “want”,’ replied Kamo. He seemed to savour the word. ‘That word is not quite sufficient. I covet that knowledge. I long for it, Vailevna. So does the Boss. So does our friend in Finland. So does the Tsar, his police, and the newspapers. Does this surprise you? You know there is so much want in this world.’ He grinned. He had one less tooth than she remembered. ‘Workers, workers, workers.’

  ‘You understand that I am not interested in my immediate death,’ said Saskia. ‘So I will not tell you where it is. I want to live long enough to show you.’

  Kamo sighed. ‘You are creating difficulties.’

  ‘Let us say that it is safe; it is undiscovered; and it is perfectly preserved.’

  Kamo looked through the window. The movement of the train made his head rock perceptibly. It reminded Saskia of the nose of the drunk alpinist in Monte Carlo.

  ‘Vailevna, I trust you,’ he said. ‘I believe that’s why you’re coming back to Russia, is it not? Do not confirm my faith; it would undo it. I understand that this is an attempt to pay off your debts. You want to be a good person for us and for the Party.’

  ‘A good person like you.’

  ‘Do you remember when I found you?’

  �
��I’ve never forgotten it.’

  ‘Then you will tell me why it has taken one winter for you reach this decision to reunite the Party with its rightful property.’

  ‘In St Petersburg, I was poisoned. I needed to recuperate.’

  ‘So I heard. Are you fully recovered?’

  ‘No. My liver and kidneys are permanently damaged.’

  Kamo pursed his lips. It was either sympathy or mirth.

  ‘And now, my dear, you have decided to return to the bosom.’

  ‘Events have forced my hand, but I had planned to return in the spring. I have gained the confidence of a Jewish lawyer called Ioffe. He has a house on Lake Geneva, from which he conducts business with the Russian émigré community. His daughter, in St Petersburg, needs a governess. For this, he was prepared to obtain a passport on my behalf and pay for passage. I intend to locate the container and give it to our mutual friend in Finland.’

  Kamo yawned. He did not cover his mouth, which was a rare slip of character.

  ‘Now,’ he said, ‘you will give it to me.’

  ‘We will give it to him together, as we had planned.’

  Saskia wiped her mouth with a napkin. At once, Kamo gripped her gloved wrist. His grin was broad in deference to the onlookers but, up close, it trembled with the effort of clamping Saskia’s bones.

  ‘I wonder,’ said Kamo.

  ‘What?’ she replied, playing indifferent.

  ‘Did that agent, Draganov, turn you after all? Have you been telling lies to your old friend, Kamo?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  Kamo held her stare for a long moment. Then he released her hand and turned to the menu. ‘To whom does one give one’s trust? That is the question of today, and every day.’

  To whom.

  That word, Кому, was the pronoun he could not correctly modify as a child. Kamo. Like camouflage, she thought, drinking him in. With it, an identity. Brigandage, murder and high talk. Those skirted coats. Laughter and piracy. Princes without money. Dust. Milk.