“You’re kidding.”
“Where did you go for almost a month this past summer?”
“I can’t answer that.”
“Of course you can’t,” Betty answered smugly. A puff of ice-laden wind funneled through the closely packed buildings and painted frost on their cheeks. She pulled her fur-lined collar tighter. “It certainly is bitter out here, don’t you think?”
“You’re changing the subject.”
“Marv is what you might call perpetually hungry. He is far from dull, despite the impression he might give. You don’t rise to the top of the New Jersey garbage heap without being remarkably agile and intelligent in a rather base way.” Betty pointed toward an art gallery’s front window. “Do you have time for me to pop in here for a moment?”
“Of course.”
The shop’s interior was stifling after the icy air. They shed coats and mufflers, stamped warmth back into their feet, denied the attentive saleswoman’s offer of assistance, strolled around the spacious rooms.
“They occasionally come up with some real prizes in here,” Betty explained. “I like to stop in whenever I can.”
“Marv treated my discovery of another new find as a real possibility,” Jeffrey persisted.
“Lower your voice,” Betty said softly. “There have been rumors. All of a sudden, everywhere I go I’m hearing tales right out of my children’s storybooks. Nazi spoils popping to the surface. Bankrupt Eastern European countries selling off things the world hasn’t heard of for centuries.”
“What kind of things?”
Betty turned a sparkling gaze his way. “Treasures, Jeffrey. Mysteries in gold and silver. Hoards of legendary kings and queens.”
She patted his sleeve. “You will remember your friend if you ever stumble across one, won’t you?”
CHAPTER 2
The place held that certain smell of an all-night tavern, one distilled to an ever-stronger proof the closer the hour crawled toward dawn. The establishment had no name—bars such as these in former East Germany seldom did. It was a single vast chamber in a run-down district of Schwerin, and possessed all the charm of a subway.
Everybody smoked. Many patrons stayed with the cardboard-tipped Russian fags said to be packed with sawdust and droppings. Others bit down on acrid-smelling cigarillos fashioned by wrapping shreds of Black Sea tobacco around straw as crooked as the fate that drew the patrons here. They spoke from throats filed down with metal rasps. Laid over the fumes like plaster off a trowel was the smell of unwashed bodies packed too closely together for too long.
The only Western import was Jägermeister, a foul, seventy-proof brew of roots and herbs meant to soothe an overstuffed belly. Here it was sucked from tiny one-shot bottles wrapped in coarse paper, taken between drafts of good East German beer. Jägermeister was the perfect companion for boilermakers, since it both numbed the belly and zapped the head with lightning-bolt accuracy.
The crowd kept itself carefully segregated. Hotel porters, security, police, and prostitutes all gathered up by the counter, where the coffee machine blew clouds of steam like a patient locomotive. The professional drunks huddled together at the two tables flanking the door; they were blasted by icy wind and snow flurries every time someone entered or left. The tavern’s far side was held by the taxi and truck drivers, either off duty or on break or unable to sleep beyond the routine of catching naps between rides. They kept their backs turned to the rest of the world and talked in the tones of those most comfortable with secrets.
The one they called Ferret sat as usual between the two others, his head buried in a sheaf of papers. His eyes were so poor he read with his nose almost touching the page. Those who knew him said it was because he rarely saw the light of day.
He had the body of a worm and the mind of a camera—whatever the eye scanned the memory never lost. In days gone by he had used this mind to protect his body, shielding himself behind the strength of others who used his abilities for gaining and holding power. Now the power holders were disgraced, either in hiding or in prison. It was only a matter of days before the investigators started working one rank further down and came upon Ferret.
The majority of the Communist overlords had held on to power so long they had not believed the cowed East Germans would dare take it back. Ferret had watched the first mob gather before the Stasi headquarters in Leipzig and had known differently. He had listened to the mob sing freedom songs and spent the long night hours stuffing files with any possible importance into boxes and bags and wastebaskets. Hauling them down to the loading platform and stuffing them into the city maintenance van had been the most strenuous exercise Ferret had done in his entire life.
He had driven the entire next day, stopping only when darkness and exhaustion forced him to pull off the narrow, rutted excuse for a road and sleep. Every passing car had jerked him awake, foggy-brained and panic-stricken, but his hunch had paid off. The police had been too overwhelmed with concern over their own future to worry about a dilapidated van and a few missing files.
The second day of driving had brought him to Schwerin, the capital of the former East German state known as Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Ferret had used a set of false identification documents, prepared years before for a contingency just such as this, to check into a lakeside resort with a walled-in parking area. The following day he had bribed his way into a filthy cellar storage room turned into an illegal studio apartment—no ventilation, no windows, a one-ring cooker plugged into the overhead light socket, bathroom one floor up via an outside stairway. With the eleven-year apartment waiting list, this was the only room available anywhere and his only because he had Western marks to slip the landlady.
In the old days, Ferret’s official title had been that of Prokurist for the Local Workers’ Council in Leipzig. It was as high a position as the Ferret could manage and still maintain his invisibility, but Prokurist was pretty high indeed. The Prokurist was the man with power to sign—that is, the power to approve checks, authorize contracts, organize budgets. Ferret had kept his position by making no decisions at all, only furthering the decisions of those who knew the value of a Ferret and courted him with the dedication of a love-addled Romeo.
What the title did not say was that the Ferret was also the Stasi’s local mole.
It had been a perfect match—the secret police whom everyone feared, hated, and refused to speak of, and a man who preferred invisibility to all other powers. Ferret had fed Stasi the information it used as fuel. The Stasi had shielded Ferret with its might.
Until the night Ferret saw his carefully constructed world go up in the flickering flames of a hundred thousand candles.
* * *
“Had the belly pains again this morning, I did.” Kurt, the man at Ferret’s right, was a former Stasi spy, and Ferret’s contact in the secret police. He and numerous other mid-level henchmen remained safe from the West German prosecutors simply because there were so many of them. Those who were being picked up tended to be the targets of strong grudges, and those who could be found. Kurt was not immune to grudge holders, but a set of false documents and a different name kept him safe. For the moment.
“Spent three hours sitting in line at the clinic,” Kurt complained. “Probably caught the plague or something. You should have seen the lot in there. Pathetic.”
The third person at their table was not impressed. Erika, as she was now known, was the former assistant chief jailer at the notorious Dresden women’s prison. Like Ferret and Kurt, she was now just another bit of flotsam washed up on the new tide of democracy.
Erika pinched the Russian cigarette’s filter, pressing the cardboard tube into a tighter hole to restrict the bitter smoke. She motioned toward Ferret, speaking as if the little man were not there. “Take a look at those old papers. What’s he working on?”
“Our freedom.” Kurt had obeyed the Ferret’s frantic midnight call and left town with a second van loaded to the hilt with stolen Stasi files. “How did it go last night?”<
br />
“You see the creep at the end of the bar, no, don’t turn around. The blue suit with ice for eyes. He’ll be over in about three seconds for his touch.”
“The cops saw you?”
“Not me.” She punched her cigarette into ashes. “Your buyers didn’t have a clue.”
“They’re not mine.” Kurt swung one arm over the back of his chair, risked a casual glance toward the bar, waved at somebody who wasn’t there. “The one with the rug on his head?”
“He’s been my contact,” Erika replied. “Until yesterday it all ran smoothly. But he’s got a lever now, and he’s going to use it.”
The police who frequented the tavern were those who valued the universal language and pocketed a percentage of every deal cut on the tavern’s far side. For them a regular visit to its crowded depths was necessary—they had to keep a careful eye on their egg-laying taxi-driving geese.
The routine was well known. Truckers brought the black-market wares in from all over the globe, but mostly from the faltering East. Taxi drivers found the local buyers. In the tumultuous days since the nation of East Germany foundered off the maps and into history, cities like Schwerin had taken on the smell and feel of the Wild West. This left a lot of room for policemen unsure of future paychecks to increase their pocket change.
Contact with the undercurrent of gray goods was far from difficult, especially since most of the newer taxi drivers were former comrades in one guise or another. These days, each new face behind the wheel of a cab brought a new story—one entire table in the taxi drivers’ corner this evening was made up of former army colonels, another of air force pilots. Communist Party henchmen formed a good solid block, most of them from the innumerable middle levels—the paper pushers and wheel greasers and slogan shouters who had neither the clout nor the foreknowledge to protect themselves when their house of cards came crashing down.
Another contingent of new nighttime taxi drivers, as well as street sweepers and bricklayers and every other job where identification papers were not too carefully inspected, were former Stasi mid-level spies. Stasi was the popular nickname given to the MFS, or Ministerium für Staats Sicherheit, the Ministry for State Security. The East German secret police had provided a model for numerous smaller nations around the world, wherever money was tight and security was deemed of far greater importance than human rights.
And now it was gone.
The police who huddled by the counter and kept a moneylender’s eye on the nighttime traffic had seen what happened to the Stasi—four hundred thousand jobs gone in the blink of an eye. They knew the prevailing opinion of cops; since the Wall’s collapse they were universally known as Honecker’s Henchmen. They saw the West German police flash by in their Mercedes patrol cars, and sneering contempt for Ossie cops—Ossie was slang for a citizen of former East Germany, Wessie for those from the West. They heard about the Bonn government’s refusal to upgrade either their salaries or their equipment. Ossie coppers who were willing to stop living on false hopes and face up to Western reality knew it was only a matter of time.
The straight-edged fools in police uniforms who had crossed over to Bonn’s side could say what they wanted—nobody could do away with forty-six years of Communist laws overnight and understand what the West Germans wanted to put in its place. Not the police, not the lawyers, and not the people. The uncertainty of life under a new system nobody comprehended or, if truth be known, really cared much for, was enormous. The chance for gain was even greater.
Kurt swiveled back around and murmured, “Here he comes.”
The cop’s joviality only touched the bottom half of his face. He pulled over a chair and sat down. “Any reason for sitting next to the window?”
“It keeps away the flies,” Kurt replied. “Most of them, anyway.”
“It’s so cold over here it burns. Ferret here must have a frozen back.” He twisted his head around. “What’s that you’re working on, Ferret?”
The Ferret raised his head, squinted in confusion through bottle-bottom glasses, murmured, “Oh, hello, Inspector.” The head dropped back to an inch or so from the page.
“Not inspector anymore,” the man replied. “Just policeman now. And how long at this job is anyone’s guess.”
“Tough,” Erika replied.
The dead smile returned. “You probably heard, they brought in your colleagues from the Zoo this morning.” The Zoo was the name neighbors had given the central prison in East Berlin. It was named for the sounds that rose from its confines, particularly at night.
“I heard.”
“Yes, thought you had. Well, in times like this it certainly is nice to have friends who can cover for you, yes?” He leaned forward. “Since when did you work with the Viets, Kurt?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“No, of course not. And you don’t have any connections to the vodka trade out of Poland, either, I’m sure.”
“I wish I did.”
“Yes, I suppose so. Did I mention that they’ve raised the bounty on nailing Eastern bootleggers? Five thousand marks it is now, with vodka top of the list. Five thousand marks. Almost enough to make a man go legal.”
Unification had brought a flood of West German marks into the defunct East German economy. Traders from the poorer Eastern lands flocked over the border by thousands of ill-defined paths, bringing anything they could buy cheaply and sell for more—Chinese T-shirts available in Cracow for fifty cents, Pakistani sweaters, prime Polish vodka that went for two dollars a liter in Poland and five times that in Germany.
The worst of the illegal traders were Vietnamese, invited over to study or work or simply visit as friends of the former Communist regime, and now refusing to go home. The new Wessie bureaucrats were denying them residency visas; they lived with the constant threat of deportation and a growing hatred of the new authorities. Their tightly knit community slid daily toward overt violence and blatantly illegal activities.
The policeman rose to his feet and nodded to the group. “I’ll be on my rounds tomorrow if you need to see me.”
Kurt watched him move away, asked, “How much does he want?”
“Half,” Erika replied.
“Too much.”
“He saw the buyers unload the van, Kurt. Chaing told me. Stood and watched them.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Not if they did it behind the all-night gas station.”
Kurt scoffed. “Nobody’s that stupid.”
“Your traders are.”
“I told you, they’re not my anything.”
“They’re going to be our noose if we don’t pay the man.”
Ferret chose that moment to raise his head. “I don’t think we will,” he said. “Pay him, I mean.”
Kurt turned his way. “Why not?”
“We’ll need that money.”
“You’ve found it?”
The bulbous head dropped once more. “Perhaps.”
“Perhaps isn’t good enough.”
“More than perhaps.” Ferret lifted his gaze. “My freedom is resting on this as well, you know.”
“What are you two going on about,” Erika demanded.
“Ferret’s been hunting for something,” Kurt replied, his eyes remaining on the strange-shaped man. “Something big.”
Erika twisted her head to examine Ferret’s folder and saw handwriting on a yellowed sheet. “How old is that?”
“Old,” Ferret replied, placing a possessive hand across the page.
“Forty-seven years, to be exact,” Kurt replied. “Ferret and I have been talking. We need a third.”
“A third for what?”
His eyes still on Ferret, Kurt asked, “Do you have any contacts left in the Dresden archives?”
Erika showed the world her best poker face. “I might. What’s in it for me?”
“Freedom,” Kurt replied. “Papers. Money. Lots of money.”
“So what is it you’re looking for?”<
br />
“Can you keep a secret?”
Erika snorted. “I should. I’ve had a lifetime of practice.”
“A treasure, then,” Kurt replied. “One called the Amber Room.”
Erika thought it over. “What do I have to do?”
The Ferret raised his watery eyes and said quietly, “We are looking for a certain man.”
CHAPTER 3
Jeffrey stepped farther back into the Cafe Royale’s entrance hall as the front doors admitted several well-dressed patrons and a blast of freezing wind. “Meeting Dr. Rokovski the day after my return from Zurich is a little too much coincidence for me.”
Located just half a block off Piccadilly Circus, the Cafe Royale had been a hub of the London social whirl for over a century. It was one of the few public haunts of Victorian England that had managed to remain financially afloat since World War II. The bars and restaurants displayed typically Victorian proportions—an almost endless series of overdone rooms set on seven floors.
“You know full well that I absolutely must speak with Pavel now,” Alexander replied. “I need his blessing on this gala business. I should have already requested it, if truth be known, but it was something I wished to do in person.”
“It’d be a lot nicer if we could have this meeting after the check is cleared and the Rubens deal over and done with.”
“Don’t be so nervous,” Alexander replied. “Rokovski is not in London on our account, of that I am sure. He is here for a conference and is meeting us because I invited him.”
“I still don’t like it. What if he’s upset because the sale took so long to go through?”
Alexander shook his head, his own calm unruffled. “The gentleman is a professional, and a professional will understand that in a sale requiring absolute discretion, patience is of the utmost importance.”
“You’re sure?”
“See for yourself.” Alexander pointed through the glass portals to the street, where a taxi was depositing the Dr. Pavel Rokovski, director of the Polish Ministry of Culture’s Cracow division and Alexander’s primary contact for his export of Polish antiques. “Does that look like the face of a worried man?”
The Amber Room Page 2