The Amber Room

by T. Davis Bunn

  “Yes, look at you,” Jeffrey agreed. “Come on. The banqueting manager’s been held up, so we’re his guests for tea.”

  The Ritz Tea Salon was in the middle of the hotel, up three stairs and through an entrance adorned with floral trellises. The chamber itself was done as a fairy queen’s garden. Little marble-topped tables dotted a pink and gold salon adorned with gilded cupids and hanging flower arrangements. Waitresses whisked about in starched crinoline and petticoats.

  Tea was served in delicate porcelain and poured through a silver strainer. Tiny sandwiches and scones and muffins arrived on a three-story circular silver palaver. Clotted cream and strawberry jam in little silver bowls completed the repast.

  Katya watched with wide eyes as Jeffrey poured her tea. Leaning over, she said in an awestruck whisper, “I feel as if I’m inside a box of valentine chocolates.”

  Jeffrey whipped open the banqueting menus, said, “Okay, now to business. I think we should go for steak and baked potato. No, on second thought, how about a real treat—barbecued baby back ribs and coleslaw. I’m sure this crowd hasn’t ever seen anything like that before.”

  Katya gave him a horrified look. “You can’t be serious.”

  “ ’Course I am. Get them some bibs, sure, and we’ll need something great for starters.” He pretended to read down the page. “Here it is. A paper plate piled high with boiled shrimp.”

  She reached across and plucked the menu from his hands. Katya studied the pages, a frown of concentration puckering her features. Then she brightened. “Oh, look at this. Lobster mousse on a bed of spinach and wrapped in strips of smoked salmon. Doesn’t that sound wonderful as a starter?”

  “Personally, I’d rather have the shrimp,” he replied, loving her.

  “Then for the main course, yes, stuffed pheasant in a sorrel and peppercorn sauce with a frou-frou of vegetables.” She smiled. “When I was a little girl, I used to think that if I ate a peppercorn I’d grow a mole.”

  “What?”

  She returned to the menu. “It made perfect sense to me.”

  “A frou-frou of anything doesn’t sound very appetizing to my ears. I think we’d be a lot better off going with corn on the cob.”

  Katya turned the page. “And what to drink?”

  “We’ll just stick some wash buckets full of ice and bottles in the middle of the tables,” Jeffrey replied. “Let everybody grab whatever they like.”

  She lifted her head to reply, then focused on someone behind him. “We’ve got company.”

  Jeffrey swiveled in his chair and caught sight of the Count di Garibaldi, a real-estate magnate who was both a friend of Alexander’s and a long-time client. The old gentleman was bent over the hand of a ravishing young woman less than a third his age. She wore a clinging bit of nothing and a king’s ransom worth of jewelry, and had two giant Afghan hounds in tow.

  Katya made innocent eyes. “She must be his niece.”

  “One of many,” Jeffrey agreed, rising to his feet. When the Count had finished following the young lady’s swaying departure with frank admiration, Jeffrey waved him over.

  “Jeffrey, Katya.” The Count approached them with a regal air and a genuine smile. “This is indeed a great pleasure.”

  “How are you, sir?”

  “Utterly splendid. And how is Alexander? Not waning, I hope.”

  Jeffrey smiled. “Practicing his dance steps the last time I saw. He wants to have his jig down properly for the occasion.”

  “He’s teaching you his odd brand of humor, I see.” The Count glanced at his watch. “I’m a bit early for an engagement. May I join you for a glass of sherry?”

  “It would be our honor.”

  “I received something quite remarkable in the mail this morning,” Count di Garibaldi said, pulling Alexander’s invitation from his coat pocket. “Of course I would be delighted to attend and offer whatever support you might require.”

  “Alexander will be very happy to hear that. Thank you.”

  “And this chalice. Lovely, just lovely. But do you know, what strikes me is how Italian in appearance it seems. Yet you say this is Polish?”

  “It came from a Polish collection,” Jeffrey replied. “And Alexander was told it was probably made in the Cracow region.”

  “Interesting. Most interesting.” The Count slipped on a pair of reading spectacles, pointed at the picture. “You see this filigree work at the base, that appears very Florentine to my eye. In fact, the whole thing appears somewhat familiar, as though I had seen it before. I don’t suppose that is possible.”

  “Extremely doubtful,” Jeffrey said. “The whole collection’s been locked in a crypt for ages.”

  The Count was clearly not convinced. “I don’t need to tell you that I am quite well connected in Rome, and I feel that I have . . . Well, no, I suppose I am mistaken if you say this is definitely a Polish piece.”

  “It is definitely from a Polish collection,” Katya said.

  “That is the whole point of this event,” Jeffrey added. “To show the beauty of Polish religious artifacts and to create a fund for their preservation.”

  “Well.” The Count folded his glasses and placed them with the invitation back in his pocket. “I am so looking forward to seeing you on the evening. I am quite sure it will not only be a great success, but a splendid fete for all present.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Dinner that night was a most intimate affair, prepared in Jeffrey’s minuscule kitchen, a place so narrow that to pass each other gave them excuses for gentle contact and sweet caresses. They ate, and tasted nothing but each other. They drank, and knew little beyond the flavor of their love. They shared silences that transcended all need for words, and they spoke simply to enjoy the sound of each other’s voice.

  After dinner, Jeffrey led Katya the brief distance to Park Lane, then through the underpass and into Hyde Park’s dark confines. It was a cold, clear night. From their unlit path winding through ancient trees, the stars appeared to rest just overhead, silently flickering friends set there to keep them company.

  “I’m really excited about our trip to Erfurt,” she said, snuggling deeper inside her coat. “It’s an unexpected gift, a reward for these past months.”

  Jeffrey nodded, not able to think of such things just then. He stopped her by the lake’s edge, checked in all directions to make sure no one was near.

  Then he looked at her. In the silvery light, her eyes were expanding, growing, drawing him in.

  She pointed to where the lake ended. “That was where we found Ling.”

  He nodded. His heart had swelled to the point that it blocked his words.

  “I’ve always thought it was a gift from God, finding that little bird.” She gazed unblinkingly up at him. “Keeping us together. Showing me that love can overcome all odds, all fears, all reason.”

  She did not drop her gaze as she slipped one hand into his. “I’ve never thanked you for that lesson, have I?”

  There’s no need, he thought, but could not speak. He remained immobile, mute. Now that he was here, the words would not come.

  Katya retrieved her hand, slipped off her glove, ran her fingers down the side of his face. “The answer is yes, Jeffrey.”

  “I haven’t asked you yet,” he said, his voice a bare whisper.

  “This is my gift of thanks,” she said. Frozen smoky veils billowed around her face in time to her soft-spoken words. “I love you, Jeffrey Allen Sinclair.”

  “Will you marry me?” The words did not come from him. He stood at a distance, his heart hammering a frantic pace, and watched a stranger speak for him. Again. “I love you, and I want you to be my wife. Will you marry me, Katya Nichols?”

  She wrapped her arms around him, said to his chest, “I have loved you since the very first moment I saw you.”

  “Is that a yes?”

  “Yes for now, yes for tomorrow, yes for all the tomorrows God grants us.”

  She looked up at him with eyes as luminous as
two earthbound stars. “You may kiss the bride.”

  CHAPTER 13

  The bar was on a small side street two blocks from Schwerin’s official Soviet Officers’ Club. As surrounding old-town structures emerged from construction scaffolding all bright and shiny and renovated, the officers’ club had sunk to ever-greater depths of obscurity. The front facade, the only portion of the club that had ever been painted, was now gray and grimy and flaking. The remaining exterior was crumbling brick and black-veined plaster. The double entrance doors no longer closed entirely and had to be chained shut at night. To either side were shattered marquees featuring brawny men and women on smudged, fly-blown posters.

  The back-street bar where Kurt stood and drank and waited was little more than a hovel, its planked flooring scuffed and seldom swept. Huddled in the dimly lit depths were hard-drinking men and women who felt far more at home in such remnants of the old regime. Here gathered those who were shunned by the new democracy, and who in turn eluded the attention of new masters they neither knew nor welcomed. As the city’s renovation crept farther and farther, they retreated in grumbling hostile throngs and watched helplessly as the noose of new laws and alien changes settled around their necks. Kurt waited in the smoky bar and sipped his beer and sighed at the irony of it all.

  Kurt’s position at the bar’s back corner offered him an excellent view of all who entered and left, including the Russian who stepped into the gloomy depths. Kurt remained hunkered over his drink, watching from the corner of his eye.

  Iron discipline kept the Russian’s advancing age in check. The body was ramrod straight, the gaze as direct and unbending as his spine. The uniform was neat and pressed in rigid lines. His officer’s cap bore the gold stars of senior rank. Kurt straightened slightly. Immediately the colonel’s gaze swung his way. Kurt waited to breathe until the piercing eyes continued their careful sweep of the room.

  The colonel walked to the bar, set his cap to one side, spoke quietly to the bartender. Russians were not an uncommon sight in this bar—either aides waiting out their superiors’ stay in the officers’ club or officers seeking less public places to do their drinking. Yet this man was very different from the others lost in the convenient shadows. He did not even unbend when drinking his beer. His hair was gray and short-cropped, his face lined but unsagging. Kurt moved closer, wondering what it must have cost such a man to come here.

  The officer did not raise his eyes from his glass as Kurt sidled up beside him and asked in very poor Russian, “Buy you a drink?”

  “My glass is full,” the officer replied, his German heavily accented but exact.

  “You are allowed only one beer?” Kurt pressed on in Russian.

  The officer turned and held him with eyes the color and temperature of a Siberian winter sky. “I’ll not stand here and listen to you desecrate my mother tongue.”

  Kurt switched to a venomously soft German. “I have money and I’m buying. But that doesn’t interest a man of principle like you. Of course not. No doubt you come here to mingle with the locals. Show off your medals.” He turned and stomped off to a corner table.

  Reluctantly the officer picked up his cap and his beer and followed Kurt. He stood over the table and announced, “We speak in German.”

  “We can speak in Swahili for all I care,” Kurt muttered to his beer.

  The officer remained standing. “I will not be insulted with offers to buy my coat or my boots.”

  “I wouldn’t have to kill time in this dive waiting for an officer, if that was all I was after,” Kurt snapped. “A hundred of your soldiers are standing on the street corners selling everything from their belts to their guns to their commandant’s medals. I could dress and arm a platoon in five minutes out there.”

  It was true. Stricter punishment had removed weapons from display at the roadside stands, but all could still be had for a price. In recent weeks, enterprising Wessie journalists had exposed the depths of the crisis by purchasing one hundred automatic weapons, a case of grenades, fifty land mines, twenty kilos of plastic explosive, a rocket launcher, and a late-model tank. All from broke, hungry Russian soldiers hanging around Ossie city squares. All for pennies on the dollar. They even filmed a negotiation to buy three jet fighters from disillusioned pilots.

  Kurt reminded himself of his purpose and offered a truce. “Why do we quarrel? It wasn’t so long ago that we were almost as allies.”

  “True, true,” the colonel subsided. “Perhaps because I am so angry with my own fate, I strike where there is no need.”

  “I know the sentiment,” Kurt admitted, “all too well.”

  “Problems are mounting,” the colonel said, “here and at home.” With a deft motion he raised and drained his glass and set it on the table. “Perhaps I will have that drink after all.”

  Kurt was on his feet at once and headed for the bar. He returned swiftly, carrying a pair of vodka shots and glasses of beer. Russian boilermakers for them both. He motioned with the beers for the colonel to be seated. “Join me.”

  The iron-hard man fought briefly with himself, nodded agreement. “My men are hungry,” the colonel replied, and sank heavily into a chair. “Our salaries have remained the same, while the ruble has been devalued to one-fifteenth of its former worth. Our shipments of supplies from Russia have almost stopped. There is no food. No coal. No money.”

  “Yes, well,” Kurt said with feigned nonchalance. “That’s why we are here, I suppose.”

  “We serve a nation that no longer exists and has no barracks to return us to,” the officer persisted. Muted earth tones of browns and deep reds colored his uniform, from heavy wool greatcoat to carefully tended boots. The only bright splashes were the gold stars of rank on his shoulders and cap. “We have a dozen new masters, and no masters at all. Every night there are screams and fights among men who have lost their esprit de corps.”

  “With that I cannot help,” Kurt said. “With the food, perhaps. But not the fact that you are now a federation at war with itself.”

  “I was a good officer,” the soldier replied. “My men were good men. We had a duty and we did it well.”

  “You were an oppressor,” Kurt flashed, his control momentarily snapping. “You were never wanted here. Never.”

  The frosty eyes narrowed. “Our task was not to be loved.”

  Kurt backed down. “Yes. Well.” He raised his vodka. “To the past.”

  “Much safer than the future,” the colonel agreed, and tossed back his glass. He breathed fumes, blinked hard, asked, “You heard of the Kazakh riots?”

  “Yes.” Seventeen thousand soldiers at the Biakanur Space Center in Kazakhstan had rioted, leaving three dead and countless wounded, many fatally. Earlier, their officers had bartered their services as common laborers to the space center authorities in exchange for food and cigarettes. The space center no longer had money to pay employees, and the soldiers were slowly starving. It had been a good agreement, except for the tragic fact that the soldiers had never been paid; the space center had not received their own promised provisions, and had been left with less than enough to feed themselves. The troops had responded by burning down all they had built and several other buildings besides.

  Kurt sipped his beer. “Now perhaps we can get down to business.”

  The flat tones of a defeated soldier returned. “To business.”

  “I need information,” Kurt said. “Nothing sensitive or harmful to your precious nation.” He grinned coldly, corrected himself. “Nations.”

  The officer let it pass. “What kind of information?”

  “About a German soldier. He was captured by Red Army soldiers as they invaded Poland—”

  “The correct term is liberated,” the officer corrected.

  Kurt waved it aside. “He was questioned and sent to a POW camp, and he died in Siberia in 1946. We wish to know what he said during his interrogation.”

  “Forty-seven years is a long time to carry a grudge,” the colonel ventured.
/>   “He was a doctor,” Kurt persisted. “No SS horror. Nothing involved with state security. You break no code.”

  The colonel bridled. “I break every code just by being here.”

  “Uncertain times,” Kurt soothed. “They call for special measures. Would you not rather search this out for me than sell your guns?”

  The colonel subsided. “This will cost you.”

  “Of course it will.”

  “Even before I know if it is possible, I will have to make payments of my own.”

  Kurt frowned. “It would be far better to promise payment upon delivery.”

  The officer snorted. “We have had our fill of promises. We have warehouses full of promises instead of food.”

  “There is that,” Kurt admitted.

  “I will be paid for the search, and more for the find,” the colonel declared.

  Kurt’s hand dived into his pocket, emerged with an envelope. “The doctor’s name and our first payment, then.”

  The colonel slipped the envelope beneath the table’s edge, counted, pursed his lips. “The first of many payments, if they are all of a size.”

  “No snippet of information can be too minor,” Kurt told him. “We seek all possible details.”

  Hard eyes bore down. “It would help to know what you are seeking.”

  Kurt forced himself not to flinch. “Details,” he repeated. “We are collectors of the minute, and we will pay the most for the most complete report.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Because of the snow and ice and threat of more, Jeffrey and Katya flew from London to Frankfurt-am-Main, then took a train to Erfurt. Berlin would have been a marginally closer airport to Erfurt, but all the flights were booked solid by movers and shakers seeking to influence or lean on or sell to or feed off the new-old capital’s massive restructuring.

  The sky hovering above the German landscape was leaden gray, the clouds so close as to rest upon the undulating hills marking the old border country. There was little snow, but the midafternoon frost appeared permanent, unchanging, an eternal part of this heavy-laden landscape. Trees were bowed and motionless, their limbs burdened and hoary white. Even the grass beside their slow-moving train was frozen at icy attention.