The Amber Room

by T. Davis Bunn

  And the gays. All the fair-haired boys trapped and suffocating in little villages where their lives had been made pure hell by the local Party roughs. They’d sell their souls for a ticket to a big city, where they could get lost within a crowd of their own kind. They made Kurt promises of eternal devotion for work and resident cards, then forgot his name once they had developed their own contacts—especially the pretty ones, who would sidle up close to someone with real power and then could thumb their noses at the likes of Kurt.

  And circus acrobats, like the young man waiting for him here, all of them with madness and mayhem in their eyes.

  And the Christians. Kurt’s last promotion had come in return for finding a Protestant minister and turning him. That is, he had found the man’s flaw and widened the crack into a crevice. Kurt had learned the Stasi lesson well—to teach a man fear, to find out what he seeks to hide from the rest of the world, and then threaten to expose it. All men had at least one such secret, most men more. No matter how big or trivial or horrible the secret, the key lay not in its size, but in its capacity to inspire terror through having someone—spouse or family or business or village or congregation or whomever—find out. A well-functioning Communist regime made it their business to find out these secrets and then to exploit them mercilessly.

  Kurt had been good at that. Very good. As the Protestant minister had discovered to his misery. The minister’s failings would have been considered minor by anyone not bearing the weight of others’ misfortunes, or souls, to use a word that Kurt had never understood. But neither superstition nor concern for the unseen had stopped Kurt from using what he had learned, confronting the man with his usage of church funds to supplant his own meager stipend and demanding that he help the Stasi cause by supplying the names of all new converts to this strange drug called religion.

  The Protestant minister had dreaded Kurt and his power. The minister had lived in fear of him until the fear had become too much to bear and driven him to take his own life. Toward the departed minister Kurt had felt neither remorse nor sorrow, nor really even thought of him at all. By then Kurt’s promotion had been official. Also by that time the minister’s information had borne fruit; there were others within the church who had secrets to hide or families to protect and were willing to pay for their own protection with yet more information.

  Kurt paid for his coffee and carried it back to where the out-of-work acrobat waited. He sat down and asked, “Do you have what I need?”

  “Let’s see the money.”

  Kurt slipped the cash from his pocket and slid it across. The man lowered his cup, fanned the bills, and counted slowly. He held the bundle up and asked, “Where’s the rest?”

  “Half now, half when we’re done,” Kurt said. “Think maybe you could drop your hands a little?”

  “Who’s to see?” The man pocketed the bills. “Besides, it’s not illegal anymore, is it? More’s the pity, far as you’re concerned. Before, you’d have just popped me into a hole somewhere and waited for me to cook, right?”

  He was big and blond, very much of both. His flaxen hair hung down below his shoulder blades. Like a bushy foxtail, it was, when tied back as now. It sprung out from the rope knotted behind his head, the same rope thonged up and around his forehead, then twisted and tied at the nape of his neck. It was the man’s trademark, the way he wore his hair in a loop of old rope, that and his strength. When released his hair fanned out like a rampant lion’s mane. On him it looked natural.

  He was dressed in the only clothes Kurt had ever seen him wear—tattered pullover, shapeless khaki pants, bulky pea jacket, filthy sneakers. But no amount of sacking could disguise the rock-solid bulk beneath. The young man was huge. Even his hands were oversized mallets. And he had strength to match his size.

  The young man had been recruited fresh from training as an acrobat and promised a place with one of the major international touring circuses if he would both inform on his comrades and act as a courier for Stasi secrets. He had agreed and done a decent job, after a fashion.

  Kurt had been the young man’s contact, his keeper in Stasi jargon. Kurt had always thought the term especially apt with this man, with his lion’s mane and his animal strength. He had remained surly and hard to handle throughout, giving Kurt the impression of facing a barely tamed big cat without benefit of chair or whip. When Kurt had mentioned to his superiors the young man’s offer to break Kurt across one knee, they had smirked and shrugged and said, What do you expect from a performer?

  Before the Wall came down, circuses had been one of East Germany’s most famous exports. They had been small affairs by Western standards—one ring, a tent one truck could haul, three dozen animals at most, perhaps twice that number of performers and trainers. Everybody had worked to pitch and dismantle the tents. The boss had also been the bookkeeper, lions’ feed had been cooked next to the acrobats’ stew. They had toured the back roads and villages from Leningrad to Budapest, sometimes as far away as Peru and Mongolia and Cuba and North Africa. People in entertainment-starved Communist villages had sometimes waited in line for days.

  Places in top schools for acrobats and performers had been more sought after than seats at the Berlin Medical Academy. Would-be dancers and stage performers and acrobats and mimes and many actors had seen the circus as their one hope for artistic expression, let alone foreign travel. The result had been a level of circus talent far surpassing anything seen in the West.

  Now, with the state subsidies withdrawn from circuses and their schools, and with television and movies pouring in from the once-forbidden West, all the circuses were closing. And the dancers and performers and acrobats and mimes went hungry.

  “Even half is a lot of money for a little information,” Kurt said.

  Huge shoulders gave a shrug. “Buy and sell, buy and sell. The law of the capitalist world, right? Besides, I need it for a ticket to Australia. Word is they’re hiring acrobats.” Blue-black eyes glittered. “And what I’ve got is not a little information.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Amazing what people will tell a day laborer,” the young man replied, refusing to be hurried. “That’s what I’m doing, by the way. Shoveling dirt in some forsaken hole, worrying night and day about losing my touch. Trying to fight off the bottle’s call, though it’s hard when I can’t see a way to hope.”

  Kurt had debated long and hard before contacting this man. He was temperamental, hard to handle, often abusive. But he was the only contact Kurt still had who was in Weimar and available. “Tell me,” he repeated.

  “Got me a job on the digging crew, I did. Learned me a lot.”

  “You might as well get started,” Kurt said. “I’m not paying you any more than I promised.”

  “Always a tight one, you were. Tight with money and tight in your mind. Like you wore a steel band wrapped around your head, always tightening it up and trying to squeeze the stuffings out. I always thought a good whap on the chin’d do a lot to loosen you up.”

  Kurt kept the queasy fear from his face. “There’s still half your money left to earn.”

  The young man leaned back and smirked knowingly. “What’s got you so interested in this?”

  Kurt replied with silence.

  “You’re after Nazi treasure, aren’t you?” When Kurt did not reply, he went on, “Well, you won’t find it here.”

  Kurt searched the man’s eyes for the first hint of gold fever as Ferret had instructed, found only the same barely controlled power. “Tell me what you found.”

  “Empty rooms. Dust. Tunnels with walls two meters thick.”

  “Artwork? Strange-shaped packing boxes?”

  “Bones,” the young man replied. “You know the SS used concentration camp prisoners to build the cellars.”

  “Yes.”

  The young man pointed at the floor. “Twenty meters below us is the Asbach River. When the Nazis started building their parade ground, they hollowed out a deep channel, filled it with concrete, and diverted t
he river. Then they put another layer of concrete on top and built a long cellar separated into little chambers by thick concrete walls. On top of that, another cellar. On top of that, a third. Then the plaza was set back in place. That’s why trees don’t grow big here, see. They’re trying to dig roots into concrete reinforced with iron rods.”

  “Must be frustrating,” Kurt probed. “All this work and nothing to show for it.”

  “The Wessies want to pay me to poke holes in Nazi walls, it’s fine with me. Same with the others. The money’s good, and jobs aren’t easy to come by.” The dark eyes glittered. “Lots of fools with money around these days.”

  Kurt let it pass. “How far down have you worked?”

  “We break into the second level next week.”

  “Six months of digging and you’re still on the first level?”

  Muscles bunched as the man leaned across the table. “You think we just open a door and prance in?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Listen, mate. It’s like drilling into lines of coffins with walls thick as I am tall. Bones. Water to your waist. Rats, big ones. And every time the drill hits air on the other side, we’re all standing there wondering if this is the one that makes those cursed rooms our own coffins.” Huge hands bunched into killing fists. “Word is, the Nazis stored bombs down there, gas canisters and shells to keep out fools like me. You know what a bomb would do, going off inside a concrete coffin?”

  Kurt nodded. He did, as a matter of fact. When he was still a child, one of his teachers had taken great delight in a story that had made headlines throughout East Germany. After conquering France, the Nazis had lined the entire Atlantic coast with massive concrete gun emplacements. These bunkers had proven to be far more difficult to dislodge than the German soldiers. The story had been told of a village on the southern coast of France that had finally come up with a means of ridding their beaches of these bunkers.

  It seemed that the villagers had already tried and failed at drilling through the six feet of concrete poured around a webbing of inch-thick steel rods. Picking them up and hauling them off had proved equally impossible, as the bunkers weighed upwards of five hundred tons each and were not easily moved.

  So the village had decided to load the bunker with all the remaining unexploded bombs left in a nearby Nazi munitions depot.

  They had chosen a bunker fairly removed from the little town, filled it to the brim with bombs and grenades and mines, cleared out all the curious onlookers, and set the sucker alight.

  The bunker had done its best to fly away, but its upward progress had been hampered by the fact that there were two openings at ninety-degree angles from each other—the narrow entrance, and the even narrower cannon-slit. So, after rising a mere thirty feet off the earth, which admittedly was not bad for a bunker weighing almost one million pounds, it had turned into the world’s largest whirligig. Before returning to earth with a resounding thud, it had stripped every tree within twenty miles of foliage, blown out all the village windows, and overturned the local train station. The bunker itself had been unharmed. Kurt’s teacher, along with many other men across the war-torn nation, had taken great pride in this proof of quality German workmanship.

  “So you don’t think anything’s down there,” Kurt asked.

  “What difference does it make what I think? But the boys with the charts and the maps and the ties, they’re starting to talk like no treasures came any closer to here than Ulm.”

  The young man toyed with his coffee cup. “Story goes, when the Americans occupied here in 1945, back before the partition was worked out, they looked around here a little but didn’t find anything. Then the Russians came in, and when they started rebuilding this place they found bombs and gas canisters. Thousands and thousands stored in a field where they built that office block out back. There’s one old man working with me who remembers it, said the Nazis stored munitions here because Weimar didn’t have any industry and wasn’t being bombed. Rumor was, though, the Nazis buried treasure under the bombs. But the Russians dug around and didn’t find anything. Then the Americans found the Ulm treasures, and everybody figured that was where it had all been stored.”

  Kurt knew the Ulm story. Every German his age did—how the Americans had needed over a hundred trucks to clear out the paintings and artwork and valuables stored in the Ulm depot, then spent years trying to track down the lawful owners. Finally what wasn’t claimed had been parceled out among the victors and stuffed into museums around the world. The spoils of war.

  Kurt decided he had enough. “I’ll be back in a month or so,” he lied.

  “Anytime, at least for as long as it takes for me to earn my one-way ticket.” Dark eyes followed him as he rose to his feet. “Just don’t come empty-handed. Information costs a lot these days, like everything else. We’re all busy learning the capitalist tricks, even you and your old mates, right? Buy whatever you want, because everything has its price. New laws for a new world.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Katya joined Jeffrey at the breakfast table with an announcement. “Frau Reining just called.”

  “Where’s my kiss?”

  She greeted the approaching waiter, ordered breakfast, said, “She wants us to go to Dresden.”

  “I asked you a question.” He was only half kidding. “I can’t get my motor started just with coffee anymore.”

  She leaned across the table, smacked him soundly. “You’ll need to be awake for this one.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  She smiled mischievously. “Your mouth says one thing and your eyes another.”

  He kept his voice flat for the benefit of the waiter pouring her coffee. “Take your pick.”

  “I’d better not.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  She waited until they were once again alone, then opened her heart and confessed as much with her eyes as with her words. “I dreamed about you last night.”

  “Katya, I—”

  “Don’t say it.” Pleading now. “I need your help, Jeffrey. I have to have it. I’m not strong enough by myself.”

  He nodded. The heat burned a dull ache in his belly.

  She reached across the table for his hand. “I feel as if I’m walking along the edge of a cliff. Just the slightest push and I’ll fall over.”

  A thousand arguments crowded for place in his mind. He struggled, fought, won he knew not how, and remained silent. He raised his eyes to find hers resting upon him, gently pleading, openly yearning, full of the same conflict he battled against. “I love you, Katya.”

  “Thank you,” she said quietly.

  He hid behind his coffee, waited while the urge subsided to a slow, dull ache.

  “Did I tell you Frau Reining called?” Her voice was as unsteady as his own inner balance.

  “I can’t hold on to this for very long,” he replied.

  “I know,” she sighed. Softer, “I can’t either.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  When she didn’t answer he ventured another glance and found her looking very shy. “Did you want a big wedding?”

  “No.” Emphatic.

  “Me neither.” She hesitated. “I don’t know if the girl is supposed to be talking about these things, but—”

  “But why have a long engagement,” he finished for her, and knew a surging thrill.

  “I’ve always dreamed of being a June bride,” she said softly. “If that’s okay with you.”

  “Perfect,” he managed, though from where he sat June seemed several lifetimes away.

  Joy shone from her eyes. And something more. “I think I’ve just lost my appetite. Do you think there’s time for a smooch upstairs before our appointment with Herr Diehl?”

  He was already on his feet and reaching for her hand. Without really caring he asked, “So what’s in Dresden?”

  Katya almost skipped alongside him. “Nothing that can’t wait.”

  * * *

  Their busine
ss was swiftly concluded, aided by a mutual desire to see their new relationship grow into permanence. With another hour before their train departed for Dresden, Herr Diehl guided them from his shop, eager to play the tour guide.

  “In old Erfurt,” he told them as they strolled along the bridge’s cobblestone length, “the houses had names, not numbers. Before, my own shop was the city’s bellhouse, as the name says in German. It was the only place licensed by the city to sell bells. The blacksmiths would bid for the privilege of making anything from cowbells to carriage bells to the great bells used in churches—but not by price. Prices were fixed by each guild, including the ironmongers’ guild. So they could compete only on terms and quality.”

  “All houses were named after the people’s professions?” Jeffrey asked.

  “Not necessarily.” He motioned toward a nearby shop, a bookstore, which had a hand-beaten copper sign of a stork hanging outside. “According to the old records, this was named the Haus zum Storchen, the Stork’s House, because the family who lived here had forty-three children. They were weavers and embroiderers of fine linen, a very lucrative profession. It required a special training, one that was highly sought after because of its special combination of artwork and craft-training. No doubt the shrewd weaver decided the best way to keep his trained employees from leaving was to draw them all from his own family.

  “There were sixty-two merchant houses along this bridge, all licensed by the king to do business with the international traders, and all carefully controlled. Then, as now, from no place could a passerby see the water. The houses formed continuous four-story walls along both sides. They sold and traded in the products of distant lands—pepper, sugar, saffron, soap, paper, silk, brass, bronze, gold, silver, jewels, ornaments, rare objects, illustrated manuscripts.