The Amber Room

by T. Davis Bunn

  “For over five hundred years,” Herr Diehl continued, “this bridge was a key destination along the Paris-Kiev trade route. It is hard for us to comprehend how vital these overland routes once were. There was no alternative, you see, none at all. The seas were pirate-infested and governed by unruly gods of wind and storm, and dragons were believed to lurk just beneath the surface. No right-minded medieval businessman would dare place his life or the livelihood of his descendants in such a precarious position. So he and his caravans traveled overland. If he was poor, he joined a group of other traders, praying they were trustworthy, and carried his wares on his back. With time and success and good fortune came first servants and donkeys, then horses, then wagons and armed guards.”

  The dealer nodded his head in time to his words. “Yes, these land routes dominated international trade until Christians once again chose that most dreadful path—arguing over how to worship the Lord of love with swords in their hands.”

  “The Reformation wars,” Jeffrey said.

  “What a name,” Herr Diehl replied. “How in God’s holy name could you ever reform faith with a sword?”

  Jeffrey shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “The Catholics and the Protestants between them poured a tide of blood over the land,” Herr Diehl went on, “and suddenly waterborne dragons seemed vastly more appealing than land-based madness. Many merchants began taking their wares to distant buyers by sea, and most of the land routes slowly shriveled and died.

  “But before the flow of history was rerouted with a bloody and heretical sword, these very same land routes reigned supreme.” Herr Diehl’s voice lifted as he swept his hand to encompass all the shops along the bridge. “Imagine what the merchants of that day and age must have seen. Each voyage from Paris to Kiev, a distance of over two thousand miles, could take as long as one year. There would be rumors of wars and new borders and greedy tax officials up ahead, many of them formed from thin air by local merchants who sought to separate the travelers from their goods at panic-stricken prices. The shopkeepers who manned this bridge were the gatherers of news and gossip, and they spiced it with their own self-interest before serving it to footsore travelers.”

  Cathedral Hill dominated what once had been medieval Erfurt’s central market. Herr Diehl led them across an ancient street and into the vast open market square. “After Martin Luther’s proclamation sparked the rise of Protestantism,” he continued, “Erfurt was one of very few cities that stubbornly refused to declare itself for one faith or another. The people and the ruling princes were so adamantly unified that they fought off the scalding rhetoric of both churches and clung to sanity.”

  The frigid air had a metallic edge that burned the nostrils. Katya’s voice was muffled by the scarf she kept wrapped around the bottom half of her face. “The prince and people demanded that both churches, Catholic and Protestant, be allowed to coexist,” Herr Diehl explained through her. “It balanced their power, you see, and kept either from dominating the government and private life. The ruling family, the government, and the royal court were all good Catholics. The tradesmen, farmers, guilds, and merchants were Protestants. As a result, during the unbounded horrors of religious conflict, all Christians were safe here. And Erfurt remained a successful center of international commerce long after the land routes began to decline and other merchant cities were either put to the torch or starved into legend-filled graveyards, inhabited by walking ghosts.”

  The vast plaza was lined with ramshackle stalls selling everything from hand-knit shawls to imported oranges. The throngs of buyers were surprisingly quiet, silenced by the effort of walking and standing and shopping in the icy air. Jeffrey and Katya followed Herr Diehl beyond the market to where a broad staircase rose up almost three hundred feet. At the summit, a pair of colossal churches stood side by side.

  “The first church is the one on the left,” Herr Diehl told them as they climbed. “It was erected in 1154 as a monastery and remained true to the faith, so the story goes, through kingdoms and centuries. During the Reformation, the monks ridiculed the Pope’s political ambitions and refused to back his demands for a war against their Protestant brethren. In reply, the Pope commanded that a second church be built, close enough and big enough to dominate the original.”

  One church alone would have been majestic. The two together looked ridiculous. Both were vast structures whose spires reached heavenward several hundred feet. Vast swatches of stained-glass windows arched between flanking buttresses of stone and dark-stained mortar. Nearby four-story buildings were easily dwarfed by the twin churches.

  “And so stands a warning to the church of today,” Herr Diehl said. “A witness to what can happen when doctrine becomes more important than the straightforward laws of love given us by the simple Carpenter. Whenever one of us opens our mouth to condemn the way another worships, we set another brick in the wall of such a monstrosity. We offer our beloved Savior up to the nonbelievers as a point of ridicule. If we as the saved cannot agree to disagree in peace and love and brotherhood, what do we show the nonbelievers but the same discord and disharmony from which they seek to escape?”

  When they arrived at the top, Herr Diehl opened his arms to encompass the two churches and their outlying buildings. The stone path between the central structures was as broad as a two-lane highway, yet the churches’ sheer mass narrowed and constricted the way to a choking tightness. There was no divine relief offered here, no hope or lightness, only an overbearing weight and looming threat.

  “The Stasi closed both churches and the monastery,” Herr Diehl went on. “They took over all but the worship halls and made this compound the central headquarters for the region’s security operations. They required no sign to remind the people of their presence. From this height they were seen by everyone who took to the streets of Erfurt.”

  He faced them and said solemnly, “I tell you this with the sincerity of a man who has sought to live the life of a true believer. It was a just punishment for the church’s maneuverings in the ways of this world, and for the misery their worldly ambitions caused the men of their day.”

  * * *

  The journey by train from Erfurt to Dresden lasted four hours and took them from the carefully tended farmlands of Thuringen through the industrial might of Leipzig and on into the old royal enclave of Saxony. Their entry into Dresden was marked by more of the same—tall, dilapidated apartment buildings, bleak forests of smokestacks, aged factories, and everything dressed a dreary gray.

  They stayed in the Ship-Hotel Florentine. It was only after a dozen or so telephone calls, Katya told him, that she had found them rooms at all. Like all the other major cities of the former East Germany, Dresden had become a boomtown. The few decent hotels were so packed with industrialists that enterprising Wessie hoteliers had floated tourist ships down the Elba River to Dresden, where they were wharfed and used as floating hotels.

  Jeffrey deposited his bags, then returned to meet Katya by the ship’s ramp. “I’m paying two hundred dollars a night for a room the size of a packing crate.”

  “Every room is full,” Katya replied.

  He was not through. “My bed is exactly eighteen inches wide. And my bathroom is smaller than an airplane toilet.”

  “I heard the receptionist tell someone on the phone that they’re taking reservations six months in advance.” She smiled up at him. “We have two hours until our meeting. Would you rather spend it complaining or taking a look at the city?”

  They walked down the riverside pathway with traffic thundering alongside. Beyond the road towered Dresden’s medieval city walls, granting them an astonishing view into what Dresden once had been—a royal city, a seat of power and palaces and parliaments. With each breath, Jeffrey felt himself intoxicated by the scent of living history mingling with the diesel fumes and construction dust.

  Only a small portion of the city remained intact after the Allied bombing during World War II. The surviving buildings now lay beneath bla
nkets of grime and neglect, the tall roof-statues stained so black they appeared carved from coal. Yet they still bore witness to a city that once had been a treasure trove of art and architecture, of power and wealth.

  They entered the wall through lofty gates built to admit mounted cavalry with lances raised in royal salute. Behind rose the skeletal remains of the Frauen Church, over seven hundred years old when destroyed in the war. They walked on, passing one of the five inner-city palaces that remained out of almost two hundred royal residences. Beyond them rose the royal opera house, erected from stones still blackened by the firebombs that had consumed it in 1944. The first act of the new city council had been to rebuild it as a beacon of reassurance to a cowed and battered populace. Jeffrey and Katya joined the quiet throng of German tourists who braved the cold to read the council’s proclamation. It promised a future of hope, a city with renewed purpose, and opportunities for growth and improvement in their own lives. Jeffrey searched the faces around him as he listened to Katya translate the words and saw how deeply these grim-faced individuals wished to believe.

  Everywhere were the signs and sounds of renovation—jackhammers and rumbling trucks and tall cranes, warning signs and dust clouds and great crews of men scrambling over war-torn surfaces. More ruins gave way to a palace that Jeffrey took for the grandest of all the old buildings until he caught sight of the one rising behind it. Beyond that loomed yet another. Each was grander and greater than the one before.

  They escaped the snow within a street-side cafe. Jeffrey listened as Katya gave their order to a waitress who looked poured into her dress. He watched her walk away, wondering how she managed to breathe. He turned back to find Katya watching him. “Was I staring?”

  “You know you were.” Katya forgave him with a smile. “She’s grown into that outfit. The shoes and dress are all pre-unification. See the dyed cork heels and fake-leather straps? Very Communist chic.”

  “She’s kept the dress because she can’t afford a new one?”

  Katya shook her head. “Denial. It’s a universal feminine trait. As long as she can get the zipper up, she’s still a size eight.”

  When their lunch arrived, Katya nodded toward a young man seated at the next table. She told Jeffrey, “Buy him an ice cream, please.”

  The young man was small and slender to the point of evident hunger. Dark eyes were planted at definite slants in leathery skin. The face was all hollows and sharp angles. “What for?”

  “Buy him an ice cream, Jeffrey. If you won’t, I will.”

  “You’ll have to, anyway,” Jeffrey replied. “I don’t speak the lingo.”

  Katya motioned to the waitress and spoke to her at length. The waitress gave them both an odd look, then moved away.

  “He’s a Russian soldier,” Katya explained.

  “How do you know?”

  “Lots of things. The plastic belt. The quietness. He doesn’t even move his eyes. When the waitress went to his table, he pointed to the menu to order, and when the waitress brought him a coffee he looked crushed. He couldn’t read the menu and didn’t know how to ask for something to eat. It’s probably his only leave. And his only money. I read that the soldiers in some barracks are selling their boots for food. The officers are so ashamed they’re keeping the enlisted men locked inside the compounds for weeks at a time.”

  The waitress brought over a large metal boat of ice cream; the young man made enormous eyes. Katya leaned across the gap between their tables and explained with her hands that it was a gift. The young man bowed almost to the seat and smiled openhearted thanks.

  “Watch,” Katya whispered. “Watch how he eats.”

  The man became totally locked into his ice cream. It consumed his attention. He ate each little mound in turn, taking tiny slivers with his spoon, making it last and last and last. Each time he felt their eyes he turned and gave them another genuine smile.

  “That look makes me want to cry,” Katya said.

  “My little Samaritan,” he said.

  “I feel so sorry for him,” she said, turning away. “He is hated here. He lives in a hell called an enlisted men’s barracks, and when he leaves here, what will he go back to? What hope does he have?”

  * * *

  When they left the cafe, snow flurries opened to reveal frantic scurrying clouds, then closed into curtains swept sideways by the wind. They followed the example of others and huddled up against the nearest building as they walked.

  The Semper Gallery, their meeting point, proved to be the last bastion of old Dresden. Beyond it was all garish modernism and broken pavement and traffic. Buildings were glass and concrete and steel and tasteless. The contrast to the Semper palace could not have been starker.

  They crossed a wooden bridge over a swan-filled moat, then passed under a multistory arch formed as a gilded crown and colonnaded pedestal. Inside were acres of carefully sculpted gardens, all brown and empty and waiting for spring. Scaffolding covered two thirds of the surrounding ornate palace, over a thousand feet to a side. The sound of construction followed them everywhere.

  Katya pointed through the falling white veil to where two leather-coated individuals watched them. “Frau Reining said they would be wearing red scarfs.”

  It was only when they were a few paces away that Jeffrey realized the second person was a woman. Her face was all angles and hard lines, her expression stubborn and suspicious.

  Her pockmarked companion spoke with a voice roughened by a metal rasp. Katya translated it as, “He wants to know if you are the one.”

  “The one what?”

  “Let me tell him yes, all right? I don’t feel comfortable with this pair.”

  The uneasiness he felt from their gaze hardened into genuine dislike at the thought of Katya’s fear. “Tell them the question is out of a third-rate spy movie, and it’s too cold out here for games.”

  Katya hesitated, then spoke in a soft voice. The man stiffened, then turned and stomped off. The woman watched him go, then turned back to Jeffrey with a smirk and spoke a few words.

  “I don’t understand,” Katya said.

  “What did she say?”

  “End of drama.”

  “This is ridiculous. Tell her we’re leaving.”

  Before Katya could speak the woman held up her hand, pointed to where the pockmarked man reappeared through the colonnaded atrium. With him scuttled a little figure bundled within a shapeless greatcoat. On closer inspection, Jeffrey decided the man looked like the embryo of a giant mole.

  When he spoke, the man had the gentle lisp of an ageless Pan. “I hear that you are an honorable businessman, Mr. Sinclair,” the little man said in greeting. The act of translating those few words was enough to give Katya’s voice a colorless tone.

  Jeffrey bridled. “No one has said the same about you.”

  Katya glanced his way. “How do you know that he can’t speak English?”

  “I don’t know, and I don’t care. I don’t even know what we are doing here.” He looked down at her. “Can we please get out of this snow?”

  “Don’t you want to know what he’s got to sell?”

  “Look at these people, Katya. Tell me how you think they came up with something of value.”

  Katya hesitated, then turned back to the trio and spoke in her lilting German. The strange-shaped man replied in sibilant tones. Katya translated, “This place is a most appropriate spot for our meeting, as the palace resembles greatly the former home of what I have to sell.”

  The pockmarked man’s dull stare rankled almost more than Jeffrey could stand. He turned sideways and asked, “Is this guy all there?”

  “I don’t know, but his German is very precise, very educated.”

  “They give me the creeps.”

  Katya nodded, waited for his move. Snow dusted her hair with a faint, damp frosting. “Tell him he has one minute to get this over with.”

  The little man showed no irritation. “What we are selling is currently being sought by three diffe
rent governments, all of whom believe it is in their territory—Lithuania, Russia, and our own German government. We know they all are racing down false trails. We know this for a fact, Mr. Sinclair.”

  “What is it?”

  “We are not selling the article,” the little man continued in tones as gray as his skin, “but rather the article’s location.”

  Jeffrey took in the bottle-bottom glasses pinched onto the smidgen of nose, the peach-fuzz hair, the sloping forehead, and decided this was the strangest human he’d ever seen. “You want me to buy directions to an antique?”

  “We will supply you with a sample of the merchandise, which will leave no doubt in your mind whatsoever,” the other replied. “Payment will be required only after you have received the sample. We seek nothing in advance.”

  That slowed Jeffrey down. “You don’t?”

  “We are most serious in this endeavor, I assure you, Mr. Sinclair. We have unearthed a hoard of world renown. And for this we wish to receive a mere two million dollars.”

  Jeffrey laughed out loud. “Come on, Katya. Let’s go back to the ship.”

  The man’s lisping voice stopped him. “Naturally, we are leaving ample room for you to add your own percentage.”

  “Tell the man it’s been swell,” Jeffrey replied. “But I deal in antiques, not fairy tales.”

  The unlined, snub-nosed face remained expressionless as he spoke. Katya translated, “He wants to know if you have ever heard of the Amber Room.”

  CHAPTER 19

  “What did they look like, these three?” Alexander asked.

  “The little man looked like a skinless frog,” Jeffrey replied. “Flanked by his and her linebackers.”

  Katya laughed out loud. “They did not.”

  “That guy with the pox,” Jeffrey persisted. “If he was any dumber, you’d need to water him twice a week.”

  They were seated in Alexander’s spacious living room, the night’s bitter chill kept at bay by a carefully tended fire. Their return trip from East Germany the day before had been long and tiring but uneventful, their arrival most welcomed by Alexander. The gala was weighing heavily upon him. Together they had put in a full day’s work on final details, then Katya had pushed aside the old gentleman’s objections and insisted that he allow her to prepare dinner.