Ten Word Game

by Jonathan Gash

  Word spread, and Big John took over. He had St Albansbury’s mayoral silver nicked on the sly (it was only in a cabinet, never used) and sold cheap to the uncomprehending Devvie. She gleefully flogged it to a stranger, one of Big John’s goons, who politely reported it to London’s Lemon Street police station, who arrested Devvie. The case against Devvie was cast iron. The public fumed. The girls in gaol, where Devvie was consigned for two years by an irate judiciary, sharpened their spoons. (Female prisoners stab their foes in the showers with spoons sharpened against the walls of their cells; just so you’ll know.) The real reason the authorities seethed most, though, was that pretty Devvie had omitted to file tax returns, and kept the Value Added Tax due to Customs and Excise.

  That’s a classic bubble. It’ll be worse for her when she gets out because the lads never forget that kind of evil. Restoring the Hospice’s finances cost us the earth, and me any chance of getting back on the electricity.

  Dark now. In the gloaming I saw two or three layabouts buy a swig of hooch from some barrow. Better if I too stank of booze, if I was going to sleep rough, then the police might leave me be. I shuffled up, watched some dosser buy his bottle, and when it was my turn proffered the same notes, giving an irate gesture to indicate the same stuff. It was colourless. I’d never tasted vodka, but tossed it back merrily in one go – and felt I’d been slugged with a brick. I actually staggered, gasped, croaked, almost fell. My head gave one thump, a reminder not to drink it again.

  Lights were on in the Moskovsky prospekt. I turned towards the main square, then left past the caff opposite and passed the station. From there it was less than a hundred yards back to the rear of the Yusupov Gardens, where I’d escaped from Natasha’s eagle eyes and my B2 passenger crocodile.

  A bloke staggered into the gardens, pausing every now and then to bawl a ditty, presumably aiming to slumber away his booze. I ambled along among the shrubbery. I found a place behind a shed. It wasn’t warm, just out of the drizzle. I huddled down.

  Sleep doesn’t do much for me. I’ve always thought it a waste of time. I think God was a real beginner. I mean, what’s sleep actually for? You get through the days as best you can, then are forced to lie horizontal gazing at the ceiling until it gets daylight when you can safely rise and shine. If you don’t snooze you feel terrible. If you do manage to doze, you can get up and go about your business, knowing you’ll have to waste another eight hours tonight, and so it goes. I think God didn’t know his onions. He should have worked us out beforehand, saved us a load of grief. Still, I tried to kip knowing I was destined to knock on the ambassador’s door in the morning complaining that my ship had sailed without me.

  Except nodding off in the lamp hours brings thoughts you don’t want. I find that. My mind wears itself out when it should be asleep instead of delving in its burrows, scouring for facts, piecing together bits of a story that finally I understood.

  * * *

  The greatest amber carver of all time was a Dane, Gottfried Wolffram, the one I’d mentioned, who was sent to work in Charlottenburg for the King of Prussia. He became heated when people disagreed – not an all-time first for an artist. In 1707 he flounced off when Goethe (no, not that Goethe; a far humbler architect) thought the amber wall Wolffram had made should have been designed different. Other amber craftsmen were drafted in, took up the work, and eventually, unbelievably, finished a whole room made of amber. Like I told Delia Oakley and others when doing that talk on the ship, the Amber Room was called a new Wonder of the World when it was installed in Berlin. The “most glorious work of amber artistry in all history,” it’s always called nowadays when folk bother to remember its transitory existence. Tzar Peter the Great, who got around, received it as a gift. Packed into special crates, slab by precious slab, the stupendous Amber Room went off to Russia.

  It landed up in the Summer Palace in 1763. Courtiers who saw it have left feeble descriptions – all agreeing that the fabled Amber Room was a dream of such beauty that it was beyond reality. Roman landscapes, flowers, bouquets of blossoms, trees, wandering figures, were carved so brilliantly that courtiers needed magnifying glasses to see the detail. And everything was amber, pure priceless amber of yellow, white, brown, golden colour, with occasional scenes in red. Not one inch was stained or artificial. Later designers tried to copy it in amberina glass – but that stuff only came in when the New England Glass Co. introduced their reheating technique to colour mere ordinary glass to an amber hue in the 1880s.

  Mirrors increased the Amber Room’s dazzling gold effect. Amber chandeliers with hundreds of amber droplets amplified the light of the golden amber walls and doors and windows.

  Then came war. And in 1941 – so rumour told – Russia decided to hide her treasures and took it to vaulted tunnels near Sverdlovsk in the Urals. And guess what, the Amber Room vanished. A German officer, a prisoner in 1944, vaguely recalled orders that the Amber Room be taken to Koenigsberg in old Prussia, in the care of Alfred Rohde, that museum’s curator. The Amber Room mysteriously disappeared, and so did Dr Rohde. After the war ended things sort of got back to sort of normal.

  Except for one thing. The Amber Room was no more, and Dr Rohde – another mystery here – reappeared from the mist one morning to resume his job, and couldn’t remember a thing. More mysteries followed, for when intensive questioning began Dr Rohde fell ill and died, poor chap. And a mysterious doctor who signed his death certificate, one Dr Erdmann, was mysteriously untraceable because he too vanished, if indeed he had ever existed. Odderer and odderer, right?

  One unsolvable mystery is bad enough. Two is chance. Three is really a bit much. Four? Four mysteries occurring together is the stuff of mythology, or there are gremlins in the works. And the Amber Room’s fate contains far more than four mysterious events. Like, just what was that mystery ship carrying, 23 nautical miles into the Baltic when it was supposedly torpedoed by a Soviet sub…? And what submarine, exactly? Wasn’t the nearest submarine 200 miles away?

  Every so often, magazine articles about the fate of the Amber Room turn up, mere copied copy churned by stringer reporters desperately worried for their pay. People exult about mysteries, and speculate how the Room must have looked, with that splendiferous and unmatched golden glow.

  For me, shivering and dozing in the lee of that gardener’s tool-shed in the Yusupov Gardens, the lights of nearby streets shining through the dank trees, I was seeing the problem more mundanely. I like measurements, for reasons I explained to Victor Lustig. The Amber Room is said to have weighed, when on its travels in World War Two, some six-and-a-half tons. The panels each measured five metres in height, brilliantly mosaicked in coloured ambers to show royal coat-of-arms of different monarchies. Over 110,000 pieces were incrusted with the combined techniques of the world’s best amber craftsmen. No wonder courtiers used to assemble to see the Amber Room’s dazzling radiance in the setting sun. Amber itself is said to be magic, an aphrodisiac, health-giving, a substance that could even turn old age back to youth, the cure-all in an age of miracles and wonder.

  Valuable, no? Russian presidents as recently as Mr Yeltsin harboured dark suspicions: it’s still concealed in German hands – where else? – or, even better, it was stolen by American gangsters. Others gloomily say the RAF bombed the great fortress of Koenigsberg to extinction and so destroyed it as the Red Army advanced. Still others say it’s in the hands of private collectors, wealthy souls gloating over it in the rays of the setting sun…

  Me? I was certain the worst bout of divvy sickness I’d ever experienced, as we sat in the theatre to admire the workmanship of St Petersburg’s restorers, gave its location away. The only single antique in the world that looked like a room, was shaped like a room, and was the size of a room, could only be, well, a room, the panels concealed in the mundane painted flats on that stage. And who would kill one poor bloke, maybe two, for a set of canvas-and-strut splurges tacked together as stage scenery? Nobody. But if that ordinary scenery was lined with wall panels of priceles
s antique amber carved by the greatest carvers in history, somebody was being tempted. Speculators in antiques have reckoned its value close to half a billion zlotniks, but that was a decade since. Now? The Amber Room was worth killing for.

  Teeth chattering in the cold, I stirred. Water had seeped under me, running from some trickle down the slope. I’d not had the sense to find shelter on higher ground. I’m hopeless outdoors, and indoors even worse.

  Shame, I thought, that a pig like Purser Mangot and his motley thieves should purloin the fabled amber treasure from St Petersburg, which had endured so much tribulation since the days of Peter the Great. I rose, trying not to groan or make any noise.

  They’d need lorries, transport of sorts. And two, maybe three, wagon drivers, plus blokes to crate up the amber panels and somehow get them down to the quayside. Once the passengers were at supper – about now? – would be a good time. It happened at every port, boxes and supplies coming aboard with the next few tons of caviar and wine.

  The shine of the sky-glow showed me the lake. It lay between where I had rested and the Yusupov Palace. I walked towards the distant building, guided by the slender string of lamps along the canal and the three solitary floodlights up ahead through the trees.

  Chapter Thirty

  Back home, I always envied the night-stealers, those who poach in silence. I hate meeting them in the lanes to Seven Arches or Friday Wood. Walk down by the navigation limit, where Caesar’s barges tied up bringing weapons, bricks, or wine for the Roman garrison in our town, you often see one of an early morning, their long coats heavy with dead birds or rabbits. Usually they have a dog, the slinking kind you never see. “Morning, George. Lost Rover today?” I say, and get back, “Morning, Lovejoy. No, he’s close by.” It’s only luck if you glimpse the shadowy creature flitting among the hedgerows.

  It must be pleasant being able to move through countryside, nobody knowing you’re there. I once nearly stood on a poacher when I was setting up my easel to paint by the River Colne. It was snowing, and a low snowdrift said quietly, “Move off a bloody yard, eh, Lovejoy?” frightening me to death.

  In countryside I sound like popcorn even when I’m hiding. Going slow hardly helps because every crackling twig, every crunchy leaf, makes sure it gets a spot underneath my next footfall. Bonfires are quieter. In the Yusupov Gardens I really tried, fondly imagining I was ghostly but probably creating a din worse than a cavalry charge. My idea was to come at the Yusupov building on the terrace from which I’d legged it.

  As I got nearer I could see the great palace – not as huge as I’m making it sound, but still a size – in silhouette against the floodlights that shone where it faced the Fontanka road and the canal bridge. No lights on the garden side – or had Mangot’s complicitors dowsed them? I saw only darkness until I was within fifty paces. Then I made out the vague shapes of three lorries, saw a flickering headlight and heard engine noise. They were loading something. Why weren’t they being secret? I heard blokes calling instructions to the loader-arm vehicle. They sounded confident, and legitimate.

  On my hands and knees I reached the last bushes. No animals, thank God. Three men angled a crate from a loader and waved it down. It dropped with a thump that made me almost cry out in grief. I thought, for God’s sake don’t damage the Amber Room now, not after these centuries. They levered it. Heavier than I would have thought. I could hear the Russian voices calling, probably the usual “Left side down a bit” that all lorry blokes shout. The loader rattled away to the rear entrance where more men showed, wheeling out another long flat crate.

  Long and flat with black Gothic lettering. I was in darkness, but they worked under light inside their lorries and small headlights on the loader-arm vehicle. I saw the driver’s cigarette glow as he called his warnings to the men. They kept the next box still while he backed his loader onto the terrace and turned it towards the lorries. His helpers vanished back inside, pulling their trolley.

  Two choices, plus the coward’s. That’s what my gran used to say, “There’s always two choices in everything, plus the coward’s, making three.” Assuming I was right, that they’d somehow found the priceless Amber Room and hit on a way of not only stealing it but simultaneously smuggling it out of the country, I could rush out and bring the police. Or, second choice, I could race back to the ship and find the captain, accuse the suspects, demand to see the ambassador, all that.

  Then, as the crate was lobbed unceremoniously into the lorry, I saw something that automatically cancelled out my first choice. A uniformed policeman strolled into the light in full uniform, touching a match to his cigarette. The police were here, and in on it. Ivy had said something like, “You can arrange anything in Russia.”

  Second choice, then?

  Well, on board they had something ready and lurking there for me. Why else had they buttered me up, given me an expensive cruise, sent women to lull me to obedience, and killed? And what ambassador would believe a tatty bloke like me?

  Neither choice, then. I was left with the coward’s. The trouble was, Gran never said what the coward’s choice was. The question was to find out, and do it properly.

  The policeman strolled to the rear of the last lorry and spoke to the men inside. I’d seen three. You didn’t need more than that to manhandle a flat crate, even if it was nearly two metres in length. Amber isn’t heavy. The first two lorries were open but unlit, their headlights off. It would have to be them. The coward’s way, hoping Gran wasn’t tut-tutting on some cloud, was do nothing brave and get away scotage free. I worked it out. The two nearest lorries were either loaded, or empty and waiting. Whichever I tackled, Number Three wagon would be in the light from the doorway.

  When the loader-arm truck had gone back, I went slowly to the first lorry, crouching low. Movement catches the eye. Even if you make the most fleeting of shadows, somebody’ll see swiftness. Go slow, you’re in with a chance. I crawled under the first lorry, stayed a minute beneath the giant rear wheels, then rose slowly to peer inside over the dropped tailgate.

  Empty. I climbed on, and felt around. There are always ropes, chains, crowbars. I came on an iron crow by almost knocking myself out on the damned thing. Three were hooked on struts fixed along the length of the lorry. I nicked two and a length of chain, dropped down and scurried underneath.

  Until you’ve been there, you’ve no idea how massive a wheel is. Each vehicle seemed to have two couples of back wheels. I’d seen my trick done at the M18 motorway service station, where jealousies run strong because antiques thieves congregate there of a Saturday to sell what they’ve nicked while people are out watching football. It’s quite simple.

  Lacking a knife to cut the tyres, I propped the short arm of the crowbar underneath one tyre, so that when the lorry moved it would dig into the rubber. The long arm I lodged against the adjacent tyre.

  It’s very effective. The tyre rotates as the lorry advances, so the short arm, being the divided end, impales itself into the tyre. The other end rips into the next tyre. It was exactly the same action on Queen Boadicea’s chariots, which had scythes projecting from their hubs to slice enemies’ legs. Progress, you might say. The lorry I’d once seen nobbled like this hadn’t got a few yards before it slewed to a halt. The extra advantage is that the wheel is damaged beyond repair. It isn’t a matter of simply changing the tyre and driving on.

  Making sure, I fixed the other crowbar on the other two massive wheels. If one didn’t work – I couldn’t see how it would fail – the other would.

  That left the chain. I wrapped it round me and went dog-like to the second lorry. I had some notion of tying the axle to a railing, but it was too far off. Between loadings, I scouted for something, anything, to fix the chain to. I began to despair, even thought of going back for another crowbar, but that was too pathetic even for the coward’s choice. It was only when I began to get scared they would soon move to the middle lorry that I realised I was kneeling on a huge grid. The chain wouldn’t quite reach, so I left it and
eeled back for more.

  If I’d been more of a workman, it would have taken me only a few seconds, but I’m all thumbs. Sweating, on my side, trying to tie two chains together, I began to make mistakes and had to do it three times before the thing got itself linked. Best I could do, tie the chain to what I hoped was an axle then onto the grid. I had the sense to loop it under the foremost grille so the lorry’s forward motion might lift the grid up. I imagined it trailing noisily behind the big vehicle. It would be halted by police, something like that.

  They slammed the tailgate on the last lorry. I heard the men walking, calling. I snuck away, staying under the lorries until I was within reach of the shrubbery, then went slowly into the shadow. I was tempted to wait, but we cowards have standards. I worked my way back, using the sky-glow to avoid falling too often. I was a wreck by the time I’d gone a hundred paces.

  The rain had almost stopped. I found shelter under some dense foliage and sat on a low branch, hunching up and trying to doze. I could hardly hear the men or the loader-arm vehicle. Nothing more I could do. Wander the streets, I’d get nabbed by the plod and be worse off than I already was? Try to nig into the Yusupov Palace? Not a bad idea, except somebody would find me and blame me for theft, trespass, God-knows-what. Stay here, I could emerge in the morning and find the embassy and turn myself in. Or not?

  Worn out, my exhausted brain abandoned logic and tried for oblivion.

  * * *

  Engines starting up woke me. I heaved myself onto a higher branch. I’m not so good at that either, only managed to lodge myself in the first crook of the stubby tree and couldn’t go up any more. From there, though, I could see vague movement in the shadows. The building’s door was closed, its light gone. Presumably the loading was done. Hard to imagine a king’s ransom in antique amber in those hulks. I prayed my sabotage would work as the first lorry’s side lights came on. It revved, and moved.