Checkmate in Amber

by Matilde Asensi

  He put aside the walkie-talkie and the laptop and rushed towards me.

  ‘Look at this! Look!’

  ‘I can’t see a thing, honey. Don’t forget that I …’

  ‘The route shows the way! This maze of tunnels conceals a swastika! We’ve walked past it twice and missed it completely.’

  ‘What are you talking about? What the hell are you saying?’

  By way of an answer, José began to scroll through Amália’s email.

  ‘Hang on a second. Where is it? Here it is. Listen: “… on the afternoon of the fifth day …”. Look for the sheet of graph paper covering the fifth afternoon, darling. “… on the afternoon of the fifth day, at the start of the fourth mile …”. Come on, Ana, please. Why haven’t you found the right sheet yet?’

  ‘Because I’m ill - or had you forgotten?’ I protested in outrage.

  ‘Oh my God, of course you are, sweetheart, of course you are!’ José responded with a shocked look on his face. He laid the laptop on my stomach, turned and leapt to his feet in an impressive pirouette, grabbed his sleeping bag, placed it under my head as a pillow, retrieved the laptop, which by then I had in my hands, and replaced it with my bundle of notes. ‘There you are then!’

  I looked at him like he was the biggest weirdo that I had ever laid eyes on.

  ‘Go on then, darling, find the fifth afternoon sheet!’ He sweetened me up with a beautiful smile.

  I opened up my logbook and took out the corresponding page.

  ‘The fourth mile!’ he insisted, impatiently.

  ‘Fourth mile it is,’ I confirmed, placing the end of my pen on the relevant mark.

  ‘Right then: “… at the start of the fourth mile, you drew a sort of cylindrical saucepan shape with a long handle coming off it at its top right.” Have you found it, Ana?’

  ‘Yes, here it is,’ I said, and drew over it several times so that it stood out.

  ‘She goes on: “It’s the same shape as the route you covered yesterday afternoon, the fifth mile - but the other way around.” Yesterday. Yesterday’s sheet. Have you got it?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I’ve got it. Let me have a look for it. Here it is.’ Again I drew over the outline of the saucepan shape, upside-down this time.

  ‘She then says: “If you now join the two figures at their bases and then slide the lower one to the right so that the routes drawn on the two sheets coincide perfectly, you will see that a swastika is formed in the center”.’

  ‘A swastika!’ I exclaimed, as I successfully carried out Amália’s instructions. ‘Look, José - a swastika, a real Hakenkreuz!’

  ‘I can’t believe it. It’s extraordinary. We have to tell Roi. We’ve found the way in!’

  ‘It was your daughter who found the way in,’ I corrected him, gritting my teeth slightly. Amália was a genius, no doubt about it. On the other hand, watching José dance what looked like a Native American rain dance in that subterranean aqueduct certainly suggested that she took rather more after her mother than her father. ‘You’ll do yourself some damage if you don’t stop leaping about.’

  ‘Get up and join me, darling. This we have to celebrate!’

  He didn’t need to ask me twice. I shuffled off my chrysalis and began to dance with him, madly, in honor of the manitou. My cold had disappeared, and I was cured of my exhaustion, of our eleven days buried in the sewers, of the stink and the filth and, above all, of my despair. Sauckel and Koch thought that they were so clever and cunning camouflaging an enormous swastika inside an even bigger labyrinth, but we in the Chess Group were way smarter - well, OK, maybe it was our offspring who were - and so far we had never met a mystery that we couldn’t crack. It never remotely occurred to us that Amália’s discovery might just be an architectural coincidence and that the way into the cache wouldn’t actually be there. And thank goodness for that.

  There were still three hours to go before we made contact with Roi again and could give him the good news, so we gathered up our gear and began to head back towards the swastika, which was only about three miles away. This time we did begin to notice differences with the rest of the tunnels. Shortly after entering into the horizontal stretch of the swastika’s lower arm, we realized that it had never flooded and that the smooth layer of sand on its floor still showed our footprints from the day before. Its walls, unlike the others which were rendered up to half-height to protect them against the flow of water, were left bare, revealing the porous brickwork heavily stained with patches of humidity and velvety black colonies of fungi and mold. This time around, it was impossible to understand how, on our first trip through, we had missed what now seemed like blindingly obvious differences between the tunnels which formed part of the swastika and the rest which belonged to Weimar’s drainage system.

  Checking so many square feet of tunneling with the magnetometer was going to be completely exhausting - each hook of the swastika was two and a half miles long and the crosspieces each measured four miles. But there was no way round it: the entrance we were looking for could be hidden anywhere in that vile Nazi emblem. And now that we had a good lead, we could hardly back out on the grounds that we were too damn tired and it had just become a drag.

  We contacted Roi at the agreed time, eleven in the evening, and told him the news. He got so enthusiastic that, despite his always priding himself on being extremely security-conscious over any form of communication, which made him notoriously tight-lipped when it came to exchanging information, this time he asked José to tell him everything, and in full detail. He wanted to know how we had identified the outline of the swastika (and was disgusted with himself for not having spotted it, given that he had a plan of the entire tunnel network) and he advised us to start our search at its center, instead of at its outer extremities. It seemed to him to make more sense to locate the entrance there than anywhere else. José, of course, didn’t breathe a word about Amália’s role and gave all the credit for the discovery to me. Nor did he mention the fact that his heroine’s fever was on the way up again. Under my clothes I was shivering with cold, but even that wasn’t enough to keep my eyes open. I fell asleep.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I slept very badly that night. I had a succession of horrible nightmares, in which either I died or José died or Ezequiela died or Tía Juana died. Even Amália died in one of them. Nobody got out of my dreams alive. Although some say that dreaming of your own death brings you ten more years of life, the truth of the matter is that I woke up in a foul mood. All I wanted was to find myself an uninhabited rain forest and lose myself in it forever. But let’s face it. Waking up all by yourself is just not the same as waking up next to someone who loves you enough to feel your pain.

  ‘I’m fed up to the back teeth with you, Ana! What the hell’s wrong with you now? Why are you being so mean? I never realized that you were so rude and inconsiderate! Can’t you even make the slightest effort to be halfway friendly? I bet you’ve had it your own way your whole life, haven’t you? That must be it! You’ve always done whatever you wanted whenever you wanted to, without anybody ever picking you up on it. That’s it, isn’t it? Well listen up, you spoiled little brat: I’m not going to put up with it! Understood?’

  ‘But … But …’

  ‘I’m not interested in your excuses! It’s time we got to work. We can talk about this when we get home. When I go to mine and you go to yours, that is.’

  The center of the underground swastika was a cube with a plan area of about six hundred and fifty square feet, more or less without walls as its four sides all had tunnel openings, with a vaulted ceiling about six and a half feet high at its apex and a slippery cobbled floor covered with loose earth. José placed the gaslamp right in the center and put it on its brightest setting. The sudden brightness of the huge intersection contrasted strongly with the insistent darkness of the four tunnels.

  ‘There might be a hidden chamber between the ceiling and the city above,’ José speculated thoughtfully, looking upwards.

 
; ‘I don’t think so,’ I answered in a sweet and helpful tone of voice, although I was still suffering from the bawling-out he had given me. ‘In the first place, there’s not enough room and, in the second place, any construction work or street repairs could have uncovered their hiding place. It makes more sense to assume that they dug it out below us.’

  ‘OK. So let’s take a good look at the floor then.’

  We cleared the earth off the floor as best we could, and stamped all over it in an attempt to discover some kind of trapdoor. But we found nothing. Despite our raising one hell of a dust cloud, the stonework was solid and there were no suspicious cracks or openings. We looked at each other dejectedly.

  ‘We’re going to have to search the whole damn swastika,’ I groaned, approaching him.

  ‘I don’t think we will,’ he said quietly, putting his arm round my shoulders. ‘There is one place we haven’t checked yet.’

  I raised my eyes to him in surprise and saw that he was smiling, and looking directly at the gaslamp.

  ‘Right in the middle!’ I yelled out. ‘We haven’t checked the middle yet, right where the lamp is!’

  Laughing with excitement, we moved the lamp and began clearing away the pile of earth which we had unthinkingly left around it. Within a short time, we had uncovered a circular manhole cover, which looked to be metal and hermetically sealed. There it was. Right there.

  ‘The way in, José!’ I cried in triumph. ‘The way in - we’ve found it!’

  The long-awaited manhole cover was so heavy and well-fitting that it took the two of us working the crowbar to shift it. Finally, with a dry metallic clang, we levered it off to one side of the opening. The echo was ear-shattering, but triumphant. A dark shaft and a rickety and badly-rusted access ladder led down into the depths.

  ‘I’ll go down first and have a quick look around,’ José decided, gingerly putting his foot on the first rung.

  ‘Be really careful.’

  I gave him his headlamp and, as he tightened up the strap, I tied one end of a coil of rope to his belt.

  ‘I won’t be long,’ he reassured me, giving me a long look, and then disappeared down into the shaft.

  As time went on, I got more and more scared and anxious. The rope sliding through my fingers told me that he was still descending. The further he went, the more I reproached myself for letting him go down first: he was a complete novice in this line of work and I was the one who was the experienced professional risk-taker. When the hundred-foot length of rope ran out, I hung on tight and gave it a sharp pull to warn him to stop. I debated whether to make him come back up again or tie on another rope and let him carry on. The second option won out: we’d gotten far too far to stop now. Another thirty or forty feet of rope disappeared into the darkness before José reached the bottom of the shaft. At that point he shouted up to me, from so far away that I could barely hear what he was saying.

  ‘Ana! Get down here!’

  Going down that stinking hole was the last thing I felt like doing, but I followed his lead. I strapped on my headlamp and began the descent. The further down I went, the narrower the shaft and the hotter and more stifling the humidity. I counted two hundred and thirty rungs on the ladder before I got to José.

  ‘God! This is worse than the fifth floor of an underground car park. And it stinks just as badly.’

  Right in front of us, about six feet away, stood a metal door.

  ‘Have you tried to open it?’

  ‘No - I thought I’d leave that to you.’

  ‘Chivalry is dead, I see.’

  The door was sheeted in steel and had a couple of hinges and a handle. It looked sturdy and well-fitted.

  ‘Sorry about this,’ I said to him, shrugging my shoulders, ‘but this looks to me like a man’s job.’

  With one powerful jerk of the crowbar, and a low grunt, José forced the door open and worked it back far enough to let us through.

  ‘After you, ma’am.’

  ‘How very kind.’

  My heart was racing. Was I just seconds away from setting my eyes on Koch’s looted treasures? I guess what I was expecting was some kind of storeroom or warehouse with all those beautiful objects perfectly packed and stacked in boxes all the way up to the ceiling. But what I saw through the gloom as soon as I got my nose through the door was nothing more than a boring old office, where I could just make out some old armchairs, a desk table, a coat stand with a black jacket hanging on it in the corner and, built into an alcove in the wall, a set of shelves loaded down with dozens of books, looking well past their best. What the hell was all this doing a hundred and sixty-five feet underground?

  ‘What can you see?’ José asked me urgently.

  ‘If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me. You’d better have a look yourself.’

  He put both his hands against the inside of the door and gave it a sharp kick. He managed to widen the opening just enough to join me inside the disappointingly tiny room. He let out a long, low whistle of amazement.

  ‘Wow. This isn’t at all what I expected.’

  He walked over to the table, with its fancy pen set covered in dust and cobwebs, and I could hear him messing around with something heavy and metallic.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked, as I approached him.

  He was holding a small desk lamp in his hands which, not surprisingly, was refusing to respond to his overenthusiastic attacks on its switch.

  ‘If there’s a lamp, there must be a damn power supply here somewhere,’ he complained, bad-temperedly.

  ‘You’re right, but you won’t get the power back on by breaking the light switch. Let’s have a look around. There must be a main power switch somewhere. We should follow the cabling. Look,’ I pointed with my finger, ‘Over there. That should lead us to the right place.’

  The old electric cable disappeared through a hole in the wall, just above a small door by the coat stand, and behind it we found a magnificent bathroom, with a big mirror above the washbasin and an impressive bath with a shower curtain and everything. We were strangely thrilled by the discovery - as if we were about to throw our gear off, jump in the shower and come out refreshed and revived. It was very weird to see the reflection of my own face in the mirror. I’d almost forgotten what I looked like, it had been so long. We turned the taps to see if they worked, and they did: at first the water came out dirty, but soon it was pouring crystal clear and as cold as ice. There was even a revolting-looking bar of soap which had fallen into a corner. It reminded me of having read somewhere that the Nazis had made soap from the fat of their Jewish victims and I quickly looked away in disgust. In between the washbasin and the bathtub, there was another door which turned out to lead to a big concrete-lined chamber where the generator was housed. It was driven by two powerful Daimler-Benz motors, firmly mounted on fixed supports and probably stripped from a couple of truck tractor units. The whole wall at the end of the room was practically covered with oil drums, cans and equipment.

  ‘Will it work, do you think?’ I asked José. ‘This stuff’s almost sixty years old.’

  José gave me a quick kiss and mimed rolling up his sleeves to get to work.

  ‘Trust me. Machines are my thing.’

  ‘Toy machines for sure, darling, but maybe not these Second World War brutes.’

  ‘O ye of little faith! Help me out here, give me some light with your headlamp.’

  He checked both the motors out from head to foot and back again, sticking his hands into various slots and openings, right up to his elbows sometimes, and carefully cleaned off the spark plugs, coils and pilot jets. Finally, he tried to start them up. You could just hear a slight click, a half-turn and then, nothing. Pure silence.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I haven’t got a clue,’ he growled, as he hunkered down again to work out what had gone wrong and why.

  For half an hour - it seemed like forever - I stood there providing the lighting by moving my head in tune with his rapid movements
from one part of a machine to the next. By the end of it I was practically seasick, not to mention bored out of my wits, given that he hadn’t said a word to me the whole time.

  ‘Have you worked out what’s wrong, José?’

  ‘No, damn it, it’s driving me crazy! I don’t understand. It’s all in really good condition. I’ve cleaned everything from the carburetor to the smallest nut. I can’t find a single fault. But the damn thing still won’t work!’

  I scratched my head for a second, then turned to him and said (you know, just to make conversation):

  ‘You don’t think they might just have run out of gas?’

  Suddenly it all went quiet. His furious eyes locked onto mine, which had gone all innocent, and his headlamp glared at the one on my forehead.

  ‘What was that you said?’

  ‘Nothing, nothing! I didn’t say a thing!’

  ‘Out of gas! Of course!’ He unscrewed the caps on the gas tanks and hit each tank lightly as he listened at the openings. ‘They’re empty! You’re a genius!’

  ‘I knew you’d wise up eventually.’

  ‘Come on, help me fill them up. Start passing me the jerrycans, OK?’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The jerrycans - those metal containers with handles over there by the wall.’

  ‘Oh, right, the containers.’

  ‘They’re called jerrycans. They were invented by the Germans not long before the war. They got their name because the British nicknamed the Germans Jerries. They’re fantastic - in fact, they’re still being used today. They’re leak-proof and the lever cap snaps open to reveal a spout for easy pouring.’

  He opened the first jerrycan and, just as he said, the spout made it easy for him to start filling the first tank. The strong smell of gasoline began to fill the room like incense in a church at high mass. I was amazed that this bluish liquid had stayed exactly the same after so many years. So José explained to me that, in a jerrycan, the gasoline doesn’t just not evaporate, but in fact maintains all of its volatile and inflammatory properties. Eventually, with both tanks filled, he tried starting up the motors again. We could hear the spark plugs sparking and, after various muffled blasts, a few convulsions and a whole series of strangled coughs, we finally heard the full-throated roar of two Daimler-Benz motors generating mechanical energy like there was no tomorrow. The electric generator sighed reluctantly at first, and then, picking up the rhythm, threw itself into its task with mad enthusiasm. All of a sudden the ceiling lights came on, almost blinding us after so many days in the shadows and turning our concrete bunker into Downtown Las Vegas at midnight.