Checkmate in Amber

by Matilde Asensi

  ‘Damn! I can’t see a thing,’ I complained, covering my eyes with my hands. ‘I’ll never see again!’

  ‘You wouldn’t dream of exaggerating, of course,’ joked José, pulling me up against him and hugging my head to his chest.

  ‘Of course not. Do I ever?’ I murmured out of the side of my mouth.

  Little by little, very slowly, our eyes got used to the brightness. We switched off our headlamps and looked at everything around us in total amazement, as if we had never been there before and had just walked in the door. We turned and went back the way we came, going through the magnificent bathroom again, which the bright lights revealed to be as grimy and filthy as the dingiest restroom in a long-abandoned bus station. José overtook me and by the time I got there myself, all the office lights were switched on.

  ‘So - what do you think?’ he asked me, turning a full circle and giving the whole room the once-over. Damp patches blackened the bare plaster walls, where it hadn’t dropped off to reveal the brickwork.

  ‘I’m thinking that we might find some very interesting stuff under the dirt and dust.’

  ‘Well, let’s divide up the work. I’ll go back up to the tunnel intersection to fetch our backpacks and you can search the room,’ he decided, and disappeared out through the metal door in seconds flat.

  I took a long good look around that old office. Who had it built? Whose office was it half a century and more ago? Who had sat in that desk chair, wearing that black leather jacket and reading those books that now smelt of mildew? Sauckel? Yes, Sauckel, no doubt about it. Fritz Sauckel, Gauleiter of Thuringia and General Plenipotentiary, the man responsible for Weimar’s KZ Buchenwald, whose prisoners had been forced to build him and Koch the best strongbox in the whole damn world. And being a strongbox, I said to myself, it must have a good lock somewhere, a lock whose combination was known only to Sauckel, and maybe to Koch. Perhaps the lock was the office itself, right below the center of the swastika symbol hidden inside Weimar’s drainage system.

  I began to rifle through the desk drawers. In the first one I opened, I found a file full of yellowing bills signed by Sauckel - confirming that it had been his office - and a copy of an Austrian newspaper called the Volks-Zeitung, dated April 20th, 1942, whose words I could barely understand because they were laid out in that indecipherable Gothic script the Nazis were so keen on. What did catch my eye was that the date had been underlined several times, in red. The second drawer was empty and in the third, buried at the back like an unwanted tourist memento, I found a bizarre wax bust of Adolf Hitler, about the size of my fist, with his hair and mustache painted in what looked like black shoe polish, and a magnificent silver cigarette case finely engraved with a map of East Prussia. Underneath the map was an inscription with an oak-leaf border which read OSTPREUSSEN and, below that, die Schutzkammer des Volkes - in other words ‘East Prussia, haven of the people’. I opened the case and found three dried-out cigarettes and, on the inside of the lid, an engraving of Eric Koch’s signature and, below it, the word ‘Gauleiter’. It was a beautiful object and was clearly a gift specially made in large quantities to be presented to friends and leading figures in the Nazi hierarchy. In one corner was the manufacturer’s stamp: Staatliche Silber Manufaktur Königsberg Pr.

  My search of the bookshelves was much more entertaining. It was fascinating to see which literary works Sauckel had considered worthy of inclusion in his select personal library. I could just imagine him, restless and bored, spending his spare time in that underground office while, nearby, the press-ganged prisoners were sweating blood to build his Ali Baba cave. Would a secret panel slide open if I shouted ‘Open Sesame!’ at the top of my voice? I will never admit to anybody that I tested out this inspired theory - but let’s just say that after a short intermission I resumed my inspection of Sauckel’s book collection. At first, I could only recognize the names of some of the authors. But once I started to wipe the thick layers of dust off their spines and covers with paper towels, I could begin to translate their titles: there was Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther), and the two volumes of his Faust: Der Tragödie (Faust: The Tragedy), Max Born’s Die Relativitätstheorie Einsteins (Einstein’s Relativity Theory) published in 1920, the 1926 revised edition of Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West), the two large volumes of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Reise ans Ende der Nacht (Journey to the End of the Night) - the book I had only just finished a couple of weeks before and had threatened Ezequiela with when she started going on and on about my biological clock - and finally Marcel Proust’s great masterpiece Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Zeit (Remembrance of Things Past), published in seven volumes, bound in vellum and with the titles picked out in gold. Sauckel was undeniably a selective and demanding reader, a man of culture. It would never cease to amaze me how people so apparently sophisticated had fallen into the arms of an ideology as histrionic and deranged as German national socialism.

  ‘Have you found anything interesting?’ I suddenly heard José say from the doorway.

  ‘Jesus! You almost scared me to death!’ I cried out, turning towards him.

  ‘Sorry, that wasn’t the plan. But don’t forget there’s not a doorbell in sight. Anyhow, tell me - have you found anything?’

  ‘Not a thing,’ I sighed in resignation, putting the book I had in my hands back in its place. ‘There’s nothing here. Books, a silver cigarette case … Nothing special.’

  ‘It doesn’t make sense. We know that there’s a hidden treasure down here somewhere and we’ve ended up in this strange underground office after following a complex trail of clues. Have you looked for some hidden opening, some secret sliding panel …?’

  ‘The truth is that so far I’ve only searched the office,’ I admitted, sheepishly. José was right: somewhere close by there had to be a way into the secret chamber where Sauckel and Koch had hidden the treasures robbed in Russia during the war, the thousands of works of art of incalculable worth which included Tsar Peter the Great’s legendary Amber Room, acknowledged as the Eighth Wonder of the World, the extraordinary Bernsteinzimmer, swathed in sheets of golden Baltic amber.

  ‘Well, OK. Let’s have something to eat now, and then we’ll get back to work.’

  I glanced at my watch and suddenly realized that it was one-thirty in the afternoon.

  ‘We must make contact with Roi!’ I pointed out in a rush.

  ‘We’ll do it right away. Don’t worry about it.’

  While I prepared a delicious gourmet selection of freeze-dried meats and vegetables (God, I was sick of it; I was just dying for a huge plate of fresh pasta with a heap of grated parmesan on top), José got out all the electronic stuff and I heard him ringing Roi. Repeatedly.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I asked, in surprise.

  ‘Roi’s not answering,’ he replied.

  ‘That’s impossible. Try again. Are you sure that you tuned in to the right frequency?’

  ‘Definitely. But I’m not getting any signal.’

  ‘Maybe there’s too much rock and earth over our heads.’

  ‘That shouldn’t matter. This equipment’s very powerful.’

  ‘Do you think it might have broken?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he muttered, thoughtfully. ‘I’m going to check to see whether we’ve received any email from Amália. That way I can check whether it’s still working.’

  He connected the laptop to the walkie-talkie.

  ‘No. There aren’t any messages from Amália, either,’ he said, more puzzled than ever. ‘But I did get onto the packet radio network without any trouble.’

  ‘Very strange. Try Roi again.’

  But again it failed. We looked at each other, not quite knowing what to do. For the first time we felt truly alone and abandoned underground, as if the outside world had vanished for good and we were the only survivors of the final and definitive holocaust.

  ‘Come on now! Let’s not make a mountain out of a
molehill,’ I changed tack all of a sudden, annoyed with myself for going soft and getting the jitters. ‘For all we know, Roi’s walkie-talkie has gone on the blink, or he just forgot the timetable, or maybe something unexpected came up and he couldn’t get in touch this time. And maybe Amália’s broken my computer and is working overtime trying to mend it to avoid dying at my hands the next time we see each other. What do you think?’

  ‘Could be, could be … Let’s try again later.’

  We were cracking jokes all the way through the meal, mainly about the stupid situation we were in. According to José, we would never ever get out of the maze and would end up creating a new race of humans, adapted to living exclusively underground. In a millenium or two, when the overground people discovered our cities for the first time, they would hear folk tales of the original Adam and Eve, who in subterranean mythology would, of course, be called José and Ana.

  ‘There’s something that’s been puzzling me for quite a while,’ I said, once he’d finished telling his fairy stories. ‘If the Königsberg loot, including the Amber Room, is really down here, hidden in these tunnels, how on earth did they manage to get it down through the manholes? Some of these galleries are huge, but the doorways are tiny, just like this one here.’

  ‘I don’t think it was that difficult. The building of this structure almost certainly began at the start of the war. Remember that Koch was in charge of the first forced labor detachments which were sent to Weimar to build the camp at Buchenwald, and it was then that he and Sauckel became friends. It’s highly likely that the two of them started planning this incredible scheme around the time of the Nazi invasion of Russia in 1941. I’d bet my life that the first thing they did was fill a chamber with the stolen treasures and then sealed it off. In other words, they excavated a hiding place, filled it, then closed it and disguised the entrance somewhere in the city’s drainage system.’

  ‘Well, they didn’t really disguise the entrance, they just hid it in a maze.’

  ‘Right, and that implies many hours of painstaking analysis and planning. They deliberately designed it to make sure that no-one else apart from themselves could ever find their cache. If Hitler had won the war, within a few years they would have been two of the richest men in Europe, a Europe governed by their own country and by their own party, and nobody would have dared question the source of their sudden wealth. When they saw that the war was lost, the loot became their safe-conduct pass, their one guarantee of personal survival.’

  ‘But Sauckel died. He was executed at Nuremberg.’

  ‘But his family didn’t. Remember that Fritz Sauckel was an old merchant mariner and the father of ten children. That’s why he kept silent at Nuremberg, no doubt about it. Realizing that it was all over for him, and knowing that if he handed the treasure over to the Allies, the best he could get was a life sentence in some miserable prison while his family struggled and suffered in poverty, he chose instead to keep his mouth shut, secure in the knowledge that his gentlemen’s agreement with Koch would ensure that half of the wealth would get through to his large and needy family.’

  ‘Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. But Koch didn’t fulfill his part of the agreement.’

  ‘Well, we can’t be sure about that,’ José said. ‘Maybe he did.’

  ‘He would have needed to have someone else with him, someone to help him. And that would have meant that the secret hiding place wasn’t such a big secret anymore. And why did he paint the Jeremiah then, with its encrypted code in Hebrew?’

  José pursed his lips in frustration and heaved a sigh.

  ‘I think you’re right. Koch betrayed Sauckel.’

  ‘Right then,’ I said decisively, taking hold of José’s hand. ‘The Weimar Gauleiter clearly doesn’t deserve any sympathy from us. Let’s get back to work, darling. Somewhere here, there’s a second door that we still need to find. You check the motor room and I’ll check the bathroom. Then we’ll meet back here and search this office again, in case I missed something. OK?’

  Two hours later, we were back together again and facing up to the depressing fact that neither of us had managed to find anything. Despite it all, I was still stubbornly convinced that what we were looking for was very close by, right in front of our noses, but we simply couldn’t see it. And that was irritating the hell out of me and putting me into an increasingly bad mood. I was an old hand at scaling walls, disabling alarm systems, getting through security doors, opening safes and taking on guard dogs. But all these brain-teasers and mental gymnastics would have driven anybody crazy.

  ‘So - nothing?’ José asked me hopelessly from the other side of the desk, holding in his hand the silver cigarette case signed by Koch.

  ‘Not a thing,’ I confessed, slumping back into one of the armchairs behind me.

  ‘Are you absolutely certain of that?’ he asked, looking at me as if I was the defendant and he the prosecuting attorney.

  ‘Look, just get off my back, will you! If I tell you I haven’t found anything, that’s because I haven’t found anything! Do you think I’m trying to hide something from you? Why the hell would I do that?’

  ‘Listen, I just wanted to find out if something had caught your attention, something strange, something that struck you as out of place. It could be anything - some hidden message in one of Sauckel’s invoices, or a book, or that hunk of soap we found in the bathroom - anything.’

  ‘Apart from the fact that that stinking hunk of soap might have been made from the fat of murdered Jewish prisoners, which I just can’t get out of my head, the only thing that occurs to me right now is that one of the books on the shelves is a German translation of Céline’s novel Journey to the End of the Night, which I only finished reading a week or two ago.’

  ‘Journey to the End of the Night?’

  ‘Reise ans Ende der Nacht. It’s about a French soldier who is wounded in the First World War and eventually returns to France to work as a doctor in a poor district on the outskirts of Paris. It’s an extremely cynical and nihilistic novel, and Céline’s savage pessimism makes it very disturbing. Lots of exclamation marks, suspension points, slang, obscenities … that kind of stuff. After the war, Céline was accused and convicted of anti-Semitism and collaboration with the Nazis and spent several years in exile in Germany and Denmark. Nevertheless, he’s still considered one of the great icons of twentieth-century literature. In fact, one night when I was reading Journey, Ezequiela came into my bedroom to ask me to …’

  A light suddenly switched on in my head. For a moment I was speechless.

  ‘To ask you to …?’ prompted José, taken aback by my sudden silence.

  ‘I’ve got it, José! I’ve got it!’

  ‘You’ve got it? Got what?’

  I didn’t answer him. I just leapt to my feet and headed straight for the bookshelves. I distinctly remembered threatening Ezequiela with my hefty copy of Journey to the End of the Night - my single volume, not the two volumes of the German editions on Sauckel’s shelves. The novel simply wasn’t long enough to fill up two volumes as thick as those, however big they made the lettering. OK, my hunch could turn out to be wrong - but half a lead was better than none.

  ‘Look, come and have a look!’ I was jubilant: the first volume did contain Céline’s novel, but the second was a completely different book, stuck inside a false cover. ‘Volk ans … Ge … wehr! Liederbuch der … Nationalso … zialistis … chen Deutschen Arbei … terpartei,’ I stuttered hesitantly. One thing is being able to read German, but saying it out loud is something else altogether.

  ‘My God, I didn’t understand a word of that,’ José complained, grabbing the book out of my hands and examining it with expert eyes. ‘Volk ans Gewehr! Liederbuch der Nationalsozialistischen Deutschen Arbeiterpartei,’ he recited, in a disgustingly perfect German accent, and then translated: ‘People to Arms! Official Songbook of the German National Socialist Workers Party. It’s a 1934 edition.’

  ‘Open it!’

  He began t
o flip through the book, scanning it page by page.

  ‘Here’s something,’ he announced, stopping on a page about halfway through.

  ‘What is it?’ I couldn’t have been more impatient. I poked my head over his shoulder, in a desperate and unsuccessful attempt to find out what he’d discovered.

  ‘One of the songs is underlined in red pencil.’

  ‘And what does it say?’

  ‘The song is called Brothers in the Mines and Pits. It’s written by someone called Horst Wessel, an SA district commander in Berlin.’

  ‘Translate it for me, please.’

  ‘Brothers in the mines and pits,’ he began. ‘Brothers laboring behind the plough, In the factories and offices, Follow the lead of our banner! Stock exchange cheaters and racketeers Enslaved our Fatherland; We want to serve it honorably, Working hard with our creative hands. Hitler is our Leader, He is not paid with the gold which falls from Jewish thrones And rolls around his feet. The day of vengeance is near! One day we will be free! Toilers of Germany, awake! Tear off your chains! Then let the banner fly, So our enemies see it clearly! We will ever be victorious, So long as we stand together. Stay true to Hitler, True unto death! Hitler will lead us Out of our misery.’

  ‘Is that it?’