Checkmate in Amber

by Matilde Asensi

‘That’s it.’

  ‘So - Hitler will lead us out of our misery,’ I repeated, half-hypnotized. ‘Hitler will lead us …’

  ‘It couldn’t be more obvious,’ José declared. ‘The clue is Hitler.’

  ‘That bit with Brothers in the mines and pits and then Brothers … in the offices could hardly fit this place any better.’

  ‘That must be why Sauckel and Koch picked this particular song. And there must be something else in it that tied in with their scheme. Follow the lead of our banner and Hitler is our Leader seem pretty straightforward. What Hitler-related stuff have we found here?’

  ‘The only thing I’ve seen is that horrible little wax bust in the bottom drawer of the desk.’

  ‘That’s right! The one that was with the silver cigarette case. Incredibly cheap and nasty.’

  I walked over to the desk and opened up the drawer again. The wax bust with its shoe polish hair and mustache rolled towards me from the back. I picked it up and took a good look at it.

  ‘I can’t see anything unusual about it,’ I announced after a moment. ‘It certainly doesn’t seem to be the solution to our problem.’

  ‘Go on - try and break it open or cut it in half or something.’

  ‘Yeah, right!’ I objected. ‘And what about if we have to stick it into some specially-shaped opening where it acts as the key to the door of the treasure chamber?’

  ‘Your imagination is starting to run away with you there,’ José replied, as he took the tiny monster out of my hands. ‘Have you seen some little slot with Hitler’s profile anywhere round here? You haven’t, have you? You sure? So let me have a go then.’

  He got a knife out of his backpack and tried to stick it into the base of the bust, but the wax had hardened solid after so many years and it just wouldn’t go in. After a lot of effort, all he had managed to do was scrape the surface.

  ‘Brain is better than brawn here, for sure,’ I said to him. ‘Give it back to me.’

  I got out the small pan we used to heat up water, dropped Hitler into it, then carefully lit the gas burner and waited for results. The old wax might be as hard as rock, I told José quietly, but wax was all it was. Seconds later, it began to melt and bubble at the bottom of the pan, forming a thick puddle laced with swirls of black.

  ‘Either this works,’ muttered José, ‘or our chances of finding the Amber Room are gone for good.’

  I didn’t answer him. I had already seen the corner of a small metal object rising and sinking in the waxy sludge. I switched off the burner.

  ‘Pass me the knife, please.’

  Using the knifepoint, I pushed the object to the edge of the pan, hooked it and finally lifted it out - a sturdy double-bit pin key.

  ‘So what do you think that is?’ I asked proudly, holding it up in front of José’s face.

  ‘It looks like a safe key.’

  ‘A safe key is exactly what it is,’ I confirmed, being something of an expert in this field. ‘This type of key is still used today with non-electronic high-security safes. It works with two cut and grooved bits which slot into two parallel wards to open the lock.’

  ‘Wow. Sounds significant. But where is the safe this wonderful key is supposed to crack open?’

  ‘Well, that I don’t know,’ I answered. ‘But at least we know what we’re looking for now: a carefully disguised keyhole.’

  ‘A lock, you mean?’

  ‘Exactly. So let’s get to it.’

  ‘OK. But I’m beginning to go stir-crazy down here.’

  ‘Yeah, me too. But there’s no way round it. Let’s do it.’

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Some nameless god must finally have taken pity on us. Maybe it was Hermes, who - apart from his day job as lord protector of crossroads - is the patron of thieves and unexpected strokes of good fortune. The fact of the matter is that we found the secret lock rather easily. My love for books took me straight to the shelves, which I began to empty to get a good view of the wall behind, and there, lo and behold, right behind Max Born’s Die Relativitätstheorie Einsteins, was not only the keyhole we were looking for, but also the dial of a Group Two combination lock and to the right, behind the seven vellum-bound volumes of Marcel Proust’s Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Zeit, the wheel which turned the latches. As it turned out, it wasn’t a safe at all. It was a huge armor-plated door, disguised with a coat of the same plaster that was used on the walls. It was exactly the size of the alcove that the shelves were built into. How we hadn’t noticed it the first time round, I just couldn’t imagine.

  The two-bit key, once I had cleaned the remains of the wax off it, slid easily into the keyhole, cleared the wards and opened the lock.

  ‘Now what do we do?’ José asked me, uncertainly. ‘You’re the lock expert.’

  ‘Now, sweetheart, we’ve got a problem to solve. The Group Two combination dial can form up to one hundred million combinations, and we don’t even know how long the combination is. So all that we have on our side is logic. If you, a smart and upstanding member of a sophisticated team of professional art thieves, could choose the number of one of your credit cards as the password for access to your secret files, then Sauckel, who organized the construction work down here and used this as his office, could certainly have come up with a similarly stupid and see-through combination.’

  ‘Sweet of you to call me smart, darling.’

  ‘You’re welcome,’ I sighed. ‘Which means that all we need to know is the date of his birthday, or his wife’s, or those of his ten children, or his mother’s … Or the date he joined the Nazi Party, the day he became a Reichsminister for the first time, or the date that …’

  ‘OK, OK - I get the message. On the other hand, I figure that up until now we’ve followed clues and leads that have been hidden more or less in plain sight. Why should it be different this time? Let’s look through his invoices, for instance, or in the pages of that Austrian newspaper that we found in one of the desk drawers.’

  ‘Of course! The newspaper!’ I cried out. ‘That’s it! The date was marked in red, just like the verses of that song! I think it must be the 20th of April, 1942!’

  José opened the drawer and pulled out the copy of the Volks-Zeitung.

  ‘That’s right - the 20th of April, 1942, Hitler’s birthday, the headline says in big Gothic lettering. That day,’ he said, reading from the newspaper, ‘there were great celebrations at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, and all over Germany. The Führer received so many gifts that they had to be stored in a whole suite of rooms in the Charlottenburg Palace.’

  I burst out laughing, at top volume - I just couldn’t stop myself.

  ‘What a crafty devil he was!’ I managed to blurt out, in between hiccups. ‘A twisted criminal mastermind! Don’t you get it, José? Charlottenburg! Charlottenburg! Hitler’s gifts were stored in Charlottenburg! The Amber Room, the Bernsteinzimmer, was built for Friedrich the First of Prussia to use as a smoking room in the Charlottenburg Palace, remember? Roi told us about it on IRC.’

  José gave a wry smile.

  ‘You’re absolutely right. A seriously twisted mind. Brothers in the mines and pits, Brothers laboring behind the plough, In the factories and offices,’ he declaimed in a loud voice, ‘Follow the lead of our banner! … Hitler is our Leader. Try using Hitler’s birthday, sweetheart. I bet you my jewelry store that it’ll work on the first try.’

  I turned the dial to set the combination to 2, then 0, then 0, then 4, and with a single turn of the wheel, the lock slid open - at the very first try, just as José had predicted. The lock’s five cylindrical steel latches slowly came into view as we pushed against the wall and it began to turn on its hinges, revealing the long dark tunnel beyond. José looked for and quickly found a large ceramic light switch just inside on the right. He pressed it and a long line of light bulbs lit up, flickering along the ceiling and revealing the tunnel’s bare rock walls. The tunnel floor was of damp black earth, well compacted, and set into it were old rail car t
racks, disappearing into the distance and marking out the route that we should follow.

  ‘Shall we make a move?’ José suggested, with a smile.

  ‘Let’s go then.’

  The tunnel was about three hundred and fifty feet long and ended at a solid concrete wall which blocked it off at right angles. An opening in a side wall led into a passage.

  ‘Jesus! They might as well have hidden their damn treasure in the deepest chamber of the Great Pyramid of Giza,’ I grumbled uneasily. ‘This isn’t my idea of fun. Any minute now we’re going to stumble into some Pharaoh’s tomb.’

  ‘Don’t worry, darling. I’ll protect you if a mummy attacks.’

  ‘Very funny, José.’

  ‘And there I was thinking that Peón was as brave and valiant as a comic book heroine …’

  ‘I am as brave and valiant as a comic book heroine, damn it!’ I protested fiercely. ‘It’s just that this place is giving me the heebie-jeebies. It’s got a sick and evil feel about it.’

  We had reached the end of the passage, which curved around to the right, and came upon two doors, one on each side and both of them half-open. The first led us into a large room with tiled walls and floors, full of showers, latrines and washbasins, and all very dank and filthy. The second opened into a dining hall with two large tables covered in dust and glass-fronted cabinets loaded with glasses, plates and serving dishes. Another door at the end led into a second dining hall, full of rough-sawn timber tables and benches. Its walls were festooned in Nazi pennants and standards, photographs of Hitler and a cast-iron plaque showing a black eagle with its long wings outstretched and its talons holding a laurel wreath with a swastika in its center.

  ‘What do you think this place was?’ I asked José.

  ‘It looks like a barracks. Or a jail, perhaps.’

  We retraced our steps and carried on exploring, no wiser than we were when we started. Next to the dining halls, some swing doors led into the kitchens, which stank of garbage as if fifty years hadn’t been long enough to wash away the stench. From there, we went down a passageway which branched into two, with the option of turning left or right. The wall directly facing us had four identical doors set into it. José opened the one nearest to us, looked inside, and then suddenly stepped back and slammed it shut.

  ‘Hey! You almost stepped on me!’ I complained to him.

  José’s face had gone as white as a sheet.

  ‘I’m sorry, darling,’ he half-whispered.

  ‘What’s wrong? What did you see inside?’

  ‘I’m not very sure,’ he admitted, so quietly that I could hardly hear him. ‘But I think it would be best for you to stay out here while I go in and have another look.’

  ‘No way am I staying out here! I’m not some little girl that needs your protection, José! I’ve had to deal with much worse stuff than this and I’m more than capable of …’

  ‘OK. Fine. But don’t say I didn’t warn you,’ he cut me off with a frown.

  He opened the door again, and I could see him searching the wall for a light switch. It was the first room we had come to that was still in the dark. The lights were on in all the others, as if they had been deliberately left to be controlled directly from the generator. When the room lit up, what suddenly appeared was utterly shattering. It was worse than anything I had ever imagined. An abject horror. Literally hair-raising. It hit me like a punch in the chest when I saw those rows of corpses, those skeletons, their hands still cuffed to their bunks, still wearing the little that was left of their striped concentration camp prisoners’ uniforms. A keening wail emerged unbidden from my mouth and left me gasping for air. It wasn’t fear, or even disgust or squeamishness. It was an infinite regret that stoked up feelings for Sauckel and Koch more hateful and vicious than any I had ever felt since the day I was born.

  José hugged me, and then pulled me out of the room. I stood stock still just where he left me, while he searched the other three rooms. In every single one he found the same. In the two rooms to the right, similar groups of prisoners, tied to their cots and executed by submachine-gun fire. In the one at the end to the left, German soldiers, killed in the same way as they slept. Not a single witness had survived. Not one had been allowed to leave the catacombs to speak of what he had seen.

  What angered me most was realizing how little the world had changed since those poor men had been gunned down. In the Balkans, the Serbs had built their camps to carry out their particular brand of ethnic cleansing. South American dictatorships tortured and then ‘disappeared’ thousands of young people. Children died in Brazilian streets, riddled with stray bullets from death squads who went out hunting after nightfall. And a painfully endless etcetera of modern-day genocides, as bloody as the one carried out by the Nazis over half a century ago.

  I felt sick and utterly disgusted. I just felt like going home and forgetting about the whole thing. What did I care about the damn Amber Room and its meaningless masterpieces?

  ‘Ana - over here! Come and have a look!’

  José’s shouts began to drag me out of my coma.

  ‘We’ve found it, Ana! Come and see how beautiful it is!’

  I walked like a zombie towards where his voice had seemed to come from, a door which faced onto the soldiers’ bunkroom, at the end of the passageway. I walked through the doorway and was surprised not to find him there. It looked like a storeroom for tools and provisions: huge cans of food and everything from hammers, drills and pickaxes to pliers, saws and wrenches.

  ‘Come on, Ana - get over here! It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.’

  His voice came from somewhere behind a set of shelves loaded down with canvas gloves, mallets and Wehrmacht spades and shovels. Still semi-comatose, I zigzagged my way around the obstacles, drawn towards the sound of his voice. Then José’s arm appeared out of nowhere and pulled aside a dark and heavy oilskin drape, leaving me suddenly face to face with a blinding vision of gold and light. Of golden light.

  But no. It wasn’t gold. It was amber.

  Like burnished hangings, great golden panels swept down from an incredibly deep blue vaulted ceiling to a dark hardwood floor where mother-of-pearl inlays marked out their scrolls and wave designs. Between panel and panel, livening up the amber continuum, narrow strips of mirrored glass reflected ad infinitum the light of the candelabra surrounded by winged cherubim and the glow of the lamps fixed to the glass itself by gilded brackets. Three grand double doors, each lacquered in white and proudly set in the center of its appointed wall - one of which I had unknowingly walked in through past the oilskin drape - were adorned with gold-embossed reliefs of garlands and festoons. And just in case this rampant display of Baroque magnificence was not enough, and the dazzling explosion of luxurious detailing in white, gold, yellow and orange had not proved sufficiently entrancing, the architraves, cornices, torus moldings, beadings and sculptures were all finished in pure gold.

  I took a step forward. Then another. And another and another, until I stood spellbound in the middle of this towering and enormous room. A thin layer of dust covered the dark hardwood flooring, dimming the polished glow of the varnish.

  ‘Never in my life,’ I whispered, ‘have I ever seen anything quite so beautiful.’

  ‘Well, it’s a bit rococo for my taste,’ commented José, right by my side. ‘But, yes, it’s beautiful. Extraordinarily beautiful.’

  For a long good while we didn’t say a word, both of us mesmerized in contemplation of the astonishing marvel which had conquered the heart of the Tsar of All the Russias. The amber gave off a wonderful smell, like a mixture of sandalwood and violet. As if it had been exposed to these aromas over many years, absorbing them into its pores as time went on. Suddenly I jumped. I seemed to have heard a muffled sound, away in the distance.

  ‘Did you just hear something, José?’ I asked with a questioning frown.

  ‘Not a thing, sweetheart, not a thing,’ he answered me, unconcerned, taking me by the hand and pulling me
forwards. ‘Come on, we’ve still got lots of things to see.’

  The Room’s four doors were all open. The door behind us was the one we had come in by. Through the two side doors we could see the raw rock of the tunnel walls. But the door in front of us opened into another chamber, with the lights already on.

  At last. This was it. This time the image I’d had in my mind finally came alive, the mental snapshot of the place which harbored all the works of art and treasures stolen in the Soviet Union by the Prussian Gauleiter, Erich Koch. I had dreamed of that warehouse a thousand times - although it turned out to be a lot bigger than I had ever imagined. There it was, right in front of my face, case after case after case, piled high, right up to the ceiling in places. It had been excavated out of the living rock and was a huge cavernous space, as high as the reconstructed Amber Room next door. The far end of the warehouse was hidden from sight by the bales and cases which covered practically every square inch of the packed-earth floor.

  From the very start, our inspection of their astonishing contents began to make clear to us the extraordinary value of what had been hidden away there: more than a thousand paintings, including works by Rubens, Van Dyck, Vermeer, Canaletto, Pietro Rotari, Watteau, Tiepolo, Rembrandt, El Greco, Mengs, Carl Gustav Carus, Ludwig Richter, Egbert van der Poel, Bernhard Halder, Ilya Yefimovich Krylov, Ilya Repin, Max Slevogt, Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, Corot and Jacques-Louis David. There were over a thousand drawings, engravings and lithographs, of similar excellence and value. There were precious jewels, Ancient Egyptian artifacts, Russian icons, Gothic carvings, medieval weaponry, porcelain ware, musical instruments, coins, ceremonial costumes of the Russian Imperial family, vestments of Russian Orthodox Patriarchs, crowns, medals made of gold and silver - the list was almost endless. It was hard, if not impossible, for me to imagine the astronomic value of some of these objects without feeling seriously faint.

  We were blown away, dumbstruck, amazed. We could hardly believe our eyes. Finally, José came up behind me and hugged me tight. In one of my hands, I was holding a Watteau drawing of a young Pierrot, in red chalk.