HS03 - A Visible Darkness (39 page)

‘General Malaport must be warned of the danger,’ I lied. ‘He must read for himself what is written here. Your beasts have attracted attention. Our nationalists have got it in for you. You’re on their target-list, I’m afraid, Herr Berodstein. I’d look about most carefully when you leave this place to night.’

‘Me, sir?’

‘They say they’ll do to you what you have done to them!’ I said, pointing in the direction of the prisoners with the scroll of papers.

‘Where did you find those sheets, sir?’

His face had drained of colour. His boys began to whimper at the sight of him. I could not see their ears beneath their long black hair, but would have sworn that they were flattened against their skulls, the way dogs do when danger threatens.

‘Hanging outside your door,’ I said. ‘The rebels know what goes on here. They have decided where to start their own
guerrilla
war in Königsberg.’

There was no need for me to say more. Berodstein’s hand was on his heart. He opened and closed his mouth, but not a word came out. His Siberian ‘hounds’ stood close together, eyes fixed on the father who had rescued them from the wilds and generously brought them back to civilisation.

‘Regarding General Malaport,’ I said, ‘there’s one thing in my power to do.’

‘What’s that, sir?’ Berodstein spluttered.

‘I may not tell him,’ I said. ‘It all depends on you.’

‘Me, sir?’

I let him think on it for a moment only. No repressive measures would be taken by the French against him, his boys, or his warehouse. Prussian prisoners would continue to go to the convict ships, and he would still be paid.

‘Give me the passenger-list,’ I snapped.

Berodstein swiped up his notebook from the table, his expression as black as coal.

‘Here, sir. This is it.’

‘Show me the page. Hold it up!’

‘It’s this one, sir.’

I ran my finger down the list.

‘
Magda Ansbach
,’ I read out loud.

‘Canal-digging down in Hook of Holland,’ he said. ‘As I said, she’s going out today on
La Pléiade . . .
’

‘Where is the son?’ I asked him, speaking between clenched teeth. ‘Adam Ansbach. They were supposed to be deported together.’

‘Next page. Got another boat due in tomorrow.
Le Petit Caporal
out of . . .’

‘Where is she bound?’ I asked.

‘French Indies, sir.’

I handed back the book.

‘Cancel out the name of Adam Ansbach,’ I said, watching carefully as he sat himself down at his desk, slid upon a drawer, took out a jar of ink and a mangy quill, and began to do so.

‘Write Adam’s name on the list of
La Pléiade
.’

Berodstein raised his eyes to mine.

‘These are official orders. Changing names on the lists is a punishable crime, sir.’

‘Do it.’ I waved my papers at him.

He took a deep breath, then he obeyed.

He reached inside the drawer again, took out a pot of sand and sprinkled it over the ink. He wheezed hot breath onto the page, then shook the sand away, and handed me the book.

‘They’ll go out together, if the wind holds fair,’ he said.

I held up the roll of handbills up, grasping them in my fists.

Piece by piece, fragment by fragment, I began to rip them up, cancelling my own name, cancelling out the names of my wife and babies, the threats which had been aimed at us. When not one readable bit remained, I threw the pieces into the air.

They fell to the floor like flakes of dirty snow.

‘G
O TO
K
NEIPHOF
,’ Berodstein had said.

How many times in my life had I heard that phrase?

The very first time, I was still a very young child. No more than five or six years old, playing hide-and-seek with my brother, Stefan, I had taken refuge beneath the table in the kitchen when I overheard a conversation.

‘You tell him to go to Kneiphof!’ the house maid squealed with laughter.

‘That rogue don’t know where Kneiphof is!’ the chambermaid grumbled.

I asked my father what they meant.

‘Kneiphof, Hanno?’ he replied brusquely. ‘You’ll learn soon enough.’

General Wagramberg’s wife explained the riddle some weeks later. While taking tea and biscuits with my mother, she chucked me playfully under the chin. ‘God bless me, Hanno,’ she said with a smile, ‘you
are
growing. It won’t be long before you’re charging off to Kneiphof.’

I asked her what she meant.

‘It’s a popular saying in Königsberg.’ She laughed. ‘A man goes to
Kneiphof to purchase a pledge for a person that he holds very dear. From the jewellery shops. Which signifies that he is about to be engaged. It means that he intends to marry, and eventually become a father.’

It is an old Prussian tradition. The matrimonial pledge is a setting of fine Baltic amber. My mother had an elaborate
complet
– necklace, pendant, earrings and bracelets–that my father gave her when he proposed. The amber gems were large, translucent, smooth, round. The gift was from a shop in Kneiphof. The tradesman’s name was impressed in the blue silk lining of the jewellery-case. But for the life of me, I could not remember it.

I had bought Helena a diamond ring when I proposed to her, instead. It came from the shop of a noted merchant in the city of Hamburg: three rose-cuts, one quite large, and two flanking smaller brilliants. Helena was overjoyed when I presented her with the box, though surprised when she opened it.

‘A clean break with outmoded tradition, Hanno,’ she said ironically, smiling as she slipped the ring onto the middle finger of her left hand.

We were married three months later.

I walked across the Kramerbrücke bridge to the leafy isle of Kniephof, which is the oldest part of Königsberg. The buildings there are made of crumbling wattle and timber for the most part. In that location, Leonard Euler posed his famous puzzle relating to the seven bridges which link the island to the city: could one cross them all in turn without crossing the same bridge twice?

I was thinking of a different problem as I stepped off the bridge.

The puzzle which tormented me was always the same: illegal amber, amber containing insects, the women who died transporting it, the person who had murdered them. Nordcopp, Nordbarn, Königsberg. How did all the pieces fit together?

I turned left on the cobbled quay, my mother’s amber treasure again in my thoughts.

What was the jeweller’s name?

The town across the water was a delightful vision, despite the damage to the castle caused the previous year by the French
bombardment. And Kneiphof was a tranquil spot—few people about, though it was a warm, balmy evening. The sun was low and slanting, the river-bank was tree-lined, it was cool in the shade. The castle bells struck five, but I was reassured by that. Our shops rarely close before six or seven in the evening. Long shadows stretched out from the shops by the waterside.

They were jewellers’ shops. All of them.

I walked along the row, glancing in at the windows, looking up at the signs.

My thoughts returned to Nordcopp. Much of the amber in these shops had come from that shore. It was stained with the blood of Kati Rodendahl and Ilse Bruen. Tainted with the sights and the smells of the coast where they had worked. Behind each polished cabochon, I saw the mangled face of Hilde Bruckner, labouring over her grindstone. Each flash of light from those glistening amber jewels was like forked lightning striking the sea, reflecting the fear in the eyes of Edviga Lornerssen, who risked her life every time she prodded the pebbles with her stick, or reached too far with her heavy net. And deep inside those stones, at the very heart of them, lay the secret of the man who was butchering the women.

K
LAUS
F
LUGGE
& S
ON
.

I halted.

That was the name inside my mother’s presentation case.

The shop was small, the window bowed, the mullions sagging out like tired knees. Honeycomb panes of glass, as round as wine-bottles, were grey with age. Two flickering candlesticks flanked a blue cloth. On this dark field, amber had been laid out on display. A double row of oval beads with a gold clasp, the centre piece carved as a cameo. Little wooden trees held earrings
en girandole
, dangling amber grapes. Before the war, the style was much in vogue. Helena possessed a beautiful pair made up of clustered amethysts and pearls. We had been obliged to trade them for a sack of flour and some pork chops not long after Jena.

No amethysts or pearls for Flugge & Son.

Every jewel in the window was amber, as if they cared for nothing else. The range of colours was vast: pale yellow, dark red, streaked orange, intense chocolate brown, and every shade in between. I peered more closely at the goods on display, looking for a fern, a leaf, some trace of animal or insect life. There was not one relic of the Garden of Eden in that window.

I pushed the narrow door, and a bell clinked.

Two ruffled heads bobbed behind the counter. One white, the other dark brown. Two men bent over a pewter tray containing beads of amber. They looked up as I closed the door. Left eyes pinched tight closed, their right eyes took stock of me by means of a metal tube like a miniature cannon. A tight metal band held these instruments of torture to their heads.

‘Am I disturbing you?’ I enquired.

Like a pair of showmen in the theatre, they simultaneously pushed these cannons onto their brows, and smiled in welcome. I might have been viewing two portraits of the same person made at a distance of a generation. Their faces were of a type, but vigour, colour and animation were absent from the face of the younger man. The old man’s hair was thick and wiry, dark as teak. Clear grey eyes peered keenly out of deep, dark sockets. Bushy eyebrows, a strong nose and large mouth denoted character, the ability to smile and encourage, or to issue a sharp rebuke. The son’s portrait was the pale ghost of his father’s, as if the artist had failed to assert what he intended to show.

‘Come in, sir. You are most welcome,’ the older man said.

They were dressed like matching funeral busts in a country chapel: a black blouse, a white collar that was stiff and high, white gloves on account of the precious material they were handling. And that strange optical headwear.

‘Herr Flugge?’ I asked. I smiled and added: ‘And
son
, of course.’

‘How may I help you, sir?’ the old man asked.

‘Amber, naturally,’ I said, pointing at the mound on the tray.

Those stones had been polished until they shone like rubies. I imagined them passing through the hands of Pastoris, being honed to a polish by his crippled girls. Now, they were about to be selected,
modelled and set by the gloved hands of Herr Flugge and his son. Afterwards, they would go into the window, or be displayed on the shelves behind the counter, the value rarefied by the velvet pads and red morocco cases in which they would be sold. Then, a well-heeled man would come along, and the jewel would go to the lady who was waiting for it, the sweetheart to whom it had been promised, according to General Wagramberg’s wife.

Flugge Senior picked up the tray and rolled the amber beads around. ‘They were brought this morning,’ he said. ‘We’ve not seen such a crop in a long while. It has been an excellent season on the coast.’

‘Excellent,’ the son echoed, his glove moving in a slow sweep over the goods, an unhappy smile traced on his face.

‘Unforgettable,’ I added, thinking of the mutilated corpses that I had seen in Nordcopp, and the others I had read about in the reports which General Malaport had shown me.

‘My father came here many years ago,’ I said.

‘What is your father’s name, sir?’ the old man asked.

‘Stiffeniis,’ I replied. ‘Ignatius Stiffeniis . . .’

‘Of Ruisling,’ he said quickly. ‘I remember all my good customers. How is your good father, sir?’

‘Well enough,’ I lied, not mentioning that my father had died in 1804.

‘Father has an excellent memory,’ the young man said.

‘It must be almost forty years ago. I was working for my own father then,’ Herr Klaus continued. ‘Now, my son, Paulus, works for me. The wheel comes round for all of us, Herr Stiffeniis. Fathers and sons. Your father came here once. Now, you have come to Kneiphof looking for a pledge,’ the old jeweller said with a knowing smile.

‘Not exactly, sir,’ I said, thrusting my hand into my shoulder-bag.

I found the kerchief that I was looking for. With a flourish, I held up Kati Rodendahl’s amber in my thumb and forefinger, then set it down on the tray with the other beads, which seemed insignificant by comparison.

Klaus Flugge stretched out his hand, as if the creature imprisoned within the amber might still be able to sting him.

His son took a step back from the counter.

‘Have you seen anything like this before?’ I prompted, imitating the son’s sweeping gesture with my hand.

The elder Flugge’s stupor was evident. He flashed me a furious glance. His hand shot up and snapped his eye-piece into place. His head ducked down over the tray, where he froze for quite some time, peering deep into the heart of the transparent golden coffin in which that massive insect had been entombed for many centuries.

‘A splendid example,’ he murmured. ‘But what it is an example
of
?’

‘Who can say?’ I made a helpless shrug. ‘I know nothing of the genus, or the species. That is not what interests me. I . . .’

‘May I look?’ asked Paulus Flugge, who was a full-grown man, forty years old at the least. He bent and examined the creature through his eye-lens, shoulder to shoulder with his father, while I watched. I did not say a word. My questions could wait until they had made their examination.

Herr Flugge murmured something to his son, making a noise that might have been the buzzing of that wasp when it flew through the air an eternity ago. Paulus nodded, then whispered something back, something that I did not catch.

‘One question, sirs,’ I said, ‘then I’ll leave you to your work.’