The Amber Knight (34 page)

‘As far as we can make out he hadn’t a clue. Not that he’s in a fit state to question,’ Josef snapped.

‘Radek told me that the Russian castrated Brunon before his men broke down the door. Idiot, everyone knows the Amber Knight kept his balls.’

‘The Russian castrated Brunon?’ Josef queried suspiciously.

‘Surely you don’t think Radek did it?’

‘I think Radek, and you, are capable of a lot of things, when someone’s helped themselves to what’s yours,’ Josef stood in front of the coffee machine and sifted through the coins in his pocket.

‘Radek was the one who staunched the bleeding and put Kaszuba into an ambulance.’

‘Before or after he embalmed the Russian in molten amber and turned him into an Amber Villain, as opposed to knight?’ Josef demanded.

‘Ask Radek. I was outside with Salen at the time. I saw nothing.’ Melerski shrugged his shoulders.

‘Has Magda seen Brunon?’

‘Briefly. He didn’t want to talk to her.’

‘I’m not surprised. Does she know?’ Josef asked.

‘That he’s lost his balls?’ Melerski asked. ‘She knows, but from the impression I have of their married life, she’s not going to be missing much.’ Tired of waiting for Josef to use the machine, Melerski pushed a couple of coins into the slot and pressed the button for coffee.

Josef took the plastic cup from his hand and waited while he repeated the procedure. They met a nurse on their way back to the waiting room, but she shook her head before they could ask any questions.

‘Adam’s still not out of theatre,’ Magdalena said when they returned.

Josef handed her one of the coffees. ‘Magda, I hate to press you at a time like this, but the Wolfschanze’s been on to us. They’ve searched all morning and found no trace of the entrance to the vault in the bunkers around the cemetery. Do you have any idea where it could be?’

She shook her head. ‘Can’t it wait until we know about Adam?’

‘The director would like to speak to you now. It won’t take long to drive to Piwna Street.’

‘Can’t we phone from here?’

‘There’s a security blackout in case of panic. Magda, I’m sorry, but you know how important it is we track that knight down quickly.’

She rose from the chair and walked towards the door.

Melerski winked at her. ‘Don’t worry, with what he’s got to live for he’ll come out of this. I’ll let you know the minute there’s any news.’

Magdalena sat in the visitor’s chair in front of Josef’s desk. ‘Courtney’s grandfather must have given her a map, a plan, something that pin-pointed the Amber Knight’s hiding place,’ Magdalena insisted. ‘Have you asked her about it?’

‘Yes,’ Josef replied shortly. ‘It was a one way conversation.’

‘She must know where the vault is. Her grandfather was one of the nine who hid the knight there.’

‘What about the paper in the bullet Mr Salen found in Krefta’s apartment, sir?’

Josef and Magdalena looked up from the table and stared at Pajewski.

‘The report came back on it?’ Josef asked.

‘Yesterday, sir. You were so busy I didn’t disturb you. It looked like a lot of nonsense to me, but perhaps you and Ms Janca can make something of it.’

‘You bloody, imbecilic…’

‘Where is it?’ Magdalena interrupted. Pajewski dived into the mess on Josef’s desk and extricated a faded sketch on greasy fax paper. She glanced at it for a moment. ‘I need a map of the Wolfschanze.’

‘Here.’ Josef produced one from his drawer.

‘Unnamed bunker opposite no 25. Get me the director on the line. He has to look at the wall opposite the door. Bottom, right hand corner – there’s a marking on a brick –’

The phone rang. Pajewski answered it smartly, lest Josef use tardiness as another excuse to direct his temper in his direction.

‘It’s Mr Melerski, sir.’ Pajewski held out the receiver. ‘Mr Salen has come out of surgery.’

A long snake of stationary trucks were drawn up on the forest path, they waited in almost the same spot where another convoy had lined up over sixty years before. Magdalena and Edmund passed them before entering the decontamination chamber that had been erected at the entrance to the unnamed bunker opposite the Third Reich’s Naval High Command Offices. After donning the bulky protective suits they padded into the bunker. The director of the Institute for Contagious Diseases, dressed in his own distinctive suit, was waiting for them. He opened the stone trap door.

There was no need for words. Everything that needed to be said had been discussed in the warden’s office. The Director lowered himself down first, Magdalena followed, leaving Edmund to bring up the rear.

Magdalena had imagined herself crouching and crawling on all fours, but there was no need. When Hitler ordered something built, it was built properly, and to last the thousand year life he had prophesied for his Reich. The subterranean staircase was as solid as the day the builders had finished their work. The passageway that flowed from the foot of the steps was intact, remarkably free from mould and damp. It terminated in a steel door. The Director opened it and stepped into a vast tomb-like vault.

A stone coffin stood against the back wall. Heart pounding, Magdalena walked slowly towards it, scarcely daring to believe that the end of a sixty-year search lay in her sights.

It really was the Amber Knight. As she shone her torch over its contours she recalled the warden’s attempt to console her on its loss.

“It’s been photographed from every angle. You have a record for the museum.”

She and Edmund had tried to be grateful, but neither had fooled the other. The last thing the museums of Gdansk needed were more photographs to join the vast collection of pictorially chronicled artefacts that had been lost, stolen and looted during the war. It didn’t matter which army had taken them, not now. The loss to the Polish people and their history had been, and would remain, catastrophic.

The Director laid his gloved hand on her arm and she nodded, remembering the warning he’d given her earlier.

“We’ve skimmed and sealed the surface with resin, a temporary measure while we shot the photographs, but don’t touch the knight. Not even the coffin. I know you’ll be wearing protective suits, but there’s no sense taking unnecessary risks.”

She tried to imagine a world without Hitler and the Second World War. A peaceful world where everyone had lived to die of natural causes, a world where the Amber Knight could have lain undisturbed – and safe – in Konigsberg castle for another five hundred years. Would its deadly secret have remained locked within the amber shroud? She glanced around the bare concrete vault and wondered where the rest of the Konigsberg treasure had gone. Both the vault and passageway had been thoroughly searched. There had been no more loose bricks, no other hidden passages, no more artefacts.

But there was one now. She turned to face another coffin pushed into the furthest corner of the vault. A stone coffin identical to the first. A coffin that was rumoured to have been carried out of the cellar where Adam had been tortured. When she’d asked Josef about it, all he would say was that the Russian who had tried to kill Adam and castrated Brunon was dead, and the Mafia had only retrieved half of their missing amber shipment.

The Director of the Institute motioned them to the door. She shuddered as she glanced at the knight and his companion for the last time. The Director wedged the steel door open and they returned to ground level.

They left the protective suits and helmets behind in the decontamination chamber, showered, dressed and walked back down the forest path. None of them wanted to wait for the trucks to move up and the pumping to begin. It was easy to imagine the ready mixed concrete oozing down the shaft and into the secret vault, filling first the tomb, then the passageway and finally the steps to the level of the trapdoor. The knight slowly drowning in the rapidly hardening concrete that would hide it from the world for a second time, only this time for ever.

Magdalena heard an engine start and looked back in spite of herself. ‘I wish –’ she began hesitantly.

‘Don’t we all,’ Edmund finished fervently.

Adam was lying on a hard, uncomfortable hospital bed in the tiny cubicle his doctor graciously referred to as a private room. Although the analgesics had softened the worst of his pain, he felt as though he’d been pounded by the hooves of a carthorse weighed down by full medieval armour.

He was also bored and angry because, after everything he’d been through, his doctor had categorically forbidden him to visit the Wolfschanze, and the authorities had refused to delay the destruction of the knight one moment longer than necessary, which meant he’d never see it, except in photographs.

He’d tried to dress that morning intending to sneak out of the hospital during breakfast, but to his shame and mortification one of the nurses had found him in a state of collapse in his bathroom. She’d returned him to his bed, clucking over him as if he were a recalcitrant child.

There was a knock at the door, and he called out, ‘Come in,’ expecting another dose of mind-numbing painkillers, or a cup of the peculiar substance the hospital called coffee. Instead Melerski and Radek strolled in.

‘How’s the invalid?’ Melerski dropped a bottle of vodka and a bunch of half-dead roses on his bed.

‘Sick of being sick, but grateful for sickness when he considers the alternative. Thank you for carrying me out of that cellar when you did.’

‘It was hot in there,’ Melerski said laconically.

‘In more ways than one.’ Radek pulled a chair up to the bed. ‘I wanted to express my gratitude for leading me to the bastard who killed my brother.’

‘I wasn’t doing anything of the kind. I was only trying to survive.’

‘All the same, I might not have found him without your help. And this is my thank you.’ He whistled, and a man built like an ox struggled in with an enormous wooden chest that could have coffined an average-sized man.

‘What’s in there?’ Adam asked suspiciously.

Melerski opened it. On top of a glistening pile of amber, gold and ivory, were thirteen golf ball sized, crystal cut amber beads.

Adam gazed at them in disbelief. ‘The missing beads from Princess Dorothea’s necklace…’

‘And her headdress, rings, bracelets, and Schreiber’s ivory and amber altar,’ Melerski smiled, ‘and…’

‘Where did you get this?’ Adam stared at the chest in awe.

‘It was stored with our raw amber.’

‘In the cellar?’ Adam reached down with his good hand and picked up the leather thong that had been threaded through the beads. ‘Did you find your money?’

‘Let’s say we’re satisfied with the overall outcome.’

‘There has to be more than this one chest. Josef said, apart from the knight, the vault beneath the bunker was empty, but we know that the Konigsberg treasure was several truckloads…’

Melerski raised his hand to silence Adam. ‘The words you’re looking for, Mr Salen, are, “thank you for this chest”.’

‘But the rest of the treasure?’

‘Do you think if we knew where it was, we’d give it to you?’

‘You gave me this.’

‘And I’m already regretting it.’ Radek rose from his chair.

‘Just one thing before you go. I’ll accept this for the museum, but not if it’s hush money.’

‘Hush money, Salen? As if we’d try to buy you?’

‘There are still a few outstanding matters. Like the murder of Rat.’

‘Kaszuba and Rat annoyed many people. The Rat deserved to die –’

‘And Kaszuba deserved to be maimed?’ Adam interrupted Radek.

‘That depends on your point of view. However, I assure you I’m not responsible for the Rat or Kaszuba’s misfortune,’ Radek smiled coldly.

‘And then there’s that car with Russian plates that tried to stop us on the way back from Kaliningrad,’ Adam continued.

‘We wouldn’t have hurt Magdalena.’

‘I only have your word for that. And Magdalena’s apartment…’

‘Our man was there to protect you and he was murdered for his trouble. It was Kaszuba who fired the machine gun,’ Melerski interrupted as Radek’s eyes darkened.

‘I guessed as much because none of the bullets hit a target. Kaszuba seems to have lousy luck. Nothing he touches goes right. And now…’

‘Forget Kaszuba, Salen,’ Melerski advised. ‘Put Princess Dorothea’s jewellery in the museum and take care of yourself and Brunon Kaszuba’s wife.’

‘I have your blessing?’

‘You know something, for an American, you’re not that bad. Which is why we’re allowing you to romance one of our women.’ Melerski led the way out of the room.

Josef came in next, looking glum and carrying a bag of grapes that he slowly munched his way through without offering any to Adam.

‘Mariana thrown you out again?’

‘She’s working.’

Adam decided not to press the point.

‘Some hot-shot American lawyer flew in. Your wife’s going to be transferred from our prison to a private American clinic.’

‘Don’t think for one moment that a private American clinic is a soft option. You’ve never met an American shrink. They’re all nuts.’

‘You had something to do with this?’

‘She’s been punished enough. She’s poor and alone.’

‘With her looks she won’t stay that way for long. And what about her grandfather?’

‘He’s old. Besides, contrary to what most Poles think, not all the SS worked in concentration camps.’

‘No, only about half of the bastards. The other half wandered around shooting civilians. I thought the United States didn’t take war criminals at the end of the war?’

‘Some slipped through the net,’ Adam acknowledged.

‘Evidently,’ Josef concurred.

‘How’s Kaszuba?’

‘I don’t know what he’s angrier at, being in jail and facing a charge sheet that grows longer every day, or losing his balls.’

‘And Helga?’

‘She’s disappeared.’ Josef screwed the bag that had contained the grapes into a ball and flicked it into the bin. It missed. ‘Rumour has it a ship sailed from the docks an hour after we raided that cellar. Apparently she was having an affair with one of the crew.’