The Amber Knight (7 page)

‘What about the magazine?’

‘It’s last week’s
Time
. Available by international subscription, not to mention on every station bookstall between here and Paris.’

‘This letter suggests they’re holding an auction. Have you contacted any other museums?’

‘Edmund Dunst is approaching them, but I doubt many institutions will be keen on pooling information. Everyone will want the knight for themselves. On the other hand, they might be prepared to talk to the police.’

‘So that’s where I come in. You want me to do your leg-work. You’ve a bloody nerve…’

‘Come on, Josef, what museum is going to talk to a rival?’

‘I don’t even know why I’m talking to you.’

‘It is the duty of all government departments to co-operate with foreign institutions prepared to invest in Poland. Directive number…’

‘Don’t ever try to pull rank on me, it turns me vicious. Can I can keep this?’ Josef held up the envelope.

‘No, but you can make copies.’

‘I may as well get it dusted for prints at the same time.’ Josef picked up his glass and drained it.

‘If I were you, I’d go for the coffee as well.’

Josef sipped the coffee, made a face and pushed it aside.

‘I take it I’m paying?’ Adam signalled to the waiter as Josef rose from the table.

‘Put it down on your tax return as a police bribe.’

‘You do realise that if we find the Amber Knight it will go on display here, in Gdansk,’ Adam opened his wallet. ‘An exhibit like that will bring the tourists rolling in.’

‘And what makes you think the Germans will allow us to keep a Teuton? They’re very possessive about their people, even dead ones,’ Josef warned.

‘They won’t have much choice in the matter if I get my hands on von Mau before they do.’

‘If I were you, I’d phone the German museums first. Fifty million dollars is small change to them.’

‘Good idea. You’ll talk to them first?’ Adam checked the bill and paid the waiter.

‘Save your time and energy. Forget about the knight.’ Josef avoided answering the question. ‘I know Germans. They’ve the taste and money for culture. If this knight is going anywhere, it’s Berlin.’

‘How much do you want to bet on it?

‘A million.’

‘Zlotys?’

‘Dollars,’ Josef corrected. ‘You’re the rich American.’

‘And if you lose?’

‘Sue me. Everyone knows no Pole owns anything worth paying legal fees.’ Josef held up the envelope. ‘Want to see if the print boys come up with anything? If they do, dinner’s on you.’

‘Isn’t it always?’ Adam followed Josef across the road into the station.

Adam took no pleasure in being proved right on the fingerprints. The technician discovered nine discernable sets plus a number of smudges on the envelope and three distinct prints on the papers and photographs. He didn’t need a detective to work out that one set was his, another Edmund’s and the third Josef’s. After extracting a half-hearted promise from Josef to sound out Melerski along with his other Mafia contacts and approach Warsaw on the off-chance that another museum had notified the authorities of the re-appearance of the Amber Knight, he retrieved his passport from Josef and left.

Turning right out of Piwna Street he made his way through narrow lanes to the Royal Way. If Mariacka Street was the most beautiful in Gdansk, the Royal Way and the Long Market were the most imposing. He lingered in front of the Neptune Fountain watching tourists pose for photographs before the gothic facade of Artus Court and wondered if the wealthy brotherhood of merchants who had built it had also paid homage at the shrine of the Amber Knight. Mulling over the possibility while drinking a glass of cold beer in a pavement café seemed infinitely preferable to the prospect of climbing the stairs to the top floor of the Historical Museum to confront the frosty Magdalena.

Changing direction, he bumped into the back of Helena, Edmund Dunst’s very new, and very pretty, blonde wife, who was trying to sell one of her still-life paintings to a chic, middle-aged French tourist.

‘I thought you were going to keep all the landscapes and still-life’s for the gallery,’ he hissed in strongly accented school French.

A born actress, Helena shrugged her shoulders. ‘I have to eat, sir, your gallery charges so much in commission it is not worth my while.’

The tourist pricked up her ears. While Adam inspected the paintings Helena had racked out on frames, the deal was concluded.

‘Five hundred euros.’ Helena tucked the money into the leather purse attached to her belt. ‘Thank you. That will put a smile on the face of our bank manager.’

‘Want a beer? We can sit on the step if you’re afraid of missing customers.’

‘A beer would be good.’

He caught the eye of a waiter, gave him an order and joined her. ‘Do you know anything about a painter called Casimir Zamosc?’

‘Polish?’

‘Presumably. All I know about him is that he exhibits with Waleria.’

‘Never heard of him.’

‘You sure?’

‘He not a member of any of the guilds I’ve joined, so that rules out most of the artists in Gdansk. Must dash, here comes another one.’ Taking her beer from the waiter’s tray she joined a German couple who had stopped to look at her landscapes.

Adam took his glass up on to the terrace and glanced at his watch. Nearly twelve – an ideal time for a combination breakfast and lunch. On impulse he finished his drink and crossed the street to the delicatessen. He picked up a basket and raided the shelves for the ingredients for a picnic lunch. No need for drink, there were a couple of bottles of good German wine cooling in his refrigerator. His purchases piled into a carrier bag, he retraced his steps through the cool, dark alleyways to St Mary’s church and Mariacka Street. An erotic vision of Manet’s “dinner of herbs” came to mind. It would be fun to recreate the scene. Helga always looked better divested of the leather mini-skirt and cropped top she wore when out of her croupier’s uniform.

‘She’s gone,’ Waleria announced as he stepped into the gallery. ‘Left about an hour ago.’ She eyed the carrier bag. ‘Replacing your silver?’

‘Lunch.’ He dropped the bag to the floor.

‘For us, how thoughtful!’

‘Edmund Dunst and I have to work through in the museum. I only called in to pick up a bottle of wine from upstairs. By the way, you heard of a painter called…’

‘Casimir Zamosc? Someone from the Salen Institute of Modern Art telephoned from Paris. I presumed you’d be connected.’

‘My sister. You should warn this Zamosc, she devours artists, body and soul. And the body part always comes first.’

‘Never seen him.’

‘You exhibit him?’

‘Only since last week. Russian from Riga. He sent me an illustrated catalogue. I liked what I saw and took half a dozen on a sale or return basis.’

‘Georgiana’s meeting him here tomorrow,’ Adam warned her.

‘Then let’s hope he arrives. Like his stuff?’ She pointed him in the direction of a framed acrylic depicting a pile of pastel sticks heaped on a black background.

‘Crayons in repose?’

‘You really are a barbarian.’

‘Perhaps something in the composition escapes me. Must love you and leave you.’

‘You can’t fool me,’ she shouted after him. ‘I know you only dropped in to count your ornaments.’

He ran up the spiral staircase, an art deco version of the one in the Historical Museum, and out on to the back stairs. His apartment was empty, just as Waleria had told him it would be, but there were signs that Helga had made full use of everything the place had to offer. Wet towels slopped in pools of water on the bathroom floor; the shower door was open, the tops left off his shampoo and shower gel and a fine scattering of talcum powder overlaid the mess.

Damp footsteps led out of the bathroom across the deep pile of the living room carpet to the sofa where a soggy imprint of her body flattened the cushions. They’d even been conveniently arranged at a comfortable angle for the telephone.

Coffee grounds littered the worktop of the tiny triangular kitchen cut from a corner of the living room. A bottle of wine was missing from the fridge. On the mezzanine the make-up-smeared sheets lay tumbled on the bed. Her hairs were in his brush. There was no note.

It took him an hour to restore order. After pushing the sheets into the linen basket and straightening the newly jacketed duvet on the bed, he checked around one last time, even opening the drawer where he kept his cutlery. Waleria had made him paranoid. The odd bottle of wine, yes, but there was no way Helga would take any of the utilitarian pieces he had furnished the place with.

Suppressing the urge to phone Helga and tell her precisely what he thought of her personal habits, he locked the door and returned downstairs.

‘About time, I was just going to throw whatever’s in this bag to the birds,’ Waleria nudged the carrier bag with the toe of her shoe.

‘Be my guest.’

‘You serious?’ Waleria picked up the bag and examined the contents.

‘I’m not hungry any more.’

‘And Edmund Dunst?’

‘He can send out for a sandwich.’

‘Feed you dinner tonight in exchange?’

‘Flaki?’ Adam asked suspiciously.

‘I was thinking of pork cutlets but if you’d prefer tripe I’ll get some.’ She knew he hated the Polish national dish. ‘Eight o’clock?’

‘I’ll bring my appetite.’

Stepping on to the small veranda that fronted the street, Adam noticed that the door to Feliks Malek’s basement jewellery shop opposite was open, and the glass case he kept his most modestly priced tourist pieces in set out on the pavement.

‘If you’re looking for Feliks he isn’t here.’ Elizbieta Hirsz, the pretty, eighteen-year-old redhead Feliks employed as an assistant informed him as he descended the steps.

‘Is he likely to be long?’

‘Who knows? A supply of amber is due in. He’s gone to see what he can get.’

‘From Kaliningrad?’

‘Where else? No one’s prepared to pay Polish rates while the Russians can mine it for a third of the price.’ She bent her head over the earrings she was working on, laying hair-thin gold wires on to beaten silver leaves.

‘What do you know about Ludwig Krefta?’ Adam asked, aware that Elizbieta’s family’s pedigree as silver- and amber-smiths was even longer than Feliks’s.

‘The younger or the elder?’

‘Is the elder dead?’

‘Since 1951.’

‘Then it has to be the younger.’

‘It doesn’t make much difference. The younger hasn’t done anything worth shouting about since 1970. You been offered some of his pieces for the museum?’

‘Would they be a good investment?’

‘The best. They’re not classed as antiques yet, but they will be, and Edmund will tell you good antique pieces are rarer than green storks these days.’

‘He has mentioned it.’

‘And while we’re on the subject, some of the modern pieces he’s bought for the museum are hideous – and worse than hideous, junk.’

‘I’ve a broad back, but I’d appreciate you not airing your opinions around Edmund. He’s sensitive about his amber.’

‘I’ve noticed. But you won’t go wrong with genuine Krefta, the elder or younger. Their early output equalled the best produced by George Schrieber and the seventeenth-century Konigsberg workshops. My father always used to say that one day Krefta the younger will be recognised as the finest amber-smith of the twentieth century.’

‘Coming from your father, that’s quite a compliment.’

‘Not really, my father trained in Krefta’s workshop. Of course that was before Krefta turned to drink. Surprising really,’ she bit her bottom lip as she concentrated on laying the final strands of wire in place, ‘just how many silver- and amber-smiths hit the bottle, but from what I’ve heard, Krefta had a better excuse than most. His wife died of cancer, and according to my father she took years to do it. All of them painful.’

‘But Krefta’s still alive?’

‘Physically maybe, but from an artistic point of view he’s dead.’ She spoke as though the only life worth living was the artistic. ‘He hasn’t exhibited since the late sixties. So what pieces are you after? If it’s one of his chess sets…’

‘It’s nothing of his. I received a note from him this morning authenticating the body of Helmut von Mau.’

‘Blessed saints! You’ve tracked down the Amber Knight?’ Feliks walked down the steps into the shop and parked his short, squat body on the edge of Elizbieta’s workbench.

‘I’m interested in its whereabouts.’

‘Does this interest extend to the Amber Room? They disappeared at the same time.’

Adam handed the well-thumbed envelope to Feliks who promptly tipped it out on Elizbieta’s work bench.

‘Feliks!’ Elizbieta remonstrated as he sent her carefully positioned strands of wire scattering.

‘Sorry, my pet.’ His baggy clown’s face sagged. Elizbieta was eighteen to his sixty-five, but he was as besotted as a lovesick boy.

‘Sorry! Is that all you’ve got to say…’

‘Could it be the Amber Knight?’ Adam cut into Elizbieta’s tirade.

Feliks studied the photographs for what seemed like an eternity. Pushing a couple across to Elizbieta he picked up a jewellers’ glass from the desk.

‘That’s Krefta all right.’ Feliks pointed to the man holding the copy of
Time
. ‘Older, thinner and more lined than when I saw him in the Moscow exhibition in ’68, but definitely him.’

‘He looks as though he’s lost his teeth,’ Elizbieta commented, peering over Feliks’s shoulder.

‘And the knight?’

‘That’s more difficult. I don’t know anything about stone coffins.’

‘But you do know amber,’ Adam pressed.

‘I have been known to recognise it,’ Feliks conceded dryly, ‘but I couldn’t say for certain what’s in that coffin without doing a few tests.’

‘What kind of tests?’

‘Let’s start at the beginning,’ Feliks pontificated, with an old man’s exasperatingly leisurely attitude. ‘There are records detailing how Helmut von Mau’s corpse was set in amber.’

Adam repeated what Edmund had told him. ‘The amber in the treasure house in Elblag melted when the town was fired by Hermann von Balk.’