The Amber Room (15 page)

“With that I cannot help,” Kurt said. “With the food, perhaps. But not the fact that you are now a federation at war with itself.”

“I was a good officer,” the soldier replied. “My men were good men. We had a duty and we did it well.”

“You were an oppressor,” Kurt flashed, his control momentarily snapping. “You were never wanted here. Never.”

The frosty eyes narrowed. “Our task was not to be loved.”

Kurt backed down. “Yes. Well.” He raised his vodka. “To the past.”

“Much safer than the future,” the colonel agreed, and tossed back his glass. He breathed fumes, blinked hard, asked, “You heard of the Kazakh riots?”

“Yes.” Seventeen thousand soldiers at the Biakanur Space Center in Kazakhstan had rioted, leaving three dead and countless wounded, many fatally. Earlier, their officers had bartered their services as common laborers to the space center authorities in exchange for food and cigarettes. The space center no longer had money to pay employees, and the soldiers were slowly starving. It had been a good agreement, except for the tragic fact that the soldiers had never been paid; the space center had not received their own promised provisions, and had been left with less than enough to feed themselves. The troops had responded by burning down all they had built and several other buildings besides.

Kurt sipped his beer. “Now perhaps we can get down to business.”

The flat tones of a defeated soldier returned. “To business.”

“I need information,” Kurt said. “Nothing sensitive or
harmful to your precious nation.” He grinned coldly, corrected himself. “Nations.”

The officer let it pass. “What kind of information?”

“About a German soldier. He was captured by Red Army soldiers as they invaded Poland—”

“The correct term is liberated,” the officer corrected.

Kurt waved it aside. “He was questioned and sent to a POW camp, and he died in Siberia in 1946. We wish to know what he said during his interrogation.”

“Forty-seven years is a long time to carry a grudge,” the colonel ventured.

“He was a doctor,” Kurt persisted. “No SS horror. Nothing involved with state security. You break no code.”

The colonel bridled. “I break every code just by being here.”

“Uncertain times,” Kurt soothed. “They call for special measures. Would you not rather search this out for me than sell your guns?”

The colonel subsided. “This will cost you.”

“Of course it will.”

“Even before I know if it is possible, I will have to make payments of my own.”

Kurt frowned. “It would be far better to promise payment upon delivery.”

The officer snorted. “We have had our fill of promises. We have warehouses full of promises instead of food.”

“There is that,” Kurt admitted.

“I will be paid for the search, and more for the find,” the colonel declared.

Kurt's hand dived into his pocket, emerged with an envelope. “The doctor's name and our first payment, then.”

The colonel slipped the envelope beneath the table's edge, counted, pursed his lips. “The first of many payments, if they are all of a size.”

“No snippet of information can be too minor,” Kurt told him. “We seek all possible details.”

Hard eyes bore down. “It would help to know what you are seeking.”

Kurt forced himself not to flinch. “Details,” he repeated. “We are collectors of the minute, and we will pay the most for the most complete report.”

CHAPTER 14

Because of the snow and ice and threat of more, Jeffrey and Katya flew from London to Frankfurt-am-Main, then took a train to Erfurt. Berlin would have been a marginally closer airport to Erfurt, but all the flights were booked solid by movers and shakers seeking to influence or lean on or sell to or feed off the new-old capital's massive restructuring.

The sky hovering above the German landscape was leaden gray, the clouds so close as to rest upon the undulating hills marking the old border country. There was little snow, but the midafternoon frost appeared permanent, unchanging, an eternal part of this heavy-laden landscape. Trees were bowed and motionless, their limbs burdened and hoary white. Even the grass beside their slow-moving train was frozen at icy attention.

They had their compartment to themselves, which was good. They needed the time alone to balance their love and their decision with the demands of business. They spoke of many things and left the most remarkable unsaid. The entire world seemed new, yet unchanged. Their conversation was casual, yet eternally serious, since now it was part of a lifetime they had agreed to spend together.

Jeffrey sat alongside Katya and watched her and spoke with her, and all the while he marveled at the fact that she was to be his wife. His
wife
. He could not help but smile. The word alone boggled the mind.

“Why are you smiling?”

He shook his head, unable to voice his thoughts just then. Instead he said, “Would you mind if I asked you how you came to faith?”

Katya looked at him a long moment, then asked in return, “Is that what you and Mama talked about?”

“Partly,” he said, and felt an ease between them, a fluidity that could not be contained. His
wife
.

She sat beside him, very prim and proper in a dark-gray suit of softest wool. From time to time, however, one stockinged toe would emerge from her pumps to caress his ankle. There was a casualness to her motion that spoke of rightful intimacy. “It was probably very sad.”

“It was.”

“I don't want to hear about it right now, okay? But please tell me some other time.”

“Whenever you like.”

“My faith.” She brought up one of his hands to give it a closer inspection. “I don't feel as if it's mine at all. It is a gift from the Father that I hold in trust.”

“That's beautiful,” he said softly.

“Mama was always strong in her faith, and I was raised to simply accept it as a part of life. As young as I was, I could see how much it meant to her in those tough times after my father left.”

“You don't have to talk about this if you don't want to.”

“It's all right. For me, growth in faith has always meant realizing that there's a lot I don't know, and probably even more that I don't have right. This keeps me from ever being too dogmatic about things, remembering times in the past when I thought I had it all perfect, only to discover later that it wasn't nearly as correct or complete as I imagined.”

He moved back far enough to be able to see her face. “You sound so wise when you talk like this, Katya.” He searched for some way to explain how he felt. “It humbles me.”

She rewarded him with a brief kiss before returning to her story. “A few years after my father left us, we moved to England. As I grew older I kept looking for a healing faith in all the wrong places. I was sure I was going to find it in a church or in a person. Somebody who was going to sit me down and draw out this path and tell me where to put my
feet and say, go from A to B to C and then you're home. But faith doesn't work like that.

“I think what I really wanted was somebody who would be my new daddy. Somebody who would be there when I needed him, who wouldn't leave me. It took a long time before I finally accepted that I really wasn't getting to know God at all, just another man—a preacher or a deacon or somebody in the church. They were substitutes, and sooner or later I was going to have to start looking for myself. Studying the Bible by myself. Praying by myself. Making contact directly with Christ, by myself. Making the relationship a
personal
one.

“When you grow up in the church, you know all the right answers. But that doesn't mean Christ is in your life. There are a lot of people who call themselves Christians and who hide from God when He manifests himself. In Genesis, it is not God who runs from people, but people who flee from God. Some things never change.”

Katya bent over his fingers, sliding a feather-light caress around each in turn. “This lesson wasn't fully learned until I went for a semester as an exchange student to Warsaw. I went primarily to improve my Polish, but I also studied what they called History of Political and Legal Doctrines.”

“Sounds positively riveting.”

She settled his hand in her lap. “It wasn't so bad, really. And it gave me some incredible lessons in keeping my temper.”

“I'm all for that,” Jeffrey said.

“The class was taught by a staunch Party member. I mean a real flag waver. I was the only Westerner in the class, and he kept saying these things as though hoping I was going to explode. I never did, though. There wasn't anything to be gained by giving him the pleasure of seeing me lose it.”

“What was the class about?”

“It was an exhaustive coverage of obscure Soviet bureaucratic Communist thinkers. Not Polish. Soviet.”

“And the Polish students didn't complain?”

“Not in class. Not in hearing range of the professor. If a
Pole made it as far as university, he had already learned to keep his mouth shut around Party members, especially when it came to complaining about the Soviets.” Katya's eyes were frosty. “The Soviet theory of history is linear. That is, all events represent a class struggle and lead inevitably to socialism. This phrase is repeated ad infinitum—the
inevitability
of socialism. So all the studies concentrated on events that supported this perspective. Everything else was virtually ignored.

“History studies revolved around uprisings, strikes, workers' actions, and the cruelest possible examples of capitalist exploitation of workers. The thrust, the key, was always the ownership of production. Their basic principle was that until workers owned
all
land and
all
resources and
all
factories and
all
stores—through the central government, of course—these uprisings would continue. It was
inevitable
. Events so obscure they did not even deserve mention in a Western encyclopedia or textbook were treated as turning points on the path to Communism.”

He made a face. “How could you put up with that stuff?”

“It was hard,” she admitted. “But these are the lies that shaped Poland for over forty years. I kept reminding myself of that, and I studied the Bible harder than I ever had in my life. There, at least, I knew I could remember what truth really was. And when I finally returned home I knew that one reward of the journey, something I would treasure for all my days, was this coming to know a personal relationship with my Savior. Beyond the confines of any church or doctrine or earthly activity. He was my Lord, and He was my friend.”

At the last stop before crossing the former border, the gray-suited West German train conductors gave way to a pudgy man with one wandering eye and a rail-thin girl with spiked blond hair. They wore uniforms of electric blue, replete with broad leather belts and shiny brass medals. They barked a demand for tickets, inspected them minutely. Katya asked
them a polite question, received a smirk and several short words in reply.

“The conductors are much more imposing here,” she said when they departed. “Less discreet than the West German officials.”

“I noticed,” Jeffrey replied. “What did you ask them?”

“When we would arrive at the old border crossing. They said to watch out for the tank barriers.”

Rolling hills gave way to a broad, flat expanse, a plateau that afforded a clear view in every direction of a frozen, silent winterscape. Soon enough the fields began growing a tragic crop of watchtowers and giant lights and crossed railings dug into metal-lined trenches. Although the barbed wire had been removed, the former dead man's zone remained marked by row after row after row of ten-foot-high concrete pillars. They stretched out to both horizons, endless lines of slender tombstones.

“Before the Wall fell, borders like this were a lot noisier,” Katya told him, her voice subdued. “The dogs had vicious-sounding barks, especially at night. And the guards were always shouting, never just speaking.”

Standing in the middle of the field was a single abandoned building, a vast multistoried structure washed to unpainted grayness by passing seasons.

“It must have been a prewar factory,” Katya guessed. “It was in the fire zone; see the stands where they had the spotlights and the machine-gun placements?”

“I see,” Jeffrey replied quietly.

“Look at the building; you can see how all the windows and doors on the first two floors are bricked up. It was probably too close to the Western border to let even the guards use; they might have tried to escape.”

Their train swung around a bend, and the roadway border appeared. Tall stone and mortar guardhouses loomed over a point just prior to where the road diminished from four well-paved and brightly marked lanes to a narrow, rutted
passage. The towers showed bare walls toward the east; all windows and gun emplacements and entrenched vigilance faced the other way.

Once beyond the border, barbed wire sprouted and grew everywhere. Everything was fenced—roads, train tracks, nearby houses, footpaths. The train slowed for another bend, and slowed, and slowed, and remained slow. The track became increasingly bumpy, the surroundings ever more grim.

“It's like another world,” Jeffrey said.

“We've passed through a fifty-year time warp,” Katya replied. “The price of Communism. One of them, anyway.”

The houses were immediately older. Instead of Western double-paned windows, there were warped squares of hand-drawn glass set in flaking wooden panels. Shutters and doors and walls shed paint like old snow, if they were painted at all. Bricks stood exposed through shattered plaster, timbers bared ancient cracks. Bowed walls were supported by tree trunks stripped and replanted at an angle. Weeds grew waist high through cracked pavement. Cars turned tiny and plastic and sputtered smoky spumes.