The Amber Room (9 page)

Clever, industrious men were also always in demand,
her employer had said many times.

She downshifted the Porsche to third. The engine groaned, then forced the tires to grab dry pavement. She twisted up the narrow road, the black asphalt surrounded by thick forest, and slowed at the castle’s main gate. What once accommodated horse-drawn carriages and deterred aggressors had been widened and paved to easily accept cars.

Loring stood outside in the courtyard, dressed casually, wearing work gloves, apparently tending his spring flowers. He was tall and angular, with a surprisingly flat chest and strong physique for a man in his late seventies. Over the past decade she’d watched the silkened ash blond hair fade to the point of a lackluster gray, a matching goatee carpeting his creased jaw and wrinkled neck. Gardening had always been one of his obsessions. The greenhouses outside the walls were packed with exotic plants from around the world.

“Dobriy den,my dear,” Loring called out in Czech.

She parked and exited the Porsche, grabbing her travel bag out of the passenger’s seat.

Loring clapped dirt from his gloves and walked over. “Good hunting, I hope?”

She withdrew a small cardboard box from the passenger’s seat. Neither Customs in London nor Prague questioned the trinket after she explained that it had been bought at a Westminister Abbey gift shop for less than thirty pounds. She was even able to produce a receipt, since she’d stopped by that very shop on the way to the airport and bought a cheap reproduction, one she trashed at the airport.

Loring yanked off his gloves and lifted the lid, studying the snuffbox in the graying afternoon. “Beautiful,” he whispered. “Perfect.”

She reached back into her bag and extracted the book.

“What is this?” he asked.

“A surprise.”

He returned the gold treasure to the cardboard box, then gingerly cradled the volume, unfolding the front cover, marveling at the book plate.

“Drahá,you amaze me. What a wonderful bonus.”

“I recognized it instantly and thought you’d like it.”

“We can certainly sell or trade this. Herr Greimel loves these, and I would very much like a painting he possesses.”

“I knew you’d be happy.”

“This should make Christian take notice, huh? Quite an unveiling at our next gathering.”

“And Franz Fellner.”

He shook his head. “Not anymore. I believe now it’s Monika. She seems to be taking over everything. Slowly but surely.”

“Arrogant bitch.”

“True. But she’s also no fool. I spoke to her at length recently. A bit impatient and eager. Seems to have inherited her father’s spirit, if not his brains. But, who knows? She’s young—maybe she’ll learn. I’m sure Franz will teach her.”

“And what of my benefactor. Any similar thoughts of retirement?”

Loring grinned. “What would I do?”

She gestured to the blossoms. “Garden?”

“Hardly. What we do is so invigorating. Collecting carries such thrills. I am as a child at Christmas opening packages.”

He cradled his two treasures and led her inside his woodworking shop, which consumed the ground floor of a building adjacent to the courtyard. “I received a call from St. Petersburg,” he told her. “Christian was in the depository again Monday. In the Commission records. Fellner obviously is not giving up.”

“Find anything?”

“Hard to say. The idiot clerk should have gone through the boxes by now, but I doubt he has. Says it will take years. He seems far more interested in getting paid than working. But he was able to see that Knoll discovered a reference to Karol Borya.”

She realized the significance.

“I don’t understand this obsession of Franz’s,” Loring said. “So many things waiting to be found. Bellini’sMadonna and Child , gone since the war. What a find that would be. Van Eyck’s altarpiece of the Mystical Lamb. The twelve old masters stolen from the Treves Museum in ‘68. And those impressionist works stolen in Florence. There are not even any photos of those for identification purposes. Anyone would love to acquire just one of them.”

“But the Amber Room is at the top of everyone’s collection list,” she said.

“Quite right, and that seems to be the problem.”

“You think Christian will try to find Borya?”

“Without a doubt. Borya and Chapaev are the only two searchers left alive. Knoll never found Chapaev five years ago. He’s probably hoping Borya knows Chapaev’s whereabouts. Fellner would love the Amber Room to be Monika’s first unveiling. There is no doubt in my mind that Franz will send Knoll to America, at least to try to find Borya.”

“But shouldn’t that be a dead end?”

“Exactly. Literally. But only if necessary. Let’s hope Borya still has a tight lip. Maybe the old man finally died. He has to be approaching ninety. Go to Georgia, but stay out of the way unless forced to act.”

A thrill ran through her. How wonderful to battle Knoll again. Their last encounter in France had been invigorating, the sex afterwards memorable. He was a worthy opponent. But dangerous. Which made the adventure that much more exciting.

“Careful with Christian, my dear. Not too close. You may have to do some unpleasant things. Leave him to Monika. They deserve one another.”

She pecked the old man on the cheek with a soft kiss. “Not to worry. Yourdrahá will not let you down.”

Atlanta, Georgia

Saturday, May 10, 6:50 p.m.

Karol Borya settled into the chaise longue and read again the one article he always consulted when he needed to remember details. It was from theInternational Art Review , October 1972. He’d found it on one of his regular forays downtown to the library at Georgia State University. Outside of Germany and Russia, the media had shown little interest in the Amber Room. Fewer than two dozen English accounts had been printed since the war, most rehashes of historical facts or a pondering on the latest theory on what might have happened. He loved how the article began, a quote from Robert Browning, still underlined in blue ink from his first reading:Suddenly, as rare things will, it vanished .

That observation was particularly relevant to the Amber Room. Unseen since 1945, its history was littered with political turmoil and marked by death and intrigue.

The idea came from Frederick I of Prussia, a complicated man who traded his precious vote as an elector of the Holy Roman Emperor to secure a hereditary kingship of his own. In 1701, he commissioned panels of amber for a study in his Charlottenburg palace. Frederick amused himself daily with amber chessmen, candlesticks, and chandeliers. He quaffed beer from amber tankards and smoked from pipes fitted with amber mouthpieces. Why not a study faced ceiling to floor with carved amber paneling? So he charged his court architect, Andreas Schülter, with the task of creating such a marvel.

The original commission was granted to Gottfried Wolffram, but in 1707, Ernst Schact and Gottfried Turau replaced the Dane. Over four years Schact and Turau labored, meticulously searching the Baltic coast for jewel-grade amber. The area had for centuries yielded tons of the substance, so much that Frederick trained whole details of soldiers in its gathering. Eventually, each rough chunk was sliced to no more than five millimeters thick, polished, and heated to change its color. The pieces were then fitted jigsaw style into mosaic panels of floral scrollwork, busts, and heraldic symbols. Each panel included a relief of the Prussian coat of arms, a crowned eagle in profile, and was backed in silver to enhance its brilliance.

The room was partially completed in 1712, when Peter the Great of Russia visited and admired the workmanship. A year later Frederick I died and was succeeded by his son, Frederick William I. As sons sometimes do, Frederick William hated everything his father loved. Harboring no desire to spend any more crown money on his father’s caprice, he ordered the amber panels dismantled and packed away.

In 1716, Frederick William signed a Russian-Prussian alliance with Peter the Great against Sweden. To commemorate the treaty, the amber panels were ceremonially presented to Peter and transported to St. Petersburg the following January. Peter, more concerned with building the Russian Navy than with collecting art, simply stored them away. But, in gratitude, he reciprocated the gift with 248 soldiers, a lathe, and a wine cup he crafted himself. Included among the soldiers were fifty-five of his tallest guardsmen, this in recognition of the Prussian king’s passion for tall warriors.

Thirty years passed until Empress Elizabeth, Peter’s daughter, asked Rastrelli, her court architect, to display the panels in a study at the Winter Place in St. Petersburg. In 1755 Elizabeth ordered them carried to the summer palace in Tsarskoe Selo, thirty miles south of St. Petersburg, and installed in what came to be known as the Catherine Palace.

It was there that the Amber Room was perfected.

Over the next twenty years, forty-eight square meters of additional amber panels, most emblazoned with the Romanov crest and elaborate decorations, were added to the original thirty-six square meters, the additions necessary since the thirty-foot walls in the Catherine Palace towered over the original room the amber had graced. The Prussian king even contributed to the creation, sending another panel, this one with a bas-relief of the two-headed eagle of the Russian Tsars. Eighty-six square meters of amber were eventually crafted, the finished walls dotted with fanciful figurines, floral garlands, tulips, roses, seashells, monograms, and rocaille, all in glittering shades of brown, red, yellow, and orange. Rastrelli framed each panel in a cartouche of boiserie, Louis Quinze style, separating them vertically by pairs of narrow mirrored pilasters adorned with bronze candelabra, everything gilded to blend with the amber.

The centers of four panels were dotted with exquisite Florentine mosaics fashioned from polished jasper and agate and framed in gilded bronze. A ceiling mural was added, along with an intricate parquet floor of inlaid oak, maple, sandalwood, rosewood, walnut, and mahogany, itself as magnificent as the surrounding walls.

Five Königsberg masters labored until 1770, when the room was declared finished. Empress Elizabeth was so delighted that she routinely used the space to impress foreign ambassadors. It also served as akunstkammer , a cabinet of curiosities for her and later Tsars, the place where royal treasures could be displayed. By 1765, seventy amber objects—chests, candlesticks, snuffboxes, saucers, knives, forks, crucifixes, and tabernacles—graced the room. In 1780, a corner table of encrusted amber was added. The last decoration came in 1913, an amber crown on a pillow, the piece purchased by Tsar Nicholas II.

Incredibly, the panels survived 170 years and the Bolshevik Revolution intact. Restorations were done in 1760, 1810, 1830, 1870, 1918, 1935, and 1938. An extensive restoration was planned in the 1940s, but on June 22, 1941, German troops invaded the Soviet Union. By July 14, Hitler’s army had taken Belarus, most of Latvia, Lithuania, and the Ukraine, reaching the Liga River less than a hundred miles from Leningrad. On September 17, Nazi troops took Tsarskoe Selo and the palaces in and around it, including the Catherine Palace, which had become a state museum under the Communists.

In the days before its capture, museum officials hastily shipped all the small objects in the Amber Room to eastern Russia. But the panels themselves had proved impossible to remove. In an effort to conceal them, a layer of wallpaper was slapped over, but the disguise fooled no one. Hitler ordered Erich Koch, gauleiter of East Prussia, to return the Amber Room to Königsberg, which, in Hitler’s mind, was where it rightly belonged. Six men took thirty-six hours to dismantle the panels, and twenty tons of amber was meticulously packed in crates and shipped west by truck convoy and rail, eventually reinstalled in the Königsberg castle, along with a vast collection of Prussian art. A 1942 German news article proclaimed the event a “return to its true home, the real place of origination and sole place of origination of the amber.” Picture postcards were issued of the restored treasure. The exhibit became the most popular of all Nazi museum spectacles.

The first Allied bombardment of Königsberg occurred in August 1944. Some of the mirrored pilasters and a few of the smaller amber panels were damaged. What happened after that was unclear. Sometime between January and April 1945, as the Soviet Army approached Königsberg, Koch ordered the panels crated and hidden in the cellar of the Blutgericht restaurant. The last German document that mentioned the Amber Room was dated January 12, 1945, and noted that the panels were being packed for transport to Saxony. At some point Alfred Rohde, the Room’s custodian, supervised the loading of crates onto a truck convoy. Those crates were last seen on April 6, 1945, when trucks left Königsberg.

Borya set the article aside.

Each time he read the words his mind always returned to the opening line.Suddenly, as rare things will, it vanished.

How true.

He took a moment and thumbed through the file spread across his lap. It contained copies of other articles he’d collected through the years. He casually glanced over a few, his memory triggered by more details. It was good to remember.

To a point.

He rose from the chaise longue and stepped from the patio to twist off the faucet. His summer garden glistened from a good soaking. He’d waited all day to water, hoping it might rain, but the spring so far had been dry. Lucy watched from the patio, perched upright, her feline eyes studying his every move. He knew she didn’t like the grass, particularly wet grass, finicky about her fur ever since achieving indoor status.

He grabbed the file folder. “Come, little kitty, inside.”

The cat followed him through the back door and into the kitchen. He tossed the folder on the counter next to his dinner, a bacon-wrapped fillet marinating in teriyaki. He was about to start boiling some corn when the doorbell rang.

He shuffled out of the kitchen and headed toward the front of the house. Lucy followed. He peered through the peephole at a man dressed in a dark business suit, white shirt, and striped tie. Probably another Jehovah’s Witness or Mormon. They often came by about this time, and he liked talking to them.