IAN WATSON

THE AMBER ROOM

And I saw her fall from the sky.

The failed hang-glider had begun to spin like a sycamore seed. Then the sail snapped upward at the keel and became a plunging V. At this point she must have pulled the handle of the parachute. The chute failed to separate from her harness. Orange nylon blossomed but was trapped.

I saw Amberfall. That was my intimate name for Isabelle because of the tan of her skin and the beads of her nipples. I watched her plum met to earth.

Afterward I wept for her just as Phaeton’s sisters wept for their brother after he was hurled from the sky because he flew the sun-chariot crawly. But my tears were only salt water. They didn’t harden into amber. Not as yet …

I must have been eleven when I first began to dream of flying. In my dreams I soared above the ripe cornfields of the English West Country underneath a wing. The wing was smooth, not feathered. I wasn’t a bird.

In the sky of my dreams the sun was a golden ball, a rich warm aromatic sphere, the quintessence of harvest. I believed I had identified the true substance of that sun when my grandmother, Gran-Annie, showed me a large bead of amber.

The fields beneath me were imprinted with patterns suggestive of runes or astrological symbols. I honestly can’t recall whether “crop circles,” so called, had already begun to appear in genuine fields. A memory isn’t like a leaf perfectly preserved in amber for all time. We don’t remember a past even t in itself, but rather our memory of that event. Subsequently we remember the memory of a memory. Thus our mind forever updates itself. Essentially memories are fictions. Each time that we suppose we are remembering, these fictions are being rewritten within ourselves, with ourselves as heroes or victims.

When my dreams began, crop circles were probably already materializing overnight in corn fields. Maybe this had been happening on and off for centuries rather than my dreams being any sort of anticipation of the phenomenon. Later, these circles became a temporary media sensation.

What wild stories there were in the newspapers! The patterns must be enigmatic attempts at communication on the part of some alien intelligence! Or possibly archetypal imagery was being stamped upon patches of plants by some kind of collective planetary mind…

Even to my immature mind I’m sure that speculations of this sort would have seemed nutty. Surely those convolutions in the crops were none other than the wind itself made visible. Eddies and swirls and turbulence. Did not the wind forever comb the hair of the tom, gently or roughly? All the air of the world was akin to the skin of a body, ceaselessly rippling and flexing sweating or shivering. Air is a vast living organ, though a mindless one.

Surely no one could fall from such a dreamy sky? Surely no one could plunge to earth, and die?

In due course, I took up hang-gliding passionately. Presently I was equipped with a degree in engineering aerodynamics a speciality. Passion became profession. With Max Palmer as partner I rounded a fledgling company to design and build new high-performance hang-gliders: craft with wider spans and nose angles, with tighter sails and more battens to camber the roached trailing edges of the airfoil (to be technical for a moment).

Maxburn Airfoils combined Max’s first name with my surname, suggesting flying feats at the leading edge of possibility. Max Palmer and Peter Burn: two aces. It was financial backing from Max’s family which allowed us to set up, thus his name preceded mine. The company fledged and soared. We even carried out some design consultancy work for NASA, honey upon the bread and butter of our regular manufacturing. Usually I wore Gran-Annie’s bead as a pendant around my neck instead of a tie.

Surely no one could fall.

Until I fell in love — or in lust — with Max’s Isabelle. Until Isabelle -until Amber — fell.

A hang-glider pilot aims to see the invisible. He or she watches wind. At first, to do so, he throws dry grasses. He kicks dust. He eyes the flutter of a ribbon, the ripple of tree-tops, the progress of smoke and clouds. Eventually, for a few of us, an extra perception is born.

As a boy a premonition of this perception showed me the words of wind written upon the fields. In the ghastly wake of Isabelle’s death impassioned perception took me to Kaliningrad on the Baltic coast in search of the lost room of amber — the lost room of Amber herself. I’d begun to dream of finding that room, and my lost love within it.

An entire room wrought of amber!

Gran-Annie first told me the tale. The central luminary of my dreams was a sphere of smoldering amber, so naturally I was enthralled. I concocted various boyish adventure fantasies about finding the room. But it was only after Isabelle died that I began to dream repeatedly of doing so in an airborne context. The room had bizarrely replaced the crop circles. Mountains replaced fields as a setting.

My German grandmother had been dead for five years, but I soon reacquainted myself with all the details of the story.

The creation of the amber room began in the year 1702 in Denmark. Disagreements and delays occurred, but by 1713 the amber room was on display in Berlin, either gloriously or partially, when Peter the Great visited Frederick. The ebullient Tsar was so enchanted that Frederick could do no other than make a gift of the whole caboodle to Peter.

Off to the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg went sleigh-loads of crates containing wall panels, pediments, turned comers, embellishments, rosettes, et al.

In 1755 Empress Elizabeth had the room transferred to the Summer Palace at Tsarskoe Selo. Finishing touches were still occurring as late as 1763 — culminating in one of the wonders of the world. Visitors expressed their sense of stepping inside of a dream or fantasy.

Although constructed by human hands, surely that room did indeed partake of otherness. Such golden luminosity! Such mosaic contrasts of yellows and honey-browns and caramel and clear red. Such a wealth of carvings: of Roman landscapes allegorizing the human senses, and of flowers and garlands and of tiny figures las if seen from high in the air) and of trees. Such mirrors, such chandeliers dripping amber lustres. Amazing the parquet floor. Ravishing, the allegorical ceiling.

In 1941, eight years after Gran-Annie’s parents fled with her from Germany, Nazi armies were about to lay siege to Leningrad. Art treasures were being evacuated to vaults in the Urals — but the Germans overran the Summer Palace. They dismantled the amber room and shipped it to Konigsberg Castle. There, it was reassembled under the eye of the director of the Prussian Fine Arts Museum, a certain Dr. Alfred Rohde. (It was from seven hundred kilometers further west, from Hannover, that Gran-Annie’s parents had emigrated to England.)

Within a couple of years loot filled Konigsberg Castle to bursting point. But British bombs! were raining; down. Dismantled once more, the room departed — and so likewise did Rohde. Konigsberg was wrecked; Konigsberg was overrun, soon to become Kaliningrad — politically a district of Russia but separated by the three Baltic republics.

Weirdly, Dr. Rohde returned to his post. He co-operated freely with the Soviet occupation forces. Yet he disclaimed any knowledge of the whereabouts of the wonder of the world. Soon after Dr. Rohde’s return, he and his wife both died suddenly. According to their death certificates the cause was dysentery. These documents were signed by a Dr. Paul Erdman — but when the KGB investigated they could find no trace of any such doctor.

Supposedly the dismantled amber room came to rest on the bottom of the Baltic Sea some twenty nautical miles off the German coast in a ship which a Soviet submarine had torpedoed.

There is such a thing as disinformation…

The Nazis had a fetish about mountains as last redoubts — about Eagle’s Nests, and high eyries. Wouldn’t the perfect place to hide the amber room be a mountain range where aircraft could not easily maneuver and which advancing tanks would avoid? My dreams imposed upon me the conviction that this was so, and that the hiding place could only be found from the air, bird-like, Godlike, in solitary flight. When I contemplated finding that missing room I was a boy again, enraptured.

Thus might Amber’s death be exorcised.

Naturally I didn’t talk to Max about this method of coping with tragedy. He had his own means of handling grief. Max immersed himself in design work — especially as regards the; catastrophic failure of the airfoil which had plunged Isabelle to her death. I ‘was fairly sure that he would search in vain for the cause. His feel for gliders — at the edge of possibility — was less than mine. I’d always been able to reach that little way beyond him. Now I would reach a long way, from England to former East Prussia.

I simply had to visit the last known location of the amber room. Surely I would meet some aficionado of amber who knew more than I could find out in England. Close to Kaliningrad was the seaside town of Yantarny -literally, Amberville. That’s the source of ninety percent of the world’s present-day supplies of amber. If you rub amber, it develops a static electric charge. Kaliningrad was drawing me like a magnet.

I told Max that I was going to Germany to revisit my grandmother’s roots and to investigate the possibility of exporting hang-gliders. I wouldn’t try to fool Max that I was hoping to sell our products in those lake-strewn boggy Baltic flatlands where the economies are bumping awkwardly along! Than ks to Gran-Annie I was fluent in German. If English wasn’t understood much in Kaliningrad, German should be a reasonable bet. After the Second World War it’s true that most of the German population of the Kaliningrad region was either dead or expelled or sent to Siberia, but since the demise of the Soviet Union, Kaliningrad had became a free port to attract prosperity, and the closest source of prosperity was. Germany.

With a sail secured on top of the Range Rover, I drove through Germany, then Poland. In Warsaw I was obliged to garage my transport. Whatever its free port status, the Kaliningrad region was militarily sensitive due to being the most westerly redoubt of the rump of Russia. The Polish border wasn’t open to ordinary civilian road traffic — and I hardly intended to emulate Matthias Russ, or whatever his name was, by hang-gliding my way into the area.

Ach: those Baltic flatlands! The nearest mountains were the Carpathians. A tidy way to the south, those sprawl across a thousand kilometers from Poland to Slovakia into Romania. The amber room had to be somewhere in the Carpathians. But without some clue even a person of special perception could spend ten years searching: that range from the air.

I allowed myself two weeks. Continued absence would amount to a betrayal of Max, and of Maxburn Airfoils too.

*

I had seen Amber fall from the sky.

I flew to Kaliningrad on a newly inaugurated direct flight from Warsaw, and on the way through Immigration an encounter occurred which was to prove crucial.

Manning the desk were a fresh-faced young officer and a sallow older colleague whose high cheekbones and absence of folds to the eyelids proclaimed Mongol blood in his ancestry…

Now, I’d opted for a tourist visa, which meant that I’d been obliged to arrange accommodation expensively in advance. Intourist in London had tried to book me into a so-called “‘floating palace” on the river in the center of the city. A couple of cruise ships were permanently moored in lieu of modem luxury hotels. The month of May was an excellent time to stay in one of those, supposedly.

I didn’t wish to be cooped up where my comings and goings could be monitored. And what was this business about the month of May? Further questioning of the Intourist lady, who had actually visited Kaliningrad, disclosed that in May the weather wouldn’t be scorching, consequently I could keep the porthole of my cabin shut. The river, it seemed, stank somewhat. I opted instead for a hotel on terra firma several kilometers from the city center. The Baltika was very popular with tour companies, I was assured.

The younger immigration officer wished to see how much money I had with me. This seem ed an American sort of question in this city where all hard currencies were legal tender nowadays. Despite having prepaid for my hotel, Did I have enough to support myself during my stay? I did have enough, and more. Much more.

He eyed my amber pendant. “Are you here to buy jewelry?” he demanded. “Your passport says you are an engineer.”

We were speaking German. The older man interrupted to point out that I seemed very fluent in German, whereas my passport was a British one.

“My Grossmutter came from Germany,” I told him.

“From so-called Northern East Prussia, Herr Burn?” Did I detect a note of nationalist displeasure? “Nordliche Ostpreussen” was how Germans still referred to the Kaliningrad Oblast.

“No, she came from Hannover. She fled from the Nazis in ‘34. She hated Nazis.”

The man smiled, then.

“Is an engineer here to buy jewelry?” persisted the junior officer. Why the quiz? Amber is hardly gold or rubies. Who would wish to smuggle it? As I understood, the bottom had virtually fallen out of the Western market for amber. With the disintegration of the superpower, any wannabe Russian rock group would bring out a haversack full of the stuff to pay their way. Maybe my fellow passengers — principally Poles — weren’t as interesting as myself to interrogate. Or maybe obstructiveness lingered.

“I’m fascinated by the history of the amber room,” I said — a harmless enough admission, not to mention being the truth.

The young man looked blank. “The amber room?” I suppose you might meet a native of London who hasn’t the foggiest idea where the Crown Jewels are housed. The other officer spoke rapidly in Russian, enlightening his colleague.

To recover from chagrin, the young officer enquired what sort of engineer I was, and when I specified hang-gliders the older man reached for my passport and my hotel confirmation with such an impetuous hand that he actually knocked the documents off the desk. I would have picked these up myself but he stepped swiftly’ out to do so. As he rose, his lapel bulged and I noticed a badge pinned on the inside where it wouldn’t normally be seen. A disc, the size of a small coin, bore a double-headed eagle. The old imperial eagle, emblem of the TSars… He must be a nationalist — of a far-out eccentric royalist stripe. All sorts of strange creatures had crawled out of the woodwork when the Soviet Union fell apart.

I was irritated by the delay. But also I felt suddenly possessed, in that moment, by my dream perception — galvanized and beguiled. The words jerked out of me almost inadvertently:

“Maybe,” I burbled, “a hang-gilder pilot can find the lost amber room, wherever it is!” Then I laughed dismissively.

In fact, the young officer had had my best interests at heart. If I was going to be carrying a lot of money round, it might be sensible to hire a driver, an interpreter, an escort, if I followed his drift. A reliable and discreet man from a private security company. Kaliningrad wasn’t awash with crime to the extent, alas, of Moscow or St. Petersburg. Yet even so! A word to the wise. He produced a little printed card with address and phone number and printed a name on the back.

“My name. Tell them that I recommended you —”

No doubt for a percentage of the fee which I would be paying. . The older man didn’t want me to take the card. He became quite vociferous, in Russian. Maybe he viewed this as an insult to his nation. I think he would have confiscated the card if this had been within his power.

Thus it was that I acquired Pavel as a minder and guide for my stay in Kaliningrad.

The fellow bore quite a resemblance to me — though this is purely coincidental. Both of us were only of medium height, though big-boned. We were both endowed with freckles and curly gingery hair and light blue eyes. Somewhere in Pavel’s ancestry them must have been a Viking or two. He could have served as a double if he had exchanged his cheap leather jacket for my more fashionable anorak, and had donned the amber pendant. He carried a registered firearm, and was discretion itself as regards my business. Maybe his employers supplied a pamphlet on “How to be a Minder.” Rule one: maintain a bland facade. Of course, to begin with it would have seemed that he was merely minding a tourist with a particular interest in amber.

Next day, he collected me from the Baltika in a dark green Mercedes with lots of kilometers cm the dock. Its bodywork might be green but its exhaust emissions no longer were. Actually, the local petrol was at fault. The streets of this dreary city which had risen upon the rains of grand old Konigsberg were full of fumes. The river was indeed as black and murky as old engine oil. Bleak wastelands punctuated some remarkably ugly Soviet architecture. The old Cathedral was a shell, though some scaffolding hinted at possible restoration. The castle, where Dr. Rohde had stored the room, had been a shell — till it was demolished by dynamite to make way for a House of Soviets which, Pard remarked, was too ugly for anyone ever to have the gall to complete.

Pavel pointed out a certain pink building beside the North Station, which had been KGB headquarters. That’s where he had worked until he had privatized himself. I suppose this admission exonerated him of being any son of informer nowadays.

We visited the Amber Museum, which was located in a burly red brick tower. That tower was one of the survivors of war, as were a number of city gates and bastions. Personally I found the museum mediocre, showcasing too much modern jewelry. Through Pavel I quizzed the dumpy lady director, who spoke no German, about the amber room.

She believed the submarine story.

I asked her about Rohde’s death. On this topic she had no opinions.

I told her that I was researching a thriller which I had long yearned to write on account of my German grandmother. This cover story had occurred to me in view of my experience at the airport. I would announce my ambition blatantly — but in the guise of fiction. I aimed to write a story about a hang-glider pilot who hunts for, and finds, the lost amber room in a mountainous Nazi hiding place. I assured the lady director that I was interested in any hypothesis, however fantastic.

However, fantasy wasn’t her forte. “Herr Burn,” she lectured me (via Pavel), “have you not noticed the blinds at all the windows? Have you not seen how thick the glass display cases are? Sunlight degrades amber over a relatively modest time. Amber is chemically a bitumen. Air oxidizes it till it is so brittle that it can distintegrate into a pile of dust. You speak of the amber room being kept in the open somewhere, fully assembled, exposed to wind and sunlight? What stupidity.”

Absolutely the room must be out in the open, three-dimensionally, beneath the sky, not packed flat in cases in some cavern! The parquet floor, the great wall panels, the allegorical ceiling dangling its chandeliers: all must be erected and connected, and suffusing and refracting golden light. How else could it conform to my dream? How else could Amber herself be waiting in the room?

“Sheer stupidity.”

My interview was at an end.

I went with Pavel to a shop specializing in amber jewelry on Leninsky prospekt, and then to another on prospekt Mira. Despite our proximity to Yantarny — to Amberville-by-the-sea — there was a dearth of decent merchandise on display. The proprietor of the first shop became brusque when he grasped that I wasn’t interested in buying anything but only in wasting his time with fanciful questions. The manager of the second was eager that I should include the exact address of his premises in my prospective best-seller — which in his opinion ought to be about an attempt to refloat the torpedoed ship, in the style of Raise the Titanic, and featuring neo-Nazi conspirators. He urged me to visit the Bunker Museum near the university. That bunker was the command post of Hitler’s Reich till the Red Army overran the devastated city. Part of it had been left completely untouched since the day the surrender was signed in it. Such ghosts, Herr Burn, such echoes of the past. Perfect atmosphere for a best-seller.

I wouldn’t visit the damned bunker. But Yantarny, yes — I would go there on the very next day. At the source of amber I might find some better pointer. Back in the ear again, in our cocoon. amidst the pollution, Pavel explained that visits to Yantarny were a slightly sensitive matter.

“You see, foreigners can only buy a train ticket to Yantarny if they have a special document…”

My heart sank. “Is it a military zone?”

No, it wasn’t. Just along the coast at Baltiysk, was a huge naval base. Baltiysk was a restricted area — though nowadays sightseeing visits could even be arranged. For commercial reasons Yantarny was somewhat out of bounds to independent travelers.

“Somewhat out of bounds,” stressed Pavel. “I could drive you there, but it might be wiser to join a group tour.”

He would arrange this. He would accompany me. Even so, at Yantarny I wouldn’t be able to visit the workings or the beach. Those were fully out of bounds. I would only be able to gawp at pipelines through which the quarried earth and amber were pumped across the town to be separated, and the amber cleaned.

Damnation. Still, did I really need to inspect those workings, like some commercial spy?

I never did get to Yantarny. Back at the Baltika, to my surprise, a message was waiting for me — to telephone a certain number.

Did the proprietor of the amber shop have some new suggestion for my best-seller about sunken treasure? Or, after a change of heart, was it the lady director of the museum who wanted to speak to me?

Not in the least. It proved to be the older immigration officer, who had noted where I was staying. Would I meet him and some friends for a meal and drinks at a restaurant on Leninsky to discuss a matter of mutual interest? But of course. And by the way, had I taken his young colleague’s advice regarding a chaperon? Why yes, I had. In that case my minder must remain in the car. This matter was confidential.

The restaurant was very noisy due to the constant loud dance music. This entertainment rendered eavesdropping virtually impossible. It wasn’t merely face to face but almost nose to nose that I met Rylov the immigration officer, and Antonov, and a nameless gentleman, over German beer and fried chicken.

Antonov was of the hefty breed. Fifty-eight inch chest and fifty inch waist, with a puce suit to match, crumpled though of decent tailoring. Mongol genes — and tissue courtesy of carbohydrate. He had to be a member of the Kaliningrad mafia. At first I thought that he was here as muscle, a bodyguard for the man with no name. In fact Antonov spoke English well, and was as much a part of this as Rylov or the Enigma. Mr. Mystery was in his seventies: dapper, with close-cropped silvery hair, and of refined features. The heavy tinted thick-lensed glasses he wore might have been due to weak eyes but they gave him the appearance of an aristocratic interrogator-though he left the interrogating to Antonov. He gave the appearance of understanding German and English but only spoke, from time to time, in Russian. During our encounter he smoked a dozen of those fragrant cigarettes consisting principally of a cardboard tube.

“So you believe that the pilot of a hang-glider can find the lost room?” Antonov said to me.

“Somewhere in the Carpathians,” I replied. Mr. Mystery sucked his cigarette then rapped out something in Russian.

The story which I’d adopted bubbled forth. I was researching a thriller.

Antonov eyed me. “And the room shall appear nakedly out in the open? Without any framework or corset to support it?”

My dream inundated me. “It must. It has to. How else can the flier find it?”

“Ah,” said Antonov. “And you are the flier.”

“I do fly, that’s true.”

His next remark amazed me. “Maybe it needs a special perception to find the room.”

I must have gaped at him.

Rylov said in halting English, “You not truly write novel. To write novel is a lie. You want to find the room.” The dance music bawled around me, isolating us in a mad oasis. “Why you want to find room, Herr Burn? Because of treasure value?”

“No!”

Because Amber fell from the sky. Because she beckoned me from within the golden room. I fingered my talisman.

“It’s a personal matter,” I said. “An emotional matter.” I hesitated before confessing: “I dream. I dream of finding it.”

“By magic,” said Antonov. I thought he was mocking me. Yet the next minute he began to discourse about the Third Reich and about psychics. For a while I imagined that he might be proposing a new plot for my phantom novel. Now that communism and state atheism had collapsed, was not occultism all the vogue in Russia?

Accompanied by nods from Mr. Mystery, Antonov explained, “The Nazis persecuted most occultists, Mr. Burn, yet some they pampered… .”

Seemingly the German navy had financed a major scientific expedition to the Baltic in the hope of determining by radar the concave curvature of the Hollow Earth. The inglorious failure of this demented project did not deter the Naval Research Institute in Berlin from lavishing the finest wines and cigars upon psychics while those visionaries swung pendulums over charts of the Atlantic — this, in response to mounting losses of U-boats. And who knew what had been the upshot of the Nazi-sponsored psychic expedition to Tibet?

The point of all this was that Antonov and his associates had evidence of a rite being performed within the amber room in Konigsberg Castle under the eye of Dr. Alfred Rohde and a high-ranking Nazi — with the aim of concealing the future whereabouts of the room. The otherworldly treasure would be hidden amidst mountains, of course — I was right on that account — but also in some veiled domain adjacent to the mundane world…till someone of vision could rediscover it with suitable aid.

“The name of the doctor who poisoned Rohde and his wife was Erdmann, Mr. Bum. The name means Earthman, by contrast with the occult world of spirit.” Antonov leered at me, sweating. “And also by contrast with the sky?”

“Why,” I asked, “did the Germans take such pains to hide the room?”

“Why?” Antonov’s tone proclaimed that the answer should be self-evident. Mr. Mystery was fingering the lapel of his own suit. I caught a flash of, yes, a double-headed eagle on a pin. This served as a signal to Antonov to initiate me.

“Because,” said the bulky fellow, “the amber room was once the glory of the Tsar’s Summer Palace, a symbol of Holy Russia, usurped by the Bolshevists. Nazis felt hatred for all Russians. The imperial Russian government fought the fathers of those Nazis in the First World War…” He didn’t need to lower his voice due to the din of the music. “Mr. Burn, the rediscovery of the amber room heralds…the restoration of the Tsars. It will serve as a sure sign.”

Rylov nodded. Mr. Mystery exhaled blue smoke. In the logic of loony nationalism perhaps this was true.

“You can help us, Mr. Burn. We will help you fulfill your own private dream! We know where to look, and we have the means to help you see. What we ask is that you buy the means from us, simply to help our funds.” He named a figure in Deutschmarks which corresponded with what Rylov already knew I had in my possession.

A seam. This had to be a seam. A confidence trick.

If I tried to walk out on them, would I be detained by a gun held covertly under the table? Would I be robbed while Pavel sat patiently in the car outside? Worse, might the music mask an actual pistol shot?

Ah but this trio couldn’t be sure that the money was on me at the moment…

“Show me this means of yours,” I demanded.

Antonov frowned. “We do not carry it around restaurants. I will come to your hotel tomorrow afternoon. We exchange…with good will.”

As pavel drove me along Moskovsky back toward the Baltika he admitted, “I took a look inside the restaurant, Mr. Burn. I recognized the big man with you. He is a criminal.”

I suppose his curiosity was justifiable in view of my mysteriously meeting with strangers within a day of my arrival in Kaliningrad. Did Pavel imagine that I was a criminal too? Or that I was involved in the espionage game? That my interest in amber was merely a front?

“It’s all right,” I assured him. “Antonov offered to sell me some information about the amber room I’ve been asking about.”

“Antonov is his real name, or at least it’s the name he uses.”

Ah. Wise Pavel.

“Did you recognize the old man with the glasses?”

My minder shook his head.

“Pavel, tomorrow afternoon Antonov is coming to the hotel to bring me the information. I’m suspicious this might be a Bauernfangerie.” A “yokel-trap”: how picturesque the German word for confidence trick. “I want you to be with me when he; visits. There’ll be some extra drink-money for you.”

We had crossed the ring-road by now, and in the darkness the ten floors of the Baltika loomed on our left.

My room was on the sixth floor. We’d been waiting most of the afternoon. I was eyeing some wasteland through the smog-haze when a white Mercedes came into view, steering erratically at speed. The car barely missed a taxi and a bus before skidding to a halt, narrowly avoiding some German tourists.

A stout figure, unmistakably Antonov, lurched from the car. Clutching his side, he lumbered toward the entrance. Was he injured?

Pavel and I were waiting by the elevator when Antonov spilled out. Luckily the corridor was deserted but for us. We had to heave Antonov along to my room, and into a dingy over-stuffed armchair. He’d been shot. It seemed that this ox of a man was dying, though he wasn’t bleeding much at all. Not externally, at least. He’d be bleeding inwardly.

I’d seen Amber bleed inwardly to death, her outward form still fairly unblemished…

Antonov’s breath was ragged. “Seeing double,” he mumbled in English as he eyed me and Pavel. Pavel said something in Russian, and recognition dawned. “Bodyguard…Rylov said…”

“This is Pavel. Don’t worry. He doesn’t understand English.”

“You met your twin, Mr. Bum…There are affinities…Pavel is Paul, and you are Peter. Both saints attend me.” Mysticism was welling up in him along with his lifeblood.

What kind of confidence trick was this, if someone had shot Antonov to try to prevent him from coming to me?

“What happened?” I begged.

Blood bubbled on his lips, consecrating his words.

“Arguing…He who had the means in his care…Hating foreigners… Even if a foreigner does have the vision…” He coughed. “Wasting time…Look in the heart of the High Tatras, Mr. Burn.”

The High Tatras of Slovakia…

He whispered the name of a town, which I hastened to scribble on a pad. Antonov struggled to reach an inside pocket of his suit, and slid out a spectacle case made of steel. “Look with these…”

I opened the case. The spectacles were so old. The frames, sides, and ear-rests were of thin tarnished metal. Surely the lenses were of amber, though the amber was so clear and transparent. Apart from their evident age the spectacles looked remarkably like John Lennon glasses.

These were the means to find the amber room?

“Man of the Konigsberg Guild made these, Mr. Burn…Christian Porschin…Sixteen-nineties…By heating amber gently in…” The English word failed him so he resorted to German. “In Leinol. Blue flower,” he mumbled by way of explanation, though I was well aware what Leinol meant, namely linseed. Heat amber in linseed to clarify it —then grind lenses.

“Later on, Mr. Burn, the Nazi magic ceremony, remember…”

A ceremony to enchant the spectacles? To attune them to the amber room! When someone of vision wore these, he would be able to locate the lost room…

Maybe there had been something magical about these glasses even back in the late Seventeenth Century. Science and magic were still uneasy bedfellows back then. These spectacles had been safeguarded somewhere m the Kaliningrad region throughout the Soviet annexation, in this hard steel case — but not on behalf of covert Nazis. There couldn’t have been any Nazis lurking in the vicinity. Nearly all Germans had been killed or deported or sent to Siberia, right? Covert Russian royalists had become the custodians.

It was my luck — no, my destiny — that Rylov was a recruit to this crazy nationalist minority cause and that my quest seemed a godsend to the dotty Tsarists.

Though not to all of them! Many of the newly liberated political animals must be deeply xenophobic. Holy Russia, sacred motherland: safeguard and restore her strength. Let not the West pollute the national soul. There’d been a violent quarrel in the royalist faction. Certain members would have preferred a Rasputin to receive the specs, not a mere visitor from abroad.

Absolutely, this was no yokel-trap, not when it led to murder. Nor could I disbelieve in the spectacles. Too much faith, and death, had been invested in them.

“Blue flowers,” repeated Antonov, as if I might find the room in some high meadow full of blooms the hue of the sky itself. This was such an inconsequential detail, communicated with such urgency as thought began to dissipate from the brain. Almost like babbling of green fields.

Finally he slurred something in Russian, and I heard Pavel suck in his breath. Unsurprising that Antonov should revert to his mother tongue in the final moments — as any of us grown-ups might cry out, terminally, to the mother who bore us. Had those last words been a prayer?

He was dead. Those high fatty cheeks slumped a little. Those eyes without any folds to the lids were blank.

I’d imagined that the fall from the sky would kill Isabelle outright, mercifully and abruptly. She should have remained unconscious throughout her dying minutes. Surely she did not once open her eyes and focus upon me!

Pavel was regarding the spectacles in perplexity. The only word of the conversation between myself and Antonov which he could have understood would have been Leinol. Linseed, and a pair of antique glasses. Why should I be willing to spend so much upon old specs? How could those be the motive for a killing?

“Help me get him out of here!” I took out my wallet, and removed a couple of hundred mark bills which I thrust at Pavel. “He won’t be needing money now. Here’s an installment on a tip for you.” Ein weniges Trinkgeld. Oh quite a lot. “There’ll be more to come, at the airport.”

After a quick recce, we heaved the body along to a tiny service room. Vacuum cleaner, linen, bars of soap. While I lurked, Pavel summoned the nearby elevator. The corridor remained deserted. The elevator arrived empty. While Pavel delayed the elevator, I dragged the body inside, then I hopped out — as did he, after pressing for the top floor.

“Wir haben Gluck, Herr Burn…”

Yes, we’d been lucky, though we still needed to erase scuff marks from the carpet then wash some spots in my room and rub dirt in to restore their former appearance. Oh, and we reversed the cushions of the armchair. Antonov hadn’t bled much at all. Not externally.

The corpse would soon be found. There’d be a bit of a fracas. But in these progressive days no KGB security men routinely haunted the lobby. And Antonov had known my room number in advance.

“By the way,” I asked casually, “what did he say in Russian at the very last?”

Pavel grimaced. “It was stupid. Long live the Tsar, he said.”

I was hard put to conceal my elation at this final confirmation of Anton’s integrity, nevertheless I agreed that Antonov’s last words were completely Dummkopf. If Pavel still decided that I was a courier between royalists in Russia and in the West, why, be had more drink-money to look forward to, in return for his discretion!

Oh, I’d seen my love fall from the sky. And now I could find her again.

Where hang-gliders are concerned, there’s always a thin line between stability and instability; and so it was with Amber too.

A cutting-edge craft which verges on being unstable is going to react wildly when you try some virtuoso maneuver — though equally, a craft which is too stable is an exhausting drag to fly. A bit of instability has its merits. Amber had many merits. She was gorgeous, passionate, adventure-some.

Yet danger excited her rather too much. She courted the frisson. Not that she was a dangerous flier. She was too skilled to be dangerous. Skill vetoes silliness. Steering toward a thundercloud wasn’t her idea of a good time, but in her regular life she did risk thunder and lightning.

A cuckolded husband is often the last to know that he’s being cheated and betrayed and I was the last of a handful of accomplices in betrayal — the awkward thumb, as it were, since I was the closest to home. The awkward eager thumb.

Isabelle knew how to conduct a liaison, so she protested to me during the early weeks of our own affair. Did Max suspect anything at all about Simon Lee, her previous conquest? Or about Jim Parrish, Lee’s predecessor?

Until then, nor had I suspected about Lee or Parrish. Lee was a locally-based rally driver and dealer in sports cars. Parrish, it transpired, was a mushroom farmer and membership secretary of some federation of potholers.

Did knowledge of my own predecessors tarnish the craving I felt for her? I suppose I was jealous and at the same time thrillingly flattered to be preferred to other men.

Cuckoldry is such an old-fashioned word for what I was doing to Max, but in view of our close relationship I found the term appropriate. Hitherto Isabelle had cheated — but her lovers weren’t as close to Max as I was. Max, whose family’s money was our foundation.

Admittedly I had desired Isabelle previously. Yet I wouldn’t have dreamed of doing anything. You might describe me as inhibited —notwithstanding my soaring; dreams! I hadn’t become intimate with a woman either at university or subsequently. At a. party I might tipsily and jokingly embrace some fellow I knew well — or an older woman acquaintance for whom I felt no frenzy — rather than the girl close by for whom I actually lusted. Displacement, that’s the name for it.

When my self-control finally slipped — was stripped away — by Isabelle, I did indeed succumb to erotic frenzy with her to an extent which surprised her, and delighted her. This delight risked being our undoing and the rain of Maxburn Airfoils. She began to muse about leaving humdrum Max for me. The frisson of flying had hitched her and Max together in the first place (and I assume his future inheritance played a part), but he wasn’t fully able to satisfy her, so it seemed. Nor was motherhood an imminent goal. Bloated with child, how might she fly at the edge of possibility? Pretense in public, frenzy in private!

I remember us relaxing after love-making in the privacy of my cottage which I’d renamed The Wings. The place was secluded. Woodland, on most sides. A shady lane gave quiet access. The Wings consisted of a south wing and a west wing with a sheltered high-hedged wild garden to the rear.

Amber’s golden sun-lamp tan left no pale loin-stripe. Blonde bloom upon her skin, as on a firm sweet fruit. Those amber areolas and the succulent beads of her nipples. Freckles on her upper arms and shoulders. Her slim nose, her restless blue eyes framed with challenging violet shadow. She wore her flaxen hair in a long braided rope, bating her brow, offering me a kind of tail to hold.

I was, in our pillow talk, The Thumb. The Thumb would jut stiffly, throbbing to hitch a ride.

“Thumb’s up,” she would say. “Thumb’s up.” This was to be her joke —risque and risky — whenever we were setting out to fly, me and her and Max each with our separate sails.

On this occasion I remember her speculating whether two people could possibly make love aloft, high in the sky, veiled by a cloud, whilst flying tandem side by side together. Would the hang-straps make this totally impossible — unless at least one person unhooked? How wildly would bodily movements pitch the craft? She laughed, she laughed.

“I’s like to go on holiday to Zanzibar,” she said. “Nobody else seems to go there. Max isn’t interested.”

“Well, the two of us can hardly slip away to Zanzibar together.”

“I suppose not. I just want to go somewhere where I’m invisible.” “I think you’d be very visible in Zanzibar.”

“Somewhere which is my own secret place. And yours.”

“We’re in it at this moment, aren’t we?”

“Jim made love to me in a cave.”

I didn’t wish to hear about my predecessors.

Isabelle was nominally a silversmith. She had trained thus, indulged by her parents. Courtesy of Max she had a little workshop kitted out with drills and cutters and melting pot, blast burner and drawbench, hammers, burnishers and buffers. She did make some elaborate earrings. She had created perfect little hang-gliders to dangle down from one’s lobes, sails brushing the wearer’s neck like silver insects. She had made life-size slim silver ears to hang underneath one’s flesh-and-blood ears. Was this wit or sheer caprice? Expensive toys gave her a pretext to hang out at swanky craft fairs and be admired, and meet such as Simon and Jim.

She began to nag at going away with me.

Going away? Away from my life?

*

Another time, at The Wings, I told her about the amber room — and immediately there was a place in which we ought to make love. To surprise her, on the next sunny afternoon I pinned golden cellophane over the bedroom window. Was my light-fitting an adequate substitute for a chandelier? Could the carpet become a parquet floor of red. and gold and caramel? The only amber was round my neck. And beside me, in bed! Amber’s skin hardly needed any tinting by cellophane, though I myself became golden for a couple of hours.

Yes, we trod such a thin line between stability and instability, If Max discovered, what a wreckage of my once-stable life there would be. Did this possibility stimulate Isabelle? Whilst in The Wings, my own self-control evaporated, If the collapse of control were to spread further, involving Maxburn Airfoils in disorder, what then?

Amber said to me, “Of course, if Max had a flying accident I’d feel so wretched and so sad. Worse, you and I could hardly continue loving. If we did, the finger of suspicion would point. Yet how could we stop loving? That’s why I’m sure we should go away. Why not to America —where they surf the sky?”

Financially this seemed deeply impractical. Was I to set up shop all over again? Was I to work with designers who might have a veto over me? Isabelle would be deserting her check book in the process of deserting Max. Was I to provide her with a new silver smithy?

Horns of a dilemma! Perils of cuckoldry. Terror tiptoed along my spine, Thumbs down.

I had no particular trouble leaving Kaliningrad. The murder had obviously been due to a gangland feud. In spite of the manifest lack of pursuit, the victim must have been trying to hide himself in the hotel — rather than having any special business at the Baltika. The Baltika was certainly not paying any protection money to racketeers. Nyet, nein, absolutely not,

Nor did any xenophobic tsarists try to hinder me on the way from boarding the Warsaw-bound plane.

Nor was my hang-glider stolen by Polish spivs on the road south by way of Krakow.

Guards on the Slovak side of the border with Poland were mainly on the lookout for cheap Polish cigarettes and for migrant Romanians —particularly for gypsy Romanians trying to reach the Shangri-La of Germany. Myself and Range Rover and hang-glider passed muster; thus I entered the heart of the High Tatra mountains. I was soon at a certain pleasant resort town crowded with tourists.

Tourists, tourists! Now that snow was thawing on all southerly slopes the skiing season was over — yet the swelter and thunderstorms of high summer were still a couple of months away. Apart from a lingering chill, this was a fine time to admire towering white peaks and ramble and climb a bit and sup strong Tatra beer. Many Germans were doing so.

Up aloft, the air would be bitter. Even in summer the higher slopes only warmed to a few degrees above zero. Visibility shouldn’t be a bother. During full summer the sky would cloud over almost every morning, prelude to thunder and lightning by midday, with clear sky only from late afternoon onwards. But not as yet.

I had to visit the nearest flying ground of the Slovak Aeroclub to present my credentials. The amber room might be invisible, but I wouldn’t be. I had to demonstrate my sail and my :skills, finesse a permit, sign a waiver, take out an expensive insurance bond in case the Mountain Rescue Service needed to be called out. I promised not to drift over the backs of mountains, to flee at the sight of any thundercloud forming to conduct myself sensibly.

In the hotel where I stayed, vegetables seemed almost entirely absent from meals. Duck with bread dumplings; pork with bacon dumplings. Had these people never heard of a pea or a carrot? Ah, explained a waiter, former Communist mismanagement of agriculture was to blame. I imagined innumerable fields devoted to a monoculture of dumpling bushes.

Isabelle would have liked it here. My Amber was a flesh-eater.

She certainly didn’t bite or scratch when we quarrelled about the idea of her leaving Max, Rather, she hugged and caressed herself, not like some wounded animal., but more as though she was making love to herself before my estranged eyes — becoming almost oblivious to me, inhabiting some domain dominated by her own senses, exhibiting a radical selfishness which chilled and shocked me more than rage would have done. I should feel compelled to reach out and promise anything whatever if only she would return from her self-imposed autistic exile.

How could she, who was usually so out-going, suddenly go inward thus? I felt that there was a madness in her — not the mad of anger, of a whim denied, of desire denied, but the mad of unreason.

This wasn’t the Amber whom I had known hitherto. Maybe here was proof that she did truly love me with a consuming passion, a passion which, nonetheless, she had chosen to experience for the frisson of it — a passion by which I must in turn fatally be captivated. (And I was, I was; so why was I denying her?)

That afternoon she departed more like a sleepwalker than a woman incensed.

I know that that same night I dreamed forebodingly of driving the several miles to the airfoil shed and doing such-and-such to one of the cutting-edge craft by torchlight, by dreamlight. In a dream details are elusive. Spurred by trauma, my subconscious mind must have intuited a structural flaw in the newest design. Certainly I woke in my own bed.

Next morning Isabelle was all smiles. Water under the bridge.

On the low hilltop from which we liked to launch, Max and I both observed her closely as she warmed up and stretched to loosen her body. Kneeling she strapped in and hooked up. Hang-check, harness check. From the nose-wire a thread of red yarn fluttered, reading the breeze. Hands on the uprights of the control bar, she stood up under sail. She stared well ahead then ran at top speed. She was airborne into the wind rising up the hillside. Perfect.

I was rising over ascending spruce trees. Look: a family of deer down below!

Above, a few patches of cirrocumulus spread wispy fans like lacy bleached corals, tinted faintly by my amber spectacles. I still felt overheated in my thermal underclothes and woolens and gloves and anorak. Well and good! I’d be shivering soon.

Soon enough, spruce was yielding to dwarf pines. As I gained more altitude the pines thinned out. The ground was increasingly jagged and snowy. One never flies the ground, one flies the air. Soon the air was chili, but chill air must still lift over hills, over soaring heights, because of catabatic convection flow. Earlier, occasional poles had marked tracks. No longer, up above the bushline. Earlier, I’d seen dozens of hikers. Now it was as if the whole world had emptied, or as if an alternative world had replaced the previous one. An azure mountain lake on my left. Was some ice still afloat there? I left the lake behind.

A pulse thudded in the pendant tucked above my heart. I found myself looking in vain for blue flowers amidst the snow and cliffs.

In a ravine, through my antique specs, at last I perceived the room —aglow and entire and golden amidst bald boulders with snowy beards and snowy ruffs. Lifting a hand from the control bar, I thrust up my glasses briefly. Of course the room hid itself, chameleon that it was, phenomenon of the realm of amber.

With amber vision I saw it again so clearly. By a shift of perception, through its ceiling I spied the chandeliers hanging downward almost like reflections. No corset sustained the room nor did any betraying litter of discarded crates lie around — of course not. The room was radiance as much as reality.

Almost, I hesitated. Almost, I fled from the mountains back to the world of a Range Rover and The Wings;, the empty Wings, and Max, coping bravely with grief. But my dreams were welling in me, replacing actuality with a more exquisite mode of being.

I began a figure-eight descent, to and fro within the ravine. I intended to alight with a final decisive flare alongside the room. Whether down-gusts buffeted me or the magnetism of so much amber pulled me like a leaf, I found myself swooping down upon the ceiling — surely to shatter it.

Not so, not so. I sprawled upon the amber parquet floor. Above me the allegorical ceiling was intact. I couldn’t recall unhooking, yet through a window I saw my sail being borne up and away out of the ravine by wind like a great bird set free.

Scrambling to my feet, I tore off gloves and harness and anorak. It was warm within the room. Within, within! I was inside the treasure room where tsars had stood.

Unable to focus upon any single particular, I scanned the wall mosaics and all the intricate carvings of trees and garlands and shells. So many scenes of nature, so many Gods and Goddesses and other personae. How the faceted amber drops of the chandeliers twinkled. How brightly the clear red plaques shone amidst surrounding yellows and browns. In the giant gilt-framed mirrors at either end of the room I saw myself receding toward infinity. Three windows reached to the floor, their frames richly carved…

Already the ravine had vanished. Dense mist stroked those windows. Condensation trickled. A cloud had nestled down so quickly. Nothing was visible outside.

There were three doors of the folding variety, with ornate frames. I hurried to one but it wouldn’t budge. Nor would the next. Nor the third.

Amber. Where was she?

Why, there she was in one of the mirrors — standing alongside one of my more distant reflections! Isabelle was dressed in the same jeans and black polo-neck sweater as on the day she had died. Her flaxen rope of hair hung forward over one shoulder and down her breast, suggestive of a noose not yet knotted. Her expression was weird. She took a step forward.

She did not give rise in the mirror to multiples of herself. She was the one and only. When I glanced back, she wasn’t present in the other mirror at all.

She had advanced again. Now she was only four reflections away from me. Could she see me here in the gleaming room?

“Why did you kill me?” she called out, stepping closer. “Why, Peter, why?”

“I dreamed that I did,” I admitted. “But how could I have done so? How could I?”

I had strayed closer to the mirror. She was so near to me now. She shook her head at my answer. The flaxen rope swung.

“Look around me,” I begged. “It’s the amber room.” All the decorations to admire! All the allegories to decode!

I was still wearing my antique spectacles, bewitched by some psychic whilst Hitler’s empire of death distintegrated. If I snatched the specs off, would she evaporate — and the treasure room too? Would there only be ravine, and a cold hill’s side?

Could I embrace her in here, one last forgiving and delirious time? I opened my arms in tentative invitation. She stepped toward me, smiling eerily, the rope of hair slack in her hands. She was intending to loop it around my neck to exact the perfect revenge inside this locked room! The means of death would completely elude any deduction…

Momentarily I shut my eyes so as not to see her accusing eyes upon me.

What I experienced was the perfusion of myself by another being, by the total essence of another, in a way that surely no other lovers had ever encountered before. I was Isabelle herself, full of memories other than Peter’s.

Yet already this essence was being peeled away, emptying me of her so that only half of myself seemed to remain. I fought in vain to remember a tiny fraction of this ephemeral stupendous event. It had been as though a God, or a Goddess, had entered me briefly, granting me a whole extra life filled with incidents and passions. I had not encountered death but its opposite: a doubling of all my days!

Gone from me already, in a robbery absolute, a devastating theft!

Amber wasn’t in the room. She was in the other mirror. Her back was to me now. She was pacing away along the line of my reflections.

“Isabelle, come back!” I cried. Vaguer and vaguer she became. Impossible to see her any longer. Only me, and me, and me.

She had never even been in the room with me in physical form. Only her essence had passed through the room, and through me, astonishing me with the fullness of a life I had quenched, then abandoning me utterly. Oh this should be the room where murderers were locked, in so elegant a hell! How I wept for myself, and my reflections wept with me.

When I took off the glasses, the room remained. Those doors wouldn’t open. Those windows were blanketed by cloud — nor would they break.

I saw her fall from the sky. The failed hang-glider had begun to spin like a sycamore leaf…

I must have been eleven when I first began to dream of flying. . On the way through Immigration an encounter occurred…

Thus it was that I acquired Pavel as my minder…

Neither hunger nor thirst affect me.

I did not notice at first, but after each reliving one of my reflections disappeared from one of the two great mirrors. Initially the queues still looked much the same, but as time repeated itself those queues began visibly shortening.

Now only three reflections remain in one mirror, and two in the other. After five more relivings I shall be on my own.

I live entirely for the brief moment of her passing at the very end of each repetition, of which I always fail to embrace a thousandth part. She wells within me; then the well runs dry.

When my last reflection vanishes, I shall lie down upon the lustrous parquet floor. I shall close my eyes and blindly await, at last, the tangible brush of her rope of hair across my throat. Then I shall truly be joined with her in death.

It can’t be that she won’t come! It can’t be that I shall simply stay here in the room of my ,dreams with no image of myself to be seen!

Soon another repetition will begin.

All has gone. Only the more. remains. I shall lay me down. First I shall strip myself, commencing with the pendant.

But wait!

In Gran-Annie’s bead I spy myself. I gesture, and the minuscule Peter gestures.

I’m lying on the parquet floor, motionless, tiny, surrounded by amber.

Please pick me up, Isabelle. Please wear me. Wear me in whatever realm you inhabit now.

Table of Contents

Start