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.