The Amber Rooms

by Ian Hocking

  Papashvily shot one more bullet before the pistol struck him below the nose. He snarled and twisted backwards. The sudden turn had more to do with surprise than the force of the throw. However, the pistol was heavy and it caught him fully. He fell to the ground and dropped the lantern.

  Saskia closed the distance. She stamped on his throat with the ball of her foot. It would have killed most men. He gurgled a scream but did not drop the gun. It fired once more. She took his wrist and bit it hard. The hairs tickled her lips. Papashvily released the gun.

  Somewhere, men shouted (two; young; Russian) and dogs barked (two; large; Rottweiler). The men were lookouts posted at the front of the villa. She had thirty seconds until they reached her, if she were lucky. Maybe longer if the dogs were poorly trained.

  Saskia and Papashvily looked at one another. Both were breathing hard. Papashvily smiled. His front teeth were missing and his nose had been flattened.

  ‘If I don’t break you,’ he said, in Georgian, ‘they will.’

  Saskia looked along the villa to the east wing. The lawn there was growing brighter. The first of the men was approaching with his lantern.

  She shot Papashvily through the pair of muscles that formed his calf. He screamed and clutched at it.

  There was a line of trees ahead. It was the southern flank of an orchard. Saskia sprinted to the trees. There she waited with her back to a trunk. Apple. Their blossoms were white against the darkness, and despite the season a sharp wind blew down the hill.

  She thought about the gun. Two bullets left. Two dogs and two men.

  The first dog bounded almost playfully from tree to tree. Saskia tracked it with her muzzle. She steadied the weapon on her forearm, exhaled, and shot the dog through an eye when he was five metres away. The animal skidded and yelped. It worked its jaw as though there was something in its mouth. Then it twisted against the ground, dead.

  She did not see the second dog until it was almost upon her. Through some hunting instinct, it had worked towards her flank while she dealt with the first. Its attack was hard and deliberate. There was no bloodlust. The dog meant to take her cold.

  Its shoulders reflected the moonlight. A bluish-black coat. Rottweiler. Front teeth bared. Slow breath. Silent footfalls. Like a cat.

  Saskia shot it through the chest. The wound glistened like a splash of mud. Undeterred, the dog came on. She turned, knowing she could not outrun it and knowing the dog had the advantage of weight and speed.

  It leapt.

  Jem, Saskia thought.

  The dog knocked her against the tree. Its claws ripped at her coat and its head turned horizontal, the better to grasp her throat.

  Saskia felt a decoupling at her core. The device at the rear of her brain stepped into a faster mode. Her mind was cast upwards, as though it were travelling in an elevator through the tallest building in the world. She looked down on reality—on the meat of her body—and saw it move with the slowness of a giant.

  She heard a buzz. As she rose, higher still, the buzz dropped in pitch until it became the flapping of bird wings.

  The sparrows.

  Where am I? she thought.

  The pain had reduced to its informational component alone. She saw the dog’s jaws snap on the air in front of her nose. The sound was low, like a far away explosion. The skin around its mouth rippled.

  Ute?

  The animal shook its head. Streamers of saliva flew left and right.

  She saw a grey, swirling ground. It passed beneath her. Then she fell towards it. The patterns rushed out to become an immense field of sparrows. Their details were blurred, as though sketched in charcoal. The sound of their calls decreased as she fell until, at length, every bird was silent.

  A sparrow said something.

  It was too far away for Saskia to make out the words.

  What? she said. What did you say?

  She heard a second, closer sparrow repeat the words, but some of the sounds had changed. A third sparrow, closer still, repeated the words. Again they changed. Sparrow after sparrow carried the message to her.

  Sparrow speaks to sparrow speaks to sparrow.

  What are you saying?

  At last, the closest sparrow turned to her and said, ‘Grey growth conceals the anger.’

  What? What?

  Another said, ‘Grade growing covers the rage.’

  Ute, the sparrows are talking to me. What are they saying?

  Below, her arm took position in front of her face and the dog bit her. Its teeth passed through to the bone and locked.

  Scraping.

  The eyes of the dog were pale rings on darkness, like the halo around the moon.

  Saskia felt herself slipping. The fall, when it came, was like a fall in a dream. She tumbled and screamed. The flapping of the unseen sparrow wings blurred into a single tone, and the tone increased in pitch. At the same time, a terrific pain in her arm blotted out all thought, until she was back in her body.

  The dog shook the arm. Once. Twice. With each shake, it rested, stared at her, and snorted great, stinking breaths. Saskia was drowned, deafened, by the hurt in her arm. Blood was running freely into her lap and the edges of her vision were retreating to a tight circle focused on the dog.

  Grim day slew the rage, said a sparrow.

  She had enough focus to think of the men. They were not nearby, as far as she could see. They had sent in the dogs to do the work.

  The dog shook her arm again, but the movement was weaker.

  Colourless, said a sparrow. Ideas.

  Something was happening. The i-Core had acted.

  Sleep, fury.

  Saskia felt overwhelmed with tiredness. It was too much effort to push back with her arm any more. When the dog yawned, allowing her to work the arm off its hook-like lower teeth, she yawned as well.

  Yes, said a sparrow. Sleeping furiously.

  The dog licked its lips and sat. She stared at it in confusion. There was a drunken sway in her torso. For the first time, she felt the wet earth through her skirt and small knots of the apple tree, which had scored her back. The dog had shredded part of her jacket and blouse.

  Her arm, however, was destroyed. While there was no arterial bleeding, the venous return tipped her blood steadily into her lap. She could not feel the outside of her forearm or move her fingers. Saskia understood, without quite knowing how, that the palmar cutaneous branch of the median nerve was severed. She held it to her chest like a child cradling a broken doll.

  The dog stared at her.

  Something twitched in her arm and she hissed with pain.

  What is he waiting for?

  Colourless green ideas slept, said a sparrow.

  What?

  Furiously, said another.

  ~

  Everything is blood. It overwhelms me. But blood alone cannot describe this taste-smell. It is the life recipe of the woman I see. She is dangerous, interesting, forbidden, very much bleeding.

  I shudder.

  Saskia shivered. She could still feel her own mouth. When she licked her teeth, they were straight, and short. But the human body was a ghost, or a recent memory. The more immediate body was that of the dog.

  The blood.

  There is one word for the man. Love. He is everything. I need him.

  As the dog trotted down the hill, slipping between the trees, Saskia felt—

  Pain in my chest. Hurts when I breathe.

  When I lick the blood.

  When I—

  She felt the chest muscles bouncing. Her nostrils moved independently now. What is it like?

  When I lick the blood.

  What is it like to be a dog? This dog.

  I see the man. He is clear in the darkness. He holds the lead in a coil and I remember what it means to be whipped by it.

  My chest—

  Saskia gasped and slid sideways. Something had pierced her heart. Suddenly, her cheek lay against the wet earth, and she forced her eyes shut. I must not scream, she thought. I mu
st not—

  Yes, I see the man. I hear his breathing, the movement of his clothes as he stands there, and the wet noises of his mouth and lips. His body is tense.

  This is my man.

  Now, he is crouching.

  Saskia does not want to experience what she knows to be coming. She feels nauseous and unable to stop the dog. Perhaps this is true; perhaps only the i-Core controls it now.

  The pops and whistles of human speech emerge from his mouth. They mean he is pleased. I run my paws up his chest as we greet each other, and this signals to my man that he is in danger, but it is too late.

  His throat comes away in my mouth.

  Saskia rolled to her side and vomited.

  He is making noises again. The breath-sound noises. They are loud and meaningless, but some element of them speaks to me; I must shout with him.

  Shout.

  She heard the dog bark.

  Shout.

  Another bark.

  The blood gets in my nose. I sneeze. It is warm. Like the blood of the woman, it is particular to my man, a recipe of him alone, and the ways the juices mix are his secrets.

  The secrets spill out. I hear them patter on the ground. They are rain.

  What is it like to be my man?

  What is—

  ~

  Saskia sat up. She worked her jaw and blinked, screwing her eyes shut each time. She felt heavy, smothered by her clothes, and limited by her human nose. She was cold and uncertain of her role in the murder of the dog’s owner. Did the i-Core possess her, as it had possessed Cory? He had believed that his mind was his own. But that was untrue. His mind had been a cartoon of its former self. It had been a structure running within the i-Core and no more a real mind than blueprints were a real building.

  No, she thought. I don’t believe that. He was real.

  I am real.

  ‘You’re a tough one.’

  Saskia blinked again. She looked up to see the last of the three men. He was dressed in tweeds and a night cloak. The clothes were new. Someone had given him cash and told him to blend in.

  ‘Not going to talk?’ he asked. The words were Russian but the accent Finnish. Saskia might have believed the man had been sent by Lenin himself, if Lenin ever handled these things personally.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, in English. She could not help him.

  ‘What?’

  The dog was silent until its last footfalls: eight of them, drum roll sounds of crushed moss and leaves. It exhaled when it jumped, just as a sniper will exhale at the shot. The man was slammed sideways by the impact. His head struck the tree, and this, she guessed, killed him before the dog bit the abdomen and the legs as though searching for something. When the dog reached his face and tugged out his cheek, probing the clenched teeth with its tongue, Saskia turned aside.

  I am real, she thought.

  The Count had spoken of a Peugeot Bébé. Saskia rose and walked unsteadily to the wooden garage at the east of the villa. There, where the eating sounds were muted, she found the vehicle amongst draped motorcycles. She wound the crank. Her fatigue was suffocating. Sleep, when it came, would be abyssal.

  As the automobile rolled downhill, the dogs of neighbouring properties began to bark, disturbed by the buzzing of the small combustion engine. The Bébé had no rear view mirror, so Saskia turned in her seat to watch the dog, her dog, trotting after the car. She opened the throttle to its fullest extent and drove on.

  ~

  The dreams of that night were rich with sparrows. Saskia rotated in space, as though falling, or in orbit around a vast object she could not see. The sparrows were sometimes in her eyes, but mostly in her mauled forearm—where a hunting hawk might rest—struggling to peck at the bad blood.

  She awoke once. It was night and she had not been discovered in her hiding place in the hayloft of an isolated barn. As she urinated near the open door, she considered her wounded arm in the moonlight. It looked as though it had been healing for a week. She could ripple all the fingers. The nerves, too, were finding their mates across the gap.

  It was her left wrist that hurt more. When she tugged off the sock and examined the stump, holding it through the barn door for the light, she saw that the stitches of the skin were being undone. Doubtless, billions of tiny machines were crawling all over them. Was the i-Core powerful enough to reconstruct her missing hand? The notion unsettled her. It reminded her too much of the trotting dog.

  No, not that, she thought. Stop it.

  A foreign thought stepped into her mind. It could only have come from the i-Core. She saw two birds in flight against the dawn. The second bird was injured but had enough strength to travel in the slipstream of the first.

  No. That is mine. This is me.

  The injured bird fell.

  Chapter Seven

  By the afternoon of the following day, Saskia had completed the ten-hour journey to Monte Carlo, where she finessed her plan while drinking an espresso in Le Café de Paris, which overlooked much of Monte Carlo and abutted the Hôtel du Paris and the casino. Her right arm had fully healed. Her amputation remained just that.

  She had spent the Count’s money—intended for bribes and other disbursements—in a waterfront boutique. She had even bought a postcard for Yusha, but she had not posted it. Did he think she was dead? It would be better that he did.

  Now, over this perfect coffee, she watched cooling, autumn Monaco. It made her think of St Petersburg, where less was not more. Her eyes moved again to the casino: a fortress of competing architectural styles; hierarchical; symmetrical; ripe.

  Yes, St Petersburg. She longed for it, too.

  ~

  ‘And two teaspoons of Maraschino.’ Her voice was raised to be heard over the crowd in the casino. ‘Very good thus. Do not shake the glass! Let each cordial show its own place.’ A nod with half her head. ‘That, my clumsy friend, is a pousse-café.’

  ‘May I try it, Mademoiselle Carrault?’

  She made a winding gesture with her fingers. The waiter—well spoken, pretty, likely a prostitute—took a metal cup from beneath the glass bar and poured some of the cocktail into it. He sipped.

  ‘Good?’ she said.

  The waiter looked embarrassed. Saskia laughed. Her delight was in character but true.

  ‘It grows on you,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, it does.’

  ‘Well, sayonara.’ She hated this word, but its use was common among the clique within which her fictional self—a bored French straycat, likely rude, certainly idle—found a dull but tolerable existence.

  ‘Good luck, Mademoiselle,’ he said. There was innocence in his smile. She hoped he kept it.

  Saskia turned to the floor of the casino. It held more than two hundred people. The stations were busy and the costumes colourful. White nebulae of tobacco smoke hung around the chandeliers. That cliché of the shuttered windows held: to deny the day when it came. In a glance, Saskia noted the games being played. The most popular, by table, was Baccarat Chemin de Fer. That was good.

  She stayed at the bar and sipped her pousse-café as she noted the clockwork of the casino employees. In fifteen minutes, she had them all. There were two hosts. They stood on the gallery to enjoy an elevated view. Each took one half of the room. Next, she looked for the sweepers, those men who walked the casino floors. There were three.

  She moved her attention to the blackjack tables. The nearest, beneath one of the chandeliers, had only two of its six bases free. The dealer used a shoe, not a free deck. This annoyed her because it would be harder to predict the fall of the dealer’s hand, unless she could calculate the number of decks in use.

  An elegant man rose from the nearest blackjack table. Either he had placed a large bet, or he was about to give up. He coughed into his fist and scanned the faces of those around him as he walked away. Saskia took the opportunity to replace him, gliding at a speed just short of unladylike.

  The two players at the remaining two bases stood as she joined the table. She
acknowledged this with a slow blink.

  ‘Mademoiselle Carrault,’ Saskia said.

  ‘Goodrington,’ said the first. ‘This is Barnes.’

  ‘Let me guess,’ she said, in French, ‘you’re alpinists.’

  ‘Alpinists!’ said the first. ‘We are’—he leaned over his gin and tonic—‘alpinists!’

  ‘I know this already,’ she said, shaking their hands, ‘because you are two of the loudest and most drunk people in the house.’

  Goodrington nodded. He stared at her. The tip of his nose made small circles. He said, ‘Alpinists!’

  ‘You charm me.’ This time, she spoke English, in part because it was the language of Shakespeare and she loved the pebble-smooth edges of its sounds. Also, she already disliked the role she had cast for herself. Mademoiselle Carrault was rude and spoiled: a trifle par for this course.

  The flattering mirror behind the dealer reflected her art nouveau ball gown. It had been worth the money: unweighted silk, a lavender-coloured lace over the pigeon chest and throat; the black buttons on the arm-length sleeves; the prominent waist sash. Only her handwarmer marked her as eccentric. Within it, her right hand worried the stack of chips.

  ‘You will oblige me,’ she said to the dealer, who was an old gentleman with a Grenadier’s moustache, ‘with a reprisal of the house variation.’

  ‘Of course, Mademoiselle,’ he said. He also spoke in English, no doubt in a vain attempt to reinforce the rules to the alpinists, who had made little effort to observe them thus far. ‘A higher hand than my own will pay at a ratio of three-to-two. Late surrender is permissible. I win ties. I do not receive a hole card. Finally, I am required to stand on seventeen and draw to sixteen.’

  ‘Very well,’ she said.

  Goodrington announced, ‘Very well,’ to the room at large.

  Chapter Eight

  Looking up from the open platform at the rear of first class, as her train departed, it seemed to Saskia that the iron hood of Monaco’s only railway station did not move. This made her think about a private docent at the University of Berne, who had a theory about special relativity, and she smiled. The journey to Russia would take five days. Nine hours to Zurich, then three to Stuttgart, a short hop to Mannheim, then two days from Wjasma to Moscow, followed by a last five-hour leg to St Petersburg.