The Amber Rooms

by Ian Hocking

  Soso nodded. ‘Of course. Please, take this.’

  ‘I don’t drink.’

  ‘You must,’ said Kamo. ‘It is a tradition.’

  ‘Please,’ said Soso. He gave a shy smile. ‘You would hurt the feelings of your host.’

  Saskia and Kamo each took a glass of wine.

  Soso raised his. ‘“One who journeying / Along a way he knows not, having crossed A place of drear extent, before him sees A river rushing swiftly toward the deep, And all its tossing current white with foam, And stops and turns, and measures back his way.”’

  From the Iliad, thought Saskia, not the Odyssey.

  ‘To journeys, Penelope. And, at the close of many adventures, to coming home.’

  ‘Coming home,’ she said.

  Kamo muttered, ‘Home.’

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Saskia opened her eyes on a pie-crust horizon moving in the heat. Nine months had passed since that meeting with Soso. She and Kamo were sitting on horses. They overlooked Tiflis from a ridge in the slow, loose foothills of the Holy Mountain. Saskia was dressed as a cavalry captain. Her moustaches had been applied with stage glue. Her boots and jodhpurs were fine quality and a Circassian sabre lay against the withers of her horse.

  Kamo turned to her. His left eye was swollen shut.

  ‘Well, do you see them?’

  This is the day of the robbery.

  She remembered her morning ride into the foothills, where she had reconnoitred the approach to Tiflis. Everything was ready. Her job was to brandish the sabre once the stagecoach was identified. The lookout on the roof of Prince Sumbatov’s house would see the flash and alert the Outfit.

  Not again. Will there be all that blood? The screaming?

  Her thoughts were interrupted as Kamo pressed his knuckle against her moustache. ‘It will do,’ he said. ‘Is your corset too tight, Penelope? Can you breathe?’

  ‘Call me Lynx,’ she replied. Her eyes were fixed ahead, straining for the telltale dust.

  Kamo’s horse settled its footing. ‘Don’t be afraid. You handle a horse better than anyone but me. Everything will be fine. And they need you.’

  She ignored his glance. ‘You exaggerate.’

  ‘In the morning, you cannot ride a horse. At lunch, you watch me ride. In the afternoon, you can ride. At supper, you see me performing tricks. By nightfall, those tricks are yours.’

  ‘You exaggerate,’ she repeated. ‘I can’t do your tricks.’

  ‘No tricks today. Unless you call your eagle eyes a trick.’

  ‘Your friends suspect me of collusion with the authorities.’

  ‘When it comes to it, they suspect everyone. Don’t speak of it.’ He added, peevishly, ‘They’re your friends, too.’

  Saskia watched the threads of chimney smoke. She could stop this. She could ruin the robbery and destroy the promising career of Joseph Stalin. There would be nothing left for him but exile from the Party—if he was lucky. More likely, someone would come for him. A trusted man like Kamo, for example, could get close enough to carry out the orders, reluctantly signed no doubt, of that man waiting in the north, of Lenin. But whereas her spirit had felt fully shackled to her body in the Amber Room of the Second World War, and during her first meeting with Stalin, she now felt like a ghostly passenger.

  ‘Do you still have your dreams?’

  ‘Which dreams?’

  ‘When we first met, you told me that you could remember a time before you walked out of the east, but that you did not trust those memories. They came to you in dreams: lighter-than-air machines, panaceas, food in abundance.’

  Saskia rubbed the shoulder of her horse. Yes, she remembered those dreams. Their edges had cut her and the blood was sanity. She had denied herself as a protective measure. She had untied the knot of 2023 and let it float away. The blank slate of her mind had been set for ideas: Marxism, brigandage, the very drive to change the world.

  She saw a distant, turning worm of dust, larger than the others on that busy highway, and outpacing them.

  ‘It’s time.’

  ‘How fast?’ Kamo gasped.

  ‘It’s difficult to tell.’

  ‘You said you’d be able to tell.’ Kamo leaned forward, but the movement disturbed an unseen wound in his neck. He hissed. ‘Fuck my carelessness.’

  ‘It’s difficult to see,’ she said, holding her voice low. ‘We have ten minutes. Maybe longer, if they slow.’

  ‘They won’t slow. How many?’

  Saskia concentrated on the black dot. She felt an expansion of the percept, though she saw no magnification. There were two Cossack guards in front of the stagecoach and two behind. Another two galloped alongside. She saw a rifle inside the carriage, and at once she understood that there was a soldier inside, along with the cashier, Kurdyumov, and the accountant, Golovnya.

  ‘As many as we thought.’

  ‘Make the signal.’

  Saskia withdrew the Circassian sabre and held it high. She caught the sun on the blade once, twice, three times.

  ‘Well?’ asked Kamo. ‘Did they see it?’

  ‘There’s nobody on the roof of the palace.’

  ‘What? Damn him, the traitor. Give me the sabre. I’ll make the signal. Go.’

  Saskia spurred her horse down into the switchbacks. Grit and scree loosened beneath the hooves but the steady warmblood had her trust and soon they entered a rhythm where her balance spoke to the animal. Moments came when she almost fell from the saddle, but she relaxed, with a sure concentration, and the rapport was re-established. The heat grew as they descended. Sweat ran into her corset and rubbed her forehead raw beneath her plumed cavalry hat.

  As the slopes flattened, she entered the city through washing lines and fields. Then she was into the streets. The crannies and turns were foetid with spice, urine, horse shit and dust. Its people were, too, a Caucasian miscellany of Georgian, Russian, Armenian and Azeri. Saskia still labelling. Still counting like the doomed accountant Golovnya.

  Saskia pulled the horse through a corner and trotted down Golovinsky Avenue. There were gendarmes and militiamen on every corner. They knew something was afoot. Saskia kept her back straight. Her jaw twisted a little to the left. She rode with the airs of a captain to suit her stolen clothes and her glued sideburns. Outside the opera house, Patsia Goldava stopped the horse and twirled, girlishly, a parasol. Saskia saw that her parasol was open. It was a signal: Nothing yet. Saskia corrected her by touching her cap.

  ‘They’re coming?’ Patsia whispered, shocked.

  Saskia grimaced at her stupidity. Within hearing distance were four blue-uniformed gendarmes and a Cossack. Saskia gunned the horse and passed Patsia before the girl could apologise and double her mistake.

  Yerevan Square, which Soso had indicated to her on that first day, was a sun-beaten flatness spotted with water carriers, carts, prostitutes, and lazy men watching the world. Saskia noticed Cossacks and gendarmes looking out from the protection of the Caravanserai, whose shadows cut deep in the bright sunlight. Beside them, some urchins were playing rough-and-tumble in the dust. She recognised them as Soso’s message carriers. She had seen them only that morning outside the Adamia tavern, as, inside, Kamo repeated the plan to his crew of roofless princes, the poor, the adventurous, and the political: the Outfit.

  She glanced back to the Military Headquarters. Patsia Goldava had joined with Anneta Sulakvelidze and they made a pretty pair. Both had parasols. Both carried Mauser pistols, hidden.

  In moments, the square would become a scene of turbulence, noise and blood. Saskia could not take a full breath because of the corset. She focused on a young woman crossing the square. Her expensive dress suggested that she was the wife of one of the army officers. Behind her stumbled a crying child. Saskia wondered what the

  (10:32 and eight seconds)

  time was and she stood high and

  (nine)

  could see the roof of Prince Subatov’s palace and, leaning on the balcony rail, the poet Sosel
o—or the Milkman, or the Pockmarked One, or Joe Pox, or Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili—who was not yet calling himself Stalin as far as Saskia could tell. Had he seen the signal? Was Kamo still brandishing the sword? There Soso stood like a man set to deliver a monologue over the coming sorrows.

  At the corner of the square, Bachua Kupriashvili folded his copy of the Georgia Arrow. That was signal that the stagecoach had been sighted. When it approached, he would lower the newspaper. Saskia trotted towards the street that led to the square. There were too many people. They would be trampled when the stagecoach came. Water-carriers rested near the gutter covers. A white-robed trainee priest crossed the street eating bread. Saskia growled at Kupriashvili. It was his job to limit civilian casualties. She drew a pistol and fired it at the sky.

  ‘In the name of the Tsar, clear the street!’

  Her scream—highly pitched for a cavalry captain—was met with indifference by the citizens of Tiflis. Only the gendarmes and policeman—and the members of the Outfit who marked them—looked at her. Those in the Outfit did not care to hear her instructions. She was just the Prussian favoured by Soso. They had seen Bachua Kupriashvili fold his newspaper, and they were set to liberate a good deal of money.

  She pulled her horse into a rear and fired another shot.

  ‘Clear the square!’

  She looked at Kupriashvili.

  He lowered his newspaper.

  So she dug into the horse and trotted along the boulevard, scattering the people. They shouted and cursed. A young man reached for her reins but she kicked him aside. A great rumbling sound rushed to her ears and, before she could rollback the horse, the convoy roared into the square. Two Cossacks made the vanguard. Then came the carriages. The first contained the state cashier and accountant. The second bore policemen and soldiers. Last, two Cossacks formed the rear. Saskia shared a look with the nearest Cossack through the dust. He looked at her hair and her uniform and her chest. She spurred her horse after them.

  As the carriages began their turn into Sololaki Street, Saskia looked for Soso on the rooftop of Prince Subatov’s mansion. Now. He threw a fist-sized object that scudded across the square, a perfect lob, through the spokes of the first carriage, where it rolled and exploded with a punch that Saskia felt through her horse and in her chest. At once, there was a cloud in Yerevan Square. Before it could clear, Anneta Sulakvelidze ran past Saskia, pulled the fuse on her own grenade, and tossed it, too, under the carriages. It detonated with the same simple thunder. Three more, from three nameless men, followed it.

  Saskia looked at a Cossack who slid towards her through the murk. He had no legs. Her horse backed away.

  She counted each of the bombs and reached ten before her horse lost its calm and shrugged her off. She fell onto wooden splinters and bent nails. Rolling, she stood and pulled the bows on her coat and let it fall open to her pistol. She approached the hopeless Cossack. He nodded for the bullet and she put it through his head.

  Sand was falling from the sky. The cloud began to disperse. She walked in a circle. Where was her horse?

  Her left shoulder-board disappeared in a puff of fabric. Saskia turned and shot a rooftop policeman through the arm. Then she walked through the dust, spitting it and still deaf, and alternated fire into the three maimed Cossacks. The first carriage had lost its windows and its shape. Its horses were gutted and still. She shot them. In the second carriage, all the soldiers and policeman were dead. They had exploded where they sat.

  A footman walked around the edge of the carriage. Saskia did not kill him but Kupriashvili dropped him with an executioner’s shot to the ear and shouted at Saskia, but she could not hear him.

  He was pointing behind her.

  She turned to see the first carriage—and the money—disappearing down the hill to the Soldiers’ Bazaar. How? The horse had lost its belly and carried one of Saskia’s bullets in its head. She aimed another shot at its flank but the eager crew of the Outfit, tantalised by the money satchels, danced after it and spoiled the shot.

  Saskia ran to her horse. Short moments remained until the soldiers and gendarmes posted around Tiflis converged on the square. Her horse refused to move smartly through the debris until she kicked it on. Kupriashvili overtook her at a sprint. She saw him reach the carriage. He was too close to toss his bomb but he did. The explosion threw him against a railing and injured several crouched bystanders. The gut-blown horse toppled and the carriage trundled into the wall of a saloon, where it stopped. Kupriashvili rolled on the cobbles, screaming, holding his ears, calling for Saskia as she now cantered past him.

  Datiko Chibriashvili jumped into the rear of the carriage and lifted a money bag. He paused. Stared at Saskia. Police whistles carried through the air. Rifles were being fired in the pattern that called all gendarmes and militiamen to arms.

  Chibriashvili said, ‘What shall I do with this?’

  Saskia’s reply was interrupted by a familiar voice from the square behind her. She turned to see Kamo circling the smoky, ruined carriage in a stolen phaeton. He held the reins in his left hand and, with his right, emphasised his shouts with shots from a Mauser.

  ‘Here!’ she called.

  The phaeton almost toppled as Kamo swung into the street. He clattered to a halt next to Saskia. His horses nodded against their harnesses.

  ‘To me,’ he said.

  Saskia jumped into the carriage and helped Datiko fling the satchels at Kamo. Each was half the size of a man. Kamo fired his Mauser at approaching militiamen and Saskia landed aboard, pushing Kamo so she could sit alongside him on the driver’s bench and they cantered away. The gendarmes shot at them but their bullets told and the sun was brighter and Kamo told Saskia that he loved her, even with the whiskers.

  She smiled.

  They took the first street at a canter and the second at a trot. She hid her face as they passed the Viceroy’s Palace. Cossacks were mounting their horses and turning under conflicting orders barked by their commanders. The Deputy Police Chief, Balabansky, stared at Kamo and raised his gun, but Saskia, remembering her role of cavalry captain, pointed to the insignia on her shoulder and shouted, gruffly, ‘The money is safe! Secure the square!’

  The Police Chief paused. Then he waved them through.

  He will regret that. In a few days, he will shoot himself through the heart.

  Kamo drove to the joiner’s yard on Vtoraya Goncharnaya Street. The old woman who owned the yard, Babe Bochoridze, closed the gate and called to the gendarme across the street that it was over. Captain Zubov nodded and walked away without firing a shot. He was due a share of the spoils.

  In the darkness of the stall, Kamo took Saskia’s hand and kissed it.

  ~

  They forced themselves to eat a small lunch. Shots and fire bells could still be heard. Later, she walked through a house and swapped hats with Patsia Goldava. She crossed the street by hopping a small gap between one second-floor window and the next; accepted a cloak from the sombre Kupriashvili, and two kisses of congratulation; and re-emerged on the steep cobbles without the agents on her tail, still moving, always moving.

  ~

  At midnight, she joined Kamo in the house of Bochoridze and his wife, Maro. The three were sewing the stolen money into a mattress. She led Kamo to the Kura and they both washed. It was icy and good and reminded Kamo of the high mountains. His wounded eye wept and she covered it with a palm and shushed him. When they returned to the house, Bochoridze and his wife did not look up. Revolutionaries might die now or later. They took the mattress to the high, quiet observatory where Soso had once worked and laid it on the couch of the director. Then the dawn came from the tops of the mountains down.

  ~

  Saskia found a samovar in the kitchen of the Tiflis Physical Observatory and made coffee. She wore a skirt and a loose blouse. Her clothes would shock, but the observatory was unstaffed. The Director and his students had been paid off. The coffee was syrupy and black. She put a covered cup next to Kamo—he had slept
on the money mattress, and still dozed—and walked onto the balcony. There she stood at the overlook in the few, short hours of cold before the heat came with the brightening sun and confined climate of Tiflis.

  She took a full breath of Caucasia. The bare mountains were cut by the Kura, which in turn divided the city. She was too far to see individuals without concentrating. She considered Yerevan Square, the gardens, the handsome bridges and the cathedrals. One of the cathedrals was Armenian. A steam engine slid into the city. It was bound for Baku on the Caspian. Already, the striking of anvils had begun. Plate, guns, swords: easy births each one.

  When Soso arrived, she did not hear him. She hardly felt his lips when he kissed her cheeks and called her his brave Lynx.

  ‘You’ll miss your train to Baku,’ she said.

  Soso leaned on the balcony rail and looked down. He was dressed for travel. ‘Are you hurt?’

  ‘No. How is everyone?’

  ‘They are well.’

  ‘And the civilians?’

  Soso removed his Fedora and knocked its brim against the edge of the rail. It might have been a signal. His feline, amber eyes turned on her.

  ‘A wise man said that public opinion has the same importance for the authorities as a topographical map has for an army commander. We have ceded some ground, nothing more, but have extended the reach of the Party.’

  Saskia looked at him. Extended the reach? It would buy some bribes and support the trinity of inventions that had so catalysed revolutionaries around the world: the high-speed printing press, rail travel, and dynamite. The dead people in the square could hardly be worth that.

  There was no direct challenge in her eyes, but Soso would not fail to perceive her mood. Abruptly, he smiled, and said, ‘Kamo tells me that you cannot die.’

  ‘That’s foolish.’

  ‘But you told him.’

  ‘I was joking.’

  ‘Tell me the story.’

  ‘I will not.’

  Soso shrugged. ‘Perhaps you have a destiny.’

  ‘Who doesn’t?’ she said, though the remark turned her cold. ‘That’s an empty statement.’