The Amber Rooms

by Ian Hocking

  She called to him in French and moved between the drifting cows, touching them as she went.

  He called back, ‘Good morning, madam.’

  Saskia smiled. ‘I walked a long way today.’

  ‘How far?’

  ‘I got off the train at Nyon.’

  ‘That’s a long walk,’ he said. His eyes resumed their pleasant disengagement and returned to the book.

  ‘Do you have any food?’

  He looked up. There was a studied amusement in his voice when he said, ‘I have my lunch, madam.’

  Saskia had reached him. He was a head shorter than her. His spine was a little curved and his blood flushed arrhythmically through his neck. He had a heart problem. Saskia popped another berry into her mouth. She smiled.

  ‘Don’t be scared.’

  ‘I’m not scared.’

  Saskia reached inside her jacket. She withdrew the pocket watch with the radium dial that she had stolen from the Count’s observatory.

  ‘This is yours if you will give me your lunch and do me a favour.’

  The boy scratched his head with a fast, practised gesture that betrayed his lice. It made Saskia think of the i-Core. He licked his lips and nodded.

  ‘It’s lovely.’

  ‘It is a rare example,’ said Saskia, ‘and you may have it. But not yet. I need a rifle. Do you see the hut on the ridge above?’

  He laughed. ‘Of course.’

  ‘Bring me a rifle and your ammunition at midday.’

  ‘Midday. One hour.’

  ‘Oh, and some milk.’

  ‘Two bottles?’

  ‘One is fine.’

  ~

  It was gone midday when Saskia stood in the cool of that hut, higher still on the mountain. The hut was earth floor, timber and mottled glass held together with moss. She looked through the window to the meadows and snow-fields on the mountain opposite.

  The boy was in the doorway. He held the rifle against his hip. This close, he smelled of his animals.

  ‘The rifle belongs to Carl. You need to be careful with it.’

  Saskia opened the window. A breeze offered the comfort of cool air. She licked her lips. She looked into the bluish air between the meadow and the far mountain. Her breath slowed. Yes, it was warm in the hut. She scratched away a droplet of sweat from her chin.

  ‘Madame,’ he said, formally, ‘will you tell me your name?’

  Saskia did not turn from the window. She said, ‘Do you want to know? Trentenaire.’

  Thirty-year-old.

  ‘Oh,’ he said.

  She took string from her pocket and retied her hair. Then she turned and accepted the rifle. It was a modern Mauser with a bolt action, ramp sight and shoulder strap. She tested the action. It slid easily. The rifle cocked on opening, not closing, which meant that the rate of fire was slower than a Lee-Enfield rifle, a weapon she had once used in Tiflis.

  ‘Trentenaire,’ he said, ‘do you want to hurt me?’

  Saskia blinked. All the threads of her mind wove to here, now, and the yielding eyes of the boy. She put the gun on the table. Then she took his head in her hands and kissed his forehead.

  ‘Never in life,’ she said. ‘Never in life. But you have to do one more thing for me. Do you know The Garden of Swans near Bastions Park?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I want you to knock on the door. Wake the neighbourhood if you have to. But tell the landlord to take a message for Soso.’

  ‘Soso.’

  ‘Clever boy. The message is: “The Lynx wants her cut”. Can you remember that? Take the watch. It’s yours, but it is unlucky. Sell it quickly.’

  ‘Will I need to buy Carl another gun?’

  ‘It’s a distinct possibility.’

  ~

  During the afternoon, Saskia waited on the porch. The high woods seeped with life. She had used string to tie her skirt into half-trousers, and she had drunk the cowherd’s milk but was too anxious to eat any of the cheese. Later, she raised and swung the rifle to gauge its weight and balance. Then she practised the bolt action. Each repetition scored her brain a thousandfold until the working of the mechanism was an automatic behaviour that followed naturally from her heft of the rifle. She placed the butt in the pit of her shoulder and tracked birds left to right across the empty space above the meadow. She tested the shoulder strap beyond the force it would need to take if she unslung it aggressively. The cowherd had provided her with two stripper clips of ammunition. There were too few bullets to fully test the range and accuracy of the weapon, but she walked one hundred metres from the hut, turned, aimed at a whorl in the wood of the door, and fired. The rifle had little kick. Inspection revealed that the bullet had struck the centre of the whorl. It had not passed through the door.

  She waited.

  ~

  A man approached the hut at the close of the afternoon. Saskia heard his footfalls and his breaths and saw birds rise ahead of him. Unseen, she entered the hut and removed her skirt and blouse. Then she thumbed the rifle’s safety catch and waited behind the door. The minutes passed. The man approached the hut and called for Ms Tucholsky. Saskia blinked. She heard him try the window. It was lashed shut. Finally, he opened the door and walked into the hut. Saskia struck the back of his head with the rifle and closed the door beneath him.

  Grisha lay in the dust and showed her his empty hands. He wore a tweed outfit that spoke to greater wealth than he had known the year before in St Petersburg, when he was the master of a illegal press, and the would-be killer of Judjuna Mikhailovna, alias of Saskia Brandt, but his impression remained that of a school bully.

  ‘It’s you,’ he said. The horror of his surprise twisted his face. ‘They said down in Caucasia that you could not be killed. They said …’

  Saskia remembered the unusual taste of the beef that Grisha had fed her, and the fever whose dreams had seemed to grow behind her eyes, and the satisfaction this man had taken in her murder. But how had this happened to Saskia Beta, with her two hands and her toys like Ego and the yellow glasses?

  ‘You’re as lucky as me,’ she said. ‘Robespierre shot you, didn’t he?’

  ‘Who is Robespierre? A codename for someone?’

  Saskia scrutinised his expression. Grisha had truly never heard that name in a contemporary context.

  ‘We don’t have much time,’ she said, covering him with the rifle. ‘You’re going to take off your clothes and put on my dress.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’ His hair, which was parted and oiled, had fallen to one side. His cheeks were red. ‘Why are we meeting again? How did it come to this?’

  ‘It’s someone’s idea of a joke,’ said Saskia.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Soso.’

  ‘I don’t know him.’

  This time, he was lying.

  ‘Put the dress on.’

  ‘Listen to yourself,’ he said. His temples ran with sweat. ‘You were once with us, were you not? You want to undermine the coming dictatorship of the proletariat. We’re fighting for that. You’re fighting against it.’

  ‘Don’t tell me what I’m fighting for,’ she said. ‘Now, get up.’

  Grisha was slow to rise.

  ‘If I go out there …’

  Saskia raised her eyebrows. ‘What? What would happen if you go out there?’

  ‘Judjuna …’

  ‘Let me ask you something,’ said Saskia. ‘Am I to be interrogated, or shot out of hand?’

  Grisha’s mouth bent with anger.

  ‘Cry, Grisha,’ she said. ‘See if your tears run red, as mine did when you tied me like a pig.’

  Saskia struck him in the groin with the rifle. He gasped and clamped his legs to his chest.

  ‘They only want to talk to you,’ he said.

  ‘What could I possibly tell them? Something of philosophy or mathematics?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Grisha collapsed to the floor. He pressed his palms into his eyes. ‘I don’t know.’

  Saskia could
not wait while he composed himself. She dug the barrel of her rifle into the dress and dealt it across Grisha’s shoulder. Sobbing, he removed his tweed jacket.

  She watched him.

  ‘All of it.’

  ~

  The evening had not yet come to the mountainside, but Saskia could see, through the barricaded window, a dull cloud shadow approaching the hut. Its edges haloed in the moments when the last of the sun shone. Within the hut, Grisha had completed his transformation. He was hunched and pitiful.

  ‘Don’t make me do it,’ he said.

  Saskia made a sympathetic noise in her throat. ‘But they only want to talk to you.’

  ‘What if they don’t?’

  Saskia considered his lanky, angular body and his crooked back. He had not buttoned the dress evenly. His jaw no longer trembled but his eyelids were raw where he had rubbed them dry.

  ‘Is Kamo out there?’ she asked, softly.

  Grisha looked at his bare feet. He said nothing.

  ‘If,’ she continued, ‘it is indeed Kamo, then he will take a full breath when he sees you. He prefers to shoot on the exhale. Are you listening?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That means you might make it if you run fast. He likes to shoot in the back. Don’t look for him ahead of you. He’ll be somewhere behind the hut. My advice is this: Run as fast as you can downhill. If you make it to the town, I suggest you find another method of employment. Your present boss would look upon these two failures—one in St Petersburg and one here—as poor reflections on your abilities.’

  Grisha swallowed. He looked from the door to Saskia and back.

  ‘Don’t do this,’ he said.

  Saskia raised the rifle and indicated the door with her chin.

  ‘I could shoot at your feet, but that would only warn him. Go.’

  Grisha offered her a last look of horror before he charged at the door. When it opened, the brightness was sudden. His silhouette stumbled onto the bald earth where the countless travellers had worn away the grass. Then he was sprinting in a zigzag towards the closest thicket of trees.

  Saskia closed her eyes. She thought of Kamo and imagined looking out through his eyes at herself, sprinting, making a desperate escape. She pictured the barrel as it swept towards her.

  Kamo inhales through his teeth.

  He exhales and—

  Nothing.

  No shot.

  She opened her eyes to see Grisha reach the thicket and dive into the undergrowth.

  Chapter Thirty

  Saskia touched her top lip with her tongue. She had the same feeling that had overcome her during those first steps into the Amber Room: numbness, stage fright, and detached frustration of playing a role in someone else’s plan. Why had Kamo not fired? He was out there. Had to be. Grisha would not have feared for his life otherwise. And Grisha had shown that glimmer of recognition when Saskia mentioned Kamo by name. It could be none other than Simon Ter-Petrossian.

  Above her, a beam creaked. She looked up. A drizzle of dust played into her eyes.

  Was Kamo on the roof? No, that is a mistake he would not make. He valued stealth too highly. If he was not on the roof, what had made the sound? Second person perhaps. Why the second person? The conclusion of her thought followed before she had truly derived it. Kamo wanted her to think he was on the roof. Why? Because it would preoccupy her while he—

  She remembered herself saying to both Kamo and Soso, ‘Where does a lynx store its spoils?’

  The tempo of her thoughts doubled, doubled again, and she lived a slow minute in the quarter-second it took for her eyes to saccade on the silhouette, the inevitable silhouette in the doorway, of Kamo. He was dressed as a clerk from bowler to boots. She had time to blink before his pistols flared—left, right—and one bullet roared past her cheek. The echoes washed around the hut as though the space were a church. It was when she had blinked again, and seen that Kamo wore a lopsided smile, that she understood one of those echoes had been the discharge of her own rifle. She had shot it from the hip.

  ‘Simon,’ she said. She gave the word its English pronunciation, which turned her mind to the English boyfriend, Simon, whose memory had been implanted within her mind those years ago. How trivial a thing to recall now.

  ‘Lynx.’

  His word seemed to lengthen in the failing light, in the tang of cordite.

  His smile continued. It might have been a cue from one actor to another. There was a patience and expectation in his eyes. As though they had been playing a game and it was over. As though they were old friends recalling a high time.

  Saskia frowned at the rifle in her hands. She removed her finger from the trigger and watched her hand open and close the bolt action. A spent shell was ejected.

  Kamo, still smiling, slumped against the doorframe.

  Saskia pulled the trigger.

  His jaw disappeared in a flare of blood.

  She moved towards him, thinking of a fog bank she had once seen at the shore of the Black Sea. Her tuned nerves felt even the cracks of the earth. When she reached him, there was no last moment of confidence. He was dead. Her first shot had passed through his heart, and the second had exploded his jaw. Pieces lay on his shirt and the ground behind him. He sat with his back to the doorframe. His head sagged on his chest. He was no longer Kamo. He was an empty body, spent like his pistols.

  She put one hand over his but made sure that she remained fully in the darkness of the hut. The solution to the trap of her surroundings, and the dangers they contained, lay in sound. She heard a distant cow bell, the purr of a woodpecker, the wind in bending branches, and a thousand diminishing signatures of nature. One of them was human: a growl of thoughtfulness.

  Hmm.

  Saskia thought about the advantages of the hut. They were few. She skipped over the body and sprinted into the meadow, holding her rifle by the stock and the barrel. Before she had taken four strides, a bullet passed her ear. The clap of pain reached her a moment later. She rolled in the grass. The sound was pure enough for her to identify the location of the shooter within a degree. As she completed her roll, she rose in a crouch. Her finger tensed on the trigger, then eased; framed in the ramp site of her rifle, and not twenty metres away, was a young man in a trench coat. He was fussing at the action on his rifle, which had jammed.

  Saskia ran towards him. She drove the stock of her Mauser into his thigh. His leg flew out and he landed on his back. Saskia looked left and right to see if the movement had flushed out more men, but the clearing was empty and still. She took the collar of his jacket and heaved him into the longer grasses where the meadow met the first of the pines. He had not released the rifle, so she put a boot on his chest and tugged it from him.

  ‘Are there any others?’

  His expression moved from shock to fear. Not of her, she guessed, but the men for whom he worked. She waited for his attention to return to her. Then she raised her eyebrows.

  ‘I speak not German,’ he replied in stuttering, thick French.

  His accent was muddy patchwork of Finnish, French and Danish. Saskia began to speak in the dialect used in the southern part of Finland. She found the phonemes difficult to articulate at first. ‘Kamo is dead,’ she said. ‘Art thou the last man?’

  His eyes, which were grey and weathered beyond his years, shrunk with suspicion. He frowned at her clothes, then at her face.

  ‘I know Kamo is dead, Comrade,’ he said. ‘You killed him.’

  She put the barrel of her rifle to the cleft in his chin.

  ‘Art thou the last man?’

  He shrugged, as though this was obvious. ‘Yes, Comrade. Three times yes.’

  As Saskia considered this, she listened once more to the sounds of the mountainside. The volume was building with the dusk. There was not, however, a human note to be heard.

  ‘Tell me where Lenin lives.’

  The Finn stilled the muscles of his face. That told Saskia enough.

  ‘Who?’

  Sas
kia spoke her next three words as though to a child.

  ‘Vladimir. Ilyich. Ulyanov.’

  The Finn looked away. The movement reminded her of Grisha, who was even now running down the mountainside. That worried her. Grisha was running for his life and Saskia would find overtaking him difficult.

  She brought the barrel of her rifle to the Finn’s cheek.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘or I will put a hole in you.’

  He remained looking away. ‘I will die for him.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it. But not today.’ She paused, then asked, ‘Am I a woman?’

  The Finn looked at her, surprised and suspicious. ‘What is this?’

  ‘Just answer me.’ Saskia put the barrel against his black neckerchief. ‘Am I a woman?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Are you a man?’

  He frowned. ‘I think—’

  ‘Try not to,’ she said, smiling. ‘I won’t hurt you if you cooperate. Now, art thou a man?’

  He sighed and said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. And two and two is five.’

  He gave her a confused half-smile. ‘It is four, miss.’

  Saskia remembered how Soso had greeted her in the Amber Room: ‘Lynx, mythic beast who sees through falsehood to the truth beyond.’

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘Now tell me this one thing: art thou the last man?’

  As he replied with one Finnish word, ‘Kyllä,’ Saskia called upon her talents. Automatic, inscrutable processors recalled all his behaviour since the beginning of their conversation. His voice was examined for stress complexes. His breath for micro-hesitation. His eyes for blink rate. She attended to the blood in his lips and the conductivity of his hand, which she had taken in a soft grip. ‘A sorceress,’ he whispered. Those automatic processors parsed his behaviours and plotted them in a non-Euclidean space, within which emerged two attractors: the truth, and falsehood. Saskia could offer his subsequent behaviours to that statistical model and observe which attractor captured them. Scylla the truth. Charybdis falsehood.