by Gayle Lynds
"I see." Sam glanced at her. Now there was more in her oval face. Earlier he'd seen fury, determination, and fear. Now he saw old, deep pain. Something had happened to her, and not just in the last twenty-four hours.
"Why do you think my cousin Vince took your packet?" She pushed her golden brown hair back from her face with one bandaged hand.
"You got me. He's never done anything illegal or shown any indication he's anything but true-blue Company, so I have to accept he really was confiscating it for the director, and that it truly could be on its way to the White House."
She thought about it. "So if Vince took it for the U.S. government, why did Maya Stern take it from my mother? For herself? For someone else?"
His gray eyes danced with excitement. "It makes you wonder, doesn't it? In fact it almost makes you believe someone. . . after more than a half century of rumors, official denials, and endless investigations . . . is trying to tell the world he—or she—knows how to find the Amber Room."
His handsome, muscled face radiated intrigue. She felt herself attracted to his quest, which seemed almost magical. She leaned forward. "You said the last time anyone saw the Amber Room was in that German city—Königsberg. But then the entire room vanished into thin air. Obviously you think you know what really happened. Tell me!"
As he watched the traffic, he began to talk. The words flowed from him with the thrill of someone on the verge of winning the biggest lottery ever. "At the end of World War Two, strange, almost surreal events occurred in Europe that we'll never have full explanations for. Stealing the Amber Room was possible in that atmosphere, even though it would've been the act of a madman. But there was one man who had the power, the lust, and the connections to pull it off. . . ."
1945, EUROPE
It was early January, and snow glistened cold and white in the moonlight around the bombed remains of Königsberg Castle. For two years the Amber Room had been on display here, the pride of Nazi Germany's eastern front. But now the future looked grim. The city was nearly rubble from Allied bombs. Still, the powerful vaults beneath the castle had protected the crates that contained the Amber Room's golden panels.
After midnight as the exhausted residents slept, crack SS special commandos dug through the castle's eight-hundred-year-old shattered stones until they found the vault. They quietly removed twenty-nine wood cases and replaced them with another twenty-nine, all filled with debris to give them the proper weight. They also carted out crates of paintings, jewelry—some of which once belonged to Russian royalty—and other treasures. They replaced the castle's rubble, loaded the crates onto lorries, and drove away to a dark rail spur, where they packed the boxes into enclosed freight cars.
As the battered train engine heated up, the commandos painted the red-and-black SS symbol on each case and on the side of each freight car. Then they added the name that'd guarantee speedy passage on German-controlled rails: Himmler.
It was a name that shot terror into the heart of anyone behind Nazi lines, since Heinrich Himmler was the dreaded chief of the SS, the gestapo, and the Nazi death camps. Unofficially he was also a world-class art thief who particularly prized the early German period. Like Hitler and Goring, he'd confiscated more valuables from across the conquered nations of Europe than he had places to display them. He'd already sent to the safety of a Swiss bank a cache of booty so large it was known as Himmler's Treasure—all stolen from Hungarian Jews.
This train went to Switzerland, too. Throughout the war, Nazis—both privately and for the government—had been sending billions of dollars in stolen gold and cash as well as some $2.5 billion in plundered art into the small, supposedly neutral country. There the bankers guarded it, invested it, sold it, laundered it, and occasionally shipped it on to banks in other nations to await its new masters.
By this time, the Führer was cowering in a bunker beneath Berlin. Still, if he found out about the theft, he'd have Himmler executed.
So Himmler protected himself. He ordered his SS commandos to return to the Soviet front, where entire companies were being wiped out in savage battles with the Soviets. But there were still the cases in the castle's vault. Luck was with Himmler, or perhaps it was simply his legendary good planning. In February or March, the substituted cases were dug out and loaded onto lorries. Instead of his theft being discovered, the cases simply disappeared. Someone else stole them, and there was no way they could report the original theft without revealing themselves. As far as history was concerned, the Amber Room vanished never to be seen again.
To bring down the city, the Soviet Union's ruthless Third Byelorussian Front firebombed it, and on April 10 they stormed it. With that, Himmler's plan had succeeded: His loot was safely in Zurich. His eyewitnesses were dead. And now it was official that the Amber Room was gone. He'd covered everything, or so he thought.
By mid May, the Führer was dead, Germany had fallen, and Heinrich Himmler was escaping with other refugees toward the Alps. He was the most wanted man in Europe. So he disguised himself as a sergeant with the Geheime Feldpolizei. But the Allies put the Geheime Feldpolizei on their blacklist, and they ordered all sergeants and above to be arrested.
It was a green, warm spring day when the British captured Himmler. They had no evidence he was anything but whom his false papers claimed. Still they were suspicious. Two days later, on May 23, they took him to an interrogation center. At lunch he admitted his identity. "Ich bin der Reichsführer-SS." Himmler.
He cracked jokes until that night when he experienced the humiliations of being strip searched and closely interrogated. He had a vial of cyanide hidden in a hole he'd ordered drilled in a molar in the lower right quadrant of his mouth. Shortly before eleven PM, Heinrich Himmler—dark prince of the 'master race,' once an unemployable poultry farmer—bit into it. Fifteen minutes later he was dead.
Now no one alive knew the Amber Room still existed.
When his Zurich banker, Selvester Maas, heard about. Himmler's suicide, he had to decide what to do with the shipment of boxes, which he'd never looked inside. It lay beneath his bank in orderly stacks of anonymously numbered crates and cases alongside those of other nameless depositors.
But Europe was beset by greed. More than a half-century later, in 1997, a Geneva newspaper reported that in that era Swiss "bankers, lawyers, and trustees helped themselves to illegally obtained assets after the massacre of their rightful owners." Many German soldiers and ex-Nazi officials carried home everything they could. Allied soldiers weren't immune either. Among the greatest finds were thousand-year-old manuscripts and artwork known as the Quedlinburg Treasure. Shortly after GIs uncovered them, the treasures vanished. Not until the 1990s did they reappear, after the U.S. Army officer who'd stolen them died and his Texas relatives tried to sell them.
It was an extraordinary era in which the Nazis' drive to "Germanize" the world included the destruction of entire cultures. Never had art been such a crucial weapon in politics. It was an age of cynicism and avariciousness and brazen self-indulgence. As a consequence, much art was stolen and lost, and today much remains in hiding.
In this atmosphere, it was no wonder that when Selvester Maas, who considered himself an honorable man, opened one of Himmler's cases and saw an Amber Room panel, he felt faint with opportunity. It was not only the magnificent beauty and mystique of the unique piece that gripped him, it was also the times.
Soon he began to plot how he could keep what Himmler had taken.
28
12:44 AM, SUNDAY
GEORGE WASHINGTON MEMORIAL PARKWAY, WASHINGTON, DC
"How much of all that can you prove?" Julia demanded.
Sam had just turned his Durango off Washington's speeding beltway onto the George Washington Memorial Parkway. The weekend traffic was thinning. As they continued south, Julia's imagination was firmly caught up in the story of the Amber Room. It seemed as if in the entirety of the globe's history there'd never been any other artwork that approached its scope and beauty, and she could understa
nd why Sam would be fascinated and driven to find out whether it still existed.
"A lot of it," Sam assured her. "We know that after the war the Königsberg Castle curator—Dr. Alfred Rohde—and a Soviet art historian—Prof. Alexander Brusov—found only charred fragments and large copper hinges in the vault where the room was stored. We know that Himmler was notorious for his light fingers when it came to great art. Since the room dated back to early 1700s Prussia, it fit perfectly with his fetish for the early German period. We know Swiss bankers were a self-aggrandizing lot who bludgeoned and bribed the Allies into dropping a full investigation of what they'd been up to during the war."
"I still find it hard to believe Swiss bankers were so bad. They have a reputation for integrity."
Off to their left, the Potomac River was a black, glossy ribbon and beyond it spread Washington, D.C., sparkling like an ocean of lights. Julia and Sam were exhausted, and although they'd escaped New York, neither felt completely safe. As they talked, they watched carefully for vehicles that paced them or followed too closely.
Sam said, "Not after all the recent revelations, they don't. Hell, it turns out Switzerland knew the Nazi central bank was broke and that the vast rivers of gold flowing into Swiss banks were stolen. Seems Switzerland's position was the Nazis had the right to take assets from nations they conquered. Even assuming that argument had any standing, the Swiss were fully aware a lot of the treasure had been stripped from individuals, particularly from Jews."
She was silent, letting it all sink in. Then she wondered, "If Professor Brusov and Dr. Rohde found those charred fragments and hinges in the castle's ruins, and the Soviet Union declared the Amber Room burned up and gone, there's no way you can be sure it survived."
"Maybe not completely sure. But pretty damn sure." In the shadowy car, Sam's face was intense. "See, amber's not a semiprecious stone or even a mineral. It's simply tree resin that's been fossilized, which means it's completely organic. Among other things, being organic means it's not very thermostable. At one hundred degrees, amber starts to decompose. At three hundred, it substantially decomposes—actually gets gluey. And at the temperature inside a bomb explosion from that period—which was around a thousand degrees—amber simply evaporates. Becomes a gas."
"It vanishes into the air."
"Right. But glass doesn't. Glass melts into globs and hangs around forever."
"Ah!" She nodded. "You said there were mirrored pilasters in the room—"
"You've got it." His voice was tight with excitement. "The castle curator and the Soviet historian found no amber. That makes sense because a firebomb destroyed the castle and toasted the vault, and if the cases and amber panels were burned up, there'd be no sign of the amber. But they found no melted blobs of glass either. None. Zero."
She was impressed by his logic and attention to detail. "Which meant that since there was no evidence of glass or mirrors, there was no serious evidence of the room."
"Exactly." He nodded vigorously. "Even if someone had searched through the debris in the. castle before the Soviets got there, why would they bother to steal melted globs of glass? No, there was no melted glass because the Amber Room was gone. It was trucked off by somebody, just as local rumor said."
"But you think Heinrich Himmler is the one who really stole the Amber Room." Julia felt his excitement as if it were her own.
"Considering the times, he was really the only one who had the power, the means, and the interest to pull it off. Except Hitler himself, of course, but by then Hitler had lost whatever weak grip he had on reality. He was plotting how to save himself and Germany in that bunker under Berlin."
Julia contemplated it all. "So you say the Swiss banker. . . Selvester Maas . . . took the panels and the rest of the treasure. If this means so much to you, why don't you just fly over to Zurich and ask him or his family about it? I suppose he'd be very old by now, but he could certainly be alive."
Sam's handsome face set in grim planes and angles. "I thought of that a dozen years ago, but Maas was murdered just a month or so after the war ended. His wife died in the early 1980s before I'd found out about him and Himmler. See, I was assigned to Berlin in the mid eighties. That's when I did most of this investigating and came up with my theory about Himmler and what I call the Second Himmler Treasure. When I got to Zurich, Maas was long dead, and his bank denied it knew anything about Heinrich Himmler. But I found a retired associate who admitted Himmler had been Maas's biggest client. Himmler's account—the second treasure—had been assigned to a Roger Bauer. Himmler's signature was on the transfer card, but the associate had always believed it was forged."
"You think it was the banker, Maas, who forged it?"
"Seems logical." Sam turned the Durango southwest onto the Shirley Memorial Highway, closing in on Alexandria where he lived.
"What about Maas's heirs?"
"He had three daughters, who died from various causes over the years. There was a son, too. But he'd disappeared." Sam hesitated. He knew he was on shaky ground with Austrian. He didn't know how important her family was to her. Still, he had to find out what she knew. "I did discover one thing that was interesting. . . . When the Zurich police investigated Maas's murder, they questioned a young U.S Army captain. His name was Daniel Austrian."
"That's the connection? My grandfather?"
"The same."
1:22 AM, SUNDAY
ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA
Sam lived in a tall brick apartment house off King Street near Old Town Alexandria. A few blocks from his place stood eighteenth-century buildings where many of the country's founders had shopped, dined, and worshiped. He'd been attracted to the easy ambience of Old Town and the respect for history. But as he drove toward his apartment house, he found himself warily studying the midnight street with its dormant oaks and sycamores. Their great naked branches snapped and swayed in heavy gusts of wind.
"What did my grandfather Austrian tell you?" Julia's blue eyes were narrowed in the dim interior of the Durango.
"He was U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands at the time and claimed to be very busy. I met him at the embassy. Before he hustled me out, he said there'd been a lot of rumors floating around Zurich back in those days, and that Maas had an unsavory reputation. He claimed to know all this because he'd been assigned to the German-Swiss border as the war was ending. Did you know that?"
"I vaguely recall it."
Sam nodded. "He said he didn't know Maas, and it was pure coincidence he was on leave in Zurich at the time of the banker's death. He said he just happened to be in the same bar as Maas an hour or so before he was killed."
"He was probably right. If it'd been more than that, the police would've held him."
"Not necessarily. Remember the times. Even in Switzerland, violence was still a problem. People all over Europe and the Soviet Union were starving, and many had no place to live. They'd slip across the border into Switzerland—the richest country around—looking for ways to survive. Naturally there was a lot of crime, and the police were stretched thin."
Her voice dropped ten degrees. Despite her outrage, she felt a pinprick of fear. "If you're saying my grandfather knew this Roger Bauer—"
"He claimed he didn't. But I'd like to find out whether he knew more than he told me or the Swiss police."
Julia felt an odd worry clutch her heart. "My grandfather was a philanthropist. Did you know that? He supported all sorts of wonderful institutions. Museums. The symphony. Kennedy Center."
"Where did he get his money?"
Her throat was dry. "Inherited it. The Austrians go way back in New York. He was educated at Andover and Harvard, just like my father. After the war he met my other grandfather—Lyle Redmond. Grandfather Austrian bankrolled their partnership. They built huge tract developments and shopping malls up and down the coast."
They were approaching the driveway that led behind his apartment building. Sam turned down it. "But Daniel Austrian retired, while your Redmond grandfather stayed in busi
ness?"
"That's right. Grandfather Austrian said he'd made enough money and it was time to do some good with it." She pulled her gaze from the buildings on either side of the drive. "You know more about him than you're telling me." Her eyes flashed blue fire, and she demanded again, "What exactly do you do in the Company?"
He rolled the Durango to a stop in the parking lot. "I'll explain it all. This is where I live. We'll order in some food, and I'll tell you what I do, and what else I know. When's the last time you ate?"
Startled by the idea, she realized her stomach had a hollow ache. "I guess I had a sandwich at lunch."
He frowned. "More than twelve hours ago. You need food." He looked pointedly at the Browning 9mm on her lap. "Ready to let me have it back? I feel naked without it."
She had one of those moments when the muddle of life made a strange kind of sense. She obviously was beginning to have faith in him and not just out of need, but because he seemed to want to understand her situation, her hands, her blindness, even whether she'd eaten. But now she'd learned faith was to be undertaken carefully, and part of her was in total disagreement that she should return his gun.
"Maybe tomorrow," she said.
"If it makes you feel safer to keep it . . . that's okay." He suddenly shivered, and it wasn't from cold. Wait for me, don't try to do it alone, Irini. Why hadn't she listened to him? Irini.
She watched his face go blank as if he were in another time, another place. But she couldn't penetrate behind the mask of his face.
He shook his head, pushed the vision away. "Ready?"
They stepped out of the car. She held the pistol tight against her blouse and shivered in the cold. Tree branches waved overhead, webbed ghosts against the starry black sky. The moon hung brightly about forty-five degrees above the horizon, splaying long dark shadows across the full parking lot. A frosty wind carried the pungent scent of wet bark.
"It's cold out here. Put this on, Austrian." Sam took off his jacket and laid it across her shoulders.
"Thanks." She pulled it close.
