The Amber Shadows

by Lucy Ribchester

  A thin candelabra burned on a tablecloth beside flowers and the shapes of bodies. The blackout drapes and the bronze light slid shadows over their shoulders. On the table, sliced into vision by the doorframe, was a feast of meats and fruits and condiments. Bottles of wine were open, mixing with metallic smells of gravy – a gravy prepared with offal and port, smells such as Honey hadn’t breathed in two years since the start of rationing. In front of each man sat a tiny covered pot. And on the head of each was placed a thick white shroud.

  She could see full-form only the figure to the left of the table’s head; but scanning her eyes down beneath the table she was certain she knew his shoes, and those trousers had trodden a familiar flimsy wooden corridor time and time again. But how and why, by God, could he be part of this hellish pageant?

  She was confused, and understood nothing but the need to open her mouth and cry. But now there was another figure in the room, a fast foot firing across her vision, kicking the door shut. She tried to sit up and choked. Her mouth gagged on bitter silk. She saw two calves in woollen slacks, and very mucky shoes. Fingers reached forward and opened the top of the shelter. A hand cradled her to sit up. ‘There we go. Don’t mind them. They’re gluttons, nothing more.’

  Honey bent over onto herself, partly to still her nausea – for her head throbbed – and partly because she did not want to look at the owner of the voice. She did not want to see his face. She did not want to know it was him, and not know him at all.

  But he wanted to look at her.

  Felix took her chin in his hand and pulled her face until they were staring at one another square. ‘You talk in your sleep, you know. That’s not very good for a Park employee.’

  ‘What are they doing?’

  ‘Them?’ Felix gave a short laugh and hesitated. She saw him turn his head and look over his shoulder. The prison room was bigger than she had thought; it was long, with a lamplit desk beneath a tiny window, stapled over by a square of blackout fabric. Beside it a bench was strewn with tools and bottles, and the air smelled strongly of sawdust and another, sweeter scent. Felix turned back to her. ‘They’re eating, I’d say. Feasting. Like the big-bellied bastards they are. They don’t let me dine with them. That’s the lot of a contractor, I’m afraid.’

  She rotated her neck in both directions. It ached and she wondered how long she had been compressed inside the shelter. As her eyes adjusted she saw across the desk sheets of draughtsman’s paper, curled at the edges, along with pots of implements – dentist’s tools, scalpels and picks, paints and varnishes. On the bench, lying on its side, spine-out, was a book: The Origin of Amber.

  ‘Can you keep your mouth shut and not panic?’

  Her eyes grew wide. Felix, though he smelled the same, was different. His touch was different. His voice was over-familiar, as if he was talking to someone he knew far better than he knew her; as if he thought he knew her better than he did.

  Her eyes moved towards the closed door.

  ‘Is it them you’re frightened of?’

  She wanted to laugh. She wanted to say, ‘No, fool, I’m frightened because the man who made love to me, who kissed me on a train, has drugged me and dragged me to his lair, and . . . is that my hands tied behind my back, and is that smell in the air the same as my carved amber? The like of which has been goading me for almost a week, that might have killed my brother?’

  But she didn’t dare mock him. Now she was afraid. Right now, afraid of everything. She felt tiny as a child, and though she fought against it, to breathe through her nose, take stock of what was happening, find an escape route, it was futile and she was afraid.

  She nudged her shoulder to her face. Felix craned closer. ‘What are they . . .’ she tried to say through the silk bar. It was rammed right back into her wisdom teeth, gnawing at the sides of her lips. ‘Him . . . him – why?’ She had, in her shock, forgotten the name of the man she had recognised.

  ‘Shhhhh,’ Felix soothed. ‘Silly and pretty. You are a catch. It’s just Christmas dinner, fool. The . . He waved his hand across his face, demonstrating a shroud. ‘Ortolans. They smuggle them in from France. I don’t see the appeal myself. All those feathers and bones. But it’s Christmas, says the chief, him at the head. Is that who you mean? You won’t see his face. He’s careful of that.’ Felix stroked the top of her spine where it bent away from the shelter wire and she shuddered at his touch.

  ‘It’s a silly ritual,’ he said softly. ‘They hide their faces while they’re eating the ortolans so God can’t see them doing it. It has something to do with the shame of it.’ He sighed. She heard him place something metal from his hand down on the floor. ‘It’s rather disgusting. The birds are drowned live in hot flaming brandy. Then they eat them whole. It’s tradition to hide your face from God. But it’s . . . it’s just a silly thing. They like it, because of the rationing and . . . well, perhaps because of the cruelty. There’s a link between wealth and cruelty, Honey, I think. They’re not folk like you and I.’ He stroked her again and where his hand fell it left a chill path on her flesh. There had been more at that table – more pates and sherries and fruits – than she had seen in two years.

  ‘Where . . .?’ she said. She felt spittle dribbling down the side of her chin. Felix reached a finger forward and dabbed it up then looked around for somewhere to wipe it, settling on his trousers.

  ‘Where do they get them? My, you are curious for someone who’s just been chloroformed. Smugglers. Bandits, black market. You can get anything if you know the right person.’ He shrugged. ‘But listen, Honey, we don’t have much time. If you’d just let me take care of you, you could have been spared all of this. Instead you have to come snooping, bursting in on the whole operation. I didn’t have a choice but to tie you. If they’d seen you you’d have been shot. It’s important you keep your mouth tight shut. You hear me? Once you’re in on it—’

  ‘In on what?’

  ‘Keep your voice down, you shrill little ape. What did I just say? They shoot people for far less round here.’

  She swivelled on her bottom so she could get a better look at him. Her upper arms had cramped to an ache. She tilted her head to look at the rope that was binding her and saw that it wasn’t rope at all but silk stockings. He had got hold of silk stockings. He saw her looking.

  ‘They were supposed to be a Christmas present.’

  ‘Untie me,’ she said through the gag.

  ‘I can’t trust you.’

  ‘You can’t trust me? You can’t trust me?’ She felt her voice rise then dropped it to a hiss as he shot up and pinned his back against the door.

  ‘You’re not listening to me, Honey. You’re a prisoner now. They can do what they want with you. They have power and they don’t want scandal. Look what happened to your friend. You were treading on razor wire going to Captain Bloody Do-Good Tiver to fight your battles. You had to tell him about your amber, didn’t you? No one likes a squealer though, Honey. Not them, not us and certainly not Bletchley Park, so I’d be careful what you say if I were you. And quiet.’

  Felix leaned back on the door panels. He looked down at her, and whether through genuine pity or a worry about the stockings snagging and spoiling he bent down and took the gag from her mouth, then untied her wrists. He glared and she felt his eyes chiselling into her, those little hard gems she had loved to see in her dreams.

  ‘What is this place?’ she whispered. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘It’s just, you know, a bit of smuggling, a bit of forgery.’

  ‘Forgery?’

  Felix rubbed at his eyes and sighed. ‘Look, you know the Nazis are pillaging art all over Europe. Looting. You know that because you get the intercepts through at the Park. Sometimes they itemise what they’ve stolen. Sometimes it’s reported in a newspaper. If it’s itemised, so much the better. We get in first before the story gets out, make a fake, flog it to whichever unscrupulous art dealer will have it, and then the news reports of the art being looted make our fake more genu
ine. Those folk out there have the contacts, me and a couple of others have the skill.’

  ‘A forgery ring? You’re forging the Nazi art thefts to sell on to the black market?’

  ‘They call themselves the Magpies.’ He leaned down and perched at an angle on the lip of the shelter, then lifted her chin again. For a second there was pride in his eyes. ‘Look.’ He pulled her up. She tweaked her hand out of his grasp and clutched the rim of the shelter as she stood. Minding her skirt she stepped high over the edge.

  He led her to the desk where he had spread out a sketch. On the draughtsman’s sheet were diagrams of a triptych, an altarpiece. Next to them were handwritten recipes for antiquated pigments, and a tiny piece of curled, browned paper with the word ‘Provenance’ and a half-finished paragraph beneath it.

  ‘War piracy,’ she said. ‘Pillaging.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Just profiteering. You wait and see. You wait and see who has money left after this war. There will be winners, Honey, and it won’t be the good folk with guns on their backs dressed in khaki. And if you’re an art dealer cruel enough to want to purchase stolen Nazi art, taken from churches, palaces, the homes of Jews . . . well, you deserve to waste your money on a fake. I only make the frames for them. The painting is done by another man, that man you saw with the car.’

  ‘Oh, proper Robin Hood,’ she whispered and there was a needle in her voice. She spotted the open gas mask box at her feet and bent down to it. Felix clutched her arm.

  ‘You cracked one of the panels,’ he said. ‘I took an age over those/

  With a small vain flourish he moved aside a pot of paintbrushes, then flicked back his hair with the other hand. A tawny object glowed beneath the gaslamp. He had mended the panel. There was a scar that ran diagonally across the carvings, but it had been brushed, glued and sealed so that the whole thing stood. He had assembled it so that it formed a box. And the missing piece had been added so the bird stood perfectly.

  It stood within a gold wire cage.

  ‘Here.’ He pointed to a lever at the top of the cage. ‘Turn it.’

  Slow in her terror, she crawled on her knees and rose until she was at eye level with the gift. She turned the handle.

  Out tinkled the melody of The Firebird, but it was a hollow, creeping, tinny sound, the mighty orchestra reduced to the tawdry pings of a trinket. She felt tears surge up to her eyes to hear the tune humiliated. But Felix’s gaze lit up. ‘Go the other way,’ he said.

  With a scratching, hating heart she turned the cage handle anticlockwise. The melody struck up again but this time the bird turned too.

  ‘It’s brilliant, isn’t it?’ His mouth hung open. He stared at her in genuine wonder at his own accomplishment. ‘I mean, they say that man Turing is a genius, but I . . . I made this for you.’

  She felt the tears now. They came hot and raw. Her past, a past that didn’t even belong to her but that she had believed in so faithfully, had been made into a toy. ‘Why?’ she sobbed. She stared at the sorry little firebird inside its cage, a phoenix that could turn and cheep and glow with flames but never ever dance. ‘You made a forgery of my life. You dredged up things I never should have thought.’

  ‘It’s not all forgery. Some of it is real.’ He poked at the bird’s beak. ‘This is real amber. The rest . . . well, you’ll forgive me a little pride but it’s a solution I made myself. Bakelite, melted from airshields, coloured with honey – I hope you like that – and scented with—’

  ‘Soir de Paris,’ she whispered. And now she saw it, there on his desk, the blue bottle, with the Arabian-shaped stopper. Sometimes her mother was right.

  ‘That’s right,’ he whispered back. Honey watched his face change in the shadows. His eyes were reaching out to her. He took a step away from the desk, and looked at his feet. In the next room music had begun. The sound of dishes being cleared away came clanging through the closed door, hearty laughter, relief after ritual abated.

  Felix leaned towards her. ‘Now listen to me, fool, I’m not an idiot. I know that all over Europe the cities are rallying to hoard their art, they want to protect it from looting. They’re doing it in England – half the National Gallery’s gone to some cave in Portsmouth.’

  ‘What?’ she spat. .

  ‘Keep your voice down.’ He rammed his flat hand hard across her airways. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ His cheeks were flushed and his eyes looked watery. ‘I never meant to hurt you, Honey, ever. But by God, you have to do as I say.’

  ‘What is it you want?’ she whispered.

  ‘Your father.’

  ‘My . . .’ Her throat closed. She looked him hard in his eyes, then cast her gaze back to the trinket box. The little firebird was sitting off kilter. Its open embrace was tilted, it looked drunk. For the first time she felt the tickle of a smile. ‘You want my father. You did all this for my . . . You’re out of luck, old boy. He died in 1918.’

  ‘Not true,’ Felix growled. ‘He’s curator of the Pushkin Palace in Leningrad. I know these things. I know all about you, little miss music. Your father knows where the Leningrad art is hidden. And you are going to lead me to him.’

  ‘You know all about me, do you?’ The man whose overcoat she had clung to on the train; the man who had implored her to tell him her secrets. He was a child, he was no more a man than Dickie had ever been.

  Felix gripped her wrist. ‘I lost my family over a year ago now. What I told you on the train, it was true. Every word. All of them, gone. And that night will be in my dreams forever. My finger, see? I was telling the truth. I did come home that night. I did lose it, and the doctor said I should be able to feel, but the nerves are gone, Honey, they’re gone.

  ‘On my way home, I had heard the story of your father. While they dropped bombs on my house I heard that story. And I knew then it was a sign. God was giving me a chance. For both of us to start new lives, to rise . . .’ His gaslit eyes looked mad ‘. . . like firebirds from this damned war. What do we have left if we don’t take chances? I know you, Honey. I know you. I used to watch you in the theatre when your mother was rehearsing, fiddling with your red hair, biting your nails. I worked there with my own father. You see, I did see Nijinsky with the Ballets Russes. I was a toddler at the time and my father worked in the theatre. She was right, your mother. She did know me. She’s a smart gel. But how could I – scenery boy – talk to the daughter of the star? When I saw him that night, it was not coincidence, it was fate. Fate, there you have it, you’d been brought back into my life. Now there’s something that can help us both. If you lead me to your real father I can help him and you smuggle out the art – these men have passages all set up, it will make us rich.’

  ‘My real . . . what are you talking about?’

  ‘Honey, I know you know how to reach him. You’re his daughter, there will be a way. We follow the trail together. We can do it. Follow the trail all the way to the palace art. Forget the Amber Room, it’s gone, but there’s trainloads of it, I know it and you know it. And the Nazis know it too. I’m sick of all of this forgery. I know I’m damned well not good enough for anything, and this war’s done for my hand. But just think . . . to control a stash of brilliance that large. Imagine . . .’

  It began to dawn on her. When I saw him . . . ‘Dickie told you . . .’

  ‘Dickie told me everything. He told me about your father escaping to Russia, he told me about The Firebird. How your family knows Stravinsky. How he became custodian of the Mariinsky theatre for a time, and then curator of the greatest collection of art in the world. Baroque paintings of Tsars, bronze statues, amber. He knows where it’s been taken.’

  Honey felt the blood drain from her head. ‘Where did you meet him?’

  But even as she asked she saw it. She saw it like it was a cinema reel, Felix and Dickie – Dickie, stuck on a train with nothing to do, enthusiastically regaling this nervy stranger with his lies, for his own entertainment.

  ‘It was the end of May last year and we were stopp
ed at . . . God knows where. Spent the night in a siding. You know how you get chatting to strangers on trains. This war . . . well, I recognised him, from the days when I did carpentry for the theatre. Anyway we chatted, and he talked and he talked. Your brother loved to talk. He showed me his cipher book.’

  ‘Why did you have to beat him?’

  Felix lowered his gaze. ‘He was trying to keep me from you. The other night, when he came off the train, he tried to take it all back, the story he’d told me, he tried to tell me it was lies, but I know he was only jealous to let a man like me near his precious sister. I’d gone too far to let that drop.’ -

  ‘You waited for him at the station. I told you. God, I told you he was coming.’

  ‘You don’t need him, Honey. I have no family, don’t forget. Clean start. We’ll track down your father, find the loot, build our own stories. The chance to have control of something real and material and worth money, real money. We can build our lives on riches. Love, Honey, is created from acts like this.’

  ‘You thought that the three of us – you, me and my fictitious father — would live happily ever after in invaded Soviet Russia? Have you read the newspapers, Felix? People are dying by the thousand, starving to death, melting the fat from lipsticks to spread on bread, to eat.’

  ‘I thought . . .’

  ‘In God’s name . . . the ciphers, the Vigenere . . .?’

  “‘To get mixed up in politics is ruination for art.” Stravinsky. It’s true, Honey. This war, we don’t have to be part of it. We are people of art, not politics.’

  ‘This war is not politics – it is families, neighbours, torture, murder.’

  ‘Keep your voice down, imbecile! It was supposed to be a puzzle. Nothing but a beautiful puzzle.’

  ‘You carved the codes? You cut up the box, you made it into a game, you were just waiting for me to need your help, lurking—’