Checkmate in Amber

by Matilde Asensi

  On reaching the bottom of the ladder, we found ourselves in a spacious tunnel intersection, which was dry enough for us to take off the backpacks and lay them down, allowing us to prepare ourselves for the work to come. Lying on the ground were an adjustable spanner and a roll of cable left behind by a work crew, which I pushed out of the way with my foot, before tightening up my headlamp straps and putting on my face mask and alveolite boots. There seemed to be no point in taking off the street clothes we wore over our protection suits, so we left them on and then began to take the equipment we were going to need out of the backpacks. I looked at my watch: it was four in the morning. We had to get a move on, as Weimar’s citizens would soon begin to go about their daily business.

  In one hand I held a digital compass (which also worked as a thermometer and pedometer) and in the other, a ballpoint pen on a clipboard with a sheet of graph paper, to trace the route we took and avoid our getting lost and going around in circles. I turned back towards José and was astounded to see him sitting on the ground and happily messing about with Amália’s laptop and the walkie-talkie that Roi had given us.

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ I asked him angrily, leaning forward to get a better look at his bizarre behavior.

  ‘What time are we meant to get in touch with Roi?’ he asked me, ignoring every word I’d said.

  ‘Ten in the morning. In six hours’ time. But do me the favor of answering my question. What do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘I’m trying to connect with Amália.’

  My jaw dropped and I rolled my eyes in exasperation. It took me a few seconds to get myself back together.

  ‘You’re trying to get in touch with who?’ I stammered.

  ‘With Amália,’ he replied, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

  ‘With Amália? But she’s twelve hundred and fifty miles away, for God’s sake!’

  ‘Haven’t you ever heard of packet radio?’

  ‘Packet radio? What the hell is that?’

  ‘It’s a digital radio communications mode. It allows keyboard-to-keyboard communication using radio waves, rather than telephone lines. All you need is a computer, a special modem and a VHF/UHF transceiver. Look - this is the modem,’ he said, pointing to a mysterious small box on his lap. ‘It converts the computer’s binary signals into modulated tones, or audio signals, and vice-versa. And this,’ here he held up the walkie-talkie, ‘is a VHF/UHF transceiver. The only problem is transmission speed - the further apart the two computers, the longer the signal takes to arrive because it has to pass through more repeater stations.’

  ‘My God!’ was all I managed to come out with. My Tía Juana would have been proud to hear me.

  ‘There’s nothing very new about it. It’s been up and running for quite a few years now and a considerable number of people use it.’

  ‘Can you go onto the internet with it, or can you only communicate with other people using the same system?’

  ‘Both. Most service providers have internet access via packet radio. You just have to apply for it. In fact, it uses the same communications protocols, TCP/IP and all the rest.’

  ‘So what you’re telling me is that you’re about to write to Amália, who’s in my house, right from these horrible sewers?’

  No wonder she had been so ready to lend us her laptop!

  ‘Exactly. And I hope you won’t mind the fact that she’s connected one of these modems to your computer system.’

  ‘Oh no!’ I groaned in horror.

  ‘I’m going to send her a message saying that we’ve arrived safely and that we’re fine.’

  I groaned again, holding a hand to the side of my face and trying to come to terms with the appalling news. My wonderful desktop was in the merciless hands of a thirteen-year-old geek. José smiled at me.

  ‘Now I know why I love you so much,’ he declared. ‘You’ve got such a great sense of humor …’

  I was still lost for words, of course, but I had to admit that his seductive smile and the warmth of his eyes on me made me feel a whole lot better.

  ‘I’m beginning to think that we may not be together for very much longer,’ I threatened him, teasingly.

  ‘You don’t even believe that yourself!’ he threw back at me as he gathered up his stuff after sending Amália his message. ‘This one’s for life, sweetheart.’

  ‘Ha!’

  ‘Same to you, darling, same to you.’

  And so began our long march through the Weimar tunnels. Little did we know at the time that we would be down there one hell of a lot longer than we expected, before we drew another breath of fresh air.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  For about two hours we walked without stopping along the narrow tunnels with their rendered brick walls built to half-height and then vaulted over, often having to duck down to avoid knocking our heads. We formed a traveling pool of light, darkness ahead and even darker behind, and there were stretches where we had to splash our way through water. At the end of the tunnel, we came to another intersection which offered us the choice of three galleries, all very similar. We decided to take the middle one and, after three more hours’ hard walking, arrived at an unexpected dead end: the passageway widened up in its final stretch, only to be blocked off completely by a cracked but impenetrable wall. Downhearted, I recorded our disappointing discovery on my graph paper route map.

  ‘We should stop here, have ourselves a bite to eat and take a nap,’ José suggested, removing his face mask. I did the same. ‘And we’re due to get in touch with Roi about now.’

  ‘In five minutes’ time,’ I confirmed, looking at my watch. ‘Pass me the walkie-talkie, will you?’

  We took off our headlamps and switched them off, replacing them with a gas lamp. Apart from the view and the terrible smell, it was just like a fun weekend campout in the countryside. While José heated up some water on the stove, I dialled in the frequency on the digital screen and got through to Roi. His voice came through loud and clear in that underground fortress. It sounded as if he had just woken up.

  ‘Good morning, Roi,’ I said, talking into the mouthpiece.

  ‘Good morning, Peón. Everything going well?’

  ‘It’s freezing cold here, but apart from that and five hours’ non-stop walking, everything’s fine.’

  ‘Describe your route to me.’

  José leant over and handed me a cup of instant coffee, giving it a final stir as he did so. I briefly interrupted communication with Roi to ask him for a bit of milk in it. Roi had a sheet of the same graph paper as I did and, as I gave him the coordinates, he traced out the route we had taken. In case something happened to us, this would give him the information he needed to come to our rescue.

  ‘Good luck to the two of you,’ he signed off.

  ‘Talk to you tomorrow.’

  I turned off the walkie-talkie and looked at José. It felt good to be with him. Somewhere cleaner, comfier and more romantic would have been even better, of course. He must have been thinking along the same lines. He came up to me, drew me into his arms and, after we had enjoyed a good long kiss, he leant his forehead against mine.

  ‘What on earth are we doing down here?’ he whispered.

  ‘We’re looking for the Amber Room the Nazis stole, remember?’

  ‘All I can remember are the times we made love together.’

  I chuckled quietly.

  ‘Hold onto that thought - it’s a good one,’ I said to him. ‘Just wait until we get out of this place. I’m going to wipe you out, boy.’

  We held each other close a while longer, taking sips from our cups of coffee. Then José let go of me and got up to go over to the backpacks.

  ‘Let’s see if there’s a message from Amália.’

  He pulled out the laptop, plugged all the cables in again, connected up to the packet network and soon came out with a happy cheer.

  ‘Look, sweetheart! Amália’s emailed!’

  ‘Great …’ I appl
auded unconvincingly, trying to disguise my lack of interest at the news. ‘So - what does she say?’

  ‘Hello Papá. Hello Ana. Everything’s fine. Ezequiela sends you her best wishes …’

  ‘Never in my whole life have I done a job with so many damn spectators!’ I snorted bad-temperedly, as I washed up the cups and spoons with a little water. It was so cold that it had never occurred to me to take my gloves off, and rinsing the dishes with my big paws turned out to be a bad move. My own incompetence put me in an even worse mood. Truth be told, I was probably feeling a bit jealous at the thought of dear old Ezequiela and that girl getting on so well. I just couldn’t help myself.

  ‘If you want me to, I’m quite happy to leave,’ said José, plainly, looking up from the keyboard.

  I stopped what I was doing and looked at him. I knew I was being terribly unfair. Childish, even.

  ‘I’m really sorry. Being reminded of my old nanny right in the middle of an operation is something I’m just not used to.’ I stopped what I was doing and sat down at his side. ‘Please stay. I promise it won’t happen again.’

  José gave me a quick kiss on the forehead and then bent down again over the laptop. I was surprised at how easily he could forgive and forget. I would have made a huge scene out of it and wouldn’t have been able to get it out of my head for hours. José picked up Amália’s email where he’d left off.

  ‘Seeing as I’ve got so much spare time on my hands, I wrote a program to monitor your route and pinpoint exactly where you are …’

  ‘What? On my computer?’ I lost it again, reacting as if I’d been bitten by a scorpion.

  ‘Ana, for goodness’ sake! Just stop behaving like a spoiled brat!’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Keep reading, keep reading.’

  Jesus! The geek was reprograming my computer!

  ‘So please send me the data on your progress. Tell me exactly what distance you walk on each stretch and in what direction, as well as any other details I might need to track your itinerary.’ José paused here. ‘We could send her the same information that we send Roi.’

  ‘But what’s the point?’

  ‘She’s worried about us. Following our progress, even at long distance, will help to keep her calm.’

  ‘But the laptop doesn’t have Läufer’s security settings,’ I objected. ‘It would be a dangerous breach of security.’

  ‘Don’t exaggerate. All we’ll be sending will be numbers, letters and symbols. She’ll work out what they mean. Leave it to me - it’ll be fine. Go on, hand over your route map.’

  ‘Does she say anything else?’

  ‘Just Um beijo7.’

  ‘OK, go ahead and do it. Then turn the laptop off. We need to get some work done before we go to sleep. As soon as we wake up, we should head back to the last intersection.’

  Once José had finished sending Amália the route map coordinates, we went down to the dead end of the tunnel and began to test the wall which blocked our way by tapping on it with our fists. The report written in the Sixties by Weimar’s Chief Engineer had mentioned cavity walls, bricked-up passageways, protective steel sheeting, false ceilings and so on. So clearly we had to check everything and take nothing at face value: what looked like a solid wall might turn out to be the way into the chamber where Sauckel and Koch had hidden the dismantled Amber Room. Our drumming on the wall produced no results at all, so I got the small magnetometer out of the backpack and passed it over the entire wall from side to side and from top to bottom. But the data display showed no hollow areas behind the brickwork. We were surrounded by solid ground.

  Our long journey to Weimar, our descent into the tunnel system and the many hours of walking had really worn us out. My sleeping bag felt as beautifully warm and welcoming as my very own bed. My one big regret was that the intense cold and humidity underground had made it inadvisable for us to bring sleeping bags which zipped together to make a double.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  We woke up six hours later, our bodies numb and aching. It was appallingly cold. My thermometer showed that it was five degrees below zero. Our thermal suits did protect our bodies, but the icy (and foul-smelling) air that we were breathing through our face masks was seriously unpleasant.

  We backtracked along the tunnel at a good pace, warming ourselves up again, and arrived at the intersection that we had left behind the day before. This time we chose the tunnel on the left, which began to curve in a semicircle to its right and was soon crossed by a larger gallery which eventually led us back again in the opposite direction. After four hours trekking along its featureless length, we reached some kind of large recess in the tunnel wall, and decided to stop for a bite to eat and a rest. Inspecting the alcove as we were clearing up and getting ready to set off again, we were surprised to find two battered and mould-stained timber hatchways, each opening into a different tunnel. The one we chose led us, three days later, right back to the tunnel intersection we had already passed through twice. We started again, from scratch.

  Slowly but surely, as day followed day without success, we became increasingly tired and less meticulous in our searches of the tunnel walls and dead-ends that aroused our suspicions. The anatomy of the tunnel network was frankly incomprehensible - no head, no hands, no feet, no nothing - and we were becoming increasingly demoralized and bad-tempered. The sheets of graph paper I was using to trace our route already made up a depressingly thick logbook, which had so far proved to be practically useless. As expected, we ran into sheet metal barriers, which had given us hope at first, but they all turned out to be hiding nothing more than the continuation of the tunnels which they blocked. Twice we were forced to retrace our steps right back to the tunnel intersection we reached when we first came down the ladder: once, after scaling our way down to the bottom of a huge and empty cistern, and the second time after wading through a long stretch of drain water and finding ourselves at one of the many dead ends we had already encountered. The place was beginning to remind me strongly of Koch’s Jeremiah painting, with the prophet climbing out of a muck-filled well. It was as if the Gauleiter had placed him in a setting he knew all too well from memory.

  José’s beard was a sad measure of just how much time we had spent down there without achieving a damn thing. We still had enough food and water to spend a few days longer in that indecipherable labyrinth, but what we were seriously running out of was any desire to keep on with the seemingly pointless search. Roi was trying to psych us up every time we spoke with him. He told us that our graph paper route maps, which he was carefully sticking together and correlating to get a general picture of where we had been, suggested that we had almost completed our survey of the northern and eastern sections of the tunnel network. Therefore, he argued, we had already covered a substantial part of the search area. After nine days stuck underground, we didn’t find his argument very convincing. We felt worn out, filthy and utterly frustrated, and the only thing we were remotely interested in was getting home as soon as humanly possible. It felt like we hadn’t seen the light of day since the dawn of time, and neither Roi’s encouragement nor Amália’s adventurous spirit managed to lift us out of our hopeless apathy. Our mission was turning into a never-ending nightmare.

  On our eleventh day - Thursday, November 12th - I woke up with a slight fever. This time I really had caught a bad cold. Despite a splitting headache, I tried to carry on as if there was nothing wrong. But after a few hours, my legs began to give out on me. I just couldn’t go on any further. José took charge of my backpack and supported me with his arm around my waist until we managed to get back to the last intersection we had passed, an oval-shaped area which luckily was pretty dry. He unrolled my sleeping bag, put me in it, made me a cup of steaming hot soup and gave me a couple of paracetamols with codeine.

  ‘You’ll get better, sweetheart,’ he told me as he caressed my cheek and looked at me with sympathetic eyes.

  ‘Don’t tell Roi,’ I asked him, already half asleep. ‘My colds never
last more than a day, they really don’t. You’ll see. Let me sleep and I’ll be fine tomorrow.’

  The good thing about having a partner is that, when you’re ill, you don’t just get the usual health treatment provided by someone in your family (or by some overindulgent old nanny who just won’t leave you alone). You get hugs and cuddles and tender loving care, enough to make you feel like the Queen of Sheba. José was so worried and concerned about me that he was treating me as if I was his favorite and most fragile mechanical toy. I, of course, let him spoil the hell out of me without putting up the slightest resistance. From time to time, I could hear him messing about with the walkie-talkie and the laptop, and once I heard him tell Roi that we had stopped in such-and-such a place to rest up and would be there until the following day. The one thing that did get through to me crystal-clear was the ear-piercing yelp of joy he let loose just as I was dreaming that we were finally escaping from those filthy sewers through a manhole cover that came out right in the middle of the Plaza del Mercado Chico in my hometown, Ávila.

  ‘¡Que perfeita inteligência!’ he shouted happily. ‘¡Que facilidade, que simplicidade …!’

  ‘Tell me, tell me,’ I butted in, turning with difficulty in my sleeping bag so that I could see his face. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Sweetheart, darling!’ he yelled back, his voice reverberating around the space as if in a horror movie. ‘Amália has found the way in! My daughter has solved the enigma! Didn’t I tell you how smart she is?’

  ‘Yes you did, you surely did.’ José’s eyes shone in the light of the gaslamp. He was so happy, so handsome and smiling so beautifully that for a second I completely forgot how ill I was, and just felt like eating him up altogether, beard and all. It’s funny what hormones get up to, and at the strangest times.