Checkmate in Amber

by Matilde Asensi

  ‘Our partners in the Group will find it hard to believe us when we tell them what we’ve found,’ he said, as he nuzzled my neck.

  ‘Well, they’re just going to have to,’ I insisted. ‘There’s an awful lot of work here for everybody. Getting all this stuff out of here and moving it all into safe hiding is going to take one hell of a lot of organization, and some serious muscle.’

  ‘True,’ said José, thoughtfully. ‘But Roi will handle all that for us. He is our Chess Group mastermind, after all. He has sorted out bigger problems than this with his hands tied behind his back. By the way, sweetheart, it’s almost eleven o’clock at night. We should go back to the office, have something to eat and get in touch with Roi. He must be worried about us.’

  ‘No, Cavalo, I am not. I am not worried in the slightest.’

  Roi? What on earth was Roi doing there? José and I spun round on our heels as one. And there he was.

  With a gun in his hands. Pointed right at us.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Roi was not alone. He had three men with him. One of them, about Roi’s age and wearing a grotesque green jacket, was looking at us from a distance with a mildly amused expression on his face. He had his hands in his pants pockets - from the cold, I guess - and was standing slightly away from the rest of them, as if none of this had anything to do with him. He looked like a self-made man who got his kicks from signing up to overpriced adventures. His face was broad and ruddy, and his feline eyes matched his jacket. The other two were much younger and looked like his bodyguards. They were tall, well-built and seriously muscle-bound, and their faces showed that they were veterans of countless brawls. And they too were pointing guns at us. All of them, Roi included, seemed to be suffering badly from the cold. None of them were properly dressed for the arctic climate of the Weimar tunnels.

  ‘Roi?’ I stuttered in disbelief. My eyes flicked back and forth between his face and the barrel of the gun he was pointing right at me. ‘What’s all this about, Roi?’

  ‘Exactly what you think it’s about, Peón.’

  Despite his seventy-five years, Roi was still a very commanding figure. He was even taller than José and, dressed in that sports jacket and pants, he looked a good twenty years younger than he was. His grey eyes, so familiar to me, looked at me from beneath his bushy eyebrows with a disrespectful indifference which hurt like hell. Could this really be the same Prince Philibert that I had known since I was a kid, who had watched me grow up, who had been a friend of my father’s until the day he died and who asked after my Tía Juana every time we met on IRC?

  ‘I’m done with thinking, Roi,’ I mumbled sadly. ‘What I’d like is for you to explain it to me.’

  ‘Damn right, Roi - I’d be fascinated to hear it from your own lips,’ José challenged him.

  ‘First, you really must allow me to fulfill my basic social obligations. Ana, José,’ he said, as he turned towards the man in the green jacket, ‘I’d like to introduce you to my good friend Vladimir Melentyev, for whom you have been so fruitfully working.’

  Melentyev! So that’s who that supercilious old smiler was - Vladimir Melentyev, the man who hired us to rob Krylov’s Muzhiks!

  ‘These fellows by my side need no introduction,’ he went on. ‘They work for Vladimir. They take care of his security.’

  ‘They’re hardly taking very good care of him at the moment, it seems. They’re too busy watching us,’ José cut in. He hadn’t let go of me for a single second. I could feel the vice-like grip of his fingers on my arms.

  Roi burst out laughing.

  ‘Now listen, Cavalo,’ he explained, once he’d stopped. ‘Vladimir and I are far too old for such disagreeable unpleasantries. Pavel and Leonid will take care of finishing you off when the time comes. I simply couldn’t bring myself to do it, to be honest.’

  ‘How very noble of you to hold on to some slight traces of your humanity,’ José said sarcastically.

  I could tell from his tone of voice that he felt just as hurt as I did by what was happening. Roi had been a friend of his father’s too. For José and for me - and for all the rest of our partners in the Group as well, of course - Roi had always been the key figure, the man in charge and deeply respected by all of us. He looked after us, took care that everything turned out OK, organized our operations, insisted on tight security … And now he was holding us at gunpoint, as if he didn’t even know us, as if he could kill us without a second thought, or at least happily get Pavel and Leonid to do the dirty work. It was just crazy. Unimaginable.

  ‘Why, Roi, why?’ I needed to know. ‘Why are you doing this?’

  ‘For money, my dear Peón. For a great deal of money. What other reason could there possibly be? Vladimir just wants the Amber Room. He has very ambitious plans and the Amber Room has a very important part to play in them. All the rest of it, everything else that there is in this storehouse, is for me. Is mine, in fact,’ he emphasized, with a steely glint in his eyes. ‘The fact of the matter, Peón, is that I had already lost everything well before this latest awful economic crisis hit. I even had to mortgage my own family château. All I was left with was the modest fortune that Rook had invested for me on the stock exchange, more or less successfully. But now even that has gone. I have nothing. Not a single euro. My debts have eaten up my entire capital.’

  ‘But what did you do with all the money we earned on our operations? We made a fortune, Roi! You can’t possibly be ruined.’

  ‘I am, my dear girl, I’m afraid I am,’ he confirmed, his voice and manner finally displaying some traces of affection. ‘Completely and utterly ruined. I speculated rather overenthusiastically in certain high-risk markets, and it turned out rather badly. I hung on for as long as I could, but finally I went down with all hands.’

  ‘Arms,’ said Melentyev, laconically.

  ‘Arms?’ I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Roi involved in the arms trade?

  ‘Well, arms and a few other things,’ Roi clarified, slightly embarrassed. ‘It hardly matters. The fact is that it turned out very badly. It was then that Vladimir paid me a visit. He had been aware of the Chess Group’s existence for many, many years, practically since I founded it in the Sixties with the help of your father, Cavalo, and yours as well, Peón. Apparently the KGB had always known that I arranged the theft of works of art, although they did not connect me with the Group until later on.’

  ‘My God, they know who we are!’ José blurted out, absolutely horrified. The thought that Amália might be in danger suddenly hit me.

  ‘No, no - they don’t,’ Roi intervened. ‘It’s only me that they identified. In those days, I didn’t only work through the Chess Group. In fact, one of my main reasons for starting it was to cover up the activities which I undertook on my own. Your fathers, for instance, were utterly unaware that I was operating independently. Indeed, on some occasions I organized a robbery for them to carry out precisely in order to disguise a more important one of mine.’

  ‘Prince Philibert de Malgaigne-Denonvilliers,’ Melentyev slowly pronounced, syllable by syllable, in his strong Russian accent, ‘was something of a celebrity in the KGB. We believed that he worked entirely on his own until our computer programs spotted that the Chess Group robberies closely tied in with his movements. We kept a very close eye on him.’

  ‘I just cannot believe what I’m hearing!’ José burst out, gripping my arms even more tightly. ‘I simply can’t, Ana, I can’t believe it. He has betrayed us!’

  ‘But how did you get to know Melentyev?’ I asked, relentlessly curious. ‘Why did you get us involved in all this? And why now?’

  The prospect of death hadn’t entered into my thick skull. I don’t remember ever having believed that I was about to die, not even for an instant. But the idea that they might do José some damage certainly had made me anxious. Losing him so soon didn’t figure at all in my plans. I don’t know whether the human brain has some strange defense mechanism which stops it from seeing what it doesn’t want to
see, or whether I just knew, through some inexplicable power of premonition, that my time had not yet come.

  ‘Well, I’ve actually known Melentyev for quite some time. We have even worked together on occasion, have we not, Vladimir?’ The Russian nodded in agreement, as he closed the neck of his not-so-discreet green jacket with one of his hands. He was clearly freezing cold. ‘My old friend is a patriotic Russian through and through. His capitalist spirit simply cannot accept the poverty and misery of his compatriots. He sees Yeltsin as a complete incompetent, a puppet president put into position by the United States and maintained in power by them at whatever cost, as they periodically intervene to help him out of the endless scrapes he gets into as a result of his own bungling. Vladimir believes that Yeltsin’s failing health will prevent his running in the presidential elections in the year 2000. That is why he urgently needs the Amber Room …’

  He paused for a second or two, as if making his mind up about something, and then went on.

  ‘A few days before he died in Barczewo, Erich Koch told Vladimir about his Jeremiah. He explained that many years before, prior to his capture, he had painted a picture in which he had hidden coded clues to the location of his stolen treasures, and insisted that neither he nor anyone would ever get their hands on it. He did say that it was concealed on the reverse side of another canvas. Vladimir kept this last important detail secret from his superiors, a detail he felt might very well be more than just an idle boast. For years, he carried out research on his own account and he finally became aware of Helmut Hübner’s existence. Hübner was the man who piloted the Junkers Ju 52 on the flight from Königsberg to Buchenwald which carried the panels of the Amber Room.’

  He paused again, and looked around the cavern where we stood.

  ‘All these marvels you see around us were brought here by road, in trucks, but the Amber Room flew here from Prussia. It was the safest way, and the most discreet. Hübner never actually knew what was in the hold on that flight, but Vladimir put two and two together and got it right. From there to finding out about Koch’s gift of Krylov’s Muzhiks to Hübner, by way of thanks for putting him up for four years at his Pulheim house in Cologne, up until his final capture by the Allies, was not that big a leap. When Vladimir came to see me, he already knew that the Jeremiah was stuck to the back of the Muzhiks. But Hübner flatly refused to sell him the Krylov painting. And even if he had agreed to, it still would have been impossible for Melentyev to decipher the code and find this magnificent hiding place. It certainly was a challenge for the Chess Group, and I assured him that we would succeed, that we would find the Amber Room. And as we can all see, I was certainly right about that,’ he smiled, proudly. ‘Now Vladimir can deliver the Room to his favored candidate to be the next Russian president, Lev Marinsky of the National Liberal Party. Marinsky’s dramatic unveiling of the Amber Room will be a major boost to his election chances. In fact, it virtually guarantees his victory. And once in power, he will not be slow to help his friends.

  ‘LET THEM GO, ROI! Läufer’s voice suddenly rang out at top volume. ‘LET THEM GO RIGHT NOW OR I KILL MELENTYEV!’

  José and I leapt apart in pure shock. Läufer! Läufer was here! This was beginning to look like a Chess Group general meeting.

  Good old Heinz had managed to sneak into the warehouse while Roi was waxing lyrical about all the ins and outs of what started off as Operation Krylov. Taking advantage of the fact that Melentyev was standing alone and well away from the rest of us, he had grabbed him and was holding a sharp chisel to his throat, a weapon he had found in the storeroom with the food supplies and tools. From that moment on, everything speeded up big-time. José took full advantage of the commotion caused by Läufer’s loud and sudden appearance. He jumped on Roi and rapidly disarmed him. Roi was an old man, seventy-five years old, freezing cold and slow to react. He didn’t put up any serious resistance. With a hard and accurate kick to his gun-toting wrist, I disarmed one of Melentyev’s bodyguards, while the other one froze in position for fear that Läufer would cut his boss’s throat with the sharp steel edge of the chisel.

  So, in a few short seconds, the balance of power had switched completely. Now José held a gun on Roi, Läufer had Melentyev subdued and I was tying the hands of the two Russian boys with some leather cord that I had found on some nearby packages.

  ‘You won’t kill me, Cavalo. You wouldn’t dare,’ Roi said calmly, looking him straight in the face.

  ‘Don’t bet on it,’ José answered him, jamming the barrel of the gun firmly into his ribs.

  I knew that Roi was right, of course: José was incapable of killing him. So I finished tying up Pavel and Leonid as quickly as I could and went over to do the same to the Prince. I was longing to get the pistol away from José: the mere sight of him with a gun in his hand frightened the hell out of me. I also knew that there was no way that Läufer would do Melentyev any harm either, so I hurried it up with Prince Philibert and headed over to the Russian mafioso. In next to no time, all the bad guys were tied up and sitting down on the floor, leaning back against stacks of cases full of paintings.

  Only then did I grab hold of Läufer and hug him like a crazy woman, crying from the sheer joy of it.

  ‘I’m so pleased to see you! So pleased to see you!’ I repeated again and again, between kisses. It’s not that I’m particularly demonstrative, but sometimes I get carried away and can’t avoid making a fool of myself. Big drops slid down my cheeks and landed on good old Heinz’s shirt as he tenderly hugged me back. It took me a while, but I eventually cottoned on that the poor guy was trembling like a leaf. I pulled away, dried my eyes and took a good look at him. ‘You’re absolutely freezing, Läufer!’

  ‘It’s really cold down here,’ he managed to stutter through his chattering teeth.

  ‘Let’s go to the office,’ suggested José.

  ‘And what shall we do with these four?’ I asked, turning around to look at them. Roi’s eyes locked onto mine. Teasingly. That should have tipped me off that he was planning something, but unfortunately it didn’t. At that point, I was more worried about Heinz. Still, I certainly was aware that they were a major problem for us. One solution was to kill them, and we weren’t about to do that, that was for sure. But we couldn’t hand them over to the police and we couldn’t just leave them there forever. And we couldn’t risk taking them with us: once we got up to street level, they would be angling to kill us, any chance they got.

  ‘Let’s just leave them down here,’ argued José, scornfully, already walking away with Läufer. ‘We’ll bring some food down for them later.’

  My soft heart got the better of me. I just couldn’t walk out on them without first collecting up some of the imperial uniforms and ball gowns and draping them over Roi and his stupid gang of co-conspirators. That would keep some of the cold off, at least. Then I finally did leave - and had to run to catch up with José and Heinz, who had already crossed the Amber Room.

  We went through the barracks area and back along the tunnels until we reached Sauckel’s office, almost as relieved and delighted as if we were safely home again. There were our backpacks, and there was the stove, still with its panful of wax. José gave Heinz the sweater he had planned to put on once we got back to the street and a good pair of gloves. Then he took the black leather jacket off the coat stand and put it over Heinz’s shoulders. The office was relatively warm, a sticky and humid heat, but our savior was cold through to his bones after having raced through the tunnel system at top speed to come to our rescue.

  While I heated up industrial quantities of mashed potato mixed with meat extract, Läufer explained to us that his miraculous and lifesaving appearance was all down to a brave and intelligent youngster called Amália. José’s mouth dropped open in astonishment and I abruptly stopped stirring the mash, yelped in pain and started sucking the finger which I had just burned on the edge of the saucepan.

  ‘Amália?’ mumbled the bewildered father of the young genius.

  ‘You
r daughter is called Amália, isn’t she? Well, it was her.’

  ‘What the hell are you …’ I began to say, but Läufer butted in.

  ‘Listen - I didn’t know anything about all this,’ he said, indicating the office with his chin. ‘I had no idea where you were. Since the last Group meeting on October 11th, I hadn’t gotten any news about anybody. So yesterday morning, Thursday, I emailed Roi to ask him how the Weimar business was going.’

  ‘What Roi told us was that you were too busy to help us out,’ I explained. ‘We thought that you had refused to get involved in this.’

  ‘I knew nothing about it,’ he insisted. ‘He didn’t tell me a thing.’

  José and I exchanged knowing glances. Roi had been double-crossing us from the start.

  ‘Anyway,’ he continued, ‘by yesterday evening it was driving me crazy. Roi hadn’t answered my email and it was over a month since I’d had any news at all. So I sent an email to you, Ana, to your regular email address. Seeing as all our emails to each other go through Roi’s computer, there was no other way to do it.’

  ‘What? You’re telling me that you actually sent me a message uncoded?’

  ‘Relax - it’s not such a big deal,’ he replied, helping himself to his first spoonful of mashed potato. ‘I didn’t say anything indiscreet.’

  ‘That’s not the point, Läufer! It’s completely irresponsible!’

  ‘Well, that irresponsibility has just saved your life,’ he defended himself (with his mouth full). ‘Because, whether you know it or not, José’s daughter spends all day and every day on your computer. And thanks to that, she saw my email and read it.’

  ‘She’s been reading my private mail?’ I fixed her father with killer eyes.

  José made a calming noise with his lips and reached over to hold my hand.

  ‘Amália answered me immediately, very frightened. She told me that you had been down here eleven days and that she thought I already knew that. Once I had got over a brief panic attack - my first reaction was to think that the police had set a trap for you - I quickly sent her a message on a password-protected channel and with an IRC key. Your daughter really knows a lot about computing, José. I’d like to get to know her - we’d have a lot to talk about. Anyway, once we were both on-channel, I blocked all further access and bombarded her with questions. I had to check that she was who she said she was and whether what she was trying to tell me was true. The first thing I did was introduce a Trojan into your system, Ana, to make sure that it was actually yours. I had a good look around, saw all your stuff and that reassured me. By the way, you should change your antivirus program, it’s pretty useless. And your firewall’s not configured properly either.’