I was beginning to feel like an insect under the microscope of a team of mad scientists. My personal privacy had just gone completely AWOL. My underwear was suddenly in full view of the public.
‘I bet you can’t work out how I made sure that she really was Amália.’
José and I both shook our heads, obediently. Heinz had a big smug smile on his face. ‘I asked her what was in the packet I gave you to bring her from Germany and she told me that it was a tinplate figure which slid along a snow-covered track, a Märklin made in 1890. Bingo! A great security question, wasn’t it?’
José and I confirmed its sheer brilliance by nodding our heads.
‘Well, you can more or less guess the rest. She told me the whole story and we both realized that you were in serious danger. The way that Roi had organized this holy mess, his lies and everything, could only mean one thing. I got in my car and drove straight to Weimar. Amália had told me which manhole would get me into the tunnel system as close as possible to where you were.’
That made me curious, and I asked him which it was.
‘You won’t believe me,’ he said, with a glint in his eyes.
‘Try me.’
‘We’re right underneath the Buchenwald concentration camp.’
‘You must be kidding!’
‘Cross my heart. Right underneath the camp, on a hillside called Ettersberg.’
My brain started working overtime. That meant that the Gauforum and KZ Buchenwald were linked by tunnel. So it wasn’t under the Gauforum that they hid the Amber Room - it was under Buchenwald.
‘I went in through a manhole in Blutstrasse8, the concrete road that runs between Weimar and the camp and which was built by the prisoners themselves. And …’
Suddenly I felt a sharp pain in my side, and an arm jerked back hard on my throat and cut off my breathing. I heard a shout and some blows, but I didn’t really catch on to what was happening until I heard Roi’s voice rasping out from behind my ear.
‘Give me the guns right now! Give me the guns or I kill her!’
Furious, I swiveled in towards him, desperately using my two hands to try and break his grip and grab a breath. But the harder I struggled, the worse the pain in my side.
‘I said give me the pistols, José, or she’s dead! I’m not joking!’
I heard a shot. Then another shot. I actually heard the whistling of the bullets as well, they passed so close to my head. But when at last I managed to get some air back into my lungs, I blacked out.
EPILOGUE
It’s not that I’m a delicate hothouse flower who faints whenever she hears a dirty word. It’s just that Roi’s arm had cut off the oxygen supply to my brain for too damn long. That’s why I dropped senseless to the floor a split second after José shot Prince Philibert and killed him.
Roi had managed to loosen the cords on his wrists not long after I left the warehouse where all the works of art were stored. I guess he had picked up on my hastiness and nerves when I went to tie him up, and had held his hands in such a way as to be able to loosen them easily after I had gone. Then he killed Vladimir Melentyev and his hatchet men with the same dagger that he had begun to stick into me not long afterwards. With its jewel-encrusted gold handle, it must have been one of the many antique weapons that Koch had looted from Saint Petersburg. Killing his three unlucky henchmen guaranteed him possession not just of the treasures in the warehouse, as already agreed with Melentyev, but also of the Amber Room itself, which was worth untold millions.
Then he came after us. He went through the barracks and along the tunnels until he reached the other side of the armor-plated door into the office. There he waited, listening to us talk, until picking the right moment to launch an attack on the person closest to his hiding-place. Who happened to be me, of course. It would have all turned out perfectly, as José had taken possession of all three pistols before leaving the warehouse and taking me prisoner guaranteed that José would promptly hand the guns over to Roi. But he miscalculated José’s reaction. When José saw me begin to collapse, he thought that Roi had stabbed me for real (which he was only seconds away from doing, in fact) and, mad with rage, just as Roi thought he was beginning to hand over the weapons, he took hold of one of them and shot him in the head. Twice, and without leaving a scratch on me.
José, Heinz and I left the Weimar tunnels that same night, through the Buchenwald manhole, not long after burying the corpses of Prince Philibert, Vladimir Melentyev and his two minders in the damp black earth. The others, so many years abandoned in their barracks bunks, would have to wait until our next visit for a decent burial.
Once in Heinz’s car and speeding away from the concentration camp, we got in touch with Amália and Ezequiela on my cell phone. It was a long call, which we kept stretching out just to keep hearing the sound of their voices. But without giving any details of what had happened, of course. Cell phone calls are notoriously insecure and even a total amateur can intercept them with a scanner and listen in to your conversations. While we were calming them down, and loving them up, Läufer was bombing down the German Autobahns heading for his house in Bonn, where we stayed for a couple of days to wind down and get our breath back after all the hustle and bustle.
José could finally have a shave, and he got rid of his beard. But I had come to the conclusion that I liked him better with hair on his face, and I made him promise to let it grow back again. Of course, that wasn’t the only important business we took care of while we were staying at Heinz’s place: we needed to get rid of every trace of the Chess Group’s online communications and offline files. Roi’s sudden disappearance would surely have attracted the attention of some of his closest associates, so Läufer set about destroying the contents of the prince’s hard disk, remotely of course, reformatting it to make it completely impossible to recover the data. We were convinced that Roi hadn’t left any paper trail or photographs. None of us had, given his always stern insistence on tight security, so with the hard disk wiped, we felt pretty relaxed about things.
There was just one item that Läufer didn’t delete altogether and instead transferred straight to his own computer: Roi’s comprehensive list of Chess Group clients, including many of the world’s most important art collectors. I was amused to find amongst them some of Hollywood’s most famous superstars alongside high-ranking figures in the Chinese Communist Party leadership, not to mention a long list of prominent Japanese businessmen. How mundane and predictable it all turned out to be, finding out who I’d been working for over all these years.
Rook and Donna, who up until then had been out of the loop, received an anonymous one-word message in their regular email in-trays: ‘Check’. They knew exactly what that meant: go on full alert, clean out your computers, destroy everything that might possibly connect you to the Chess Group and await instructions.
José got very worried about his car, which we had left in the deserted garage of the ruined building in Frankfurt’s Römerhofstrasse, and also about the old dark blue Mercedes that we had left behind in Weimar. Läufer assured him that he would personally go to Frankfurt and pick up the Saab, and that he would take good care of it until José came to get it back. As for the Mercedes, it had been parked in the same place for sixteen days and we had no idea of what might have happened with it or where Roi had gotten hold of it. By now there was a good chance that it was sitting in a police car pound, or even worse, that it had been put under surveillance in the hope of catching whoever returned to pick it up. In fact that was pretty improbable, but we were getting so paranoid about it that Läufer hacked into Weimar’s municipal computer system and, after spending ages going round in circles, eventually found a short report which noted the recovery of a vehicle stolen from a Frankfurt repair shop in mid-October, on the same street we parked the car and of the same make and description. We guessed that it had been returned to its original owner without any further investigation, as was normal practice in such cases. Added to the fact that we had wiped it free of
fingerprints before we left it, we calmed right down and forgot all about it.
In the early morning of Tuesday, November 17th, we finally boarded a plane to Madrid. Once in Barajas airport, we hung around until lunchtime and then left the airport with a group of French tourists. From Madrid we took a taxi to Ávila, joking around in French all the way, and in mid-afternoon we walked through the door of my house like two shipwrecked sailors setting foot on dry land after many weeks lost at sea. Amália and Ezequiela hugged and kissed us almost to death - although not quite as much as they hugged and kissed each other when, three days later, José and Amália got on a train back to Porto.
Amália’s role in the whole adventure had gone to her head in a big way. José was duly appreciative of the important part she had played, but he didn’t put up with her grown-up airs and graces and, with a few short and well-aimed comments, reminded her that she was a thirteen-year-old adolescent girl who still had to go to high school. One night, when José had fallen asleep, I got out of bed and went over to my old bedroom. Amália woke up all of a sudden and looked at me in complete surprise.
‘I just wanted to see you alone to thank you for everything you did,’ I said to her with a smile. ‘Without you, we simply wouldn’t be here. If you decide you want to join the Group when you’re older, I’ll support you one hundred per cent. But don’t tell your father, OK? I don’t think he’d agree with me on that one. And hey - you’re welcome in my house whenever you want and you can do whatever you like with my computer.’
Now we were co-conspirators. She hugged me tight and I hugged her back, which for folk as undemonstrative as she and I was a major step forward in our relationship, and sealed the deal. Ezequiela had also become really fond of her and made a point of repeatedly expressing her approval of my firmly established relationship with Amália’s father. She even went so far as to hint that she was quite prepared to leave Ávila and live in the neighboring country to our west ‘if I felt that you needed my help’. Yes, she was back on that track again. And I, of course, shut her up with the usual series of tactless remarks.
Life returned to normal, just as if it had never left there. Every weekend, José and I met up in Porto or in Ávila to spend a couple of days together, sometimes with Amália and sometimes without her. It became part of my regular routine to drop down to Madrid on Fridays, either to catch a plane myself or to meet José at the airport. We had established a relaxed and enjoyable modus vivendi - apart from his occasional resentment and moaning as if he had been sentenced to life imprisonment. But the trick there was just to ignore him.
Thanks to the database which Läufer had downloaded off Roi’s hard drive before wiping it clean, we found the name and details of the French collector who had bought the icon I robbed from the iconostasis of the Orthodox church of Saint Dimitri in Saint Petersburg. In mid-December, still slightly nervous about the possible repercussions from the Weimar events, we left the icon in the restroom of a gas station on the outskirts of Lyon and, six hours later, picked up five hundred thousand dollars from the bus station checkroom. But we still felt very exposed and vulnerable, and so it wasn’t until March the next year that we felt confident enough to arrange to meet up with Donna and Rook.
Four months had passed since Roi’s treachery and death. Weimar was celebrating its exalted status as 1999’s European City of Culture and was constantly in the news, although mention of its Nazi past and the existence of KZ Buchenwald six miles outside the city was notable by its absence.
Roi’s disappearance from the scene was hardly commented on in the art world. It was as if nobody wanted to be reminded that they had ever known him. Or maybe everybody assumed that he had swanned off to some glorious island hideaway in the French Antilles to enjoy a well-deserved retirement. Melentyev’s disappearance, we found out later, was rapidly and carefully covered up by his son, Nikolai Sergeiovich Rachkov, who had already been running the family’s businesses for quite some time.
In the early spring, we held a meeting on IRC which Heinz had called, using a new mail encryption system which he had developed. It was a short meeting, and we quickly decided that the time had come to change the way the Chess Group operated. We agreed to meet in person, the five of us, on the following Monday, March the 8th, at the Casuarina Beach hotel, which was in Anse-aux-Pins on Mahé Island in the Seychelles. There, while we tanned ourselves on the white sand beaches, swam in the turquoise waters of the Indian Ocean and enjoyed some live Creole music at sunset, we could calmly discuss the various matters that we needed to sort out and make all the decisions necessary for our future well-being.
That wasn’t exactly the way it turned out, of course, but nevertheless it was both moving and exciting to all meet up for the very first time, in Läufer’s room in the early morning, with all the windows shut down tight and our nerve ends jangling. Rook turned out to be a bit more stupid, grasping and uglier than I’d expected from our online contacts (he was one of those Brits with a brolly and braces, and the soul of a yuppie). But Donna was a fantastic woman, very clear in her way of thinking and with a healthy and passionate love for art. We were only five chess pieces, not six, sitting together that night on Casuarina Beach. Right from the start we were aware that we lacked a leading figure - a King - but there was a really good feeling among us and we were all committed to making a go of it. And, key to it all, we all knew that together we had exclusive possession of a massive goldmine in the Weimar catacombs.
The sun was high in the sky by the time that we finally all agreed to leave the Amber Room in its subterranean hiding place. We spent a long time trying to find a viable alternative, because it bothered the hell out of us not being able to find a practical solution to the problem. Unfortunately, we eventually had to face up to the fact that we were simply incapable of taking on such a huge operation: we would have needed, at the very least, a big team of specialized personnel, a battery of mechanical diggers, cranes, fork lift trucks and stuff, and a huge fleet of trucks to carry it away. Besides, where on earth would we be able to store it? Where could we hide, and keep in good condition, those enormous panels of golden amber which were over two hundred years old? Better to leave it all where it was, we decided - at least until we had managed to empty all the other works of art out of the next-door warehouse. We all agreed on that, right from the start. We needed to set up a regular schedule of visits to the Weimar tunnel network, going in and coming out at Buchenwald. In a year or two, we could shift everything that Sauckel and Koch had stolen and hid, and we wouldn’t have any problem at all selling such prime material on the more than extensive private collectors’ market.
Donna raised the possibility of returning the Amber Room to the Russians anonymously, by slipping them the information of its whereabouts through a series of untraceable sources. But Läufer pointed out that this could provoke a major diplomatic crisis between Russia and Germany, who were already in a serious confrontation over what was known as Priam’s Treasure, which the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann had discovered in the remains of Ancient Troy in the late nineteenth century. It seems that, at the end of the Second World War, the Soviets had stolen everything that Schliemann had dug up and had claimed it all as spoils of war. So, in the end, it made more sense to everyone to avoid stirring up a hornets’ nest.
As a result, for the moment at least, the Amber Room was ours. Some day, maybe, it might be of some use to us. We might turn it to our advantage (not monetary, necessarily) or use it as a bargaining chip, as Erich Koch tried to do. Or, on the other hand, we could simply return it one day, if the circumstances were right. Only time would tell.
With only one vote against (mine), we also agreed to ‘rent’ one or two more cells from my Tía Juana at the Santa María de Miranda monastery. That way, my partners patiently explained to me, we could store the pieces we had already sold prior to their delivery to the end customers. Fine, I replied, but from now on, my aunt’s endless demands for money to fund the rehabilitation of her monastery
would have to be met by the Group as a whole, not just by me. I was sick and tired of the way that bloodsucker only ever stuck her teeth into my throat. They agreed, of course, and I just had to swallow my more than mixed feelings about it. My aunt was about to get stinking rich, and that irritated the hell out of me.
The Chess Group is still hard at work, but now it’s more for the sheer fun of it. A lot has happened since the Weimar showdown. We nominated a new Roi less than a year later, a fantastic person who’s doing a really good job. And it wasn’t long after that …
But, hey, that’s another story.
_______________________________
1 Jean-François Champollion (1790-1832), French archeologist and founder of modern Egyptology. In 1821, he began to decipher the Egyptian hieroglyphics on the Rosetta Stone, the key to the development of our understanding of Ancient Egypt.
2 IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is a worldwide internet protocol for real-time one-to-one or group communication in text-based discussion forums, known as channels.
3 Regional Leader of the Nazi Party during the Third Reich.
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