The Amber Room

by Steve Berry

  “How stupid do you take me for?” Knoll said, inches from her.

  “Come on, Christian. Can’t we settle this? I meant what I said back at the abbey. Let’s go back to your room. Remember France? That was fun.”

  “What’s so important that you have to kill me?” His grip tightened.

  “If I say, you’ll let me go?”

  “I am in no mood, Suzanne. My orders are to do as I please, and I believe you know what pleases me.”

  Buy some time, she thought. “Who else was in the church?”

  “The Cutlers. It seems they have a continuing interest. Care to enlighten me?”

  “How would I know?”

  “I believe you know a lot more than you are willing to state.” He squeezed harder.

  “Okay. Okay, Christian. It’s the Amber Room.”

  “What of it?”

  “That chamber was where Hitler hid it. I had to be sure, that’s why I’m here.”

  “Sure of what?”

  “You know Loring’s interest. He’s looking for it, just like Fellner. We’re just privileged to information you don’t have.”

  “Such as?”

  “You know I can’t say. This isn’t fair.”

  “And blowing me up is? What is going on, Suzanne? This is no ordinary quest.”

  “I’ll make you a deal. Let’s go back to your room. We’ll talk after. Promise.”

  “I’m not feeling amorous right now.”

  But the words had the desired effect. The hand around her throat relaxed just enough for her to pivot off the wall and knee him solidly in the groin.

  Knoll crumpled in pain.

  She kicked him once more between the legs, driving the toe of her boot into his cupped hands. Her adversary crashed to the cobbles and she rushed away.

  Blinding pain racked Knoll’s groin. Tears welled in his eyes. The bitch had done it again. Quick as a cat. He’d relaxed only a second to readjust his grip. But enough for her to strike.

  Damn.

  He stared up to see Danzer disappearing down the street. His groin ached. He was having trouble breathing, but he could probably still take a shot at her. He reached for the pistol in his pocket, then stopped.

  No need.

  He’d tend to her tomorrow.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  Wednesday, May 21, 1:30 a.m.

  Rachel opened her eyes. Her head pounded. Her stomach churned as if from seasickness. The stench of vomit rose from her sweater. Her chin ached. She gently traced the outline of a blood pimple, then remembered the knifepoint boring in.

  Hovering over her was a man dressed in the brown cassock of a monk. His face was old and withered, and he watched her intently with anxious watery eyes. She was propped against the wall, in the corridor where Knoll had attacked her.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “You tell us,” said Wayland McKoy.

  She looked beyond the monk and tried to focus. “I can’t see you, McKoy.”

  The big man stepped closer.

  “Where’s Paul?” she asked.

  “Over there, still out. Got a nasty blow to the head. You okay?”

  “Yeah. Just have one monster headache.”

  “I bet you do. The monks heard some shots from the church. They found Grumer, then you two. Your room keys led them to the Garni and I hustled up here.”

  “We need a doctor.”

  “That monk is a doctor. He says your head’s fine. No cracks.”

  “How about Grumer?” she asked.

  “Aggravatin’ the devil, probably.”

  “It was Knoll and the woman. Grumer came up here to meet with her again and Knoll killed him.”

  “Fuckin’ bastard got what he deserved. Any reason why you two didn’t invite me?”

  She massaged her head. “You’re lucky we didn’t.”

  Paul groaned a few feet away. She pulled herself across the stone floor. Her stomach started to calm down. “Paul, you all right?”

  He was rubbing the left side of his head. “What happened?”

  “Knoll was waiting for us.”

  She slid close and checked his head.

  “How did your chin get cut?” McKoy asked her.

  “Not important.”

  “Look, Your Honor, I’ve got a dead German upstairs and police askin’ a thousand questions. You two are found sprawled out cold, and you tell me it’s not important. What the fuck’s goin’ on?”

  “We need to call Inspector Pannik,” Paul said to her.

  “I agree.”

  “Excuse me. Hello? Remember me?” McKoy said.

  The monk handed her a wet rag. She dabbed it to the side of Paul’s head. Blood stained the cloth.

  “I think he cut you,” she said.

  Paul reached up to her chin. “What did happen there?”

  She decided to be honest. “A warning. Knoll told us to go home and stay out of this.”

  McKoy bent close. “Stay out of what?”

  “We don’t know,” she said. “All we’re sure of is the woman killed Chapaev and Knoll killed my father.”

  “How do you know that?”

  She told him what happened.

  “I couldn’t hear all of what Grumer and the woman were saying in the church,” Paul said. “Only little bits and pieces. But I think one of them—Grumer, maybe—mentioned the Amber Room.”

  McKoy shook his head. “I never dreamed things would go this far. What the crap have I done?”

  Paul said, “What do you mean,done ?”

  McKoy said nothing.

  “Answer him,” Rachel said.

  But McKoy stayed silent.

  McKoy stood in the underground chamber, his mind a swirling montage of apprehension, and stared at the three rusted transports. He turned his gaze slowly to the ancient rock face, searching for a message. An old cliché,if the walls could talk , kept racing through his mind. Could these walls tell him more than he already knew? Or more than he already suspected? Would they explain why the Germans drove three valuable trucks deep into a mountain and then dynamited the only exit? Or was it even the Germans who sealed the exit? Could they describe how a Czech industrialist breached the cavern years later, stole what was there, and then blasted the entrance shut? Or maybe they knew nothing at all. As silent as the voices that had tried through the years to forge a trail, only to find a path leading to death.

  Behind him, footsteps approached through the opening from the outer gallery. The other exit from the chamber was still stuffed tight with rock and rubble, his crews yet to start any excavation. They wouldn’t until tomorrow at the earliest. He glanced at his watch and saw that it was nearly 11:00A .M. He turned to see Paul and Rachel Cutler emerge through the shadows. “I didn’t expect you two this early. How’re your heads?”

  “We want answers, McKoy, and no more stalling,” Paul said. “We’re in this whether we, or you, like it or not. You kept wondering last night what you’d done. What did you mean?”

  “You don’t plan to take Knoll’s advice and go home?”

  “Should we?” Rachel asked.

  “You tell me, Judge.”

  “Quit delaying,” Paul said. “What’s going on?”

  “Come over here.” He led them across the chamber to one of the skeletons embedded in the sand. “There isn’t much left of what these guys were wearin’, but from the scraps the uniforms appear World War Two vintage. The camouflage pattern is definitely U.S. Marine.” He bent down and pointed. “That sheath is for an M4 bayonet, U.S. issue from the war. I’m not certain, but the pistol holster is probably French. The Germans didn’t wear American issue or use French equipment. After the war, though, all sorts of European military and paramilitary used American-issue stuff. The French Foreign Legion. Greek National Army. Dutch Infantry.” He motioned across the chamber. “One of the skeletons over there is wearing breeches and boots with no pockets. Hungarian Soviets dressed like thatafter the war. The clothing. The empty trucks. And the wallet you fou
nd cinches things.”

  “Cinches what?” Paul asked.

  “This place was robbed.”

  “How do you know about what these guys were wearing?” Rachel asked.

  “Contrary to what you might think, I’m not some dumb-ass North Carolina redneck. Military history is my passion. It’s also part of my preparation on these digs. I know I’m right. I felt it Monday. This chamber was breachedpost war. No doubt about it. These poor slobs were either ex-military, current military, or workers dressed in surplus. They were shot when the job was finished.”

  “Then all that you did with Grumer was an act?” Rachel asked.

  “Shit, no. I wanted this place to be full of art, but after that first look Monday, I knew we had a violated site. I just didn’t realize how violated till now.”

  Paul pointed to the sand. “That’s the corpse with the letters.” He bent down and retracedO ,I , andC in the sand, spacing the letters as he remembered. “They were like that.”

  McKoy retrieved Grumer’s photographs from his pocket.

  Paul then added three additional letters—L,R ,N —filling in the blank spaces—and changed theC to aG . The word now readLORING .

  “Son of a bitch,” McKoy said, comparing the photo to the ground. “I think you’re right, Cutler.”

  “What made you think of that?” Rachel asked Paul.

  “It was hard to see clear. It could have been a halfG . Anyway, the name keeps coming up. Your father even mentioned it in one of his letters.” Paul reached in his pocket and withdrew a folded sheet. “I read it again a while ago.”

  McKoy studied the handwritten paragraph. Halfway down, the Loring name caught his eye:

  Yancy telephoned the night before the crash. He was able to locate the old man you mentioned whose brother worked at Loring’s estate. You were right. I should have never asked Yancy to inquire again while in Italy.

  McKoy grabbed Paul’s gaze with his own. “You believe your parents were the target of that bomb?”

  “I don’t know what to think anymore.” Paul motioned to the sand. “Grumer talked last night about Loring. Karol talked about him. My father may have talked about him. Maybe even this guy here in the sand was talking about him. All I know is Knoll killed Rachel’s father and the woman killed Chapaev.”

  “Let me show you somethin’ else,” McKoy said. He led them to a map lying flat near one of the light bars. “I took some compass readings this morning. The other shaft that’s sealed goes northeast.” He bent and pointed. “This is a map of the area from 1943. There used to be a paved road that paralleled the base of the mountain to the northeast.”

  Paul and Rachel squatted close to the map.

  “I’d wager these trucks were driven in here through the other sealed entrance, over this road. They would have needed a compact surface. They’re too heavy for mud and sand.”

  “You believe what Grumer said last night?” Rachel asked.

  “That the Amber Room was here? No doubt about it.”

  “How can you be so sure?” Paul asked.

  “My guess is this chamber wasn’t sealed by the Nazis, but by whoever looted it after the war. The Germans would have needed to get the amber panels back after they were stashed. It makes no sense to blast the entrance shut. But the guy who came in here in the 1950s, now that bastard wouldn’t want anyone to know what he’d found. So he murdered the help and collapsed the shaft. Our findin’ this was a fluke, thanks to ground radar. The fact that we gained entrance, just another fluke.”

  Rachel seemed to understand. “Always pays to be lucky.”

  “The Germans and the looter probably didn’t even know that another shaft passed this close to the chamber. Like you say, just dumb luck on our part, lookin’ for railroad cars full of art.”

  “They had rail lines going into these mountains?” Paul asked.

  “Damn right. That’s how they moved munitions in and out.”

  Rachel stood and gazed at the trucks. “Then this could be the place Daddy talked about going to see?”

  “It well could,” McKoy said.

  “Back to the original question, McKoy. What did you mean about what you’d done?” Paul asked.

  McKoy stood. “You two I don’t know from shit to shine-ola. But for some reason I trust you. Let’s walk back outside to the shed, and I’ll tell you all about it.”

  Paul noticed the midmorning sun as it cast a dusty hue through the shed’s dingy panes.

  “How much do you know about Hermann Göring?” McKoy asked.

  “Just what’s on the History Channel,” Paul said.

  McKoy smiled. “He was the number-two Nazi. But Hitler finally ordered his arrest in April 1945, thanks to Martin Bormann. He convinced the Führer that Göring intended to mount a coup for power. Bormann and Göring never got along. So Hitler branded him a traitor, stripped him of his titles, and arrested him. The Americans found him just as the war ended, when they took control of southern Germany.

  “While he was imprisoned, awaitin’ trial on war crimes, Göring was heavily interrogated. The conversations were eventually memorialized in what came to be called Consolidated Interrogation Reports. These were considered secret documents for years.”

  “Why?” Rachel asked. “Seems like they would be more historical than secret. The war was over.”

  McKoy explained that there were two good reasons why the Allies suppressed the reports. The first was because of the avalanche of art restitution requests that came after the war. Many were speculative and spurious. No government had the time or money to fully investigate and process hundreds of thousands of claims. And the CIRs would have done nothing but amplify those claims. The second reason was more pragmatic. The general assumption was that everyone—apart from a handful of corrupt people—nobly resisted Nazi terror. But the CIRs revealed how French, Dutch, and Belgian art dealers profited from the invaders by supplying art for theSonderauftrag Linz project, Hitler’s Museum of World Art. Suppression of the reports eased the embarrassment that fact would have caused a great many.

  “Göring tried to have his pick of the art spoils before Hitler’s thieves arrived in any conquered country. Hitler wanted to purge the world of what he considered decadent art. Picasso, van Gogh, Matisse, Nolde, Gauguin, and Grosz. Göring recognized value in these masterpieces.”

  “What does any of that have to do with the Amber Room?” Paul asked.

  “Göring’s first wife was a Swedish countess, Karin von Kantzow. She visited the Catherine Palace in Leningrad before the war and loved the Amber Room. When she died in 1931 Göring buried her in Sweden, but the Communists desecrated her grave, so he built an estate he called Karinhall north of Berlin and encased her body there in an immense mausoleum. The whole place was gaudy and vulgar. A hundred thousand acres, stretching north to the Baltic Sea and east to Poland. Göring wanted to duplicate the Amber Room in her memory so he constructed an exact ten-by-ten-meter chamber ready to accept the panels.”

  “How do you know that?” Rachel asked.

  “The CIRs contain interviews with Alfred Rosenberg, head of the ERR, the department Hitler created to oversee the looting of Europe. Rosenberg talked repeatedly of Göring’s obsession with the Amber Room.”

  McKoy then described the fierce competition between Göring and Hitler for art. Hitler’s taste reflected Nazi philosophy. The farther east the origin of a work, the less valuable. “Hitler possessed no interest in Russian art. He considered the entire nation subhuman. But Hitler didn’t regard the Amber Room as Russian. Frederick I, King of Prussia, had given the amber to Peter the Great. So the relic was German, and its return to German soil was considered culturally important.

  “Hitler himself ordered the panels evacuated from Königsberg in 1945. But Erich Koch, the Prussian provincial governor, was loyal to Göring. Now here’s the rub. Josef Loring and Koch were connected. Koch desperately needed raw materials and efficient factories to deliver the quotas Berlin imposed on all provincial governors. Lor
ing worked with the Nazis, opening family mines, foundries, and factories to the German war effort. Hedgin’ his bets, though, Loring also worked with Soviet intelligence. This may explain why it was so easy for him to prosper under Soviet rule in Czechoslovakia after the war.”

  “How do you know all this?” Paul asked.

  McKoy stepped over to a leather briefcase angled from the top of a survey table. He retrieved a sheaf of stapled papers and handed them to Paul. “Go to the fourth page. I marked the paragraphs. Read ’em.”

  Paul flipped the sheets and found the marked sections:

  Interviews with several contemporaries of Koch and Josef Loring confirm the two met often. Loring was a major financial contributor to Koch and maintained the German governor in a lavish lifestyle. Did this relationship lead to information about, or perhaps the actual acquisition of the Amber Room? The answer is hard to say. If Loring possessed either knowledge of the panels or the panels themselves, the Soviets apparently knew nothing.

  Quickly after the war, in May 1945, the Soviet government mounted a search for the amber panels. Alfred Rohde, the director of the Königsberg art collections for Hitler, became the Soviets’ initial information source. Rohde was passionately fond of amber, and he told Soviet investigators that crates with the panels were still in the Königsberg palace when he left the building on April 5, 1945. Rohde showed investigators the burned-out room where he said the crates were stored. Bits of gilded wood and copper hinges (that were believed part of the original Amber Room doors) still remained. The conclusion of destruction became inescapable, and the matter was considered closed. Then, in March 1946, Anatoly Kuchumov, curator of the palaces at Pushkin, visited Königsberg. There, in the same ruins, he found crumbled remains of the Florentine mosaics from the Amber Room. Kuchumov firmly believed that while other parts of the room may have burned, the amber did not, and he ordered a new search.

  By then, Rohde was dead, he and his wife having died on the same day they were ordered to reappear for a new round of Soviet interrogations. Interestingly, the physician that signed the Rohdes’ death certificate also disappeared the same day. At that point, the Soviet Ministry of State Security took over the investigation along with the Extraordinary State Commission, which continued to search until nearly 1960.