Amber Beach (6 page)

“Half right. I got hired, which was more than your man did.”

“How did you know about – hell”, she said in disgust at falling into his trap.

“No harm done. Duping someone in as her guide was an
obvious move.”

“Did you tell Honor that you’re looking for her brother?”

“The subject didn’t come up.”

“That’s what we thought”, Ellen said with cream-licking satisfaction. “The Donovans have stonewalled everyone overseas, including you. So you’re going to backdoor them, using the younger sister in America.”

There was no disapproval in Ellen’s voice. If anything, there was a note of congratulations on finding an opening no one had before now. Jake would have preferred it if she had been shocked. But people with a low threshold for shock didn’t last long in a world without fairy dust.

“We won’t get in your way”, she said quickly. “Just keep
us informed.”

“You’re in my way right now.”

“Get used to it, or I’ll drop in on Little Miss Muffet and tell her who her fishing guide really is.”

For a few moments Jake simply looked at Ellen. Then he shook his head slightly. “I don’t think so.”

“What?”

“Right now I’m all you have inside the Donovan clan walls. You’re not stupid enough to blow my cover until you’re certain you can’t use me at all.”

Manicured nails tapped on black leather. A cool wind gusted and then gusted
again,
making a grove of slim, red-barked madrona trees shudder.

Jake knew without looking up that the clouds to the southwest were slowly reclaiming the sky. It would probably rain before sunset. The forests hadn’t gotten green by accident.

 
“All right”, she said. “What do we have that you want?”

“Did Kyle come through SeaTac about two weeks ago?”

“His passport came through. The Immigration guy we interviewed said he looked pretty much like his picture, given
that he was coming off a two-week fishing trip on the Kamchatka Peninsula.”

“What do you say?”

“We’re betting if the man and the picture matched, neither was Kyle Donovan.”

Jake’s eyes narrowed. “Bad news.”

“For Donovan, certainly. He probably got that chunk of Mother Russia they offered you. But bad for us? We don’t know.”

“Did…”

“My turn”, she interrupted. “Have any of your Emerging Resources contacts heard rumors of prime Baltic Amber for sale from shady sources?”

“Raw or worked?”

“Both.”

“Just the usual. Petty smuggling and theft in the mines are commonplace and not part of any larger conspiracy. The big-time smugglers are all connected to government. Hell, half the time they
are
the government.”

“Welcome to the former Soviet Union”, Ellen said sourly, “where a conflict of interest is your best hope of getting rich.”

“When your currency is in freefall or you don’t even have a currency to call your own, you have to expect a little creative bartering by the natives.”

“Creative bartering.” She smiled briefly. “That’s good. Have any of your people turned up anything having to do with Russian amber specifically?”

“The usual small forgeries from Russian plastic factories. Some estate stuff that probably came from stolen World War Two household goods. A pretty decent replica of a corner table from the czar’s legendary Amber Room.”

Only someone who had once played the game would have recognized the subtle tightening of Ellen’s features. Jake noticed the predatory sharpening of interest and felt a cold stone settle in his stomach.

More than raw amber and less than nukes.

The Amber Room.

Jake had heard rumors that the Amber Room had been found… but there were always rumors about World War II’s most famous lost treasure. In 1941 the Nazis had dismantled one of the czar’s extraordinary palace rooms, a room whose ceiling, doors, wall coverings, and furnishings – tables, chairs, lamps, knickknacks, candlesticks, vases, knives, forks, spoons, snuff boxes, objets d’art,
everything – were
carved from solid amber or surfaced in mosaics of precious amber.

The only exceptions to the amber rule were the tall, gilded mirrors that doubled and redoubled the play of light throughout the magical room. When the room was intact, walking into it must have been like walking into a shimmering golden paradise suspended within the vast, icy gray of the Russian
winter.

The Germans shipped their unique golden loot out of Saint Petersburg to Kaliningrad. From there, it vanished, thus beginning a treasure hunt that would endure as long as human imagination and greed or until the lost Amber Room was recovered, whichever came first.

“The table was fake?” Ellen asked.

“The mosaic inlay was real amber. The table itself was real and very well made, but it had never been part of the czar’s Amber Room.”

“How can you be certain?”

“It’s my job.”

“Convince me.”

Jake thought it over for a split second and decided to be gracious. That way he had a fallback position.

“Quantities of Baltic amber are hard to come by”, he said, “unless you’re very well connected with a Baltic government or a local
mafiya
chieftain, take your pick. Mexican and Costa Rican amber are available to anyone with money. Whoever
crafted the forged table was forced to use some clear amber from the New World.”

“How can you tell the difference between New and Old World stuff?”

“Ask your experts.”

“You’re here. They’re not.”

Wistfully he looked at the sky. Clouds were thickening off toward the Olympics, but there was still plenty of time to try out the
Tomorrow
before the weather got nasty.

“Baltic amber is called succinite because of its high percentage of succinic acid”, he said. “It’s unique among ambers. In fact, some purists claim that succinite is the only real amber. All the rest is something else.”

“All Baltic ambers are unique for the succinic acid content, no exceptions?” she asked.

“None that matter.”

“Tell me about the ones that don’t matter.”

Jake looked at his watch. He would rather have been photocopying Kyle’s log than telling Ellen what any amber dealer could have told her. He hoped that a little patience now would pay big dividends later on.

“About ten percent of Baltic ambers don’t have succinic acid”, he said, “but they didn’t end up in the czar’s palace.”

“Why not?”

“That kind of Baltic amber is too soft, too brittle, or too ugly for decorative use. It was turned into varnish or medicine or burned as incense. The amber I saw in the forged table was as clear and radiant as liquid sunshine. First-class amber in the New World. The Old World still prefers bastard amber.”

“Bastard?”

“Opaque or semi-opaque. Depending on its color and ‘feel,’ nontranslucent amber is called butter, bone, ivory, fatty, cloudy, semi-bastard…”

“I get the picture”, she interrupted. “A lot of names.”

“A lot of variations in color and transparency. Amber’s
link with human culture is long and richly textured, especially in the Baltic regions. They spent as much time describing and naming minute differences in amber as we did counting angels and pinheads.”

Polished red fingernails tapped in slow counterpoint to the dying wind while Ellen ran what she had just heard through
her first-class brain.

“Are color and clarity a reliable way to tell Baltic from
other amber?” she asked.

“No. What I just gave you only skims the surface. There are literally hundreds of words in the Baltic languages describing varieties of amber. Each variation of clarity and/or color has its own passionate collectors and its own mythology.”

“The czars traded all over the world”, she said. “Could some high-quality non-Baltic amber have been used in making the original Amber Room?”

“Anything is possible.”

“Is it probable?”

“Not really. The amber discoveries in Mexico and Puerto Rico are recent. The Amber Room dates from Prussian times, the early eighteenth century. Besides, why trade halfway around the world for goods you can get at home for a great price?”

“Meaning?”

“The Baltic amber mines were an imperial monopoly.”

“Mother”, she muttered. “What you’re saying is, no matter what the color or clarity, every bit of amber in the Amber Room came from the Palmnicken mines.”

“Or other mines along the shores of the Baltic Sea. Lithuania and Kaliningrad have the best mines, but not the only
ones.”

“Well, there goes that theory.” She frowned. “What…”

“My turn”, he interrupted. “Do you have proof that the Donovan family is part of Kyle’s scheme?”

“Nothing to take to court. It’s our working hypothesis. Do you have a better one?”

“No. Are you looking for the whole Amber Room?”

“Who says we’re looking for it at all?”

“That’s the problem with interrogation. You can’t ask questions without giving away information.
Are you looking for the whole room?”

Silence. Then Ellen shrugged. “They can’t say I didn’t warn them about you. At the moment, all we care about is the panel that Kyle stole.”

“Does he have the whole room?”

“We don’t know.”

“Give me your best estimate.”

“We think he may or may not be somebody’s cat’s-paw for the sale of the entire room. Either way, he ended up with a panel from the room as a calling card to excite the international market.”

“Bloody hell. Who was the corpse that washed up in the San Juans, the one with Third World dental work?” Jake asked.

“Former KGB from the former Soviet Union.”

“What was he doing lately?”

“People.”

“Anyone in particular or was he an equal opportunity killer?”

“He worked for one of the Moscow
mafiya
chieftains for a while, then went freelance.”

“Why was he after Kyle?”

“No answer.”

“What do you have on Marju?”

“She was the usual loyal daughter of a downtrodden, diluted, bastardized Baltic country. The losers keep track of feuds, wars, and bloodlettings going back centuries. They’re good haters.”

Jake already knew that. What he didn’t know was whether Marju’s brand of patriotism went beyond speaking an arcane language and taking up traditional Lithuanian crafts.

“How serious was she about freeing Lithuania?” he asked.

“From what we’ve discovered, good old Grandpa did a thorough job of infecting his granddaughter with a heavy dose of Father Country claptrap. She went to the usual ‘secret
¹
meetings, which were duly reported to the Russians by Lithuanian informers.”

“There are meetings and then there are conspiracies. Which were these?”

“Babe, they haven’t had a useful conspiracy in Lithuania since God wore knickers. There was lots of shouting over how our poor great-great-great-granddads were screwed, plus retellings of even more ancient rape and robbery.”

“They would be better off shouting for a currency of their own, one not based on the Russian ruble”, Jake said.

“Lacks sex appeal.”

“What about…”

“Back to the missing amber”, Ellen interrupted. “Have you heard any rumors about the Amber Room?”

“Sure.”

Again Jake saw the shift in her, as though she had just
come into hard focus.

“Tell me what you’ve heard”, she said.

“You may have the rest of the day, but I don’t.”

“If I do, you do.”

For a moment his impatience almost got the better of him. Then he reminded himself how much easier life would be if Ellen or someone like her wasn’t sticking to him like lice.

“A few people say that the room never left Saint Petersburg, and therefore was lost when we bombed the place to a smoking ruin at the end of the war. Most people believe that the Nazis dismantled the Amber Room with hacksaws and pry bars in 1941, packed up the lot, and shipped it to Kaliningrad.”

“And?”

“That’s when the real fun begins. The crates the Amber Room was packed in vanished sometime in 1945. No one has seen them since. The bean counter types say the whole thing went up in smoke when we bombed the hell out of the city.”

Ellen grimaced. “What do the rest of the people say?”

“You’ve heard of Erick Koch, a former Nazi from what was then East Prussia?”

“Have I?”

“He’s the one who said the Amber Room is still buried in Konigsberg, which the Russians renamed Kaliningrad. He ought to know. He’s the one who buried it.”

“Why didn’t he dig it up?”

“He spent his life in jail after the Nazis fell. Various folks wooed him and whispered promises of freedom in his ear, but even on his deathbed he never told where the loot was hidden.”