Checkmate in Amber (12 page)

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 applauded 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 beijo
⁷
.’

‘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.

He put aside the walkie-talkie and the laptop and rushed towards me.

‘Look at this! Look!’

‘I can’t see a thing, honey. Don’t forget that I …’

‘The route shows the way! This maze of tunnels conceals a swastika! We’ve walked past it twice and missed it completely.’

‘What are you talking about? What the hell are you saying?’

By way of an answer, José began to scroll through Amália’s email.

‘Hang on a second. Where is it?
Here
it is. Listen: “… on the afternoon of the fifth day …”. Look for the sheet of graph paper covering the fifth afternoon, darling. “… on the afternoon of the fifth day, at the start of the fourth mile …”. Come on, Ana, please. Why haven’t you found the right sheet yet?’

‘Because I’m ill - or had you forgotten?’ I protested in outrage.

‘Oh my God, of course you are, sweetheart, of course you are!’ José responded with a shocked look on his face. He laid the laptop on my stomach, turned and leapt to his feet in an impressive pirouette, grabbed his sleeping bag, placed it under my head as a pillow, retrieved the laptop, which by then I had in my hands, and replaced it with my bundle of notes. ‘There you are then!’

I looked at him like he was the biggest weirdo that I had ever laid eyes on.

‘Go on then, darling, find the fifth afternoon sheet!’ He sweetened me up with a beautiful smile.

I opened up my logbook and took out the corresponding page.

‘The fourth mile!’ he insisted, impatiently.

‘Fourth mile it is,’ I confirmed, placing the end of my pen on the relevant mark.

‘Right then: “… at the start of the fourth mile, you drew a sort of cylindrical saucepan shape with a long handle coming off it at its top right.” Have you found it, Ana?’

‘Yes, here it is,’ I said, and drew over it several times so that it stood out.

‘She goes on: “It’s the same shape as the route you covered yesterday afternoon, the fifth mile - but the other way around.” Yesterday. Yesterday’s sheet. Have you got it?’

‘Yeah, yeah, I’ve got it. Let me have a look for it. Here it is.’ Again I drew over the outline of the saucepan shape, upside-down this time.

‘She then says: “If you now join the two figures at their bases and then slide the lower one to the right so that the routes drawn on the two sheets coincide perfectly, you will see that a swastika is formed in the center”.’

‘A swastika!’ I exclaimed, as I successfully carried out Amália’s instructions. ‘Look, José - a swastika, a real
Hakenkreuz!
’

‘I can’t believe it. It’s extraordinary. We have to tell Roi. We’ve found the way in!’

‘It was your daughter who found the way in,’ I corrected him, gritting my teeth slightly. Amália was a genius, no doubt about it. On the other hand, watching José dance what looked like a Native American rain dance in that subterranean aqueduct certainly suggested that she took rather more after her mother than her father. ‘You’ll do yourself some damage if you don’t stop leaping about.’

‘Get up and join me, darling. This we have to celebrate!’

He didn’t need to ask me twice. I shuffled off my chrysalis and began to dance with him, madly, in honor of the manitou. My cold had disappeared, and I was cured of my exhaustion, of our eleven days buried in the sewers, of the stink and the filth and, above all, of my despair. Sauckel and Koch thought that they were so clever and cunning camouflaging an enormous swastika inside an even bigger labyrinth, but we in the Chess Group were way smarter - well, OK, maybe it was our offspring who were - and so far we had never met a mystery that we couldn’t crack. It never remotely occurred to us that Amália’s discovery might just be an architectural coincidence and that the way into the cache wouldn’t actually be there. And thank goodness for that.

There were still three hours to go before we made contact with Roi again and could give him the good news, so we gathered up our gear and began to head back towards the swastika, which was only about three miles away. This time we did begin to notice differences with the rest of the tunnels. Shortly after entering into the horizontal stretch of the swastika’s lower arm, we realized that it had never flooded and that the smooth layer of sand on its floor still showed our footprints from the day before. Its walls, unlike the others which were rendered up to half-height to protect them against the flow of water, were left bare, revealing the porous brickwork heavily stained with patches of humidity and velvety black colonies of fungi and mold. This time around, it was impossible to understand how, on our first trip through, we had missed what now seemed like blindingly obvious differences between the tunnels which formed part of the swastika and the rest which belonged to Weimar’s drainage system.

Checking so many square feet of tunneling with the magnetometer was going to be completely exhausting - each hook of the swastika was two and a half miles long and the crosspieces each measured four miles. But there was no way round it: the entrance we were looking for could be hidden anywhere in that vile Nazi emblem. And now that we had a good lead, we could hardly back out on the grounds that we were too damn tired and it had just become a drag.

We contacted Roi at the agreed time, eleven in the evening, and told him the news. He got so enthusiastic that, despite his always priding himself on being extremely security-conscious over any form of communication, which made him notoriously tight-lipped when it came to exchanging information, this time he asked José to tell him everything, and in full detail. He wanted to know how we had identified the outline of the swastika (and was disgusted with himself for not having spotted it, given that he had a plan of the entire tunnel network) and he advised us to start our search at its center, instead of at its outer extremities. It seemed to him to make more sense to locate the entrance there than anywhere else. José, of course, didn’t breathe a word about Amália’s role and gave all the credit for the discovery to me. Nor did he mention the fact that his heroine’s fever was on the way up again. Under my clothes I was shivering with cold, but even that wasn’t enough to keep my eyes open. I fell asleep.