Checkmate in Amber (9 page)

CHAPTER TWELVE

My Iberia flight left Barajas airport in Madrid at seven in the evening and when we landed in Porto, the co-pilot announced that it was just five minutes past seven. What? Only five minutes’ flight time? Then I realized how stupid I was being: the clocks in Portugal are always an hour behind Spain’s. So five minutes
officially
, yes. But then my Sunday flight back to Madrid would take two hours and five minutes. Officially speaking.

I got off the plane and boarded the bus that took me to the terminal building. Once inside and waiting for my baggage to appear on the carousel, I could see José and Amália waving at me cheerfully from the other side of the glass partition at the back. José was looking really good. He was wearing a long navy blue overcoat, his immaculately ironed trousers leading down to a pair of deep-shined shoes. The sight of him made me catch my breath and I couldn’t help wondering, yet again, why the hell I found him so damn attractive. If only Amália didn’t have to be there every single time we met. It was becoming a real nuisance.

José and I greeted each other with the traditional kisses on both cheeks, giving me a disconcerting whiff of his musky but subtle cologne which briefly threatened to knock me off balance. Amália, who was wearing a leather jacket, jeans and sneakers, restricted herself to brushing her cheek against mine and blowing a raspberry into my ear. But when we moved apart, her oh-so-innocent face was flashing an angelical smile. That girl was clearly going to be a handful, and I realized that she was dead set against my staying at her home over the next two days. If she thought it was because I wanted to, she couldn’t have been more mistaken. I would much rather have stayed in one of the glorious suites at the Grande Hotel do Porto and been able to wander in and out of the bathroom without a stitch on if the mood took me, for instance. Or whatever. I’d stayed there several years before, but Cavalo vetoed it outright this time, so I had no choice but to stay with Amália and her father, like it or not, until Sunday afternoon.

Porto provoked in me the same sensations as it had the first time I visited there: a small city teetering on the edge of total chaos. The sheer quantity of people and traffic reminded me of Paris, but with the key difference that in Paris the avenues are a whole lot wider and the traffic lights are more or less respected. Porto’s narrow old alleyways rise and fall like never-ending mountain ranges, and are jam-packed twenty-four hours a day. But the city has something friendly and familiar about it that makes you feel very much at home.

José left the car in an underground parking lot on the Rua da Alegria, and carried my little travel bag for me as we strolled along to the Rua de Passos Manuel, which was just around the corner. Soon I caught sight of his
Ourivesaria
store sign, his goldsmith’s. The truth of the matter was that I was very curious and keen to get to know the house where he had lived his entire life, just like I had in mine.

In fact, once we got there, it struck me that they were both very similar: old and large, with high ceilings and countless rooms, half of which were completely unused. The living room, which looked onto the street through huge bay windows, was full of sofas and bookshelves. In one corner you could see a small TV facing a comfortable-looking armchair with a matching footstool. All the display cabinets and bookshelves were antiques, made of mahogany and chock-full of chess trophies. In the opposite corner from the armchair was a large dining-room table, and between the two an enormous Persian carpet which almost covered the entire floor.

‘It’s beautiful, José,’ I told him, gazing over the room.

‘You really like it?’ he asked.

‘I’m crazy about it,’ I confirmed. ‘It’s so cozy and welcoming.’

And if he came to my house sometime, I suddenly thought, I would really have to get rid of Ezequiela’s shabby old armchair, not to mention her beloved
mesa camilla
, that round table with the brazier underneath to keep her legs warm under the tablecloth.

‘Are you going to go out for dinner, Papá?’ asked Amália, as she wandered away down the long hallway which led to the other rooms in the house.

‘Yes, Amália, but I would rather you didn’t run away quite so soon. You should help me show our guest around.’ His daughter immediately picked up on José’s cautionary tone of voice and swiftly returned to stand obediently by her father’s side.

Room by room, they showed me round the whole house. Amália’s was done up with a strange mixture of cuddly toys, old-style lace curtains with festoons matching the bedspread, posters of rock bands on the walls and at the far end, the cutting edge of modern technology: three computers - a laptop and two big desktops - hooked up to a monitor so huge that it was more like a cinema screen than a computer’s. And stacked up in a nearby corner was a top-of-the-range networked sound system. On a small armchair by her bed sat a gigantic teddy bear with a virtual reality headset and wearing a pair of earphones and an extra-large tee-shirt with the Stones’ Tongue and Lips logo.

José’s room was quite a bit less exuberant - in fact, I would have even called it monastic had it not been for the huge wrought-iron bed, whose headboard of scrolls and vine leaves stretched across the whole width of the room and looked as if it posed a serious danger to people’s heads. Where on earth had he got hold of a bed like that? It looked well over a hundred years old. Even two hundred, maybe. And a bit noisy, perhaps? It was a pleasure to see the enormous collection of beautiful antique toys displayed on his bedroom’s mantelpiece, shelves and windowsills. I could just imagine them wound up and moving around with all their different tunes ringing out. On the right, just next to a big built-in wardrobe, was a mirrored door which led to the bathroom.

My own bedroom was right at the end of the hallway, warm and comfortable, and I was thrilled to see that it too had its own bathroom. The window looked onto the Rua, like in the living room, so you could hear some street noise. But the bed was big and beautiful and the mattress was as firm as a plank, just the way I like it.

José took me out to dinner in a small village close by, called Foz do Douro. Our table looked west, so we were treated to a wonderful sunset over the Atlantic. The food was slightly too greasy for my taste, all seafood, and it reminded me vividly of Spanish restaurants along the Mediterranean. The strange thing about the evening was that both José and I were desperately awkward and uptight with each other. We no sooner started a conversation than it ground to a shuddering halt. It was as if neither of us knew what the hell to say. Or we were both thinking stuff that had nothing to do with what we were supposedly talking about. I was looking at him with rapt attention as he struggled to explain me something or other, and I felt his eyes tight on me whenever it was my turn to dream up a sensible-sounding remark. We were both smiling our heads off and you could see from a mile away that we were making complete fools of ourselves. But, luckily, no-one else noticed. Apart from us.

We ended up reaching a point where either we found some topic of conversation that would keep us on the straight and narrow or we were doomed. So there was no way around it. We had to talk about work. After all, that
was
why I had come to Portugal.

‘The Amber Room! What an incredible story!’ José blurted out, as he raised his glass of
vinho verde
.

‘Believe me, I still don’t really understand how on earth we ended up going quite this far with it,’ I responded with a sigh.

‘Face it - it’s all your fault,’ he countered playfully. ‘Who found the lining behind the Krylov canvas? Who worked out that Koch used the Atbash Cipher? Who put two and two together, trawled through all those life stories and made sense of the whole thing?’

‘Oh come on! It was Läufer who foraged around on the internet and came up with the real goods.’

‘Yeah, sure. And Donna and Rook and Roi and I all put in our two cents’ worth as well. But the real culprit is you. In any case, you shouldn’t feel guilty about it: you’re the one who’s going to end up suffering for it, down in those damn Weimar sewers.’

‘But I will have you with me.’ My pleasure at the prospect shone through in the way I said it.

José had such dark, dark eyes, dark but streaked with honey, and as they looked me over, they felt like the most beautiful eyes I had ever seen. Just to wake up next to them one morning, I was ready to do anything, crazy or not. I felt so attracted to this guy that I was only a hair’s breadth away from owning up to being in love with him. Hang on a minute. What did I just say?
In love with him?
Jesus. It was blindingly obvious. Who the hell was I trying to kid? I almost died of shock as it suddenly dawned on me what I felt for him. A halfwit smile spread across my face and my fingers fit to break the wine glass in my grip. That was it! I was madly in love with the man! I had always been in love with him, I realized, but the distance, Roi’s no fraternization rule, my endless coming and going - everything had conspired to blind me to the truth. Just a few short hours with him in his own surroundings had been enough to blow the cork clean off my bottled-up emotions. Stupid for sure, plain stupid, because what the hell was I going to do about it now? There was no way out.

‘It’s far too dangerous,’ I muttered to myself.

‘No it’s not. Not if we do it right.’

José’s voice was just as jittery as mine. By now neither of us was quite sure what we were talking about - the Weimar job or the next ten minutes. Fear of making a total fool of myself slightly improved my level of self-control, but my pulse was racing and I was badly short of breath.

‘We’ll have to work hard tonight.’

Oh my God! What the hell did I just say? My subconscious was behaving like a drunken Judas Iscariot, betraying my wants and desires without the least disguise. My blushing cheeks lit up the whole damn restaurant and I begged the earth to swallow me up and have done with it. But José just smiled and stretched his arm out to clink his glass against mine.

‘I’ll drink to that,’ he said, and for a long while we just couldn’t keep our eyes off each other.

I don’t remember much about the rest of the meal. I guess the wine went to my head, I was really warm and just didn’t stop making crazy remarks and laughing happily. On the drive back, José had his eyes firmly fixed on the road and I snuggled down into my seat, enjoying the darkness and the gentle bluesy
fados
sung by Dulce Pontes. José’s face was lit up from time to time by the headlights of the oncoming traffic. God, I loved him! Even if he didn’t feel the same way about me, in that moment he was mine and that moment was mine forever. It was then that José, without even turning his head towards me, took hold of my hand and squeezed it, and I squeezed back. Hand in hand, we drove on home and went up the stairs to his front door, without a word, not daring to break the spell. And once he’d shut the door behind me, he pulled me to him in the dark of his hallway and we began to kiss like there was no tomorrow …

I’m happy to report that the two hundred year-old wrought-iron headboard left not a single scar on my head.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

That Saturday we did plenty. But none of it was work. In the morning, José took me for a walking tour of the city - although walking is hardly an accurate way to describe our increasingly breathless ascents and descents of those endless steep hills and ridges. We walked across the impressive and thankfully more-or-less level Ponte Luis I double-decker wrought-iron bridge across the River Douro (which we Spanish call the Duero) and visited Porto’s São Bento train station, the Torre dos Clérigos and some of the city’s famous Port wine
bodegas
.

We had lunch in a place called
A Brasileira
, like the famous café in Lisbon, an art-nouveau gem bedecked in mirrors, chandeliers and marble, its waiters dressed in the traditional style with their white aprons and black bow ties. In the afternoon, José took me to the
Livraria Lello
, an amazing mixture of bookshop, library and museum, open since 1906 and still with its original interior built around an extraordinarily beautiful central staircase. I staggered out of there with a stack of books which I’ll probably never get round to reading, seeing as they were all in Portuguese. But nothing mattered to me that day. I was just so gloriously happy. I felt myself floating from place to place, an enchanted spirit hand-in-hand with the finest-looking, most wonderful man in the world. I had the dumbest ecstatic smile on my face all day long, right up until …

‘We should go home now,’ José announced. ‘Amália is on her own.’

‘Doesn’t your daughter have any buddies?’ I asked him, in a grudging tone of voice that I couldn’t quite disguise.

‘She’s a very unusual girl,’ he answered thoughfully. ‘Solitary, intelligent, introverted … She’s been getting on very badly with her mother and that’s made her very vulnerable right now.’

I think that it was at that precise moment that I finally got it into my head that, just like the eighteenth-century Spanish console with its lion’s paw feet that I bought at auction, José wasn’t the only item in the lot: little Amália came included with her father. Whether I liked it or not, I couldn’t just make her disappear. Either I accepted her, or I’d lose José.

‘Fine,’ I said, serious now. ‘Let’s go back.’

Throughout that whole wonderful day, we hadn’t said a word either about work or about what was happening between us, and both conversations were still outstanding. But, once again, just as we were about to get started, the Amália issue pushed us apart.

‘Listen, Ana, there’s something I really need to own up to before we get home.’

José was opening the car door for me as he spoke. I was dumbstruck with apprehension. He smiled back at me and gently stroked my cheek.

‘I realize that it’s going to make you very angry, but I feel that I owe it to you now to come clean about it.’

Whenever Ezequiela started a sentence like that, it immediately set all my alarm bells ringing. But José’s words fell like a heavy weight on my heart. What on earth was he planning to tell me? I got into the car and waited for him to join me, expecting the very worst. But all he did was just get in the car and drive out of the parking lot. It wasn’t until we ended up stuck in a massive traffic jam on the Avenida dos Aliados that he opened his mouth to speak.

‘Amália knows all about us. About the Chess Group, I mean.’ It was like being hit across the head with a sledgehammer. But worse. I was speechless. I immediately turned to look at him, opened my mouth to speak, but not a single word came out.

‘OK, OK,’ he began to trot out his unconvincing excuses. ‘I know what you’re going to say. Everything you’re thinking right now makes perfect sense, and if you get mad at me, I’ll say nothing in my defense. But even if you decide that you never want to see me again, please, please let me explain myself.’

There was ringing in my ears, my head was spinning, my eyes had gone out of focus and I felt like throwing up. I was completely terrified. If Count Dracula, Mister Hyde and Frankenstein’s monster had all turned up at the same time to disembowel me, it would have been a cakewalk by comparison. But it really wasn’t a laughing matter. This was a major disaster, a catastrophe. And if Roi ever found out … Jesus. If Donna, Läufer and Rook suspected for a split second that their freedom, their lives, their jobs and everything they owned depended on the tender whims of a thirteen-year-old girl!

‘I didn’t tell her a thing,’ Cavalo went on.

‘Yeah, right,’ I finally managed to speak, still scared out of my wits. ‘So now I’m supposed to believe that Amália cracked Läufer’s security programs and found everything out all on her lonesome?’

‘Well, yes. It was something like that.’

‘Something like that?’ I screamed, by now hysterical. ‘How dare you tell me …!’

‘Just calm down now, Ana! I promise you there’s no way my daughter will tell anybody anything!’

‘How the hell do you know? She’s
thirteen
, for chrissakes! She’s just a child!’

‘She’s my daughter. I know her.’

‘Shit, José, you’ve ruined everything! Everything!’

Out of sheer desperation, I burst into tears. I just couldn’t help it. I realize now that I was so emotionally on edge that day that I wasn’t thinking straight and couldn’t see anything positive at all in the whole mess. At that particular moment, I was focused exclusively on Amália as a seriously dangerous threat to my life, and to the lives of all the other members of the Group.

‘I want to return to Madrid tonight,’ I told him, as we walked up the steps to his house, the very same steps we had run up hand-in-hand just last night, swept up in a wave of mutual desire.

‘Don’t be silly, Ana,’ he said, pulling his keys out of his pocket and opening the front door.

The girl was nowhere in sight. The house was in darkness, and utterly quiet.

‘What you’ve just told me is a major problem, José. Too damn big a problem.’

‘I know, but I really had to tell you.’ He looked straight into my eyes. ‘Your aunt Juana knows about it too, doesn’t she? And I’m willing to bet that old Ezequiela has been well aware of it for a good few years already.
They
don’t worry you?’ he smiled, a touch sarcastically, and carried on. ‘I swear to you, Ana, I swear to you that Amália can be trusted completely, even though you can’t see it right now because you’re shocked and frightened. I want you to understand that she will definitely not say a word to anybody. She understands how important it is. A year ago,’ he began to explain, as he walked around opening doors and turning the lights on, ‘I gave her permission to connect my computer down in the goldsmith’s store to the three she has in her bedroom. All it required was drilling a tiny hole in her floor and running a cable through, she told me, and then she’d be able to go online using my existing internet connection. I didn’t realize that it would be so easy for her to find the subdirectory where I keep all my Group-related files. It just never occurred to me. I thought I had everything safely hidden, but it turned out I was wrong. I used a password, of course,’ he shrugged his shoulders apologetically, ‘but I forgot that Amália knows all my credit card numbers.’

‘You used one of your credit card numbers as a password?’ I’d never heard of anything so amateurish and downright stupid in my whole life.

‘OK, I know,’ he protested, ‘but I made sure that I didn’t have the numbers written down anywhere. I know them all by memory.’

‘Right - and so does your daughter!’

‘That’s true enough. I just didn’t take that into account back then. All she wanted to be able to do was to go online from her room. But she’s my daughter, and like all daughters, I guess, she was curious to see what her father had kept hidden away. Wouldn’t you have done the same?’

In fact, one of my proudest achievements as a girl was having discovered all of my father’s secret hiding places around the house, despite his rather naive belief that he had actually managed to keep certain family mysteries hidden away from me. Even the safe that he had had installed in what was now my study, I cracked with my nimble little fingers as easily as a child’s toy. His cunning combination - as amateurish and stupid as José’s password - was my mother’s date of birth.

‘OK then,’ I muttered as I fell back onto the nearest sofa. ‘Give me some time to take it in. But I honestly don’t think that I’ll ever feel comfortable with it.’

‘You can feel as comfortable about it as you want. It completely depends on you. Amália knew all about the Chess Group this time last month and you were sleeping fine. So what’s new?’

‘What’s new is that now I
know
that I’m in danger!’

‘But the whole point is that you’re
not
in danger, godammit!’ he roared and delivered an angry punch to the back of the sofa where I was sitting.

‘Don’t you dare shout at me,’ I yelled back, ‘let alone start smashing up the furniture!’

He looked at me in amazement and stood stock still for a second. But only a second, because before I had a chance to do anything about it, he threw himself on top of me, laughing his head off.

‘Ana, Ana, Ana …’ he kept murmuring as we kissed.

‘Papá …?’

My blood curdled in my veins. The brat was here.

José leapt to his feet at the speed of light and stood to face his daughter, looking awkward and guilty. But he looked a hell of a lot better than I did: I was lying flat on my back on the sofa in a suggestive and highly undignified position and with my hair and clothes seriously mussed up.

‘Papá, I’m hungry. Have you had dinner yet?’

Amália was staring at us from the living-room doorway with an expression of pure disgust on her face.

‘Where have you been? We thought you were going out.’

‘In my room. Talking with Joan. I had the door closed.’

‘With Joan?’ I asked, horrified. Jesus! That’s all I needed: someone else eavesdropping on José and me talking. And not talking.

‘On IRC,’ José clarified, reading my thoughts. ‘Joan lives in Washington. Amália practices her English with her.’

‘OK, but have you eaten or haven’t you? I’m starving. I didn’t know whether I was meant to wait for you or not.’

‘Would you like a pizza?’ I suggested, as I discreetly finished making myself semi-presentable. ‘I could really murder a huge pizza with extra pepperoni.’

Amália’s eyes suddenly lit up with hope and expectation.

‘Papá doesn’t let me eat pizza. But maybe today - as a special treat?’

José began to frown, but then faced up to the fact that he wasn’t exactly in a very strong position.

‘OK. We’ll eat pizza.’

Amália yelped with pleasure - and looked at me, and gave me a smile. Hey, maybe she wasn’t so awful after all.

Half an hour later, the three of us were sitting around a major-league family-sized pepperoni pizza, digging in enthusiastically, with drops of grease shining up our chins, and washing it all down with cans of Coca-Cola. It wasn’t exactly the romantic dinner for two to celebrate the glorious start of a love affair that I’d originally had in mind, but given the circumstances, it was nothing to complain about. The next day I was going back home and how it would all end up was a complete mystery. At least in Weimar, the two of us would be alone together, I consoled myself.

José was telling us about a clock which was about to arrive at his workshop for repair. He was really excited about it: apparently the original clockmaker was unknown, but it probably dated back to the end of the sixteenth century and had been made in Antwerp.

‘It’s an absolute beauty, Amália! You’ll love it!’ he enthusiastically explained to his daughter. ‘It’s made in the shape of a lion, and its ruby eyes actually move with the hours. The clockwork mechanism runs for three days, and it chimes on the quarter hour and with the alarm setting. It’s absolutely wonderful! The wheel train that transmits power to the escapement and drives the hour and moon phase display hands on the dials was broken in the late 1950s, but I should be able to fix it.’

‘Where do the dials go?’ I asked innocently, just to stay in the conversation.

‘In their casings - where else could they go?’ answered José, surprised, with Amália next to him nodding in agreement.

‘I would love to see your workshop, José.’

‘After dinner. Although we should really start thinking about Weimar, Ana.’

I stuffed a huge slice of pizza into my mouth just to hide how hard this was for me to handle. I was going to have to get used to talking about what I had always thought was the world’s best kept secret right in front of this frighteningly small girl.

‘You haven’t really got a lot of time,’ Amália pointed out, gulping down a mouthful of pizza with the help of a sip of Coke. My plane back to Madrid the next day was leaving at five-thirty in the afternoon.

‘The truth is,’ explained José, ‘the expert here is Ana. I just help her out.’

‘It’s not such a big deal,’ I cut in, trying to play it down. ‘Organizing the trip, making lists of stuff we need, working out what we need to buy …’

‘Will you have any outside back-up?’ asked Amália casually, as if it were a matter of little interest to her, while she took another slice of pizza out of the box.

‘Outside back-up?’ José repeated in surprise.

‘Well,
someone
needs to be outside while you two are underground, surely? In case something happens to you, in case you need something, whatever.’

She took a big bite out of her pizza. José and I looked at each other in amazement and then, in a flash and at the exact same time, we both realized what she was suggesting.

‘No way! Don’t even think about it,’ José countered.

‘Your daughter gets some seriously off-the-wall ideas into her head, José.’

‘If she keeps coming up with this kind of craziness, I’d rather my daughter stopped thinking at all.’

Amália looked at us both with a dangerously innocent expression on her face. She reminded me of Ezequiela putting on her ‘deeply-misunderstood little old lady’ act.

‘But I never said a thing!’ she insisted indignantly.

‘You didn’t have to,’ her father answered her in a chilly tone of voice. ‘We read your thoughts.’