Checkmate in Amber (13 page)

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I slept very badly that night. I had a succession of horrible nightmares, in which either I died or José died or Ezequiela died or Tía Juana died. Even Amália died in one of them. Nobody got out of my dreams alive. Although some say that dreaming of your own death brings you ten more years of life, the truth of the matter is that I woke up in a foul mood. All I wanted was to find myself an uninhabited rain forest and lose myself in it forever. But let’s face it. Waking up all by yourself is just not the same as waking up next to someone who loves you enough to feel your pain.

‘I’m fed up to the back teeth with you, Ana! What the hell’s wrong with you now? Why are you being so mean? I never realized that you were so rude and inconsiderate! Can’t you even make the slightest effort to be halfway friendly? I bet you’ve had it your own way your whole life, haven’t you? That must be it! You’ve always done whatever you wanted whenever you wanted to, without anybody ever picking you up on it. That’s it, isn’t it? Well listen up, you spoiled little brat: I’m not going to put up with it! Understood?’

‘But … But …’

‘I’m not interested in your excuses! It’s time we got to work. We can talk about this when we get home. When I go to mine and you go to yours, that is.’

The center of the underground swastika was a cube with a plan area of about six hundred and fifty square feet, more or less without walls as its four sides all had tunnel openings, with a vaulted ceiling about six and a half feet high at its apex and a slippery cobbled floor covered with loose earth. José placed the gaslamp right in the center and put it on its brightest setting. The sudden brightness of the huge intersection contrasted strongly with the insistent darkness of the four tunnels.

‘There might be a hidden chamber between the ceiling and the city above,’ José speculated thoughtfully, looking upwards.

‘I don’t think so,’ I answered in a sweet and helpful tone of voice, although I was still suffering from the bawling-out he had given me. ‘In the first place, there’s not enough room and, in the second place, any construction work or street repairs could have uncovered their hiding place. It makes more sense to assume that they dug it out below us.’

‘OK. So let’s take a good look at the floor then.’

We cleared the earth off the floor as best we could, and stamped all over it in an attempt to discover some kind of trapdoor. But we found nothing. Despite our raising one hell of a dust cloud, the stonework was solid and there were no suspicious cracks or openings. We looked at each other dejectedly.

‘We’re going to have to search the whole damn swastika,’ I groaned, approaching him.

‘I don’t think we will,’ he said quietly, putting his arm round my shoulders. ‘There is one place we haven’t checked yet.’

I raised my eyes to him in surprise and saw that he was smiling, and looking directly at the gaslamp.

‘Right in the middle!’ I yelled out. ‘We haven’t checked the middle yet, right where the lamp is!’

Laughing with excitement, we moved the lamp and began clearing away the pile of earth which we had unthinkingly left around it. Within a short time, we had uncovered a circular manhole cover, which looked to be metal and hermetically sealed. There it was. Right there.

‘The way in, José!’ I cried in triumph. ‘The way in - we’ve found it!’

The long-awaited manhole cover was so heavy and well-fitting that it took the two of us working the crowbar to shift it. Finally, with a dry metallic clang, we levered it off to one side of the opening. The echo was ear-shattering, but triumphant. A dark shaft and a rickety and badly-rusted access ladder led down into the depths.

‘I’ll go down first and have a quick look around,’ José decided, gingerly putting his foot on the first rung.

‘Be really careful.’

I gave him his headlamp and, as he tightened up the strap, I tied one end of a coil of rope to his belt.

‘I won’t be long,’ he reassured me, giving me a long look, and then disappeared down into the shaft.

As time went on, I got more and more scared and anxious. The rope sliding through my fingers told me that he was still descending. The further he went, the more I reproached myself for letting him go down first: he was a complete novice in this line of work and I was the one who was the experienced professional risk-taker. When the hundred-foot length of rope ran out, I hung on tight and gave it a sharp pull to warn him to stop. I debated whether to make him come back up again or tie on another rope and let him carry on. The second option won out: we’d gotten far too far to stop now. Another thirty or forty feet of rope disappeared into the darkness before José reached the bottom of the shaft. At that point he shouted up to me, from so far away that I could barely hear what he was saying.

‘Ana! Get down here!’

Going down that stinking hole was the last thing I felt like doing, but I followed his lead. I strapped on my headlamp and began the descent. The further down I went, the narrower the shaft and the hotter and more stifling the humidity. I counted two hundred and thirty rungs on the ladder before I got to José.

‘God! This is worse than the fifth floor of an underground car park. And it stinks just as badly.’

Right in front of us, about six feet away, stood a metal door.

‘Have you tried to open it?’

‘No - I thought I’d leave that to you.’

‘Chivalry is dead, I see.’

The door was sheeted in steel and had a couple of hinges and a handle. It looked sturdy and well-fitted.

‘Sorry about this,’ I said to him, shrugging my shoulders, ‘but this looks to me like a man’s job.’

With one powerful jerk of the crowbar, and a low grunt, José forced the door open and worked it back far enough to let us through.

‘After you, ma’am.’

‘How very kind.’

My heart was racing. Was I just seconds away from setting my eyes on Koch’s looted treasures? I guess what I was expecting was some kind of storeroom or warehouse with all those beautiful objects perfectly packed and stacked in boxes all the way up to the ceiling. But what I saw through the gloom as soon as I got my nose through the door was nothing more than a boring old office, where I could just make out some old armchairs, a desk table, a coat stand with a black jacket hanging on it in the corner and, built into an alcove in the wall, a set of shelves loaded down with dozens of books, looking well past their best. What the hell was all this doing a hundred and sixty-five feet underground?

‘What can you see?’ José asked me urgently.

‘If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me. You’d better have a look yourself.’

He put both his hands against the inside of the door and gave it a sharp kick. He managed to widen the opening just enough to join me inside the disappointingly tiny room. He let out a long, low whistle of amazement.

‘Wow. This isn’t at all what I expected.’

He walked over to the table, with its fancy pen set covered in dust and cobwebs, and I could hear him messing around with something heavy and metallic.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked, as I approached him.

He was holding a small desk lamp in his hands which, not surprisingly, was refusing to respond to his overenthusiastic attacks on its switch.

‘If there’s a lamp, there must be a damn power supply here somewhere,’ he complained, bad-temperedly.

‘You’re right, but you won’t get the power back on by breaking the light switch. Let’s have a look around. There must be a main power switch somewhere. We should follow the cabling. Look,’ I pointed with my finger, ‘Over there. That should lead us to the right place.’

The old electric cable disappeared through a hole in the wall, just above a small door by the coat stand, and behind it we found a magnificent bathroom, with a big mirror above the washbasin and an impressive bath with a shower curtain and everything. We were strangely thrilled by the discovery - as if we were about to throw our gear off, jump in the shower and come out refreshed and revived. It was very weird to see the reflection of my own face in the mirror. I’d almost forgotten what I looked like, it had been so long. We turned the taps to see if they worked, and they did: at first the water came out dirty, but soon it was pouring crystal clear and as cold as ice. There was even a revolting-looking bar of soap which had fallen into a corner. It reminded me of having read somewhere that the Nazis had made soap from the fat of their Jewish victims and I quickly looked away in disgust. In between the washbasin and the bathtub, there was another door which turned out to lead to a big concrete-lined chamber where the generator was housed. It was driven by two powerful Daimler-Benz motors, firmly mounted on fixed supports and probably stripped from a couple of truck tractor units. The whole wall at the end of the room was practically covered with oil drums, cans and equipment.

‘Will it work, do you think?’ I asked José. ‘This stuff’s almost sixty years old.’

José gave me a quick kiss and mimed rolling up his sleeves to get to work.

‘Trust me. Machines are my thing.’

‘Toy machines for sure, darling, but maybe not these Second World War brutes.’

‘O ye of little faith! Help me out here, give me some light with your headlamp.’

He checked both the motors out from head to foot and back again, sticking his hands into various slots and openings, right up to his elbows sometimes, and carefully cleaned off the spark plugs, coils and pilot jets. Finally, he tried to start them up. You could just hear a slight click, a half-turn and then, nothing. Pure silence.

‘What happened?’

‘I haven’t got a clue,’ he growled, as he hunkered down again to work out what had gone wrong and why.

For half an hour - it seemed like forever - I stood there providing the lighting by moving my head in tune with his rapid movements from one part of a machine to the next. By the end of it I was practically seasick, not to mention bored out of my wits, given that he hadn’t said a word to me the whole time.

‘Have you worked out what’s wrong, José?’

‘No, damn it, it’s driving me crazy! I don’t understand. It’s all in really good condition. I’ve cleaned everything from the carburetor to the smallest nut. I can’t find a single fault. But the damn thing still won’t work!’

I scratched my head for a second, then turned to him and said (you know, just to make conversation):

‘You don’t think they might just have
run out of gas?
’

Suddenly it all went quiet. His furious eyes locked onto mine, which had gone all innocent, and his headlamp glared at the one on my forehead.

‘What was that you said?’

‘Nothing, nothing! I didn’t say a thing!’

‘Out of gas!
Of course!’ He unscrewed the caps on the gas tanks and hit each tank lightly as he listened at the openings. ‘They’re empty! You’re a genius!’

‘I knew you’d wise up eventually.’

‘Come on, help me fill them up. Start passing me the jerrycans, OK?’

‘The
what?
’

‘The jerrycans - those metal containers with handles over there by the wall.’

‘Oh, right, the
containers
.’

‘They’re called jerrycans. They were invented by the Germans not long before the war. They got their name because the British nicknamed the Germans
Jerries
. They’re fantastic - in fact, they’re still being used today. They’re leak-proof and the lever cap snaps open to reveal a spout for easy pouring.’

He opened the first jerrycan and, just as he said, the spout made it easy for him to start filling the first tank. The strong smell of gasoline began to fill the room like incense in a church at high mass. I was amazed that this bluish liquid had stayed exactly the same after so many years. So José explained to me that, in a jerrycan, the gasoline doesn’t just not evaporate, but in fact maintains all of its volatile and inflammatory properties. Eventually, with both tanks filled, he tried starting up the motors again. We could hear the spark plugs sparking and, after various muffled blasts, a few convulsions and a whole series of strangled coughs, we finally heard the full-throated roar of two Daimler-Benz motors generating mechanical energy like there was no tomorrow. The electric generator sighed reluctantly at first, and then, picking up the rhythm, threw itself into its task with mad enthusiasm. All of a sudden the ceiling lights came on, almost blinding us after so many days in the shadows and turning our concrete bunker into Downtown Las Vegas at midnight.

‘Damn! I can’t see a thing,’ I complained, covering my eyes with my hands. ‘I’ll never see again!’

‘You wouldn’t dream of exaggerating, of course,’ joked José, pulling me up against him and hugging my head to his chest.

‘Of course not. Do I ever?’ I murmured out of the side of my mouth.

Little by little, very slowly, our eyes got used to the brightness. We switched off our headlamps and looked at everything around us in total amazement, as if we had never been there before and had just walked in the door. We turned and went back the way we came, going through the magnificent bathroom again, which the bright lights revealed to be as grimy and filthy as the dingiest restroom in a long-abandoned bus station. José overtook me and by the time I got there myself, all the office lights were switched on.

‘So - what do you think?’ he asked me, turning a full circle and giving the whole room the once-over. Damp patches blackened the bare plaster walls, where it hadn’t dropped off to reveal the brickwork.

‘I’m thinking that we might find some very interesting stuff under the dirt and dust.’

‘Well, let’s divide up the work. I’ll go back up to the tunnel intersection to fetch our backpacks and you can search the room,’ he decided, and disappeared out through the metal door in seconds flat.

I took a long good look around that old office. Who had it built? Whose office was it half a century and more ago? Who had sat in that desk chair, wearing that black leather jacket and reading those books that now smelt of mildew? Sauckel? Yes, Sauckel, no doubt about it. Fritz Sauckel,
Gauleiter
of Thuringia and General Plenipotentiary, the man responsible for Weimar’s KZ Buchenwald, whose prisoners had been forced to build him and Koch the best strongbox in the whole damn world. And being a strongbox, I said to myself, it must have a good lock somewhere, a lock whose combination was known only to Sauckel, and maybe to Koch. Perhaps the lock was the office itself, right below the center of the swastika symbol hidden inside Weimar’s drainage system.