Checkmate in Amber (2 page)

At the beginning, my father’s business had been strictly legit. He had always been a huge admirer of beautiful objects, and this love had led him to travel all over the world buying antiques and building up a collection of seventeenth-century Flemish paintings. Not long after marrying my mother, his family wealth - earned in the construction of Spain’s first railways during the reign of Isabel II - finally ran out for good. So, given that one way or another he was going to have to work for a living, and seeing as there were no top-class antique dealers in Spain at the time, he decided that it would be an excellent idea to set himself up in a business so in tune with his own tastes.

Spain in those days was an inexhaustible gold mine for works of art. ‘The whole country is full of masterpieces that nobody takes care of and nobody gives a damn about!’ he used to yell in absolute disgust, whenever he came back from one of his many trips to Galicia, Asturias, Castilla, Navarra and Catalonia. Everything that he bought with the gypsies’ help off the priests and bishops, he sold immediately at sky-high prices. And it just didn’t stop. Every single time the loaded trucks arrived at the finca, dozens of traders, dealers and collectors were waiting, desperate to buy whatever there was at whatever the price. One of those early collectors was Prince Philibert de Malgaigne-Denonvilliers, a French aristocrat who lived in a fortified château in the Loire Valley and ended up becoming my father’s best friend. It was Philibert de Malgaigne-Denonvilliers - aka Roi - who introduced my father to the Chess Group.

‘Are you going to be much longer?’ Juana asked me, all of a sudden, from the other side of the door. My aunt never ever put a foot inside the dungeon. See no evil, speak no evil - Juana-style.

I took the leather bag off my shoulder and gently set it down on a plank. With the maximum possible care, I untied the knotted drawstring and pulled the top open to reveal a stunningly beautiful eighteenth-century Russian icon. With the same hands which had calmly and coolly unhooked it from the iconostasis in the little Orthodox church of Saint Dimitri, I caressed it now with loving care as if it was a defenseless new-born kitten. A Madonna and Child whose stylized and prayerful faces gazed at me in silence from across the more than two hundred years which separated us.

The monk who painted them had carried out his task with tools and techniques which had remained strictly unaltered over the centuries. Painting an icon was by no means the same as producing a picture in the style of Zurbarán or Murillo. For an Orthodox monk, creating an icon represented a singular and sacred moment in his life, which required prayerful contemplation and fasting before he even began to prepare his glues and pigments. Tradition allotted each color its own particular significance: blue stood for transcendence, yellow and gold signified divine glory, while white meant righteous majesty. Before being considered worthy of using white, for instance, the monk had to devote many hours to prayer and penitence, as he also did before painting the faces and hands and feet, regarded as the icon’s most important features, not covered by clothing, the essence of its very sacredness. So even when, from the ninth century onwards, the custom rapidly caught on throughout Russia of embossing the whole icon with a coat of gold or silver, a finish known as
rizza
, these visible parts of the sacred body were left untouched.

The sudden halt in icon production in 1921, as a result of Lenin’s edict banning it, only had the effect of awakening the voracious appetite of collectors for these treasures. And it was for one of these connoisseurs that I had robbed this particular beauty, which had been saved from the Leninist mass destruction and then resurfaced, thanks to
perestroika
. The buyer, a reclusive French multimillionaire, had offered $500,000 for the piece and, given the minimal risk involved, the Chess Group had happily accepted the job and carried it out with consummate ease. At this very moment, an exquisite and perfect replica of the icon I held in my hands was hanging undisturbed on the Church of Saint Dimitri’s iconostasis in Saint Petersburg, ensuring that the disappearance of the original would remain undetected for the next one hundred years. Donna’s forgery was, as ever, a masterpiece in itself.

‘Ana María, are you going to be much longer?’ repeated my aunt, at the limits of her patience.

‘No, no, I’m done,’ I answered, putting the icon down in a corner, covering it with a clean cloth and hurriedly gathering up my stuff.

I checked the cell over with a final glance and brushed the dust off my hands on my jeans as I left. Juana shut the door, turned the lock and headed back to the cloisters in a tearing hurry.

‘Come on then. We’ve still got lots to do.’

The entire Redemptorist community was waiting for us by the doorway of the old scriptorium, which was now used as an archive for historical documents. The nuns’ work area was now just next to the monastery kitchens and, apart from the chroniclers and researchers directly authorized by the bishopric, nobody at all went into the scriptorium except to clean it. With one arm, my aunt ushered me into the room and, with the other, she waved away the sisters, whose disappointment came out in a low, stifled moan.

‘Take a look over there, on the shelves with the fourteenth and fifteenth-century papers.’

I looked over in the direction she was pointing and noticed a huge splintered crack in the coffered ceiling, open through to the stone above.

‘What happened there?’

‘Woodworm and old age,’ she answered curtly. ‘It’s been on the cards for a long time. I told you about it last Christmas, but you didn’t pay me any attention.’

I slowly shook my head and looked her straight in the eyes.

‘Last Christmas, Tía dearest, you asked me for money to repair the irrigation channels in the gardens, and I remember giving you thirty thousand euros on Twelfth Night, and another thirty thousand in June when you told me that the kitchen garden wall was about to fall down.’

‘Well, now I need a little bit more. Repairing the coffered ceiling needs skilled restoration work, not to mention the cost of killing off the woodworm once and for all.’

For a second I didn’t know whether to laugh or scream the roof off.

‘Now listen here!’ I snapped, facing up to my insatiable aunt. ‘So far this year, I’ve given you sixty thousand euros. That’s quite enough already! It was fifty thousand last year and I don’t remember how much the year before that. Why don’t you get the money off the Castilla and León regional government or from your damn bishopric?’

‘I already applied for it,’ she responded calmly.

‘So …?’ Frankly, I was furious.

‘The government technicians are due to carry out an inspection next week, and if we’re really lucky, we might be able to start the work in a couple of years or so. Let me remind you that there are over forty thousand church properties in Spain in worse condition than ours, which is officially rated as being only ‘at average risk’. By the time any help arrives, all the wood in these archives will be sawdust. My advice to you is to write off your generous contributions to the monastery as charitable donations, just as you always have done.’

I restrained my rage with some difficulty and lowered my head to hide my face behind my hair as I mouthed off a string of curses.

‘How much?’ I asked, when calm finally returned.

‘Fifty thousand.’

‘What!’

My yell alarmed the sisters who were loitering outside the door and one of them popped her head discreetly into the room. My aunt’s killer glance popped it right back out again, at the speed of light. The nuns were well aware that it was my wallet which was financing the restoration work on the monastery. But they were convinced that it was pure generosity on my part, and sheer devotion to my only aunt. Major misconception: that harpy had been extorting money out of my father for years - and now she was ruthlessly extorting the hell out of me.

‘Fifty thousand euros, Ana María - and not a céntimo less.’

‘But Tía!’

‘Forget your buts. Either you pay up, or tomorrow morning I’ll ring up the Guardia Civil’s Historical Heritage Group and invite them to pay your dungeon a visit.’

‘You pig!’

‘What did you say?’ she asked, in a tone of pained indignation.

‘I said that you’re a pig, Tía, and that’s exactly what you are.’

For a second, Juana just looked at me in amazement - not knowing quite how to respond to my insult, I suppose. Then, like a seasoned politician well-used to taking the rough with the smooth without a ruffle, she burst out laughing.

‘I’m going to invoke the guarantee of forgiveness - that whoever robs a thief gains a hundred years of absolution! In fact, I’m confident that I can persuade God to grant me an extension.’

Smiling broadly and brimming over with self-confidence, she sailed out of the archive and left me standing there, looking like a complete idiot. She’s just like my father was, I muttered to myself furiously. An absolute carbon-copy.

CHAPTER TWO

The next day started off cloudy and rainy, and I spent the whole morning in the shop, poring over bills and dealing with customers. On my desk were various letters from some of my regulars asking for information about items in my catalog, as well as two or three flyers for auctions at Sotheby’s and Christie’s due to be held in London and New York over the next few months. The prospect of spending a good while without any ‘special assignments’ (at least until December, when I had to arrange the delivery of the icon) was a very welcome one. Inspiring even, and I was seriously thinking of joining a gym or signing up at some language school to improve my appalling German and maybe to start learning Russian.

The design of my storefront was the result of much thought and expensive research by my father back in the ‘seventies. The last thing he wanted was that boring and uptight look favored by your typical antique store. So he had it painted in a very bright green, dotted with tiles and capped with large gold lettering. OK, maybe that sounds a little bit loud for a business like ours, but - strange as it may seem - it really looked pretty good: an open facade with two big shop windows, separated by an elegant wooden Italian-style entrance door (also painted green, but darker) and reached by three steps, given that the street was on a slope.

The major attraction offered by Antigüedades Galdeano was our fine collection of seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth-century engravings, in color and in black-and-white, and our impressive selection of seventeenth and eighteenth-century Spanish mirrors. But we also had the finest range of furniture,
bargueño
desks, paintings, silver and pottery in the whole of northern Spain. We had always tried to maintain a clear difference between what we sold in the shop and what we sold out of the dungeon: an antique dealer specializing in the sale of eighteenth-century
bargueños
was highly unlikely to know very much about fourteenth-century Gothic polychrome wooden carvings, for instance.

Our customers were both expert and demanding and, on the whole, bought exclusively through intermediaries. For that reason, my father devoted enormous energy and consideration to making sure that our catalogs were classy and exquisite, a task which I had inherited and made my own, doing all the design and lay-out on my computer, from start to finish. For the photographs, I hired one of the top professional studios in Madrid, and to print the catalog - in runs of 500 or 1000 copies - I used Martí B. Gráficas S.A. of Valencia, universally acknowledged as the best in their field.

When I got home at lunchtime, the glorious smell of garlic soup and veal T-bone steak set my mouth watering. On the Saint Petersburg job, I had lost almost half a stone of my already limited reserves. My excessive skinniness, apart from being a family trait and downright unattractive, drove Ezequiela to distraction and led to her preparing me gargantuan feasts worthy of a sumo wrestler.

‘Is the food ready?’ I yelled from the hallway.

‘In a minute or two!’ she shouted back.

I frowned in disappointment and headed for the study. While my store boasted nothing more high-tech than its power supply and an alarm system, to avoid frightening off the antiques customers who hated the sight of anything more recent than nineteenth-century, I made up for it at home, big-style. With one hand, I turned my sound system on by remote control and set my
Jarabe de Palo
CD to play, and with the other I switched on my awe-inspiring PC, as I dropped into my ergonomic desk chair and kicked off my high heels. I chilled out by playing a card game - push-button meditation with flickering lights. Simple, but fantastic.

I was still undoing the top buttons on my blouse and loosening up my skirt when the loudspeakers suddenly beeped and the screen started flashing
Message from the Chess Group
,
Message from the Chess Group
.

‘Damn it!’ I muttered to myself grumpily, staring at the monitor like an idiot. ‘I just want to be left alone right now!’

It was very unlike the Group to get in touch with me so soon after a job. Once Roi had been sent a rapid report on the outcome, we usually shut down communication for at least a few weeks. And if it made sense to put the item to sleep in the dungeon for a few months, as it did in this case, contact between members of the Group was cut off completely. Time out and time off. But there was no arguing with the insistent on-screen announcement.

The Group’s computer wizard was Läufer, a German guy. He had written all the programs we worked with and he made sure that all the encoding and encryption systems which guaranteed the security of our communications were kept bang up to date. Läufer was a hacker and a veteran member of the Chaos Computer Club. It was Läufer who had cracked the security systems at the Space Research Center in Los Álamos, California, at the European Space Agency, at the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, and at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics and the Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg. Just to mention a few. But his most memorable coup was in 1985, shortly after a top executive of the
Bundespost
, the German federal postal service, had recklessly declared that the security system protecting their
Bildschirmtext
online videotex service was completely unbreakable. Läufer immediately took up the challenge, hacked into the
Bundespost
system and, with inspired directness, programmed one of their phones to connect non-stop - at up to 9.99 Deutschmarks a hit - to a Chaos Computer Club-owned site for twelve hours and fifty-nine minutes. The resulting bill was so astronomical that in next to no time the
Bundespost
braggart was on the unemployment line.

Läufer was smart enough to drop out from Chaos before being ID’d and jailed, as had happened with a lot of his fellow hackers, and he changed tracks by throwing himself into his other passion - fine art. Without ever abandoning his infatuation with computer systems, he devoted himself to broadening and polishing up his knowledge of the art world. Within just a few years, he was making a very good living as an appraiser and valuer of everything from porcelain and china to paintings, sculptures and jewelry, and came to be recognized as one of the best art authentication experts in the whole of Europe.

The combination and excellence of his two particular skills, together with his intelligence and highly-tuned artistic sensitivity, made him the perfect candidate to fill the vacancy left by the previous Läufer. But I’ve no idea how Roi found him and recruited him, as he became a member of the Chess Group quite a few years before I did.

With a mixture of annoyance - not to mention apprehension - at the sudden intrusion, I angrily hit the key to get the news. The screen immediately showed a string of illegible characters and symbols. Not even Champollion
¹
, with all his extraordinary skill, would have been able to make head or tail of this gobbledygook. After just a few seconds, though, the decoding algorithm designed by Läufer had done its job and made sense of the impenetrable mishmash.

- IRC, #Chess, 16:00h, pass: Golem. Roi -

Damn.

‘Shit, shit,
shit!
’ I yelled out, springing out of my chair. Seconds later, startled by my outburst, Ezequiela rushed into my study, still drying off her hands on a kitchen towel. She was a tiny old lady, skinny and stooped, with a shrewd look in her eyes, a deeply-wrinkled face and a receding jawline. For a few years already, she had been taking up the hems of her skirts to disguise her steady loss of height.

‘What’s going on?’

‘Roi
again!
’ I complained, with a desperate look on my face.

She raised her eyebrows in a way which either meant ‘well, nothing to be done about that, then’, or ‘just deal with it, dumbo’. Shaking her head with resignation, she turned right around and went back out the door again, abandoning me to my fate.

‘Damn it, not
another
job
now
, I can’t believe it!’ I shouted into the wasteland of my study. We had been working full-on recently: Cézanne’s
Auvers-sur-Oise
from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, a seventeenth-century manuscript by Johannes Kepler, the discoverer of the three laws of planetary motion, which I stole from the University of California at Santa Cruz, a 1530 Joan de Joanes work from the Musée Goya in Castres, France and, of course, the Saint Petersburg icon.

I picked at my food without enthusiasm, and paid little attention to Ezequiela’s non-stop gibbering. She had clearly decided that this was the perfect time to bring me completely up to date on all the town gossip. Bombarded by a steady string of weddings and divorces, baptisms and funerals, I eventually managed to finish off my dessert and then drank my coffee down in one gulp. A seductive sleepiness washed through my limbs, calling me to my siesta. But no. Instead of enjoying an hour-long nap on the sofa before returning to work, I had to stay awake to connect to IRC
²
. Why the hell couldn’t Roi have got us together in the evening or at nighttime, when my neural paths were fully functional? OK, fine, discipline and going by the book were crucial for security reasons, but the reason why I really felt obliged to do what he said was the certain knowledge that if I didn’t, Roi would break up the Group within the hour.

So at five minutes to four there I was, sitting at my computer again, with another cup of coffee by my keyboard and a nervous cigarette in my fingers, as I logged on to the internet and activated the IRC access program. Once connected to the Undernet server, I routed through Norway on Undernet-Oslo, re-routed through Toronto and then again through Auckland, New Zealand, changing my ID every time to minimize traceability. Now suitably camouflaged, I called up the active channel list, easily found #Chess once it came on-screen and double-clicked on it. In the middle of the blank screen which came up was a flickering box requesting a password, so I typed in
Golem
and pressed Enter. The screen immediately filled with welcome messages in the six languages spoken by the members of the Chess Group: in French for Roi - the King - who was already online, in Italian for Donna - the Queen, in German for Läufer - the Bishop, in English for Rook, in Portuguese for Cavalo - the Knight, and in Spanish for me, Peón - the humble Pawn.

‘Hello Peón,’

‘Hello Roi,’ I tapped out in French.

‘The urgency of this meeting will have surprised you.’

‘You can bet your life it did.’

At that point Cavalo came on-channel.

‘Hi everybody,’ he typed in English.

‘Hello Cavalo.’

A series of beeps announced the arrival of Donna and Rook, in rapid succession.

‘Greetings,’ said Donna.

‘Mine too,’ added Rook. ‘Läufer’s not here yet, I see.’

‘For a change,’ said Cavalo.

‘He won’t be long. As soon as he gets here, I’ll explain why I’ve called this unexpected meeting.’

‘I hope it’s worth all the trouble, Roi. I had a very important business lunch in Naples which your message obliged me to cancel,’ wrote Donna, clearly still annoyed by the change in plan.

Donna, better known as Giulia Volontieri, was the proprietor of a prominent fine art and antique restoration and conservation house, specializing in handling projects for Italian government authorities and the Vatican. Her staff were recognized experts in the restoration of altarpieces, sculptures and canvases, and had all been apprenticed and trained in Giulia’s own workshop in Rome. Using the most modern and sophisticated technology available, it was there that they also created the perfect copies which the Chess Group used to cover up the fact that the originals had flown the coop. I had never met Giulia in person, but Roi assured me that, now in her ‘fifties, she was still one of the most attractive and beguiling women he had ever known.

‘Well, we all had important things to do, Donna,’ I commented, still mourning my lost siesta.

‘My dear Donna,’ added Cavalo with transparent sarcasm. ‘Always so busy, and so hard-working.’

‘And you, my esteemed Cavalo,’ she answered. ‘Always such a gentleman.’

Cavalo, whose real name was José da Costa-Reis, was the owner of a successful
Ourivesaria
- a goldsmith’s and jeweler’s - founded by his grandfather shortly after the end of the Second World War on the fashionable Porto street, Rua de Passos Manuel. His father, the original Cavalo, was also a jeweler and jewelry restorer, and a specialist clock and watch repairer. He was a chess fanatic and the founder of the
Grupo de Xadrez do Porto
. So when he and Roi decided to get together to carry out activities which weren’t strictly legitimate, they felt that ‘Chess Group’ would make a good cover name. José’s father died more or less at the same time as mine, both of them from heart attacks, and so he and I inherited our family businesses and our particular roles in the Group more or less simultaneously.

‘HELLO EVERYONE!’

Our computer genius had arrived on-channel. Just in case nobody had noticed this world-shattering event (and apart from his using capital letters, which in IRC-speak amounts to SHOUTING), Läufer flooded our screens with smiley faces, flaming dragons and one or two naked women. But discreetly naked, as experience had shown him that Donna and I went ballistic if his macho-man displays went any further. Läufer’s tomfoolery was always enthusiastically applauded by his stooge Rook, and the two together were sometimes completely unbearable.

‘And about time too, kid!’ wrote his number-one fan.

‘HEY, ROOK! HOW ARE THOSE BUSINESS DEALS GOING?’

‘Läufer - type in lower case, please,’ Roi demanded.

‘I CAN’T, MY KEYBOARD’S KAPUT.’

‘Not that old excuse again.’

‘WHY DO YOU SAY THAT, DONNA?’

‘Because I love you, maybe?’

‘I KNEW IT! HEY, ROOK - WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THAT?’

‘Läufer - please,’ interrupted Roi. ‘We have work to do.’

‘OK, I’LL SHUT UP THEN.’

‘Let’s get on with it, Roi. This is taking forever,’ I cut in quickly, before Donna had a chance to escalate her assault on Läufer.