The Amber Room (8 page)

“You realize that if Borya is dead we are out of leads. I have checked the depositories in Russia. Only the one in St. Petersburg has any information of note.”

Fellner nodded.

“The clerk in St. Petersburg is certainly on someone’s payroll. He was once again attentive. That’s why I kept the sheets.”

“Which was wise. I’m sure Loring and I are not the only ones interested inyantarnaya komnata . What a find that would be, Christian. You’d almost want to tell the world.”

“Almost. But the Russian government would want it returned, and if found here, the Germans would surely confiscate. It would make an excellent bargaining chip for the return of treasure the Soviets carted away.”

“That’s whywe need to find it,” Fellner said.

He leveled his gaze. “Not to mention the bonus you promised.”

The old man chuckled. “Quite right, Christian. I have not forgotten.”

“Bonus, Father?”

“Ten million euros. I promised years ago.”

“And I’ll honor it,” Monika made clear.

Damn right she would, Knoll thought.

Fellner stepped from the display case. “Ernst Loring is surely looking for the Amber Room. He could well be the benefactor of that technocrat in St. Petersburg. If so, he knows about Borya. Let’s not delay on this, Christian. You need to stay a step ahead.”

“I intend to.”

“Can you handle Suzanne?” the old man quizzed, a mischievous smile on his gaunt face. “She will be aggressive.”

He noticed Monika openly bristle at the mention. Suzanne Danzer worked for Ernst Loring. Highly educated and possessed of a determined intent that could be lethal if necessary, only two months back she’d raced him across southwestern France looking for a pair of nineteenth-century jeweled Russian wedding crowns. More “beautiful loot” hidden away for decades by poachers. Danzer had won that race, finding the crowns with an old woman in the Pyrenees near the Spanish border. The woman’s husband had liberated them from a Nazi collaborator after the war. Danzer had been unrelenting in securing the prize, a trait he greatly admired.

“I would expect no less of her,” he said.

Fellner extended his hand. “Good hunting, Christian.”

He accepted the gesture, then turned to leave, heading for the far wall. A rectangle parted in the stone as the bookcase on the other side swung open again.

“And keepme informed,” Monika called out.

Woodstock, England

10:45 p.m.

Suzanne Danzer sat up from the pillow. The twenty-year-old slept soundly beside her. She took a moment and studied his lean nakedness. The young man projected the assurance of a show horse. What a pleasure it had been screwing him.

She stood from the bed and crept across hardwood planks. The darkened bedroom was on the third floor of a sixteenth-century manor house, the estate owned by Audrey Whiddon. The old woman had served three terms in the House of Commons and eventually acquired the title of lady, purchasing the manor house at foreclosure after the previous owner defaulted on a minor mortgage. The elder Whiddon still sometimes visited, but Jeremy, her only grandson, was now its main resident.

How easy it had been to latch on to Jeremy. He was flighty and spirited, more interested in ale and sex than finance and profit. Two years at Oxford and already dropped twice for academic deficiencies. The old lady loved him dearly and used what influences she still retained to get the boy back in, hoping for no more disappointments, but Jeremy seemed unaccommodating.

Suzanne had been searching nearly two years for the last snuffbox. Four constituted the original collection. There was a gold box with a mosaic on the cover. An oval one trimmed with translucent green and red berries. Another fashioned of hard stone with silver mounts. And an enameled Turkish market box adorned with a scene of the Golden Horn. All were created in the nineteenth century by the same master craftsman—his mark distinctively etched into the bottom—and looted from a private collection in Belgium during World War II.

They were thought lost, melted for their gold, stripped of their jewels, the fate of many precious objects. But one surfaced five years ago at a London auction house. She’d been there and bought it. Her employer, Ernst Loring, was fascinated by the intricate workmanship of antique snuffboxes and possessed an extensive collection. Some legitimate, bought on the open market, but most covertly acquired from possessors like Audrey Whiddon. The box bought at auction had generated an ensuing court battle with the heirs of the original owner. Loring’s legal representatives finally won, but the fight was costly and public, her employer harboring no desire of a repeat. So the acquisition of the remaining three was delegated to her surreptitious acquiring.

Suzanne had found the second in Holland, the third in Finland, the fourth quite unexpectedly when Jeremy tried to peddle it at another auction house, unknown to his grandmother. The alert auctioneer had recognized the piece and, knowing that he couldn’t sell it, profited when she paid him ten thousand pounds to learn its whereabouts. She possessed many such sources at auction houses all over the world, people who kept their eyes open for stolen treasure, things they couldn’t legally handle but could sell all too easily.

She finished dressing and combed her hair.

Fooling Jeremy had been easy. Like always, her fashion-model features, saucer-round azure eyes, and trim body played well. All masked a mien of controlled calm and made her appear as something other than what she was, something not to be feared, something easy to master and contain. Men quickly felt comfortable with her, and she’d learned that beauty could be a far better weapon than bullets or blades.

She tiptoed from the bedroom and down a wooden staircase, careful to minimize the squeaks. Dainty Elizabethan stencils decorated the towering walls. She’d once imagined living in a similar house with a husband and children. But that was before her father taught her the value of independence and the price of dedication. He’d also worked for Ernst Loring, dreaming one day of buying his own estate. But he never realized that ambition, dying in a plane crash eleven years ago. She’d been twenty-five years old, just out of college, yet Loring never hesitated, immediately allowing her to succeed her father. She’d learned her craft on the job and quickly discovered that she, like her father, instinctively possessed the ability to search, and she greatly enjoyed the chase.

She turned at the bottom of the stairs, slipped through the dining hall, and entered an oak-paneled piano room. The windows highlighting the adjacent grounds loomed dark, the white Jacobean ceiling muted. She approached the table and reached for the snuffbox.

Number four.

It was eighteen-carat gold, the hinged cover enameleden plein with an impregnation of Danaë by Jupiter in a shower of even more gold. She drew the tiny box close and gazed at the image of the plump Danaë. How had men once believed such obesity attractive? But apparently they had, since they found the need to fantasize that their gods desired such a butterball. She flipped the box over and traced her fingernail over the initials.

B.N .

Its craftsman.

She yanked a cloth from the pocket of her jeans. The case, less than four inches long, easily dissolved into its crimson folds. She stuffed the bundle into her pocket and then crossed the ground floor to the den.

Growing up on the Loring estate came with obvious advantages. A fine home, the best tutors, access to art and culture. Loring made sure the Danzer family was well cared for. But the isolation of Castle Lou-kov deprived her of childhood friends. Her mother died when she was three, and her father traveled constantly. It was Loring who took the time with her, and books became her trusted companions. She read once that the Chinese symbolized books with the power to ward off evil spirits. And for her they did. Stories became her escape. Particularly English literature. Marlowe’s tragedies on kings and potentates, the poetry of Dryden, Locke’s essays, Chaucer’s tales, Malory’sMorte d’Arthur .

Earlier, when Jeremy had shown her around the ground floor, she’d noticed one particular book in the library. Casually, she’d slipped the leather volume from the shelf and found the expected garish swastika bookplate inside, the inscription reading:EX LIBRIS ADOLF HITLER . Two thousand of Hitler’s books, all from his personal library, had been hastily evacuated from Berchtesgaden and stashed in a nearby salt mine just days before the end of the war. American soldiers later found them, and they were eventually cataloged into the Library of Congress. But some were stolen before that happened. Several had turned up through the years. Loring owned none, desiring no reminders of the horror of Nazism, but he knew other collectors who did.

She slipped the book off the shelf. Loring would be pleased with this added treasure.

She turned to leave.

Jeremy stood naked in the darkened doorway.

“Is it the same one you looked at before?” he asked. “Grandmother has so many books. She’ll not miss one.”

She approached close and quickly decided to use her best weapon. “I enjoyed tonight.”

“So did I. You didn’t answer my question.”

She gestured with the book. “Yes. It’s the same one.”

“You require it?”

“I do.”

“Will you come back?”

A strange question considering the situation, but she realized what he truly wanted. So she reached down and grasped him where she knew he could not resist. He instantly responded to her gentle strokes. “Perhaps,” she said.

“I saw you in the piano room. You’re not some woman who just got out of a bad marriage, are you?”

“Does it matter, Jeremy? You enjoyed yourself.” She continued to stroke him. “You’re enjoying yourself now, aren’t you?”

He sighed.

“And everything here is your grandmother’s anyway. What do you care?”

“I don’t.”

She released her hold. His organ stood at attention. She kissed him gently on the lips. “I’m sure we’ll be seeing one another again.” She brushed past him and headed for the front door.

“If I hadn’t given in, would you have harmed me to get the book and the box?”

She turned back. Interesting that someone so immature about life could be perceptive enough to understand the depths of her desires. “What do you think?”

He seemed to genuinely consider the inquiry. Perhaps the hardest he’d considered anything in a while.

“I think I’m glad I fucked you.”

Volary, Czech Republic

Friday, May 9, 2:45 p.m.

Suzanne angled the porsche hard to the right, and the 911 Speedster’s coil-spring suspension and torque steering grabbed the tight curve. She’d earlier hinged the glass-fiber hood back, allowing the afternoon air to whip her layered bob. She kept the car parked at the Ruzynè airport, the 120 kilometers from Prague to southwestern Bohemia an easy hour’s drive. The car was a gift from Loring, a bonus two years ago after a particularly productive year of acquisitions. Metallic slate gray, black leather interior, plush velvet carpet. Only 150 of the model were produced. Hers bore a gold insigne on the dash.Drahá. “Little darling,” the nickname Loring bestowed upon her in childhood.

She’d heard the tales and read the press on Ernst Loring. Most portrayed him as baleful, stern, and dismissive, with the energy of a zealot and the morals of a despot. Not far off the mark. But there was another side of him. The one she knew, loved, and respected.

Loring’s estate occupied a three-hundred-acre tract in southwestern Czech, only kilometers from the German border. The family had flourished under Communist rule, their factories and mines in Chomutov, Most, and Teplice vital to the old Czechoslovakia’s once supposed self-sufficiency. She’d always thought it amusing that the family uranium mines north in Jáchymov, manned with political prisoners—the worker death toll nearly 100 percent—were officially considered irrelevant by the new government. It was likewise unimportant that, after years of acid rain, the Sad Mountains had been transformed into eerie graveyards of rotting forests. A mere footnote that Teplice, once a thriving spa town near the Polish border, was renowned more for the short life expectancy of its inhabitants than for its refreshing warm water. She’d long ago noticed that no photos of the region were contained in the fancy picture books vendors hawked outside Prague Castle to the millions who visited each year. Northern Czech was a blight. A reminder. Once a necessity, now something to be forgotten. But it was a place where Ernst Loring profited, and the reason why he lived in the south.

The Velvet Revolution of 1989 assured the demise of the Communists. Three years later Czech and Slovakia divorced, hastily dividing the country’s spoils. Loring benefited from both events, quickly allying himself with Havel and the new government of the Czech Republic, a name he thought dignified but lacking in punch. She’d heard his views about the changes. How his factories and foundries were in demand more than ever. Though spawned in Communism, Loring was a tried and true capitalist. His father, Josef, and his grandfather before that had been capitalists.

What did he say all the time?All political movements need steel and coal. Loring supplied both, in return for protection, freedom, and a more than a modest return on investment.

The manor suddenly loomed on the horizon. Castle Loukov. A former knight’shrad , the site a formidable headland overshadowing the swift Orlík Stream. Built in the Burgundian-Cistercian style, its earliest construction began in the fifteenth century, but it wasn’t finished until the mid-seventeenth century. Triple sedilia and leaf capitals lined the towering walls. Oriels dotted vine-covered ramparts. A clay roof flashed orange in the midday sun.

A fire ravaged the entire complex during World War II, the Nazis confiscating it as a local headquarters, and the Allies finally bombing it. But Josef Loring wrestled back title, allying himself with the Russians who liberated the area on their way to Berlin. After the war the elder Loring resurrected his industrial empire and expanded, ultimately bequeathing everything to Ernst, his only surviving child, a move the government wholly supported.