‘They’re the wrong shape. Where are all the entran-?’ And even as Pekkala spoke, the words froze upon his lips.
He slammed on the brakes.
The Emka skidded until it was almost sideways, finally halting in the middle of the road.
‘Why have we stopped?’ shouted Kirov. ‘You haven’t spotted another one of those hotel chairs, have you?’
‘Give me the painting,’ said Pekkala.
Kirov handed it over.
A car approached them, headed in the opposite direction. The driver slowed as he passed, eyeing them suspiciously, and did not stop.
‘Look, Inspector,’ began Kirov, ‘maybe you’re right. I don’t know Leningrad that well. They could be gardens, I suppose.’
‘They aren’t,’ murmured Pekkala. ‘They’re rooms.’
‘Rooms? What kind of apartment building has so many rooms laid out in rows like that?’
‘A palace,’ replied Pekkala.
‘But there are many palaces in Leningrad. There’s the Winter Palace, the Stroganov, the Menshikov, the Taurida. .’
‘This is the layout of the Catherine Palace. I’m sure of it. There,’ he said, aiming with the tip of his finger at the honeycomb of cells. ‘The Arabesque Hall, the Blue Drawing Room, the Stasov Staircase. The sizes all match. The spaces you thought were gardens are the rooms up on the second floor.’ While he spoke, Pekkala’s eyes darted back and forth over the canvas. It was as if the insect had disintegrated, and from the blur of colours, the skeletal frame of the palace had risen to take its place.
At first, the uniformity of each tiny blue and red and green paint fleck, mirrored in both of the wings, seemed to rule out any correlation between the colours and the rooms. But then he spotted a mistake. One of the cells on the right wing had been painted orange, whereas the same marking on the left wing was red. ‘There,’ he told Kirov, pointing out the tiny dabs of paint. ‘These are the only two which don’t match. There is red elsewhere in the design but this is the only place where the painter has used orange.’
‘What room is that?’ asked Kirov.
Pekkala closed his eyes, concentrating as he drifted like a ghost through each room along that corridor. ‘The White Dining Room. The Crimson Dining Room. The Green Dining Room. The Portrait Gallery.’ And then he paused. His eyes flicked open. ‘The Amber Room‚’ he said.
As moonlight glinted
As moonlight glinted off the shattered windows of the Catherine Palace, Stefanov surveyed the damage he had done. It was not only windows he had broken while blazing away with the anti-aircraft gun. The walls and doors and railings also bore the scars of bullet strikes. He had expected Commissar Sirko to say something about it‚ but all the commissar had done was to place the building off limits. The man seemed much more concerned about the plane Stefanov had brought down, and had even scrounged up a small pot of paint and a brush for Stefanov to paint a white band on the barrel of his gun, signifying their first kill.
Wrapped in the oil-stained blanket of his rain cape, Stefanov climbed out of his foxhole. Out in the darkness, he could see the little cooking fires of the other gun crews, and the glow of burning cigarettes. The rough smell of machorka tobacco reached him on the still night air.
He walked over to the tiny crater Barkat had dug for himself. ‘Barkat,’ whispered Stefanov.
‘What is it?’
‘I was thinking we might take a look around the palace.’
‘What? Now?’
‘Why not?’
‘You mean walk around the outside?’
‘We could maybe take a look inside as well.’
Now Ragozin appeared from his foxhole where, also unable to sleep, he had been eavesdropping on the conversation. ‘What’s this? You can’t go inside the palace. Commissar Sirko has forbidden it.’
Barkat sighed irritably. ‘Were you like this as a child, Ragozin? Did you tell on people in the school yard?’
‘Commissar Sirko-’ Ragozin began.
Barkat didn’t let him finish. ‘Is not here! He’s wandered off somewhere and found himself a bed in which to sleep. Now are you coming to look around the palace or aren’t you?’ he demanded, as if it had been his idea all along.
‘There might be food,’ added Stefanov, removing from his mess kit a piece of Russian army bread which had been steeped in grease and allowed to congeal, forming it into a waxy brick. Contemptuously, he tossed it into Ragozin’s lap. ‘Better than this stuff.’
‘Food,’ Barkat egged on Ragozin. ‘I bet they’ve got everything in there.’ Thoughtfully, he set a strand of grass between his teeth. It hung from his mouth like the tongue of a snake.
‘Shut up,’ Ragozin told him. ‘You know I am starving to death.’
‘The Romanovs could have anything they wanted,’ Barkat assured him.
Ragozin huffed. ‘They’ve been gone a long time.’
‘But who knows what they left behind, eh?’ Barkat broke in.
‘Oh, fine!’ Ragozin threw up his hands. ‘You realise we’ll all probably end up in a penal battalion because of this. Still‚ it would be worth it as long as we can scrounge up something better than the canned pig skin I’ve been living off ever since I joined the Red Army!’
Cloaked in the darkness, the three men set out across the park.
Kirov and Pekkala
Kirov and Pekkala sat in the Emka, which was still in the middle of the road.
‘You’ve been in the Amber Room, haven’t you?’ asked Kirov.
‘Of course,’ replied Pekkala. ‘I met the Tsar there many times.’
‘Then can you tell me why the Fascists would be so concerned with getting their hands on it?’
‘If you had ever seen it for yourself,’ Pekkala told him, ‘you wouldn’t need to ask the question. And if the sight of it wasn’t enough to convince you, then consider that the amber in that room is worth ten times its weight in gold.’
‘And how much amber is in the room?’
‘Seven tons of it,’ replied Pekkala.
‘What are they planning to do?’ asked Kirov. ‘Tear the walls apart?’
‘They wouldn’t have to,’ Pekkala informed him, ‘because the amber is not actually embedded in the walls. It’s fitted into panels, some about twice the height of a man and others which would come up to your waist. Once those had been removed, the room would be an empty shell.’
‘I am beginning to understand,’ said Kirov. ‘We should go straight to the Kremlin. Now that you’ve figured out the purpose of the map, Comrade Stalin will want to know immediately.’
‘Not before I have confirmation from Lieutenant Churikova that my assumptions are correct. There are still many questions which have yet to be answered. Like why those two men would have been transporting the map when it was already too late to get their hands on the amber.’
‘Why is it too late?’
‘The contents of the room, including the amber, were evacuated to safety, along with most of the other treasures in the palace. Everything has been boxed up and shipped east of the Ural mountains. The Amber Room is somewhere in Siberia by now. I heard about it on State radio over two weeks ago, but it’s only been seventy-two hours since the two men who were carrying the painting went down over our lines.’
‘Perhaps they didn’t hear the broadcast,’ suggested Kirov. ‘I know I didn’t.’
‘The Germans monitor Russian State Radio, just as we monitor all of their radio stations. They would have known‚ for sure. And there’s something else I can’t figure out.’
‘What’s that, Inspector?’
‘The location of the Amber Room is not a secret. It has been there for two hundred years. Why would someone go to the trouble of preparing an elaborately coded message to inform the Germans of something they could find out from any art history book?’
‘A pity we don’t have Comrade Ostubafengel to speak with,’ said Kirov, remembering the word they had found scrawled on the back of the canvas. ‘I’m sure he could have told us everything.’