Thick velvet curtains still hung in front of the windows, moonlight winking through tears in the fabric where Stefanov’s gunfire had smashed through the window and strewn the floor with dagger-like shards of glass.
‘Where is everything?’ whispered Barkat. ‘Where did they put it all?’
Stefanov said nothing. He had heard stories, assembled piece by rumoured piece, about what had become of the treasures of Tsarskoye Selo. In the years after the Revolution, the office of Internal State Security, known to men like Stefanov simply as the ‘Organi’, had taken over one wing of the Alexander Palace, for use as a rest home for their senior officers. In reality, it was just a place for them to bring their mistresses. Things soon began to disappear, not just from the Alexander Palace but from the Catherine Palace as well. In the beginning, they were only small items, like letter openers and fountain pens. Later, whole paintings went missing, along with icons, lamps and even life-size statues, only to reappear for sale in the auction houses of London, Paris and Rome.
They arrived at a closed door.
Stefanov took hold of the brass handle, but remained frozen, as if suddenly afraid to go on.
‘What are you waiting for?’ demanded Barkat.
Stefanov knew that beyond this door lay the Amber Room, which his father had once described to him as the place where the walls were on fire.
At first, Stefanov had dismissed the old man’s description as another figment of his primitive and superstitious mind. But then, one summer evening, when many of the palace windows had been opened to let out the heat of the day, Stefanov had caught a glimpse of what at first he took to be flames, leaping from the walls inside.
The next day, in school, it was his teacher, Madame Simonova, rumoured to be the fiancee of Inspector Pekkala, who had provided the explanation. The thousands of pieces of amber, each one worked into huge panels, reflected the light in such a way that they sometimes appeared to glow like embers.
Stefanov longed to see the Amber Room, but the palace was off limits to all but specially appointed staff, of which his father, the gardener, was not one. And if the chances of Stefanov’s father getting in were zero, his own seemed even less. In spite of this, he couldn’t let it rest. Thoughts of the amber consumed him and it was not long before he had devised a scheme to catch a glimpse inside the room.
The following week, he casually mentioned to his father that the ornamental hedges which lined the base of the Catherine Palace looked as if they needed trimming. Being well aware that this job required the use of ladders, and that his father did not like to climb on ladders, it came as no surprise to him when, a few days later, his father assigned him the task of trimming the hedges.
By ten o’clock the next morning, when Stefanov arrived for work, he had already planned it all out. He would have been there sooner, except it was not allowed to begin work anywhere on the estate before that time, in case the Tsarina was still asleep and might be woken by the noise.
The Amber Room lay nearly in the middle of the palace, on the ground floor, between the Hall of Pictures and the Portrait Gallery. For Stefanov‚ the simplest course of action would have been to begin working on the hedge directly beneath the windows of the Amber Room, but he reasoned that this would soon alert any bystanders to his real motive. Instead, beginning outside the choir anteroom on the left-hand side of the building, Stefanov worked his way across the front of the palace. It was difficult balancing on the rickety, paint-spattered ladder and the repetitive motion of cutting with the shears soon caused the muscles of his forearms to cramp. His only consolation was the fact that the hedge didn’t need trimming as badly as he had conveyed to his father, and the old man had taken his son’s word for it, rather than wait and risk having to do the job himself.
Finally, the young Stefanov arrived beneath the large double windows of the Amber Room, the bases of which stood about twice the height of a man above the level of the ground. Sweat pasted his shirt to his back. His head was reeling in the still, close heat of that July afternoon. He set up the ladder, careful to position it in such a way that he would, if he looked up from his cutting, be able to see directly into the room.
Slowly, Stefanov climbed the ladder and began his work, blinking sweat from his eyes as he snipped away at those individual branches of the hedge which had dared to grow beyond the level of the rest. The noise of the shears filled his brain, its sound like a clashing of daggers. At first he did not dare look up, petrified that someone might be watching.
Finally, Stefanov judged that the moment was right. At this point, he still had his back to the window. Glancing from beneath the brim of his cap, he scanned the grounds, in case anyone else might be watching. He had been planning this moment for so long that his mind had begun to play tricks on him. The act of simply peering into the room had, in Stefanov’s mind, taken on the magnitude of a great crime, the punishment for which lay beyond his comprehension.
The grounds were empty. Anyone with any sense was sleeping in the shade. Heat haze weaved and shimmered off the crushed stone of the riding path, as if ghostly horses were galloping by.
He began to turn, his movements practised and precise. The great glass panes slid into view. At first all he could see was his own reflection: a damp, dishevelled figure, unrecognisable even to himself. Slowly, however, like someone staring at the ripples on a pond, his eyes began to make out the interior of the room. He saw a desk, a chair, and a table on which he could make out the figures of a chess set. The walls looked dirty and mottled, as if they were covered with a layer of soot. He bared his teeth in concentration, leaning towards the glass until his breath condensed upon its surface. Now he began to see the colours. The walls took on a deep brownish-orange tint, and he could not escape from the notion that they were, in fact, on fire, and that his father had been right all along. Now the colour changed, both lightening and deepening at the same time. The whole room appeared to be losing its shape, expanding into that strange and parallel dimension, of which his father had always been aware. The amber seemed to shudder, as if the light of the sun which streamed into the room had brought the ancient sap to life.
In that moment, Stefanov finally grasped why the delicate amber was so valuable, and it did not surprise him that the Romanovs had learned to covet the substance whose origins were still a mystery to him. In fact, it seemed the perfect treasure for the Tsar and his family. Everything about the Romanovs had always seemed to Stefanov to exist in a separate dimension, whose glittering fragility could not endure the crude and rough-hewn world in which he lived.
Suddenly, a figure materialised inside the room. It advanced upon him, drifting across the floor, seemingly enveloped in white smoke. Another angel, his heat-dimmed mind announced, seeking vengeance for my crimes.
His legs began to shake. His left knee buckled. He did not fall exactly. It was more like a slow, clumsy, painfully controlled descent, bumping down the rungs on elbows, knees and chin until he came to rest upon the ground. High above him, the handles of the shears poked like the ears of a wooden rabbit from the top of the hedge.
There was a rattling noise and the double windows swung open. He saw two arms, swathed in the thin fabric of a white summer dress, and then a face. He gasped. It was the Princess Olga. Or was she a Grand Duchess? Suddenly, he could not remember. All of the Tsar’s daughters looked somewhat similar to him. They usually wore the same clothes and had more or less the same hairstyles. There was little to tell them apart, as far as Stefanov was concerned, but Olga’s face had always seemed to him the most distinctive. Her almond-shaped eyes and the steadiness of her gaze would have made her appearance too severe if it weren’t for the fullness of her lips. He had fallen in and out of love with her several times already.