The Amber Room

FIFTY

Prague, Czech Republic

6:50 p.m.

The sleek gold-and-gray corporate jet rolled across the tarmac and settled to a stop. The engines whined down. Suzanne stood with Loring in the dim light of late evening as workers nestled metal stairs close to the open hatch. Franz Fellner exited first, dressed in a dark suit and tie. Monika followed, sporting a white turtleneck, navy blue silhouette blazer, and tight-fitting jeans. Typical, Suzanne thought. A vile mix of breeding and sexuality. And though Monika Fellner had just stepped off a multimillion-dollar private jet at one of Europe's premier metropolitan airports, her face reflected the disdain of someone clearly slumming.

Only three years separated them, with Monika the elder. Monika started attending club functions a couple of years back, making no secret of the fact that she would someday succeed her father. Everything had come so easily to her. Suzanne's life had been so radically different. Though she'd grown up at the Loring estate, she was always expected to work hard, study hard, acquire hard. She'd wondered many times if Knoll was a divisive factor between them. Monika had made it clear more than once that she considered Christian her property. Until a few hours ago, when Loring told her Castle Loukov would one day be hers, she'd never considered a life like Monika Fellner's. But that reality was now at hand, and she couldn't help but wonder what dear Monika would think if she knew they would soon be equals.

Loring stepped forward and briskly shook Fellner's hand. He then hugged and kissed Monika lightly on the cheek. Fellner acknowledged Suzanne with a smile and a polite nod, club member to Acquisitor.

The drive to Castle Loukov in Loring's touring Mercedes was pleasant and relatively quiet, the talk of politics and business. Dinner was waiting in the dining hall when they arrived. As the main course was served, Fellner asked in German, "What is so urgent, Ernst, that we need to speak this evening?"

Suzanne noticed that, so far, Loring had kept the mood friendly, using light conversation to put his guests at ease. Her employer sighed. "It is the matter of Christian and Suzanne."

Monika cut Suzanne a look, one she'd seen before and grown to hate.

"I know," Loring said, "that Christian was unharmed in the mine explosion. As I am sure you know, Suzanne caused the explosion."

Fellner set his knife and fork on the table and faced his host. "We are aware of both."

"Yet you continued to tell me the past two days you knew nothing of Christian's whereabouts."

"Frankly, I did not consider the information any of your business. At the same time I kept wondering, why all the interest?" Fellner's tone had harshened, the need for appearances seemingly gone.

"I know of Christian's visit to St. Petersburg two weeks ago. In fact, that is what started all this."

"We assumed you were paying the clerk." Monika's tone was brusque, more so than her father's.

"Again, Ernst, what is this visit about?" Fellner asked.

"The Amber Room," Loring slowly said.

"What of it?"

"Finish your dinner. Then we will talk."

"Truthfully, I am not hungry. You fly me three hundred kilometers on short notice to talk, so let us talk."

Loring folded his napkin. "Very well, Franz. You and Monika come with me."

Suzanne followed as Loring led their guests through the castle's ground-floor maze. The wide corridors wound past rooms adorned with priceless art and antiques. This was Loring's public collection, the result of six decades of personal acquiring and another ten decades before that by his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. Some of the most valuable objects in the world rested in the surrounding chambers--the full extent of Loring's public collection was known only to her and her employer, all protected behind thick stone walls and the anonymity a rural estate in a former Communist-bloc country provided.

And soon it would all be hers.

"I am about to breach one of our sacred rules," Loring said. "As a demonstration of my good faith, I intend to show you my private collection."

"Is that necessary?" Fellner asked.

"I believe it is."

They passed Loring's study and continued down a long hall to a solitary room at the end. It was a tight rectangle, topped by a groined vault ceiling with murals that depicted the zodiac and portraits of the Apostles. A massive delft tile stove consumed one corner. Walnut display cases lined the walls, their seventeenth-century wood inlaid with African ivory. The glass shelves brimmed with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century porcelain. Fellner and Monika took a moment and admired some of the pieces.

"The Romanesque Room," Loring said. "I don't know if you two have been here before."

"I haven't," Fellner said.

"Neither have I," Monika said.

"I keep most of my precious glass here." Loring gestured to the tiled stove. "Merely for looks, the air comes from there." He pointed to a floor grate. "Special air handlers, as I am sure you utilize."

Fellner nodded.

"Suzanne," Loring said.

She stepped before one of the wooden cases, fourth in a line of six, and slowly said in a low voice, "A common experience resulting in a common confusion." The cabinet and a section of the stone wall rotated on a center axis, stopping halfway, creating an entrance to either side.

"Voice activated to my tone and Suzanne's. Some members of the staff know of this room. It, of course, has to be cleaned from time to time. But, as I am sure with your people, Franz, mine are absolutely loyal and have never spoken of this outside the estate. To be safe, though, we change the password weekly."

"This week's is interesting," Fellner said. "Kafka, I believe. The opening line to A Common Confusion. How fitting."

Loring grinned. "We must be loyal to our Bohemian writers."

Suzanne stepped aside and allowed Fellner and Monika to enter first. Monika brushed past, casting her a look of cool disgust. She then followed Loring inside. The spacious chamber beyond was dotted with more display cases, paintings and tapestries.

"I am sure you have a similar place," Loring said to Fellner. "This is from over two hundred years of collecting. The past forty with the club."

Fellner and Monika weaved through the individual cases.

"Marvelous things," Fellner said. "Very impressive. I recall many from unveilings. But, Ernst, you have been holding back." Fellner stood in front of a blackened skull encased in glass. "Peking Man?"

"Our family has possessed it since the war."

"As I recall, it was lost in China during transport to the United States."

Loring nodded. "Father acquired it from the thief who stole it from the marines in charge."

"Amazing. This dates our ancestry back a half million years. The Chinese and Americans would kill to have it returned. Yet here it rests, in the middle of Bohemia. We live in odd times, don't we?"

"Quite right, old friend. Quite right." Loring motioned to the double doors at the far end of the long chamber. "There, Franz."

Fellner walked toward a set of tall enameled doors. They were painted white and veined in gilded molding. Monika followed her father.

"Go ahead. Open them," Loring said.

Suzanne noticed that, for once, Monika kept her mouth shut. Fellner reached for the brass handles, twisted them, and pushed the doors inward.

"Mother of God," Fellner said, stepping inside the brightly lit chamber.

The room was a perfect square, its ceiling high and arched and covered in a colorful mural. Mosaic pieces of whiskey-colored amber divided three of the four walls into clearly defined panels. Mirrored pilasters separated each panel. Amber molding created a wainscoting effect between tall, slender upper panels and short, rectangular lower ones. Tulips, roses, sculpted heads, figurines, seashells, flowers, monograms, rocaille, scrollwork, and floral garlands--all forged in amber--sprang from the walls. The Romanov crest, an amber bas-relief of the two-headed eagle of the Russian Tsars, emblazoned many of the lower panels. More gilded molding spread like vines across the uppermost fringes and above three sets of white double doors. Cherub carvings and feminine busts dotted the spaces in between and above the upper panels, and likewise framed the doors and windows. The mirrored pilasters were dotted with gilded candelabra that sprouted electric candles, all burning bright. The floor was a shiny parquet, the woodwork as intricate as the amber walls, the polished surface reflecting the bulbs like distant suns.

Loring stepped inside. "It is exactly as in the Catherine Palace. Ten meters square with the ceiling seven and a half meters tall."

Monika had maintained better control than her father. "Is this why all the games with Christian?"

"You were coming a bit close. This has been a secret for over fifty years. I could not let things continue to escalate and risk exposure to the Russians or Germans. I do not have to tell you what their reaction would be."

Fellner crossed the room to the far corner, admiring the marvelous amber table fitted tight at the junction of two lower panels. He then moved to one of the Florentine mosaics, the colored stone polished and framed in gilded bronze. "I never believed the stories. One swore the Soviets had saved the mosaics before the Nazis arrived at the Catherine Palace. Another said remnants were found in the Konigsberg ruins after the bombing in 1945 crumbled it to dust."

"The first story is false. The Soviets were not able to spirit the four mosaics away. They did try to dismantle one of the upper amber panels, but it fell apart. They decided to leave the rest, including the mosaics. The second story, though, is true. An illusion staged by Hitler."

"What do you mean?"

"Hitler knew Goring wanted the amber panels. He also knew of Erich Koch's loyalty to Goring. That is why the Fuhrer personally ordered the panels moved from Konigsberg and sent a special SS detachment to make the transfer, just in case Goring became difficult. Such a strange relationship between Hitler and Goring. Complete distrust of one another, yet total dependency. Only in the end, when Bormann was finally able to undermine Goring, did Hitler turn on him."

Monika drifted to the windows, which consisted of three sets of twenty-pane casements from floor to midway up, each topped by half-moons, three sets of eight-paned, arched windows overhead. The lower casements were actually double doors shaped to look like windows. Beyond the panes came light and what appeared to be a garden scene.

Loring noticed her interest.

"This room is entirely enclosed within stone walls, the space not even noticeable from the outside. I commissioned a mural to be painted and the lighting perfected to provide an illusion of outside. The original room opened to the Catherine Palace's grand courtyard, so I chose a nineteenth-century setting at a time after the courtyard had been enlarged and enclosed with fencing." Loring stepped close to Monika. "The ironworks of the gates there in the distance are exact. The grass, shrubs, and flowers are from contemporary pencil drawings used as models. Quite remarkable, actually. It appears as if we are standing on the second floor of the palace. Can you imagine the military parades that regularly occurred, or watching the nobles taking their evening promenade while a band played in the distance?"

"Ingenious." Monika turned back toward the Amber Room. "How were you able to reproduce the panels so exactly? I visited St. Petersburg last summer and toured the Catherine Palace. The restored Amber Room was nearly complete. They have the moldings, gild, windows, and doors replaced and many of the panels. Quite good work, but not like this."

Loring stepped to the center of the room. "It is quite simple, my dear. The vast majority of what you see is original, not a reproduction. Do you know the history?"

"Some," Monika said.

"Then you surely know that the panels were in a deplorable condition when the Nazis stole them in 1941. The original Prussian craftsmen fastened the amber to solid oak slabs with a crude mastic of beeswax and tree sap. Keeping amber intact in such a situation is akin to preserving a glass of water for two hundred years. No matter how careful one is, eventually the water will either spill or evaporate." He motioned around. "The same is true here. Over two centuries the oak expanded and contracted, and in some places rotted. Dry stove heating, bad ventilation, and the humid climate in and around Tsarskoe Selo only made things worse. The oak pulsed with the seasons, the mastic eventually cracked and pieces of amber dropped off. Nearly thirty percent was gone by the time the Nazis arrived. Another ten percent was lost during the theft. When Father found the panels, they were in a sorry state."

"I always believed Josef knew more than he acknowledged," Fell-ner said.

"You cannot imagine how disappointed Father was when he finally found them. He'd searched for seven years, imagined their beauty, recalled their majesty when he'd seen them in St. Petersburg before the Russian Revolution."

"They were in that cavern outside Stod, right?" Monika asked.

"Correct, my dear. Those three German transports contained the crates. Father found them during the summer of 1952."

"But how?" Fellner asked. "The Russians were looking in earnest, as were private collectors. Back then, everyone wanted the Amber Room and no one believed it had been destroyed. Josef was under the yoke of the Communists. How did he manage such a feat? And, even more important, how did he manage to keep it?"

"Father was close with Erich Koch. The Prussian gauleiter confided in him that Hitler wanted the panels transported south out of the occupied Soviet Union before the Red Army arrived. Koch was loyal to Goring, but he was no fool. When Hitler ordered the evacuation, he complied, and initially told Goring nothing. But the panels made it only as far as the Harz region, where they were hidden in the mountains. Koch eventually told Goring, but even Koch did not know where precisely they were hidden. Goring located four soldiers from the evacuation detail. Rumor was he tortured them, but they told him nothing of the panels' whereabouts." Loring shook his head. "Goring was fairly insane by the end of the war. Koch was scared to death of him, which was one reason he scattered pieces from the Amber Room--door hinges, brass knobs, stones from the mosaics--at Konigsberg. To telegraph a false message of destruction not only to the Soviets, but to Goring, as well. But those mosaics were reproductions the Germans had been working on since 1941."

"I never accepted the story that the amber burned in the Konigsberg bombings," Fellner said. "The whole town would have smelled like an incense pot."

Loring chuckled. "That is true. I never understood why no one noted that. There was never a mention of an odor in any report of the bombing. Imagine twenty tons of amber slowly smoldering away. The scent would have drifted for miles, and lingered for days."

Monika lightly stroked one of the polished walls. "None of the cold pomposity of stone. Almost warm to the touch. And much darker than I imagined. Certainly darker than the restored panels in the Catherine Palace."

"Amber darkens with time," her father said. "Though sliced into pieces, polished, and glued together, amber will continue to age. The Amber Room of the eighteenth century would have been a much brighter place than this room is today."

Loring nodded. "And though the pieces in these panels are millions of years old, they are as fragile as crystal and equally finicky. That is what makes this treasure even more amazing."

"It sparkles," Fellner said. "It is like standing in the sun. Radiance, but no heat."

"Like the original, the amber here is backed with silver foil. Light simply comes back."

"What do you mean like the original panels?" Fellner asked.

"As I mentioned, Father was disappointed when he breached the chamber and found the amber. The oak had rotted, nearly all the pieces had fallen off. He carefully recovered everything and obtained copies of photographs the Soviets had made of the room before the war. Like the current restorers at Tsarskoe Selo, Father used those pictures to rebuild the panels. The only difference--he possessed the original amber."

"Where did he find the craftsmen?" Monika asked. "My recollection is that the knowledge of how to fashion the amber was lost in the war. Most of the old masters were killed."

Loring nodded. "Some survived, thanks to Koch. Goring intended to create a room identical to the original and instructed Koch to jail the craftsmen for safekeeping. Father was able to locate many before the war ended. After, he offered them a good life for themselves and whatever remained of their family. Most accepted his offer and lived here in seclusion, rebuilding this masterpiece slowly, piece by piece. Several of their descendants still live here and maintain this room."

"Is that not risky?" Fellner asked.

"Not at all. These men and their families are loyal. Life in the old Czechoslovakia was difficult. Very brutal. To a man, they were grateful for the generosity the Lorings showed them. All we ever asked was their best work and secrecy. It took nearly ten years to complete what you see here. Thankfully, the Soviets insisted on training their artists as realists, so the restorers were competent."

Fellner waved his hands at the walls. "Still, this must have cost a fortune to complete."

Loring nodded. "Father purchased the amber needed for replacement pieces on the open market, which was expensive, even in the 1950s. He also employed some modern techniques while rebuilding. The new panels are not oak. Instead, pieces of pine, ash, and oak were fused together. Separate pieces allow for expansion, and a moisture barrier was added between the amber and the wood. The Amber Room is not only fully restored, it will also last."

Suzanne stood quiet near the doors and carefully watched Fellner. The old German was openly stunned. She marveled at what it took to astonish a man like Franz Fellner, a billionaire with an art collection to rival any museum in the world. But she understood his shock, recalling how she felt the first time Loring showed her.

Fellner pointed. "Where do the two other sets of doors lead?"

"This room is actually in the center of my private gallery. We walled the sides and placed the doors and windows exactly as in the original. Instead of rooms in the Catherine Palace, these doors flow to other private collection areas."

"How long has the room been here?" Fellner asked.

"Fifty years."

"Amazing you have been able to conceal it," Monika said. "The Soviets are difficult to deceive."

"Father fostered good relations with both the Soviets and the Germans during the war. Czechoslovakia provided a convenient route for the Nazis to funnel currency and gold to Switzerland. Our family aided many such transfers. The Soviets, after the war, enjoyed the same courtesy. The price of that favor was the freedom to do as we pleased."

Fellner grinned. "I can imagine. The Soviets could ill afford you to inform the Americans or the British about what was transpiring."

"There is an old Russian saying, 'But for the bad, it would not be good.' It refers to the ironic tendency of how Russian art seems to spring from turmoil. But it likewise explains how this was made possible."

Suzanne watched Fellner and Monika approach the chest-high cases lining two of the amber walls. Inside were an assortment of objects. A seventeenth-century chessboard with pieces, an eighteenth-century samovar and flask, a woman's toilet case, a sand glass, spoons, medallions, and ornate boxes. All of amber, crafted, as Loring explained, by either Konigsberg or Gda nsk artisans.

"The pieces are lovely," Monika said.

"Like the kunstkammer of Peter the Great's time, I keep my amber objects in my room of curiosity. Most were collected by Suzanne or her father. Not for public display. War loot."

The old man turned toward Suzanne and smiled. He then looked back toward their guests.

"Shall we retire to my study, where we can sit and talk a bit more?"