The Amber Rooms

Chapter Thirty

Saskia touched her top lip with her tongue. She had the same feeling that had overcome her during those first steps into the Amber Room: numbness, stage fright, and detached frustration of playing a role in someone else’s plan. Why had Kamo not fired? He was out there. Had to be. Grisha would not have feared for his life otherwise. And Grisha had shown that glimmer of recognition when Saskia mentioned Kamo by name. It could be none other than Simon Ter-Petrossian.

Above her, a beam creaked. She looked up. A drizzle of dust played into her eyes.

Was Kamo on the roof? No, that is a mistake he would not make. He valued stealth too highly. If he was not on the roof, what had made the sound? Second person perhaps. Why the second person? The conclusion of her thought followed before she had truly derived it. Kamo wanted her to think he was on the roof. Why? Because it would preoccupy her while he—

She remembered herself saying to both Kamo and Soso, ‘Where does a lynx store its spoils?’

The tempo of her thoughts doubled, doubled again, and she lived a slow minute in the quarter-second it took for her eyes to saccade on the silhouette, the inevitable silhouette in the doorway, of Kamo. He was dressed as a clerk from bowler to boots. She had time to blink before his pistols flared—left, right—and one bullet roared past her cheek. The echoes washed around the hut as though the space were a church. It was when she had blinked again, and seen that Kamo wore a lopsided smile, that she understood one of those echoes had been the discharge of her own rifle. She had shot it from the hip.

‘Simon,’ she said. She gave the word its English pronunciation, which turned her mind to the English boyfriend, Simon, whose memory had been implanted within her mind those years ago. How trivial a thing to recall now.

‘Lynx.’

His word seemed to lengthen in the failing light, in the tang of cordite.

His smile continued. It might have been a cue from one actor to another. There was a patience and expectation in his eyes. As though they had been playing a game and it was over. As though they were old friends recalling a high time.

Saskia frowned at the rifle in her hands. She removed her finger from the trigger and watched her hand open and close the bolt action. A spent shell was ejected.

Kamo, still smiling, slumped against the doorframe.

Saskia pulled the trigger.

His jaw disappeared in a flare of blood.

She moved towards him, thinking of a fog bank she had once seen at the shore of the Black Sea. Her tuned nerves felt even the cracks of the earth. When she reached him, there was no last moment of confidence. He was dead. Her first shot had passed through his heart, and the second had exploded his jaw. Pieces lay on his shirt and the ground behind him. He sat with his back to the doorframe. His head sagged on his chest. He was no longer Kamo. He was an empty body, spent like his pistols.

She put one hand over his but made sure that she remained fully in the darkness of the hut. The solution to the trap of her surroundings, and the dangers they contained, lay in sound. She heard a distant cow bell, the purr of a woodpecker, the wind in bending branches, and a thousand diminishing signatures of nature. One of them was human: a growl of thoughtfulness.

Hmm.

Saskia thought about the advantages of the hut. They were few. She skipped over the body and sprinted into the meadow, holding her rifle by the stock and the barrel. Before she had taken four strides, a bullet passed her ear. The clap of pain reached her a moment later. She rolled in the grass. The sound was pure enough for her to identify the location of the shooter within a degree. As she completed her roll, she rose in a crouch. Her finger tensed on the trigger, then eased; framed in the ramp site of her rifle, and not twenty metres away, was a young man in a trench coat. He was fussing at the action on his rifle, which had jammed.

Saskia ran towards him. She drove the stock of her Mauser into his thigh. His leg flew out and he landed on his back. Saskia looked left and right to see if the movement had flushed out more men, but the clearing was empty and still. She took the collar of his jacket and heaved him into the longer grasses where the meadow met the first of the pines. He had not released the rifle, so she put a boot on his chest and tugged it from him.

‘Are there any others?’

His expression moved from shock to fear. Not of her, she guessed, but the men for whom he worked. She waited for his attention to return to her. Then she raised her eyebrows.

‘I speak not German,’ he replied in stuttering, thick French.

His accent was muddy patchwork of Finnish, French and Danish. Saskia began to speak in the dialect used in the southern part of Finland. She found the phonemes difficult to articulate at first. ‘Kamo is dead,’ she said. ‘Art thou the last man?’

His eyes, which were grey and weathered beyond his years, shrunk with suspicion. He frowned at her clothes, then at her face.

‘I know Kamo is dead, Comrade,’ he said. ‘You killed him.’

She put the barrel of her rifle to the cleft in his chin.

‘Art thou the last man?’

He shrugged, as though this was obvious. ‘Yes, Comrade. Three times yes.’

As Saskia considered this, she listened once more to the sounds of the mountainside. The volume was building with the dusk. There was not, however, a human note to be heard.

‘Tell me where Lenin lives.’

The Finn stilled the muscles of his face. That told Saskia enough.

‘Who?’

Saskia spoke her next three words as though to a child.

‘Vladimir. Ilyich. Ulyanov.’

The Finn looked away. The movement reminded her of Grisha, who was even now running down the mountainside. That worried her. Grisha was running for his life and Saskia would find overtaking him difficult.

She brought the barrel of her rifle to the Finn’s cheek.

‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘or I will put a hole in you.’

He remained looking away. ‘I will die for him.’

‘I don’t doubt it. But not today.’ She paused, then asked, ‘Am I a woman?’

The Finn looked at her, surprised and suspicious. ‘What is this?’

‘Just answer me.’ Saskia put the barrel against his black neckerchief. ‘Am I a woman?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Are you a man?’

He frowned. ‘I think—’

‘Try not to,’ she said, smiling. ‘I won’t hurt you if you cooperate. Now, art thou a man?’

He sighed and said, ‘Yes.’

‘Good. And two and two is five.’

He gave her a confused half-smile. ‘It is four, miss.’

Saskia remembered how Soso had greeted her in the Amber Room: ‘Lynx, mythic beast who sees through falsehood to the truth beyond.’

‘Good,’ she said. ‘Now tell me this one thing: art thou the last man?’

As he replied with one Finnish word, ‘Kyllä,’ Saskia called upon her talents. Automatic, inscrutable processors recalled all his behaviour since the beginning of their conversation. His voice was examined for stress complexes. His breath for micro-hesitation. His eyes for blink rate. She attended to the blood in his lips and the conductivity of his hand, which she had taken in a soft grip. ‘A sorceress,’ he whispered. Those automatic processors parsed his behaviours and plotted them in a non-Euclidean space, within which emerged two attractors: the truth, and falsehood. Saskia could offer his subsequent behaviours to that statistical model and observe which attractor captured them. Scylla the truth. Charybdis falsehood.

Kyllä.

His reactions were aggregated to a data point and fell into that non-Euclidean space, orbited the truth, them tumbled into it unambiguously.

So he is the last man.

‘You have met Lenin.’

‘Who?’

Falsehood; he knows who Lenin is.

‘He is here, in the city. Correct?’

‘Who is?’

Again, the sum of his physiological responses were presented to the model, returning truth.

The Mountain Eagle is here.

She cocked her head. ‘Lenin lives in Colgny.’

‘I have never heard of that place.’

Truth. He has not.

‘In Chambésy, then.’

‘Where?’

False. He knows it. We’re getting closer.

‘Near the train station?’

‘Which?’

Truth. Yes, near there.

‘Lenin lives on Chemin de Valérie?’

He said nothing. There were little data for her model, but his thoughts were plain enough. Lenin did not live on that street.

‘But near there?’

The Finn looked glum.

Truth.

‘He lives on … Chemin de la Pie?’

The Finn looked defeated. Truth. He sighed and said, ‘You will not be able to reach him. He is guarded by better men.’

Saskia nodded. She released his hand. He took it, as her touch had burned him, enclosed it in his other hand against his chest.

‘This place reminds me of the highlands of Georgia. Do you know them?’

The Finn shrugged. Saskia smiled at him and stood. The edge of evening had fallen on the meadow. A quietness had settled. She glanced at the body of Kamo, which filled the doorstep of the hut, and was surprised by a sparkling in her chest and a note of sorrow in her thoughts.

‘I want you to bury him.’

The Finn leaned so that he could see the hut. ‘Kamo, is it? Told me his name was Alexei.’

Saskia clipped his head with the rifle stock. The weapon connected with a louder sound than Saskia had anticipated. Perhaps the temporal plate of his skull was thinner than normal because of a developmental abnormality. She crouched and touched the bone. It was firm; intact. She laid him on his side. She took his rifle, then returned to the hut, where she took Kamo’s pistols from the dirt. She put them in her rucksack. There was a tall pine behind the hut. She climbed it, carrying all the weapons, until she had risen into the last of the sunlight. She jammed the rifles there and returned to the hut. Its snow shovel was hanging at the rear. She unhooked it and dropped it near the body. Finally, she removed Kamo’s dagger and cut ‘Simon’ into a piece of blackened wood. As she cut, she realised that the name echoed that of her boyfriend, an Englishman, for whom she had pined in the night hours following the inception of her first case for the FIB. The boyfriend had been fictional; a picture to hang in the empty room of her identity. What residue of truth remained in his given name, Simon Ter-Petrossian, after the long years of his disguise, Kamo? But if she had ever held affection for Kamo, or loved him to even the smallest degree, it was not this Kamo. Hers was, in some parallel reality, still held in the Amber Room, entombed mid-movement.

Kamo’s trouser leg had ridden up his calf, exposing a dirty sock. She tugged it into place before turning to Lake Geneva. It was wholly dark but for the lights of its shores and boats. There was still time to overtake Grisha. She began to jog.