The Amber Rooms

Chapter Thirty-One

Saskia followed the trail of roughened grass and broken branches and reached Grisha within an hour, on a rocky cowpath not far from a small hermitage. He did not have her night vision advantage or her sense of direction. She retrieved the dark dress and put it on over her clothes. It was ragged but would serve her better once she was around people. Grisha she left naked and lost. She thought of breaking his neck as he scrambled away into the pines, thinking it a kindness, until she told herself that those kindnesses led to the sorrows over which the dictator conducted his monologue, and she would not be kind in that way, even merciful, even thinking of what the Party would do to Grisha.

Two hours passed before she reached the shore of Lake Geneva. She was in time for one of the last ferries to the western side. She sat on deck, in a dark spot behind the paddle, and ate fondue with a group of middle-aged British wool merchants on a walking tour. She explained that she was a nanny from Bradford and allowed one of the younger walkers to tell her about his time as an usher in the Panathinaiko Stadium during the first Olympiad. The man offered her his straw boater because the wind was freshening. Saskia took it.

At the shore, Saskia thanked them for their kindness and took a taxi through Chemin de la Pie, though it was a short walk. The early night was a quiet time in this quarter of Geneva. She inspected the street as she passed. It was tree-lined and spotted with villas whose splendour did not fit well with the conception that Saskia had formed from stories of Lenin in exile. She had heard of his preference for cheap, anonymous and often seedy establishments in which he and his wife Nadezhda mixed with the downtrodden and the passionate. These villas, however, reminded her of the residence of Count Nakhimov on Lake Lucerne. She tried to identify lookouts. She could see none.

Saskia thumped the roof of the carriage and asked to be dropped near a streetlamp on the next corner. When she had paid the driver, she doubled back. She kept her boater tilted forward and strained to overhear voices. Midway down the road a piebald ginger-white cat moved towards her. Saskia heard its footfalls. Then she heard the scrape of a chair and the dry clap of book being closed and, far away, the laughing of a child. A voice (female, Russian, upper class accent, probably from St Petersburg) admonished the child.

Saskia did not stop, but she turned her head. Here, then, was the house that held Lenin, perhaps the money from the Tiflis robbery, and Soso. It was a three-storey building with a hipped roof, blue walls and white beamwork. The surrounding garden was hedged and expansive. The iron gate was ajar.

She walked on to the next villa. It was unlit and shuttered. She entered the gate with deliberate confidence and walked into its rear garden. She climbed the rear hedge and landed on gravel at the rear of Lenin’s house. The shadows were deep. She waited, crouching, for sounds of alarm, or the inquisitive patter of an approaching guard dog. She heard none. It was as she expected. Grisha, the Finn and Kamo were likely to have formed Lenin’s complete bodyguard. He did not like a retinue.

Saskia looked around the garden. On the brick support of the iron gate, the ginger-white cat was sitting. Its eyes looked past her. Slowly, Saskia followed its stare.

There was nothing but wind mussing the branches of the high trees separating this property from the one behind.

Saskia moved beneath an unlit window near the back door. She removed her rucksack and withdrew Kamo’s guns. Their barrels were pitted and scratched. There had been a time when Saskia thought she could change his direction with the application of a little loving force. She remained troubled by the smile he had worn when she shot him.

Still meditating on the revolvers, she heard footfalls within the house. She put her ear to the bricks. There was a commotion. The front door swung open. There was no mistaking its sound. Meanwhile, boots made soft crunches in the grass. Saskia closed her eyes and let the sounds mix and merge; let the meaning come to her. In a moment, she understood that the Finn she had left on the mountainside had returned. Saskia was not surprised that he had failed to bury Kamo—who had often boasted that the birds and were welcome to pick at his meat—but she was surprised by the speed of his arrival, considering the blow she had dealt him.

Breathlessly, the Finn said, ‘Kamo is lost. I’m sorry, truly.’

The next voice made Saskia’s eyes open.

‘I fucked your mother,’ said Soso. ‘Tell me what happened.’

‘She overpowered me.’

‘Catch your breath. Did she follow you?’

‘I ran as fast as I could.’

A third man, quieter than the other two, said, ‘Never mind your belated efforts. Does she know this address?’

‘Not,’ said the Finn, ‘not exactly.’

The quiet man: ‘Yes or no, idiot.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘You’re sorry?’ said Soso. ‘When I shit in your mouth, you’ll be sorry. Make up for your mistake by securing a carriage this instant.’

‘No,’ said the quiet man. ‘You go, comrade. I will not put the safety of myself and the solvency of the Party in the hands of this idiot. Take him with you and pay him off.’

There was a pause. Saskia imagined the strained faces. The Finn anguished, Soso anxious, and the quiet man—who was surely Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov—unreadable. Then the silence ended in a series of footfalls that signalled the departure of Soso and the Finn as they hurried to make arrangements.

She crouched in the darkness with her head cocked, trying to picture Lenin. Was he scanning the street for shadows shaped like her? There would be a ruthless cast to his face. Saskia was in no doubt what the instruction ‘pay him off’ meant for a man like Soso, who was renowned for carrying little money about his person.

But Saskia had noted another phrase of Lenin.

‘I will not put the safety of myself and the solvency of the Party in the hands of this idiot.’

The proceeds of the Tiflis bank heist were in the house.

Saskia put the rucksack on and tightened its straps until they cut into her shoulders. Then she pushed the guns under the straps barrel-first. This made the handles high but reachable. She cocked both the revolvers and moved towards an open window on the corner of the house. The room beyond was gaslit but unoccupied. She jumped onto the sill and braced herself with a foot against the frame. The room was full of toys. A doll’s house had been left open; it was filled with marbles, a paper windmill, and a drum. In a heap by the door lay costumes—a sailor, a Red Indian—and tiaras and sparkling slippers. A chest, with its drawers pulled into steps, sat beneath a hanging mobile on which wooden children rode moonbeams.

The plucked notes of a music box filled the room.

All around the mulberry bush.

Saskia looked at the floorboards to better identify where to step. Then she lowered herself gently into the room. She crouched. She marked off thirty seconds. At the twenty-fifth, the pile of costumes moved.

The monkey chased the weasel.

The monkey stopped to pull up his sock.

Saskia approached the costumes and pulled them away.

Pop! goes the weasel.

There was a girl, perhaps nine years old, in a blue dress. She was turning the handle of a small jack-in-the-box. There was a resemblance between this girl and the girl Ute who had played on the sand in Saskia’s dream.

Saskia smiled. She whispered in French, ‘Hello, little weasel. Are you playing hide and seek?’

The girl said nothing. Her expression was petulant.

‘It takes a special girl to fool my special ears. I’m Penelope. How do you do?’

Still the girl said nothing.

Saskia feigned seriousness, and in Russian, whispered, ‘Have you been told not to speak to strangers?’

The girl nodded.

‘I see you have found an accomplice, young lady,’ said Vladimir Ulyanov. He was standing in the black doorway. He looked at Saskia. ‘I was speaking to my student. We were practising our German verbs when I was called to the door.’

With all the grace she could gather, she rose from the child.

Lenin was shorter than Saskia. His premature baldness emphasised his forehead and his steady eyes, which took in the pair of revolvers. The sharpness of his eyebrows and his neat Van Dyke beard made him rather more caricature than real, and his short neck seemed to lift his shoulders, but there was nobility about him. A nobility not like that of the Count, who was gentle and intelligent. Lenin’s airs were colder. He counted himself among the superior examples of humanity.

‘You must be Comrade Penelope,’ he continued, ‘which makes you an extremely resourceful individual. May I treat you as an intelligent woman and not introduce myself as a Finnish chef?’

‘What’s in a name?’ Saskia said. Her voice was measured. ‘In Tiflis, they call you the Mountain Eagle.’

Lenin smiled. It was the smile of a lawyer about to cross-examine a witness. ‘The money is here, of course. We packed it inside encyclopaedias. I can show you. There would be no dishonour in leaving this house with some volumes. Shall we say A to D?’

‘I don’t want the money.’

Taking the hand of the girl, Saskia pulled her towards the window, then pushed her behind her skirt.

Lenin snorted. ‘You should not underestimate my will on the matter of our coming socialist revolution, Penelope. Kamo told me that you are a sentimentalist. What do you intend? To burn the money, no doubt, and kill me. So what of the girl? How do you think she will live with the memories of my murder, and those murders to come?’

Saskia withdrew one of the revolvers and pointed it at Lenin. He frowned at her, as though astounded by her failure to understand. ‘You wish to aid a regime that lies, kills, and robs those who are born within the cage of slavery. Think on it. If you are not convinced by this scientific explanation of the ills of the world, then your imagination fails you. You don’t see every possibility. You are condemned by your own stupidity.’

Saskia thought about the girl. Saskia could never show her the millions dead who might live by this bullet. Given the freedom of escape from a universe in which she was destined to perform an action many years hence, the decision to kill this man felt like the first choice she had ever made.

‘To change the future,’ she said, smiling, ‘all it takes is one good man. Since he’s not here, I’ll have to do.’

Before she could squeeze the trigger, Saskia felt the girl hug her leg. Saskia looked down and smiled. It had never occurred to her, walking towards the house, that Lenin would have a pupil. Was the girl the daughter of a friend? Was Lenin funding his exile through private tuition, just as Saskia had done in St Petersburg?

Saskia watched her return the smile. The little mouth opened to reveal a missing tooth.

‘You’ll be fine,’ Saskia said. ‘Just stay …’

There was something on the floor. Saskia blinked at it.

She tried again. ‘Just stay behind me and everything will be …’

Her eyes seemed to lose their focus. She concentrated on the shape on the floor. It was not her shadow. It was a deep, red pool whose edge moved like fire on the steppe, and it had almost reached the doll’s house.

Lenin was speaking, and Saskia needed all her concentration to catch the meaning of his words. Unimportant, peripheral trivia occupied her mind: he could not pronounce his ‘R’s correctly, and she lost the sense of whether or not it would be rude to correct him, just as she had corrected Pasha those weeks ago upon their first meeting in St Petersburg.

‘Plissed to meet you.’

‘I warned you, Penelope, that you should not underestimate my will on the matter of our revolution.’

A fog of euphoria seemed to settle about her. She looked at the man.

‘What,’ she said, ‘did you …?’

The girl released her leg and Saskia, losing that little support, stumbled backwards. She stood on the hem of her dress and tripped, falling heavily on her bottom among the toy soldiers. The pain brought a spell of clarity. She looked once more at the shadow and saw her death in the deepness of its red.

‘I will quote Prime Minister Stolypin: “The punishment of a few prevents a sea of blood”.’ Lenin then called behind him, ‘Krupskaya, it’s done!’

The girl was still smiling. She held a long knife, one edge of which was bloody. She wiped the blade on the face of a teddy bear and ran towards the door. There, she was gathered up by a tall lady. The lady wore an elegant dress with rolled sleeves. Attached to her lapel was an upside-down nurse’s watch.

‘Oh,’ said the woman, looking at Saskia with bulging eyes. ‘Nina, find your best coat and wait for us in the parlour.’

The woman stepped over the growing blood pool and pulled the revolver from Saskia’s hand.

‘I am Krupskaya,’ said the woman. She had the manner of a physician. ‘Are you English?’

For moment, Saskia’s chin fell to her chest.

‘Help me.’

‘Let me see.’

The woman took the knife, which the girl had dropped, and cut a line in the span of skirt on Saskia’s lap. Krupskaya pulled back the cloth and slit the underlying bloomers to reveal a curved, deep cut near the groin. It ejected a mouthful of blood with each tick of Saskia’s heart.

‘Apply …’ Saskia gasped. ‘Pressure.’

She tried to put her hand across the wound but Krupskaya gripped her wrist.

‘Shh,’ said the woman. She studied the wound and seemed satisfied by it. Turning, she called, ‘It will do for her. I’m sure.’

‘Then come along,’ Lenin called back. ‘Where on Earth is Gorky?’

Saskia hissed and gathered all her strength, but Krupskaya held her knees apart and steered the weakening hands away and, still watching the wound, made appreciative noises, as though comforting a child.

‘I’ve heard stories about you, Penelope,’ she said. ‘When you’re gone, I’ll have one to tell about you.’

Saskia tried to give her a defiant look.

‘They’re here,’ said Lenin, returning to the toy room. He looked around, as though for the last time, and then crouched alongside Krupskaya. He too inspected Saskia’s wound. ‘Nina is our little saviour, I find.’

‘She is,’ agreed Krupskaya, standing. She lifted her nurse’s watch with two fingers, as though taking its pulse. ‘Has Joseph returned with our carriage?’

For Saskia, the pain had come and gone. Now even her anxiety faded to a ghost. She let her head rest against the doll’s house. A sleep settled upon her. Her thoughts transformed from one thing to another in an unbroken chain of associations. She remembered the feel of Jem’s blue hair between her fingers. Sclumpfchen. These thoughts became soundless images of Pasha. She had loved him from the moment he blushed at her correction of his English.

Pliss.

She remembered Kamo performing tricks with his horse, Rooster, on Golovinsky Avenue. He had wheeled it in the dust. The horse had kicked out and stepped high. The two had danced. Kamo had winked for the children and laughed at the blushing ladies before departing with the shout, ‘Die, but save your brother!’

She remembered Soso in the Adamia milk bar. One time, he had held court not long after an escapade that left his Fedora with a bullet hole. Gun cartridges had lined the chest of his long, chokha coat as he related the story to the penniless princes. His amber-coloured eyes had burned. What had been the escapade? That memory had faded.

Her mind returned to the dark band that had punctured the skin of time. Saskia had screamed when she tumbled into the frozen air of 12th April, 1904, but the impact with Lake Baikal, or reaching its surface, had silenced a part of her. She was immortal. Even the vertical crash of an aeroplane had failed to kill its chosen passenger.

Her eyes opened once more. There, among the toys, she could die. There was no sanctity of time paradox in this universe. Here she was, dying, proving it.

Saskia considered the blood that soaked the boards and her skirt.

‘There,’ said a voice. ‘So you were undone after all.’

Saskia squinted. The handsome face of Soso came into focus as he lowered himself. She envied him his lithe movements and the quickness of his smile. He held an oil lamp in his hand.

Saskia fumbled for her revolvers. They were gone.

‘Lynx,’ he said. ‘Your fangs have been removed. Now, where is he? Where did you leave Kamo?’

Saskia smiled. She felt as though she had run beyond her endurance, where even the muscle of her heart was burning. She took a long breath and sang in a whisper:

‘Sunny expanses are open to us.

The flames of victory light our country

For our happiness lives Comrade Stalin

Our wise leader—here comes my favourite bit—

and dear teacher.’

Her life had almost left her. It took an effort even to blink.

She shook her head. ‘What could anybody, ever, learn from you, comrade? Listen: My name is Saskia Maria Brandt.’

Soso stared at her. She saw in his face something quite foreign to its lively muscles: the slackness of despair. She raised her hand to his cheek and slapped it softly.

‘Remember me,’ she said.

Soso turned from her. He opened the lamp and poured its oil over the roof of the dollhouse. He dropped the smouldering wick down the chimney and closed the door. Then the dollhouse was burning and he was gone, and she knew that Krupskaya, Lenin and girl were gone, too. She was more alone than ever.

The floorboards might have been a wall of rock. She placed her hands with care, hauled, and hauled again. Each drag of her half-dead body seemed a year coming. She crossed into a dark passageway and turned towards the front door. She looked back. A smear of blood led towards the glow of fire. She could not see the fire itself, but the dollhouse was loud with clicks and pops as it burned. There was a greyness to the air and her throat felt dry. Fortunately, she was low to the ground, and the bleeding had reduced. Either her blood volume was so low that her blood pressure had dropped, or lying on her front helped to compress the wound.

The front door was open. Saskia thought this a mistake until a cool slice of night air chilled the sweat on her forehead and she heard a doubling of the fire-sound behind her. The house was going to burn fast and hot.

Something vibrated against her chest. Saskia groaned.

‘What do you want?’ she whispered.

Keep moving, said Ego. I am attempting to augment your body’s physiological response to the wound.

‘If it’s help you want to give, you’re too late.’

She reached the jamb of the front door and, from the concealment of this darkness, looked into the street. Soso and a coachman were loading an automobile with a trunk. Its weight made the suspension drop. Saskia thought of the encyclopaedias inside. She tried to shout, but her airway had narrowed to a dot. Krupskaya and the girl, Nina, were looking back at the house from the rear of the carriage. They wore hooded travelling cloaks. Lenin, smart in his bowler hat, appeared from the far side of the car and helped the driver and Soso fasten the bindings for the trunk. Then Soso and Lenin entered the automobile and the driver climbed to his high seat. The automobile was away with a clatter of cylinders.

Saskia made fists in despair. Failure in the reality she had come from, and failure in this.

The first neighbours began to arrive before the vehicle had turned the corner of the street. A man on a bicycle slowed, shouted, ‘Fire!’ and rode on. A family of six, dressed for dinner and still wearing napkins, appeared at the front gate. The father opened it and approached the house. His face was more curious than apprehensive, but he gagged on the smoke and put his napkin to his face.

Saskia reached out with her fingers. She became aware that she had stopped breathing.

A second man ran through the gate, passed the father, and continued up the steps. It was Pavel Eduardovitch. Saskia gasped as he rolled her onto her back and pulled her across the threshold by the straps of her rucksack. On the steps, he put an arm around her back and another beneath knees, and shouted at the onlookers—now a dozen—to make way. He carried Saskia into a waiting automobile. It was Count Nakhimov’s Peugeot Bébé and the man in the driving seat was Mr Jenner, the butler with the famous ancestor.

Pavel laid her on the back seat. He pushed himself underneath her head and shoulders and let her head rest on his lap. His finger pushed a lock of hair behind her ear.

‘My God,’ he said. ‘My God.’ Then, ‘Jenner, drive on.’

The car lurched forward. Saskia tried to reach for Pasha’s cheek, but her arm would not move. A darkness, truer than the night, passed over her eyes and she saw nothing. She could not speak or move. There was a weariness in her mind as though she had travelled a thousand years, been many people.

The last senses that remained were hearing and touch. She still heard the car and still felt the fingertips of Pasha as he tidied her hair.

‘Pavel Eduardovitch?’ asked Mr Jenner. His voice was urgent. ‘Count? How is she? I know a doctor two streets away. We’ll be there directly.’

‘There’s—’ Pasha began, but his voice cracked. He swallowed. ‘“Through the prayers of our holy fathers, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us.”’

Saskia wondered if her expression was peaceful. In truth, the expression was no longer hers. It belonged to Ute. Those connections between Ute’s musculature and Saskia’s mind—as it lived, dead, on a chip—were failing.

‘“Deliver me, O Lord, from my enemies; In You I take shelter.”’

The pitch of the engine, which had lowered, and the stuttering sobs of the man holding her head, began to fade. Saskia felt as though she were floating.

Ego vibrated against her chest.

I know you are not Saskia, he Morsed. Once, you thanked me. Your mission to kill Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin is not sanctioned by Meta. However, I am permitted some operational independence. I will complete a modified form of your mission using the help of Mr Jenner and the Count. I overheard Lenin make a telephone call to a man called Gorky. The money will be held overnight in a disused section of the Jungfrau railway, inside a mountain called the Eiger. Tonight, it will be destroyed, though Stalin will live. This is how I thank you, whoever you are.

Saskia felt angry at this dilution of her plan. She had focused on killing Soso. True, she had understood that another monster, greater than him, could turn the energy and luck of the Party to a still more murderous direction, but it had always been him, his face, the grin of Stalin and avuncular, amber eyes that represented that monologue deadening greater part of the twentieth century, and the Russias, and her future. Perhaps there was wisdom in Ego’s decision. With this money gone forever, the intrigues and weapons and bribes that the Party needed would be gone, too. Might this embarrassment, traced to Lenin and the Georgian Highlander, be the true end of the Party? What might take its place?

She would never know. Her body had died, and she was condemned to limbo until her chip was destroyed in a crematorium, or trickled out of power in a grave.

Quite distantly, she felt Pasha unbutton her collar.

‘Something is here,’ he said. ‘It buzzes like a bulb.’

‘Be careful, sir.’

‘It’s a business card for a Ms Tucholsky. Silly girl must have kept it from her time in St Petersburg. On the back it says, ‘P—If something happens, the money is going to the Eiger, JF Railway. Talk to BRYULLOV @ Embassy in Berne. Yrs, M T.’’

Saskia felt as though she smiled.

‘Clever,’ said Mr Jenner. ‘I wish I’d known her.’

‘Me, too,’ said Pavel Eduardovitch.

The silence came like cold water closing above her head. She opened her eyes in the airless gloom to see scintillas of light on the sea floor: amber, the resin of antiquity.

The last words of Pavel Eduardovitch reached her as thought, not sound.

O Lord, revive me, for Your name’s sake. For Your righteousness, deliver my soul from danger.

She might have felt lips in the centre of her forehead.