Ian Hocking - The Amber Rooms

Touchy , thought Saskia. She was satisfied.

‘Tell me,’ she said, dividing her croissant again, ‘why you left the lounge to look for me that day. Surely the ladies had not tired of your stories?’

‘You had been gone for several minutes,’ he said. There was nothing defensive in his tone. This was the truth. ‘I was worried.’

‘I remember you knocking on the compartment door. Draganov pulled out his gun and told me to be quiet. I was. The rest you know.’

‘Not quite,’ said Kamo. He nodded at an approaching waiter and asked for black tea, bread and herring. ‘I find it unusually coincidental that Draganov should let his guard drop at the moment we three were moving from one carriage to another.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Can it be that Draganov invited me to attack him?’

‘That is preposterous,’ said Saskia. She thought, Kamo’s inscrutable intellect wins again. I admire him. ‘The man had just apprehended us. Within minutes, we would be in the custody of the police.’

‘It would be one way of removing me from the train.’

Saskia smiled. ‘But that plan would have the effect of removing him as well. You fell in each other’s arms, remember?’

‘I remember it.’

Saskia regarded him carefully. His demeanour remained difficult to read. She said, ‘What did you do to Draganov afterwards?’

‘What do you care?’ He looked at her plate. ‘But eat. You’re so skinny.’

Saskia paused. She ate another morsel, though she was less hungry than she had ever been. She kicked Kamo in the shin with the toe of her boot: she had the centre of the bone, and enough power to hurt her toes. Kamo did nothing to register the blow. His breathing, blink rate, and pupil dilation remained unchanged.

‘If Draganov survived,’ she hissed, ‘he will have informed the Petersburg office. He will have his surveillants loose. I need to know. What happened to him? Is he alive?’

Kamo yawned. ‘You are correct. We should be careful. Draganov did indeed survive the day. After I pulled him clear of the train, he repaid my kindness with a rock, which he applied to the base of my skull. Ungrateful man. Perhaps he remembered how easily I had overpowered him. Either way, he left me to sleep it off.’

‘I see.’

‘Do you?’ said Kamo, distracted. ‘Do you?’

They paused to watch a boy in a sailor’s uniform as he ran down the carriage. The waiters stopped, holding their dishes high, until the boy returned to his nanny at the head of the carriage.

Kamo turned to Saskia. ‘What about the others?’

‘What others?’

She thought once more of the man leaning from the train, struggling to hold his hat against his head.

‘Come. Do you think that the Boss would entrust the safe delivery of such a huge windfall to us alone? There were other agents on that train. You may be certain of it.’

‘Like who?’

‘Like Judjuna Mikhailovna. Remember her from Tiflis?’

In every detail.

‘Not especially.’

‘Curiously,’ said Kamo, and the coldness returned fully to his eyes, an icy precipitate, ‘just after the train pulled into the station, her body was found in a locker by one of our informers. She had been garrotted.’

Saskia thought of Judjuna. She had been a whore, a traitor, and a teller of interminable stories, but she had once washed the body of an unclaimed corpse because the man had, in life, taken off his hat to her. That had been in Gori.

‘And you think I killed her,’ said Saskia, as though supplying a line in a well-worn joke.

He smiled. ‘Did you?’

Saskia reached for a butter knife. ‘Tell me what you’re thinking.’

‘It is conceivable that she saw me fall from the train and attempted to make contact with you, Penska. Plenty of time remained before the train reached St Petersburg. One wonders whether, in that period, she was taken.’

‘By the opposition?’

‘Not necessarily.’

‘Who, then? Don’t be conspiratorial.’

Kamo chuckled. Saskia kept her eyes on the plate, and she could feel Kamo looking at it, too. Did he see her reflected in the knife blade, just as she saw him? Was his uninjured eye that good? Saskia thought not.

‘There is something else you did,’ he said, ‘in those two hours before leaving the train in such a singular fashion. You bribed a guard to permit you access to the luggage.’

‘Did I?’ asked Saskia.

Damn. Don’t look up at him.

‘Once there, you changed the recipient and destination of the rose.’

The rose was their codename for two dressers, each with secret compartments jammed with cloth-wrapped roubles. The rose contained more cash than had ever been stolen in the history of Russian crime. It was enough money for Lenin to fuel the Party for years.

‘Why do you think this of me?’

‘Many investigations were conducted during your winter holiday, my dear. Some are still ongoing.’

‘That’s not what I meant. Why should I want to change the destination of the container?’

‘Leverage,’ he said, but his certainty was fading. ‘Fear that the situation was beyond your control.’

She looked at him. ‘Did you kill the guard after he’d told you about me?’

‘No. He cooperated. A worker is a worker is a worker. Fortunate that you passed him the new luggage label inside an envelope.’

‘So,’ said Saskia, ‘you want me to tell you what the label read.’

‘Ah, “want”,’ replied Kamo. He seemed to savour the word. ‘That word is not quite sufficient. I covet that knowledge. I long for it, Vailevna. So does the Boss. So does our friend in Finland. So does the Tsar, his police, and the newspapers. Does this surprise you? You know there is so much want in this world.’ He grinned. He had one less tooth than she remembered. ‘Workers, workers, workers.’

‘You understand that I am not interested in my immediate death,’ said Saskia. ‘So I will not tell you where it is. I want to live long enough to show you.’

Kamo sighed. ‘You are creating difficulties.’

‘Let us say that it is safe; it is undiscovered; and it is perfectly preserved.’

Kamo looked through the window. The movement of the train made his head rock perceptibly. It reminded Saskia of the nose of the drunk alpinist in Monte Carlo.

‘Vailevna, I trust you,’ he said. ‘I believe that’s why you’re coming back to Russia, is it not? Do not confirm my faith; it would undo it. I understand that this is an attempt to pay off your debts. You want to be a good person for us and for the Party.’

‘A good person like you.’

‘Do you remember when I found you?’

‘I’ve never forgotten it.’

‘Then you will tell me why it has taken one winter for you reach this decision to reunite the Party with its rightful property.’

‘In St Petersburg, I was poisoned. I needed to recuperate.’

‘So I heard. Are you fully recovered?’

‘No. My liver and kidneys are permanently damaged.’

Kamo pursed his lips. It was either sympathy or mirth.

‘And now, my dear, you have decided to return to the bosom.’

‘Events have forced my hand, but I had planned to return in the spring. I have gained the confidence of a Jewish lawyer called Ioffe. He has a house on Lake Geneva, from which he conducts business with the Russian émigré community. His daughter, in St Petersburg, needs a governess. For this, he was prepared to obtain a passport on my behalf and pay for passage. I intend to locate the container and give it to our mutual friend in Finland.’

Kamo yawned. He did not cover his mouth, which was a rare slip of character.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘you will give it to me.’