Ian Hocking - The Amber Rooms

The gendarmes inserted a needle beneath the nail of his big toe. That woke him. They were experts, after all. These gendarmes, careful as nurses, put his socks back on and helped him stand on the chair. The case officer asked for the door to be opened once more. The superintendents filed in. Kamo watched them sleepily.

‘Remember,’ called the officer, ‘if you recognise him, there is no need to tell us this instant. Have no fear. Begin.’

Kamo barked. ‘I will dance for a penny, gentleman. Only a penny!’

He danced, though the flesh of his feet was crushed and lumpy. The gendarmes steadied him and the case officer, shaking his head, returned to his book.

Kamo turned towards the south, where the trees were thickest. He saw a sleek movement flicker between two trunks. It appeared again further up the slope. Kamo did not need another glance to tell him that this was a lynx. Unusual to see one so close to the city. Unusual to see one break cover.

Slowly, Kamo worked the bullet from one side of his mouth to another.

‘Dmitri, do you remember the boat shed to the east of the lake?’

‘Why?’

Kamo gave him a serious look. To his credit, the boy straightened his back. ‘I remember,’ he said. ‘The bicycle is there.’

‘It’s yours.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘When I tell you, run as fast as you can across the lake. Keep to the edges. Don’t cross the middle. Run to the shed, get on the bicycle and ride back to the city. Go to the church of the Metekh near the old Royal Palace and ask for Papa Chiladze.’

‘But the bicycle is too big for me.’

Kamo smiled. His heart slowed as it always did on the cusp of a fight. The worst angels of his nature quietened and the dragging, sapping burden of his anxiety lightened. He looked at the sunlight on the mountain behind them and understood the privilege of the moment.

He tried to think through the nature of this trap. If a Tsarist group had hanged the woman and let the boy escape to return with help, how could they be sure that their net would snare revolutionaries? And why rig the trap so clumsily that their haul was so meagre? Kamo was, perhaps, a prize, but the Tsarists had no way of knowing that.

How important was this woman, whom he had never seen before? Why did the Tsarists believe her peril would draw out revolutionaries, and in number?

He put a second bullet in his mouth.

‘Dmitri, you run now.’

They called from the trees, a dozen men or more, ‘In the name of the Tsar!’ and fell upon them both.

Kamo counted six hours before they let him step down from the chair. By that time, his legs were bloated. He could not unlock his knees. His bladder was a tight, painful ball. The gendarmes helped him down through the building in a reinforced lift that—Kamo noted, one eye open—was unlocked by a key carried by each of them.

His cell was a concrete cubicle no wider than a horse trough. Its floor sloped towards a drain with a fist-sized hole that had no echo and stank of the worst human smells. Eight feet above him, an electric light flickered. Its mesh was bunged with dead flies. Kamo smiled. He’d seen worse.

They had taken his clothes. He moved to the rear of the cell and lay on his back. His feet, which he did not bother to inspect, throbbed somewhat less now, but the pain was growing. Even his cheeks ached where he had lost some of his beard to the thorough inspection of the sergeant, looking for razors or files or keys. He raised his legs so that they rested against the wall.

Kamo, inverted, sang a Siberian fishing shanty in a strong Armenian accent. That would confuse them. And, at last, he held his penis and let the urine out, steering it towards the drain. It was the colour of rosé. This did not worry him. The police in Georgia had played the same trick on his feet years before, and the blood was a temporary symptom. He sung the chorus of the shanty even more lustily.

Having relieved himself, he paused his singing for the answer of fellow revolutionaries. None came. Perhaps he had the wing to himself.

He acquiesced to sleep and the last of the shanty became a quiet slur. He did not relive the story of his defeat in his dreams, but parts of the episode flickered through him, as though on the pages of that book the case officer had been reading: Saskia, that spider, wearing that battle frown of hers; the boy with his fists raised like a proper gentleman; the smartly-dressed old man who had died with such surprise. Such surprise! Asleep, Kamo licked his lips. His hands twitched. Another image: the door to the Amber Room, opening.

The Amber Room.

An uncle in Alexandrapol had once shown him an amber pendant. When rubbed with a cloth, the amber could lift chicken feathers.

His hands twitched again, as though scratching.

Kamo had targeted one man and shot him. He picked his next man, who was loping through the high snow. Before Kamo could shoot, hot sparks struck his face. He growled and dropped to his knees. He loosed his next bullet blind. Seconds; seconds, he knew, until the group could close the distance and shoot him point-blank.

He needed to find cover. Still blinded, he scrambled towards the hanging tree but pellets struck him in the thigh and buttock. He tumbled forward, rolled twice, and lay in the snow with a foamy blood on his lips.

Distantly, a man shouted, ‘For the Tsar!’

Kamo brought his hand to his face. It had been pierced by wood splinters from a ricochet. He scraped them out, rubbed the blood from his eyes, and blinked at the empty sky and the branches that veined through it. He focused first on the birds that had taken flight from the gunfire. Then he saw something he could not understand.

It was a figure leaping with the ease of an acrobat through the trees. The figure crouched and launched upward again and again, using the bounce of the living wood, keeping to the hardier branches near the trunk, passing needle-like through the fir much as the lynx had passed through the forest less than five minutes before.

Kamo blinked away the blood.

He turned to his left, where the body of the woman should have been.

There was nothing but a pit of snow.

Kamo was awoken by a long, icy train of water that choked him and dragged his eyelids open. Hands hooked his armpits and lifted him to his feet. Now, with his weight and the pressure of blood, his soles burned again. He grinned through his pain at the men who held his shoulders. From their countenance, he could tell that they were prepared for the bureaucracy of a prisoner who has died under interrogation.

After blindfolding him, they took him to a chamber whose earthen floor had been sprinkled with sawdust. He was dropped into a wooden chair and tied with leather straps. The seat had been polished by the cold arses of a thousand subversives, criminals, and innocents. It stank worse than the open drain in his cell.

Somebody removed the blindfold.

Dull daytime glowed on a high, dirty window. The case officer was leaning against the far wall. His head almost touched the window, and the effect was to silhouette his face. Kamo shivered on the chair. His feet were tilted to their outer edges.

The case officer pulled back his overcoat and checked his pocket watch. ‘You are being held by the Department for Protecting the Public Security and Order. You were found, disrobed and unconscious, in the Great Summer Palace of the Tsars having gained unlawful entry. You also impersonated a member of the Imperial horse guards. Would you like to tell me why?’