Ian Hocking - The Amber Rooms

The poker passed through empty air.

Draganov felt that the garrotte was loose. He whipped it from his throat using the gun. Ignoring the pain of his burnt neck, he coughed and staggered to his feet. He forced air into his lungs but his vision darkened abruptly and he slumped against the upturned chair. He raised his gun into this gloom and prepared to fire.

Draganov could see his assailant. It was an ostler. No, a woman dressed as an ostler—her long, untied hair betrayed her—and she was running for the window. He would have to shoot her in the back. He decided this was justice. It was her own fault for attacking one of the Protection. But he could not bring himself to fire, and in three bounds she was through the window. He expected to see her fall to the ground. This room was on the first floor. Instead, she tumbled onto something that rang wooden and hollow. There had to be a carriage beneath the window.

The Countess was retrieving her belongings from the collection of evidence. She turned to Draganov and looked coldly at the gun as he brought it to bear. She did not hesitate. The last item she took was the black band. She passed this over the stump of her left wrist and secured it at the elbow.

‘It is you,’ said Draganov. His voice had a drunken slur. He felt crushed with sleepiness. ‘You are … Brandt.’

A man’s face appeared in the window. Draganov recognised him as the Georgian poet who had led the pirates. The man hissed, ‘Lynx! Come!’

Instead, the woman walked towards Draganov. He held the weapon but her green eyes scared him. She used her teeth to pull off her glove.

‘We have a custom here,’ she said, talking from the side of her mouth, ‘which a stranger will practise on a child when leaving a house. It helps learn names, and a little respect.’

She slapped him hard.

‘I am Lynx.’

Draganov coughed, then smiled. The Countess moved out of focus.

‘I know you as Saskia Brandt, late of the Federal Investigation Bureau. You remember it as a dream, don’t you?’

Though he could no longer see her face in detail, Draganov perceived her bewilderment. The glove still hung from her teeth. She was staring at him. The moment ended when the man at the window shouted, ‘Now or never again, Lynx. We have it all. Come.’

Slowly, and still covered by Draganov’s gun, the Countess walked away. Draganov fell to his knees. He could hear the shouts of alarm from the floor below. Someone was knocking at the door. Even as he pitched onto his face and his sense of himself evaporated, enough wit remained to appreciate the sophistication of his entrapment. Saskia Brandt, alias the Countess, had been reunited with her most precious possession. Did she even know why it was so important? Did she justify her yearning for the band as a sentimental attachment, origins forgotten? In passing, she had also discovered the identity of the man, Paruyr, who had betrayed their latest expropriation, as well as the death of the woman she called Alenya.

Yes, it was the neatest thing.

Draganov watched the blur of this woman slip through the window. He had been outplayed. But he was determined to meet her again. It would take more than a garrotte to separate him from a vow.

Approaching St Petersburg: Early September, 1907

A late evening train moved north through the empty miles towards the City Upon Bones. The electric lights of the train reflected in the water dripping from the trees and the animal eyes only one passenger, Saskia Brandt, could see. She sat in the dining carriage. Her right hand held The Travels of Marco Polo open at an illustration of Kublai Khan, but Saskia was not reading the book. Her eyes searched for the occluded horizon. She had been thinking of that first meeting with Draganov in Sukham, when he had used her real name and unlocked the puzzle box of her memory.

Pink spray carnations leaned in pity over her uneaten lemon sorbet. Saskia had no appetite. She was more scared than she could remember, and she could remember everything. Fear was her partner and had been since April of 1904. Some days she led; some days the fear took her through every step and turn.

She looked once more to the horizon. The Tsar’s Village was close. She needed to reach it within twenty-four hours or her hope would be lost. She could, if necessary, leave the train before St Petersburg and head to the Tsar’s Village directly, but there was little chance of entering the Summer Palace undetected. She would need the help of revolutionaries, and they were to be found in St Petersburg.

Her right hand closed The Travels of Marco Polo and joined her left wrist within a bearskin warmer that she wore around her waist.

She thought of one hour before, when her travelling companion, who happened to be a psychotic and a murderer, had fallen from the train. Fear rocked the balance of her mind and she imagined this man having clung to the carriage.

Was that Kamo’s bloodied face in the window of the connecting door? No. It was the guard of the dining carriage. She had exchanged pleasantries with him earlier in the journey. His long coat was silvered with rain. He ignored Saskia and moved past her to the curving partition behind which the maître d’ was making preparations for the second service.

Saskia inventoried the occupants of the carriage once more. She worried that her daydreaming had distracted her from the entrance of a passenger she could not trust. Since its inception, the Moscow-St Petersburg railway had unsettled those authorities who did not wish to see the Russian people move quickly between the two cities. The train was intended for passengers above a certain class threshold. Passport control was strict. The train would carry any number of Tsarist agents. Saskia wondered whether a third person had been assigned to watch both her and Kamo and, perhaps, assume responsibility for the completion of their task should they fail.

There were three other people in the carriage. Each was travelling alone. The first was an elderly Hussar who was occupied with the anatomy of his strudel. The second, shaking straight his newspaper at irregular intervals to the annoyance of the first, appeared to be a civil servant. The third was a minor royal of some description, and he was sleeping with an open mouth. Next to him, a stove flickered redly. Saskia looked at the upright carriage clock near the door to the first class sleeping carriage. She alone heard it tick.

Yes, Kamo had failed. He was lying somewhere along a cold curve of rail, miles to the rear, maybe near a rural train station, maybe not.

Two minutes passed. Each second was crowded with ideas, notion upon notion. She thought about the item in the luggage carriage addressed to the Twelve Collegia. At the close of that second minute, Saskia resolved that she would complete her business on the train and jump clear before its arrival in St Petersburg.

The wheels struck an irregularity in the rail. Saskia rocked. The minor royal snorted awake. The civil servant looked at Saskia and smiled in the manner that said: he was a man, she was a lady, and in his opinion everything would be quite all right.

Saskia inclined her head towards him and left the carriage by its rear door. Outside, on the open platform, the wind pressed against her hat, which was securely pinned to her hair. She could see the connective tissue of the train beneath her feet; sleepers flickering by; the knots of time passing. The fear was there, too, leading her.

She tried to relish the air from the Gulf of Finland but her nerves hummed like ramshackle electrics. It was likely her mascara still carried the dust of the Caucasus. She thought about Kamo as the sky in the west lost its blueness for black.