Ian Hocking - The Amber Rooms

Saskia reached the end of the first class corridor and checked the open vestibule. It was empty. She stepped out into the cold. The air carried steam and smoke. Saskia looked to windward. As the train rounded a bend, she saw the furious coupling rods of the locomotive. Then the train straightened. She closed the button of her collar, tightened the straps on her canvas rucksack, and jumped.

When she had been walking uphill for six hours, and as she was passing a berry into her mouth, Saskia looked down at the plate of Lake Geneva. She turned to follow the sound that she had been tracking for the last two kilometres. She walked higher, through the pines and towards the quiet, steady peal of cowbells. The animals were seven in number. She smiled at their incurious eyes. Beyond them, there was a boy in a black blazer and canvas trousers. Twelve years old, no more. He was leaning against his hookless staff and reading a leather-bound book. Saskia was twenty metres away and approaching when a flash of sky reflected on its embossed cover: Imago . Clever boy.

She called to him in French and moved between the drifting cows, touching them as she went.

He called back, ‘Good morning, madam.’

Saskia smiled. ‘I walked a long way today.’

‘How far?’

‘I got off the train at Nyon.’

‘That’s a long walk,’ he said. His eyes resumed their pleasant disengagement and returned to the book.

‘Do you have any food?’

He looked up. There was a studied amusement in his voice when he said, ‘I have my lunch, madam.’

Saskia had reached him. He was a head shorter than her. His spine was a little curved and his blood flushed arrhythmically through his neck. He had a heart problem. Saskia popped another berry into her mouth. She smiled.

‘Don’t be scared.’

‘I’m not scared.’

Saskia reached inside her jacket. She withdrew the pocket watch with the radium dial that she had stolen from the Count’s observatory.

‘This is yours if you will give me your lunch and do me a favour.’

The boy scratched his head with a fast, practised gesture that betrayed his lice. It made Saskia think of the i-Core. He licked his lips and nodded.

‘It’s lovely.’

‘It is a rare example,’ said Saskia, ‘and you may have it. But not yet. I need a rifle. Do you see the hut on the ridge above?’

He laughed. ‘Of course.’

‘Bring me a rifle and your ammunition at midday.’

‘Midday. One hour.’

‘Oh, and some milk.’

‘Two bottles?’

‘One is fine.’

It was gone midday when Saskia stood in the cool of that hut, higher still on the mountain. The hut was earth floor, timber and mottled glass held together with moss. She looked through the window to the meadows and snow-fields on the mountain opposite.

The boy was in the doorway. He held the rifle against his hip. This close, he smelled of his animals.

‘The rifle belongs to Carl. You need to be careful with it.’

Saskia opened the window. A breeze offered the comfort of cool air. She licked her lips. She looked into the bluish air between the meadow and the far mountain. Her breath slowed. Yes, it was warm in the hut. She scratched away a droplet of sweat from her chin.

‘Madame,’ he said, formally, ‘will you tell me your name?’

Saskia did not turn from the window. She said, ‘Do you want to know? Trentenaire .’

Thirty-year-old.

‘Oh,’ he said.

She took string from her pocket and retied her hair. Then she turned and accepted the rifle. It was a modern Mauser with a bolt action, ramp sight and shoulder strap. She tested the action. It slid easily. The rifle cocked on opening, not closing, which meant that the rate of fire was slower than a Lee-Enfield rifle, a weapon she had once used in Tiflis.

‘Trentenaire,’ he said, ‘do you want to hurt me?’

Saskia blinked. All the threads of her mind wove to here, now, and the yielding eyes of the boy. She put the gun on the table. Then she took his head in her hands and kissed his forehead.

‘Never in life,’ she said. ‘Never in life. But you have to do one more thing for me. Do you know The Garden of Swans near Bastions Park?’

‘Yes.’

‘I want you to knock on the door. Wake the neighbourhood if you have to. But tell the landlord to take a message for Soso.’

‘Soso.’

‘Clever boy. The message is: “The Lynx wants her cut”. Can you remember that? Take the watch. It’s yours, but it is unlucky. Sell it quickly.’

‘Will I need to buy Carl another gun?’

‘It’s a distinct possibility.’

During the afternoon, Saskia waited on the porch. The high woods seeped with life. She had used string to tie her skirt into half-trousers, and she had drunk the cowherd’s milk but was too anxious to eat any of the cheese. Later, she raised and swung the rifle to gauge its weight and balance. Then she practised the bolt action. Each repetition scored her brain a thousandfold until the working of the mechanism was an automatic behaviour that followed naturally from her heft of the rifle. She placed the butt in the pit of her shoulder and tracked birds left to right across the empty space above the meadow. She tested the shoulder strap beyond the force it would need to take if she unslung it aggressively. The cowherd had provided her with two stripper clips of ammunition. There were too few bullets to fully test the range and accuracy of the weapon, but she walked one hundred metres from the hut, turned, aimed at a whorl in the wood of the door, and fired. The rifle had little kick. Inspection revealed that the bullet had struck the centre of the whorl. It had not passed through the door.

She waited.

A man approached the hut at the close of the afternoon. Saskia heard his footfalls and his breaths and saw birds rise ahead of him. Unseen, she entered the hut and removed her skirt and blouse. Then she thumbed the rifle’s safety catch and waited behind the door. The minutes passed. The man approached the hut and called for Ms Tucholsky. Saskia blinked. She heard him try the window. It was lashed shut. Finally, he opened the door and walked into the hut. Saskia struck the back of his head with the rifle and closed the door beneath him.

Grisha lay in the dust and showed her his empty hands. He wore a tweed outfit that spoke to greater wealth than he had known the year before in St Petersburg, when he was the master of a illegal press, and the would-be killer of Judjuna Mikhailovna, alias of Saskia Brandt, but his impression remained that of a school bully.

‘It’s you,’ he said. The horror of his surprise twisted his face. ‘They said down in Caucasia that you could not be killed. They said …’

Saskia remembered the unusual taste of the beef that Grisha had fed her, and the fever whose dreams had seemed to grow behind her eyes, and the satisfaction this man had taken in her murder. But how had this happened to Saskia Beta, with her two hands and her toys like Ego and the yellow glasses?

‘You’re as lucky as me,’ she said. ‘Robespierre shot you, didn’t he?’

‘Who is Robespierre? A codename for someone?’

Saskia scrutinised his expression. Grisha had truly never heard that name in a contemporary context.

‘We don’t have much time,’ she said, covering him with the rifle. ‘You’re going to take off your clothes and put on my dress.’

‘I don’t understand.’ His hair, which was parted and oiled, had fallen to one side. His cheeks were red. ‘Why are we meeting again? How did it come to this?’

‘It’s someone’s idea of a joke,’ said Saskia.

‘Who?’