Ian Hocking - The Amber Rooms

As he buttoned his dress shirt, Saskia put her hand over his.

‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘Does Meta send agents through time?’

‘Think of them as soldiers of a special regiment.’

‘Or soldiers of God like you, Sir Robert of Chappes.’

Draganov pushed her hand away and finished buttoning his shirt.

‘As I discovered to my cost, my dear, God has little to do with it.’

‘Did God send me through those parallel universes?’

‘Why would He do that?’ asked Draganov, closing the doors of the medical cabinet.

‘I don’t know. As a lesson in hope, perhaps.’

‘I thought you might say, “Faith”.’ He looked down on her. His stern expression changed to one of fondness. ‘My dear, listen to me. If someone at Meta deliberately manipulated the behaviour of that time band, you should be worried.’

‘Why?’

‘Because they want to recruit you.’

‘They have already recruited me. One version of me, at least. The one that died in the back of a Peugeot Bébé.’

The doors of the ambulance opened on a dark courtyard. The driver stood there. He was no more than a boy.

In Russian, Draganov said, ‘See to it that she is taken directly to Dr Leontiev.’

The boy nodded and clapped his mittened hands against his thighs.

Saskia said, ‘How do I repay you?’

Draganov grunted as he stepped from the ambulance. He scratched his red beard and gave the courtyard a searching look. Satisfied, he turned back to her.

‘Payment, pilgrim? You forget my vow of poverty.’

A whistle was blown in the distance. The sound of trotting horses and clattering body armour reached the courtyard. The last that Saskia saw of Draganov was his tall form, perfectly at home in itself, charging as though a lone vanguard, moving to intercept soldiers as they entered the hospital grounds.

The Gulf of Finland: Autumn, 1908

The last hours of the Baltic approach to St Petersburg were renowned. Many of the first class passengers gathered on the unsteady private deck to watch the Imperial City rise from the troubled sea. The morning was bright and its sky gulled. The east wind smeared spray from the wave crests but this reached neither the high deck nor the muzzled figures surrounding Saskia Brandt, who had the truest balance of all the passengers.

The mouth of the River Neva opened and the many islands of the Gulf of Finland took shape. Over the next minutes, the vast naval fortress of Kronstadt passed to the north and the palaces of Peterhof moved by on the south. The gentlemen pointed cigars and pipes at the golden tower of the Admiralty. Appreciative noises filled the deck. Then a warm gust carried salt water into the air and Saskia turned against it.

She overheard one of the passengers speaking Hebrew. The words had the monotone of prayer. He would be placed in a category of close inspection when they arrived at the Russian customs on Vasilyevsky Island. The slightest irregularity would ensure his entry was refused. She thought of Yusha, her once-lover in that Zurich garret.

Pasha was somewhere on that horizon, impossibly small against the infinite line of Russia. She wondered if he had forgiven her. The boy lived, that was sure, but the i-Core lived with him, too. What had the parasite done? Saved the host for itself? Saskia did not know who, or what, would look out through his eyes. Pasha might hate her.

Thoughts on the consequences of his resurrection had followed her since that night when she had ridden from the Great Summer Palace in the ambulance, and burdened her through months alone in Finland and Norway reading about Draganov’s arrest and his court martial, and they slowed her steps from the crowded, blaring customs room to the noisy quayside. There, no fewer than five taxi drivers competed for her fare. They wore padded blue coats despite the growing warmth. Each claimed to have met her before and rendered an excellent service. Saskia selected the largest of the bearded men. Robespierre had always claimed that the larger the beard, the better the driver. She negotiated a rate that was half of his proposal, citing his torn collar. His fellows laughed at this out-smarting, and as she waited, watching for Green coats, anxious to be gone, the driver loaded her trunk. A moment later, she was once more moving through the streets.

Where there were people, there were spies. The pink Petersburg stones had always been unquiet with the tectonics of revolutionary forces. To attract the attention of the Tsarist variety would be problematic, while to attract the revolutionary variety would be disastrous. Saskia sat in the rear of the covered compartment. It was darkest there. She let the faces impress upon her instant by instant, as if each were a word in a book, and tried to discern errors in their grammar. The spy as error, as a dropped stitch. She smiled. No , she thought, no matches yet. But there will be a price on my head not much smaller than the heist expropriation. Do they still look for me in St Petersburg? Probably.

Saskia needed to be lucky.

Her cabbie took her across the Nikolayevsky Bridge, which joined Vasilyevsky Island to the mainland near the western corner of the Winter Palace. The red paint on the government buildings was peeling. Saskia watched the birds wheel above squares and the canals. The cabbie stood to bow towards the Orthodox chapel in the centre of the bridge. He did not slow his horses.

They passed the Hermitage, the golden spire of the Admiralty, and entered Nevsky Avenue, its buildings elegant as a parade, their styles countless.

At the hotel, Saskia checked in using her Danish passport. Her trunk was carried to her room. She asked for tea and the most recent edition of the Morgenbladet while she rested in the reading room. The best the waiter could do was the Financial Times , and one third of that had been obscured using black ink by the imperial censor.

Later in the day, she received a note from a waiter. It had two wax seals. When she opened the note, the paper was blank. Saskia did not stop to finish her tea. She went upstairs to her suite. There, she held the note over a candle and watched as the paper darkened to reveal white letters. It reminded her of Draganov’s business card.

Calamity! Execution date brought forward by bureaucrat. Knight died bravely last Wednesday at midday along with fifty more comrades. I am so sorry. Assume plan is cancelled. Will make arrangements.

R.

Saskia lowered Robespierre’s note another centimetre and watched it burn. She recalled a poetaster in the Outfit called Yevgeny who was fond of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat . Yevgeny was forever reciting the words until they passed into cliché and dulled. But their brightness returned now, as Saskia pondered them in FitzGerald’s translation.

When the paper was ash, she brushed her hand clean and went to her trunk. Inside she found the dark costume of a Finnish doorway woman, enough roubles to bribe all the guards of the Prison for Solitary Confinement twice over, the prison’s blueprints, and contacts for the river men who were to transport Saskia and Draganov down the Neva once they had escaped the outer wall. Now these things were for nothing. Saskia had failed him.

She reached to the bottom of the trunk and took out a bottle of vodka. There was a shaving pot in the bathroom. She put some vodka in that, drank it, and buzzed for a boy. She took a sheet of headed paper from the bureau and wrote:

Dear General,

I was instrumental in the robbery of the State Bank of Georgia, which took place on 13th June last year. While transporting the spoils to St Petersburg, I had a change of heart and diverted the money to the School for the Blind as a charitable donation: twin dressers, each with a false compartment at the rear. There you will find the money satchels.