Ian Hocking - The Amber Rooms

You are reading the third book of the Saskia Brandt series. It may be read as a standalone novel, but it will spoil aspects of the first two books, Déjà Vu and Flashback. If you intend to read them at all, I recommend doing so before you continue.

Have you lost the plot? I’ve included summaries of Déjà Vu or Flashback at the end of this book. There you will also find an author interview.

At the end of Flashback , Saskia Brandt has used Jennifer Proctor’s time band to escape 2003. Her last moments in that book feature a vision of forested land and eastern European myths.

The keystone historical event in this book is real. The 1907 Tiflis (now Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi) heist, known also as the Yerevan Square Expropriation, took place on the 26th June, 1907 (Old Style calendar) and shocked the world for its daring and the unprecedented sum of money stolen. It was enacted by Bolshevik paramilitaries as a way of procuring funds for seditionist activities.

The courageous, chivalrous and murderous psychotic Bolshevik known as ‘Kamo’ is real. In our own world-line, Kamo languished after the revolution and passed through a series of jobs secured through his boyhood connection to Joseph Stalin. He was briefly a member of the feared All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle against Counter-revolution and Sabotage—its acronym is Cheka —but was forced to leave when his behaviour was considered too brutal even for them.

As an old man, Stalin said, ‘Kamo was a truly amazing person… A master of disguise.’

In 1922, Kamo had returned to Tiflis to write his memoirs, which would include Stalin’s days as a bandit, when he was killed under mysterious circumstances. It seems likely that he was removed to protect Stalin’s image as a statesman, and likely that Stalin gave the order.

His fate in my book is somewhat different.

Easter, 1906

The Turkish merchantman Theodorus sailed south through the Strait of Kerch towards the Black Sea. It carried a tall, broad-shouldered Russian named Alexei Sergeyevich Draganov. He amused the crew with stories and songs of north-west Russia, which he translated into broken Turkish at their demand. He was an officer of the Department for Protecting the Public Security and Order. This department was known to some as the Okhranka .

Theodorus moved clockwise around the Black Sea and touched at Novorossiisk and Cape Kodori, where Draganov went ashore and made enquiries. He carried pistols beneath his tunic because there were thieving practices in this part of the world. His enquiries at the Cape were productive. At their conclusion, Draganov returned to his cabin and ate fish eggs and bread. Then he entered his thoughts in his diary. Each word was encoded with a cipher known only to him and his Protection Department mentor, Dr Kaplan. Once his speculation was set down in the diary, he copied out the text as an addendum to the serial letter that the captain kept on his behalf. The captain had been on a retainer for the Protection since the 1870s, when it had been known as the Third Section.

Towards the end of the voyage, Draganov often spent the later part of the evening smoking his pipe on deck with the ship’s surgeon, an erudite young Georgian called Chabua. They discussed whether the Black Sea itself could be described as a living organism. Both agreed it could be so; it depended on one’s definition. Chabua was taken by the history of the Sea. He had never sailed it before. He was a romantic and fascinated by its role as a watery crossroads during antiquity. To think of the Thracians of the Iliad ; to think of these harbours, some older than the pyramids.

Draganov shrugged. He knocked the remains of his tobacco into the creamy wake and bade the doctor a good night. He lay without sleeping in his damnably short bunk. He thought of the Argonauts labouring into the eye of the wind, towards the edge of the known world. A golden fleece the prize. He listened to the slap of water against the hull. The ship’s bell rang to mark the middle watch. Someone laughed. It was a happy ship. Draganov slept, finally, with his feet in the air.

Ever on, the ship nodded its way towards Anatolia.

In Sukham, the Theodorus was met by a forgettable Protection Department officer, who paid off the captain of the merchantman and asked to introduce Draganov to the settlement. It was an overcast day and by late afternoon the weather was an unpleasant combination of draughty and hot. Draganov went alone to the bazaar and bought gifts—Caucasian trinkets, for the most part—for certain of his female companions in St Petersburg. He visited a bath house and had a proper shave. Then, for good form, he had tea and jam with the Sukham agent in the botanical gardens, though the fellow bored him with asinine observations on the relationship between cranial topology and anarchistic tendencies, particularly in the Georgian male.

‘Where is she?’ asked Draganov when he could stand their conversation no longer.

The agent fidgeted.

‘In my house. With my wife.’

Draganov dabbed at his mouth with a napkin and watched a child lead a camel across dusty cobbles. The agent seemed to deflate.

‘Shall we?’

The Countess stood in the beautiful corner—that place in a Russian house where the icon is hung. She was tall. Her features were a trifle too penetrating for his taste. But her cheeks were rouged and her eyes were green and he looked forward to the interrogation. Age: twenty-six. Not young and not old; able to be either at a whim. She wore fine skirts and a short jacket. Her hat was broad-brimmed and slanted. In all, she was dressed exactly as Draganov would expect a young woman of her class and means to dress. Indeed, she shone with nobility.

Before he acknowledged her, Draganov closed the drawing room door and inspected his surroundings. He looked out of the second-storey window at the white caps of the Caucasian mountains. They were in the north-east of the town. A girl careened down the dust road on a bicycle. A fire bell rang somewhere.

Draganov dropped his canvas bag. He felt that the Countess was watching him with some amusement and this, in turn, amused him. There were no electrical fittings in the room. A fire was burning in the hearth. Winged armchairs faced it. The paintings on the wall were cheap, local prints. A rounded card table had been placed on a bear rug—itself a former local, Draganov had no doubt.

‘May I sit down?’ she asked.

‘Where are my manners?’ said Draganov. ‘Of course.’

It had taken her a long time to ask that question. He noted this, but reminded himself not to read too much into the delay. Her papers were in order, after all.

She assumed the further of the two winged chairs. Her back was straight and her hands remained in her bearskin hand warmer.

Draganov sat opposite her and smiled. He was thinking about the wife of the Protection agent and her servant, both of whom were likely to be listening at the door. The agent himself was probably where Draganov had left him: in the kitchen, drinking milk.