Stephan Collishaw - Amber

As I approached my apartment block, the door of a car opened, narrowly missing my leg. I jumped back against the wall, stumbling in my panic.

‘Are you OK?’ Zinotis said, stepping out of the car.

I nodded, shakily.

‘I gave you a shock.’ He smiled.

‘I thought you were somebody else,’ I said.

‘Oh?’

‘It’s nothing.’ I waved my hand, self-consciously. ‘Come up for coffee. I found that book Vassily borrowed from you some while ago.’

He looked perplexed for a moment, then seemed to remember.

‘Ah!’ He grinned.

As I boiled some water, Zinotis leafed through the volume on jewellery from the Kushan Empire.

‘I just happened to be passing,’ he called through from the front room, ‘and I thought I would pop in to tell you some interesting things I discovered a little earlier.’

When I entered the room with the coffee, he was putting on his half-moon spectacles to inspect a picture.

‘I was talking to a colleague,’ he said, not looking up from the book, ‘from the Department of Antiquities. I told him about the bracelet and he said he thought he knew what it was I was referring to.’

I sipped my coffee and watched him. He took off his glasses and slid them back into the breast pocket of his jacket.

‘He was convinced the bracelet you described was one which was fashioned first for the Emperor Nero. The Romans were obsessed with amber◦– northern gold, they called it. A Roman soldier was sent north to get some and came back with such an immense quantity that the nets at Nero’s games in the Colosseum were decorated with it, as was the armour and swords of the gladiators. Pliny writes about it.

‘Pliny also mentions a jewel Nero wore in his Historia Naturalis . He refers to it in terms of the inclusions, which were of scientific interest to him.’

He fished inside his jacket and pulled out a folded sheet of paper.

‘Legend has it,’ he continued, opening out the paper, a photocopy, and looking at it absently, ‘that the bracelet was later presented by an Egyptian princess to Tamerlane, the great warrior king born in Samarkand, who went on to build a bloody empire stretching from Delhi to Baghdad.

‘It was one of those artefacts I told you about before, unearthed in Bagram by a British adventurer and displayed in the Kabul Museum. It was stolen from the collection in the mid-eighties.’

Leaning over, he handed me the piece of paper.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘I copied it a couple of hours ago in the library. It’s a newspaper article. My colleague mentioned he thought he had seen it at one point and I was able to trace it.’ I took the paper from him and glanced at it. Faded, barely distinguishable, it showed a photograph of a bracelet. The filigree band was intricate and thick, as was the clasp that held the large oval piece of amber. The amber was spherical, beautifully translucent. The inclusions were spectacular, so perfectly centred, so clear, it seemed as if they had been especially arranged for display.

‘Ancient amulet stolen from Kabul collection,’ the caption ran beneath the photograph.

‘You know,’ he said, when I had finished reading, ‘this bracelet would be worth a lot of money on the black market.’

I nodded. ‘Are you sure this is the one?’

‘It fits,’ Zinotis said. ‘The description he gave you… Afghanistan…’

He rubbed his chin furiously. ‘Of course, it would be necessary to examine it to make sure it was not a fake.’

‘But surely,’ I said, ‘it’s not possible to fake the inclusions in the amber?’

‘Of course you can,’ Zinotis said. ‘There have been some very clever examples.’

For a few moments we both lapsed into silence, each preoccupied by our thoughts.

‘If you have this bracelet,’ Zinotis said, ‘I would be very keen to have a look at it.’

‘I don’t have the bracelet,’ I told him. ‘I’m not interested in it.’

He looked up, questioningly. ‘Oh?’

‘It’s Kolya I need to find.’

Zinotis smiled. ‘Of course,’ he muttered. ‘So you said yesterday morning.’

He gazed at me for a few moments, as if he was trying to judge what my real interest was. I realised how strange my behaviour must seem to him.

‘But when you find him,’ Zinotis continued, leaning forwards, interrupting my thoughts, ‘you will have to give him the bracelet. Would he know what to do with it? Would he know somebody who could sell it for him?’

‘I don’t know anything about that.’

‘He could get into trouble, of course, selling stolen goods.’ He smiled. ‘It would be worth a lot, though, on the black market.’ His smile turned into a roguish grin. ‘If you can’t find Kolya…’

‘I have his address,’ I told him. ‘If Kolya needs your help I will tell him to contact you.’

He stood up and held out his hand.

‘I will help in whatever way I am able,’ he said.

We shook hands and he left. For some while I did not move as I pondered the situation. What, I wondered, did Vassily want me to know, which only Kolya could tell me? Why was he not more explicit? Why could he not tell me himself? The price was too great, he had said. If there was one thing I had learnt from Vassily it was that beautiful jewellery shouldn’t be sullied by talk of money. As I sipped my coffee, I remembered a conversation we had had shortly after we had arrived in Vilnius and started up our business.

‘We need to get our own supply of amber,’ Vassily said. We were sitting in the beer hall across the street from his apartment. ‘To buy our amber here in Vilnius would cost too much. If I tried to get some out of the bastard we are working for, there would be no profit in doing the work. We need to go to Kaliningrad to get some for ourselves; it is the only way.’

There was a large factory that processed amber in Ribachi, a small village in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad. Amber was excavated from the Curonian Lagoon, then cleaned and processed at the factory.

‘I know the place,’ Vassily told me. ‘There are people at the factory I know from the old times. You see, the thing is, comrade, you don’t want to be paying too much tax to import the amber. What kind of a profit are you going to make then? What is the point in you doing the business, just to feed some greedy border guards? No, no. On one set of papers you buy a tonne of amber and then from my friend the second tonne, and that travels without papers. This way you can make a profit. It can be done.’

‘Where do they get the amber from, these friends of yours?’ I asked.

‘They steal it from the factory.’

‘A tonne of amber?’

He glanced at me to see whether I was joking. ‘Are you stupid or what?’ was all he would say. He slammed his empty beer glass down on the table in front of me. ‘Go get me another beer.

‘Listen, let me tell you,’ he continued when I returned with two more litre glasses of foaming beer and a plate of fried garlic bread. ‘Since you have so many scruples about stealing from those fucking bastards who think they can trawl the amber from beneath the waves and sell it at whatever cost they think fit◦– let me tell you about amber.

‘For many centuries people have collected amber from along the Baltic shore, when the winds have risen and the stormy sea has tossed it up on to the sand. They fished for it with nets, delving into the seaweed. Some, later, would swim out into the sea, or the lagoon, with a wooden paddle, and dive for the amber beneath the water, prising it from the seabed. Can you imagine that, eh, comrade? The danger they risked to get hold of it. Later, of course, the capitalists took over and they, as always, were wanting to improve the efficiency of the business and so introduced new machines, dredgers ploughing up the whole bed of the sea, sifting out the amber.