Berry, Steve - the Amber Room

Loring stepped inside. "It is exactly as in the Catherine Palace. Ten meters square with the ceiling seven and a half meters tall."

Monika had maintained better control than her father. "Is this why all the games with Christian?"

"You were coming a bit close. This has been a secret for over fifty years. I could not let things continue to escalate and risk exposure to the Russians or Germans. I do not have to tell you what their reaction would be."

Fellner crossed the room to the far corner, admiring the marvelous amber table fitted tight at the junction of two lower panels. He then moved to one of the Florentine mosaics, the colored stone polished and framed in gilded bronze. "I never believed the stories. One swore the Soviets had saved the mosaics before the Nazis arrived at the Catherine Palace. Another said remnants were found in the Konigsberg ruins after the bombing in 1945 crumbled it to dust."

"The first story is false. The Soviets were not able to spirit the four mosaics away. They did try to dismantle one of the upper amber panels, but it fell apart. They decided to leave the rest, including the mosaics. The second story, though, is true. An illusion staged by Hitler."

"What do you mean?"

"Hitler knew Goring wanted the amber panels. He also knew of Erich Koch's loyalty to Goring. That is why the Fuhrer personally ordered the panels moved from Konigsberg and sent a special SS detachment to make the transfer, just in case Goring became difficult. Such a strange relationship between Hitler and Goring. Complete distrust of one another, yet total dependency. Only in the end, when Bormann was finally able to undermine Goring, did Hitler turn on him."

Monika drifted to the windows, which consisted of three sets of twenty-pane casements from floor to midway up, each topped by half-moons, three sets of eight-paned, arched windows overhead. The lower casements were actually double doors shaped to look like windows. Beyond the panes came light and what appeared to be a garden scene.

Loring noticed her interest.

"This room is entirely enclosed within stone walls, the space not even noticeable from the outside. I commissioned a mural to be painted and the lighting perfected to provide an illusion of outside. The original room opened to the Catherine Palace's grand courtyard, so I chose a nineteenth-century setting at a time after the courtyard had been enlarged and enclosed with fencing." Loring stepped close to Monika. "The ironworks of the gates there in the distance are exact. The grass, shrubs, and flowers are from contemporary pencil drawings used as models. Quite remarkable, actually. It appears as if we are standing on the second floor of the palace. Can you imagine the military parades that regularly occurred, or watching the nobles taking their evening promenade while a band played in the distance?"

"Ingenious." Monika turned back toward the Amber Room. "How were you able to reproduce the panels so exactly? I visited St. Petersburg last summer and toured the Catherine Palace. The restored Amber Room was nearly complete. They have the moldings, gild, windows, and doors replaced and many of the panels. Quite good work, but not like this."

Loring stepped to the center of the room. "It is quite simple, my dear. The vast majority of what you see is original, not a reproduction. Do you know the history?"

"Some," Monika said.

"Then you surely know that the panels were in a deplorable condition when the Nazis stole them in 1941. The original Prussian craftsmen fastened the amber to solid oak slabs with a crude mastic of beeswax and tree sap. Keeping amber intact in such a situation is akin to preserving a glass of water for two hundred years. No matter how careful one is, eventually the water will either spill or evaporate." He motioned around. "The same is true here. Over two centuries the oak expanded and contracted, and in some places rotted. Dry stove heating, bad ventilation, and the humid climate in and around Tsarskoe Selo only made things worse. The oak pulsed with the seasons, the mastic eventually cracked and pieces of amber dropped off. Nearly thirty percent was gone by the time the Nazis arrived. Another ten percent was lost during the theft. When Father found the panels, they were in a sorry state."

"I always believed Josef knew more than he acknowledged," Fell-ner said.

"You cannot imagine how disappointed Father was when he finally found them. He'd searched for seven years, imagined their beauty, recalled their majesty when he'd seen them in St. Petersburg before the Russian Revolution."

"They were in that cavern outside Stod, right?" Monika asked.

"Correct, my dear. Those three German transports contained the crates. Father found them during the summer of 1952."

"But how?" Fellner asked. "The Russians were looking in earnest, as were private collectors. Back then, everyone wanted the Amber Room and no one believed it had been destroyed. Josef was under the yoke of the Communists. How did he manage such a feat? And, even more important, how did he manage to keep it?"

"Father was close with Erich Koch. The Prussian gauleiter confided in him that Hitler wanted the panels transported south out of the occupied Soviet Union before the Red Army arrived. Koch was loyal to Goring, but he was no fool. When Hitler ordered the evacuation, he complied, and initially told Goring nothing. But the panels made it only as far as the Harz region, where they were hidden in the mountains. Koch eventually told Goring, but even Koch did not know where precisely they were hidden. Goring located four soldiers from the evacuation detail. Rumor was he tortured them, but they told him nothing of the panels' whereabouts." Loring shook his head. "Goring was fairly insane by the end of the war. Koch was scared to death of him, which was one reason he scattered pieces from the Amber Room--door hinges, brass knobs, stones from the mosaics--at Konigsberg. To telegraph a false message of destruction not only to the Soviets, but to Goring, as well. But those mosaics were reproductions the Germans had been working on since 1941."

"I never accepted the story that the amber burned in the Konigsberg bombings," Fellner said. "The whole town would have smelled like an incense pot."

Loring chuckled. "That is true. I never understood why no one noted that. There was never a mention of an odor in any report of the bombing. Imagine twenty tons of amber slowly smoldering away. The scent would have drifted for miles, and lingered for days."

Monika lightly stroked one of the polished walls. "None of the cold pomposity of stone. Almost warm to the touch. And much darker than I imagined. Certainly darker than the restored panels in the Catherine Palace."

"Amber darkens with time," her father said. "Though sliced into pieces, polished, and glued together, amber will continue to age. The Amber Room of the eighteenth century would have been a much brighter place than this room is today."

Loring nodded. "And though the pieces in these panels are millions of years old, they are as fragile as crystal and equally finicky. That is what makes this treasure even more amazing."

"It sparkles," Fellner said. "It is like standing in the sun. Radiance, but no heat."

"Like the original, the amber here is backed with silver foil. Light simply comes back."

"What do you mean like the original panels?" Fellner asked.

"As I mentioned, Father was disappointed when he breached the chamber and found the amber. The oak had rotted, nearly all the pieces had fallen off. He carefully recovered everything and obtained copies of photographs the Soviets had made of the room before the war. Like the current restorers at Tsarskoe Selo, Father used those pictures to rebuild the panels. The only difference--he possessed the original amber."

"Where did he find the craftsmen?" Monika asked. "My recollection is that the knowledge of how to fashion the amber was lost in the war. Most of the old masters were killed."