Checkmate in Amber Read online

  ‘CAVALO, I DELIVERED THAT MÄRKLIN PIECE TO PEÓN JUST AS WE ARRANGED.’

  ‘Right, so how can I get it to you, Cavalo?’ I asked. The truth was that it had completely slipped my mind. It was lying around somewhere in my bedroom closet.

  ‘There’s no hurry. We’ll fix to meet up one of these days, OK?’

  ‘Great,’ I answered. He certainly didn’t need to twist my arm on that one.

  ‘Have you all looked at the photographs that I sent you?’ Roi butted in, bringing us back to business.

  We all replied in the affirmative.

  ‘Any useful comments on this strange painting?’

  For a brief moment, nothing new appeared on screen.

  ‘Fine. I will now explain why I called this meeting. The fact of the matter is that I barely slept a wink last night.’

  Roi explained to us that what had intrigued him most about the painting at first sight had been the signature of a German painter, Erich Koch, on a work which showed an old Jewish man with clearly biblical references, a figure who he could not immediately identify. But what most surprised him - apart from the fact that it had been hidden behind a completely different painting - was the signed date: 1949, only four years after the end of the Second World War. Eaten up by curiosity, he had woken Läufer up in the middle of the night to ask him to find out everything that he could about this unknown artist, and had then phoned his friend Uri Zev, of the Cultural and Scientific Affairs Division of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

  ‘So what exactly did you tell your friend Uri, may I ask?’ interjected Donna suddenly, clearly concerned about security.

  ‘None of you have anything to be worried about. Uri and I have worked together in the past and I trust him completely. Furthermore, I took the trouble of rescanning the photographs without Koch’s signature and the date.’

  ‘And he wasn’t annoyed that you rang him so late at night?’ insisted Donna, still uneasy.

  ‘Uri is well used to fielding phone calls at any time of the day or night. His work in the Cultural Affairs Division is only a small part of his very busy international schedule. Believe me, Donna, Uri is someone in whom you can have complete confidence. This is by no means the first time that I have consulted him for information relating to our activities - although I have always taken great care to avoid his being able to connect my requests with anything that might subsequently appear in the press. Last night I told him that the image was of a work by a contemporary Israeli artist living in Galilee, and that all I wanted was for him, as a Jew, to make a rapid and informed analysis of the work and translate the inscription.’

  ‘AND WHAT DID HE TELL YOU?’ Läufer asked impatiently.

  ‘First I would like you to tell the others exactly what you told me earlier this morning. I would also very much appreciate it if you would stop shouting.’

  ‘I CAN’T! DON’T ANY OF YOU BELIEVE ME?’

  That was a question which nobody even bothered to answer. Läufer went on to bring us all up to date with what he had discovered - still shouting, of course. He had only had a couple of hours to search the web for any bits of information about a German artist of the mid-twentieth century called Erich Koch. The little he had been able to lay his hands on had left him frankly stunned. The hits that kept coming up on screen had nothing to do with an unknown painter called Erich Koch. Every single one of them dealt with Gauleiter Erich Koch, a top Nazi official in the East Prussian capital, Königsberg, who had died in a Polish prison in 1986.

  ‘What? Not a single mention of any other Eric Koch?’ asked Cavalo. ‘We’re clearly dealing with two completely different people.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ I pointed out, rapidly putting two and two together.

  ‘THEY ARE ONE AND THE SAME PERSON. NO OTHER ERICH KOCH APPEARS IN ANY GERMAN CENSUS AFTER 1875.’

  ‘How strange that he’s the third Nazi to crop up in this story,’ I wondered out loud. ‘Fritz Sauckel, Helmut Hübner and now Erich Koch. All closely connected to the art world and to the Krylov painting.’

  ‘That is precisely the point,’ remarked Roi. ‘I am convinced that we have become inadvertently involved in some rather tricky business that, so far, we do not fully understand, but which could affect us directly if it turns out that Helmut Hübner is actually part of some conspiracy.’

  ‘And what about our Russian client? We need to find out a good deal more about him, I think,’ said Cavalo.

  ‘Vladimir Melentyev? Yes, you are absolutely right, we should investigate him as well. Clearly it is his interest in the Krylov piece which has set off the whole process that we are now caught up in. Perhaps we should have looked into him more thoroughly before accepting his order.’

  ‘IT’S POSSIBLE THAT HE KNEW NOTHING AT ALL ABOUT THE KOCH CANVAS.’

  ‘Oh come on, Läufer!’ protested Cavalo. ‘Remember that he was willing to pay whatever price we asked him for, however high we pitched it. That hardly sounds innocent, does it?’

  ‘ONLY IF THE KOCH CANVAS HAS SOME KIND OF INTRINSIC VALUE FOR HIM. WHICH I DOUBT BECAUSE ARTISTICALLY IT’S A MESS.’

  ‘By the way, Roi,’ I butted in. ‘You haven’t told us yet what your friend Uri found out.’

  ‘Fair enough. Apparently the painting depicts the moment when the prophet Jeremiah was rescued from captivity. For those who have a Bible to hand, this is described in Jeremiah 38: 1-14. They imprisoned the prophet in the cistern of Malchiah, son of King Zedekiah, for prophesying a succession of disasters for the people of Israel. This cistern was empty of water but still silted up with mud, and Jeremiah would have died of hunger there. An Ethiopian court eunuch interceded with the king and convinced him to free the prophet. And it is this moment which is portrayed in the painting.’

  ‘But what does the inscription in Hebrew say?’ I asked.

  ‘That, I’m afraid, Uri was unable to tell me. The script is indeed Hebrew, but the text is utterly incomprehensible.’

  ‘AMAZING!’

  ‘Läufer, I want you to turn every single database on the planet upside down, if need be, as long as you find out absolutely everything you possibly can about Erich Koch, Fritz Sauckel, Vladimir Melentyev and Helmut Hübner. I am going to immerse myself in Ilya Krylov’s life story until I can read his mind, and I ask the rest of you to study and study the Koch painting until we are sure that we have not missed a single detail. It is more than possible that the Chess Group has become involved in some seriously ugly business with highly unpredictable consequences. So - get to work! I expect you all next Sunday, October 11th, same time, same place, and with the password “Gobi”. And remember: maximum security is our best possible insurance. If one of us goes down, we all go down.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I spent the whole day in the store, taking care of the usual minor details. But at eight o’clock in the evening, as soon as I had set the alarm, lowered the security shutters and closed up the store, Koch’s painting dominated my every thought. Ezequiela was watching TV in the sitting room, and cross-stitching linen to produce embroidered squares to frame and hang on her bedroom walls. The house was pleasantly warm and there was fresh-made coffee in the kitchen.

  Without even taking off my jacket or hanging up my handbag on its usual hook, I hurried into the study, turned on all the lights and switched on my desktop and printer. As my system booted up, I poured myself a cup of coffee and changed my clothes. Back in the study, I checked my email to see if there was anything important (there wasn’t) and uploaded my digital photo of Koch’s Jeremiah. I fed the photo paper into my printer, adjusted my brightness, contrast and saturation settings and printed off a first copy of the highest quality available. After quite a while, a whole pack of paper and a change of ink cartridges, my study walls were completely covered in a series of blow-ups of the canvas, section by section and all taped to the shelves, furniture and walls. I’d got my hands on the old family Bible, bound in black leather and seriously beat-up, and was soon striding up and down the s
tudy with the weighty heirloom in my hands, declaiming out loud the first fourteen verses of Jeremiah, Chapter 38:

  ‘Then Shephatiah the son of Mattan, and Gedaliah the son of Pashur, and Jucal the son of Shelemiah, and Pashur the son of Malchiah, heard the words that Jeremiah had spoken unto all the people, saying,

  “Thus saith the Lord, ‘He that remaineth in this city shall die by the sword, by the famine, and by the pestilence: but he that goeth forth to the Chaldeans shall live; for he shall have his life for a prey, and shall live.’ Thus saith the Lord, ‘This city shall surely be given into the hand of the king of Babylon’s army, which shall take it.’”

  Therefore the princes said unto the king, “We beseech thee, let this man be put to death: for thus he weakeneth the hands of the men of war that remain in this city, and the hands of all the people, in speaking such words unto them: for this man seeketh not the welfare of this people, but the hurt.”

  Then Zedekiah the king said, “Behold, he is in your hand: for the king is not he that can do any thing against you.”

  Then took they Jeremiah, and cast him into the dungeon of Malchiah the son of Hammelech, that was in the court of the prison: and they let down Jeremiah with cords. And in the dungeon there was no water, but mire: so Jeremiah sunk in the mire.’

  The door of the study suddenly opened, I pulled up sharp and froze into position like in a frame of an old movie, with the book in my left hand and my right fist raised up against the princes.

  ‘Is something wrong? What are you yelling and screaming about?’

  ‘I’m reading the Bible.’

  Ezequiela raised her eyebrows, looked at me with wide open eyes, turned on her heels and left the room, heaving a deep sigh.

  ‘You’re clearly unwell.’

  ‘… sunk in the mire,’ I resumed. ‘Now when Ebed-melech the Ethiopian, one of the eunuchs which was in the king’s house, heard that they had put Jeremiah in the dungeon - the king then sitting in the gate of Benjamin - Ebed-melech went forth out of the king’s house, and spoke to the king saying, “My lord the king, these men have done evil in all that they have done to Jeremiah the prophet, whom they have cast into the dungeon; and he is like to die for hunger in the place where he is: for there is no more bread in the city.”

  Then the king commanded Ebed-melech the Ethiopian, saying, “Take from hence thirty men with thee, and take up Jeremiah the prophet out of the dungeon, before he die.”

  So Ebed-melech took the men with him, and went into the house of the king under the treasury, and took thence old cast clouts and old rotten rags, and let them down by cords into the dungeon to Jeremiah. And Ebed-melech the Ethiopian said unto Jeremiah, “Put now these old cast clouts and rotten rags under thine armholes under the cords.” And Jeremiah did so. So they drew up Jeremiah with cords, and took him up out of the dungeon: and Jeremiah remained in the court of the prison.’

  Koch’s painting depicted the precise moment in which the prophet began to be pulled out of the dungeon with the cords. But however much I blew up the images, however much I adjusted the colors and made all the different checks and adjustments I could think of, I found not a single hidden message, nothing cunningly disguised or even suggested by the paintwork, aside from what I could see in plain view. And the only thing I could see in plain view was the enraged expression on the prophet’s angry face.

  At 11:30 Ezequiela came back to wish me goodnight. The whole house fell completely silent, apart from the low hums and clicks of the printer which hadn’t finished churning out the thousand-and-one copies I’d tasked it with, with all the tweaks and variations imaginable. By two in the morning, my constant staring at the screen had given me such a bad headache that I had to take painkillers to keep myself going. At three, I decided to abandon my adventures in graphic design and take up Bible Studies. Who was Jeremiah? Why did they throw him into the dungeon? What was it about this Jewish prophet that had so fascinated an anti-Semitic Nazi Gauleiter?

  Jeremiah was born in around 650BC and died some time after Babylon’s conquest of Jerusalem in about 586BC. From the start he broke with the traditional model of prophesying future glories, favoring instead lyrical but ominous predictions of conquest, captivity and exile. In the early days of his ministry, he enjoyed the protection of Josiah, king of Judah, but fell from grace soon after the king’s death in 609BC. His prediction of the Babylonians’ victory over Jerusalem and Judah led to his being considered a traitor, and he was forbidden from preaching in public. Naturally, he disobeyed the ban time and time again, was frequently arrested and ended up being thrown into the mire-filled dungeon.

  I found a wealth of information about the Book of Jeremiah in the various en-cyclopedias I had around the house, but it was all too scholarly and theological, and very hard to understand for a newcomer to the subject like me. Nothing I read really grabbed my attention, and I was finding it increasingly hard to stay awake at that time of the night, as I ground my way through academic texts. I was on the point of giving up and going to bed, when I suddenly remembered an old book I’d seen on my shelves. It was one of those books that you only ever come across when you’re looking for something else, that you don’t remember ever having bought and that you’ve never once opened, not even just out of curiosity. It’s not as if it had much to do with what I was looking for, but it was about the Bible and by this time I wasn’t exactly thinking straight.

  The book was called The Messages of the Old Testament, and its unknown author had set out to prove that all the allegories, parables, metaphors and proverbs contained a coded announcement of the end of the world and the arrival of a new civilization. As I browsed mechanically through the index of contents, my bleary eyes hit upon an entry which woke me up like a shot: the fourth chapter was entitled Atbash: The Secret Code of Jeremiah. Quickly I flipped through the pages until I found the start of Chapter Four and began to read with rapt attention. The oldest secret code in the history of humanity, the book argued, was the so-called Atbash Cipher, first used by the prophet Jeremiah to disguise the true meaning of his writings. Relentlessly persecuted by powerful members of the king’s court and by the king himself for predicting that Judah would be conquered by Babylon, he began to encrypt the name of the enemy whenever it appeared in his writings. He used a simple substitution cipher with the Hebrew alphabet, so that the first letter, aleph, was replaced by the last, taw, the second, beth, by the second from last, shin, and so on. Atbash, the name of this original cipher from over two and a half thousand years ago, is derived from these first two substitutions, aleph to taw, beth to shin, using the first sound of each letter - which produces atbsh. So in Chapter 25, Verse 26 and Chapter 51, Verse 41 of the Book of Jeremiah, for instance, the prophet wrote Sheshakh in place of Babylon.

  I grabbed the family Bible again to check out whether or not what this thin volume said was true, and sure enough it was, as clear as daylight. Despite the time and my lack of sleep, I felt as fit and dandy as at midday. I immediately wrote out the Hebrew alphabet on a sheet of paper so that each half folded against the other, making it easy to substitute the letters. I copied down the inscription from the Koch painting, applied the Atbash cipher and wrote the result at the end of a brief explanatory email which I sent to Roi. Then I destroyed all the paperwork which I had printed out and written on (as required by Group regulations) and went off to bed.

  The two hours’ sleep I got that night was the best night’s sleep I’ve ever had. I didn’t have the slightest idea whether the deciphered inscription would make any sense at all once Uri Zev got his hands on it. But even if it didn’t, I had worked so hard and with such passion that I slept the sleep of the righteous.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The information put together by Läufer over a few days’ research turned out to be even more astonishing than anything any of us could ever have expected. From far-flung places such as England, the Ukraine, Berlin and Israel, from wide-ranging sources such as the University of Toronto, the El Universal newsp
aper in Mexico, Moscow’s Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, the War Museum in Athens and the Institut Français in Santiago de Chile, and from classified documents of the Israeli police, the FBI, the Stasi secret police service of the defunct German Democratic Republic and the reconstituted KGB, the documentation came flooding into our computers and painted an ever more detailed and horrifying portrait of figures who up until now had been no more than dimly-lit bogeymen in a messed-up horror story.

  Fritz Sauckel was one of the most brutal of the Nazi old guard, a member of the Reichstag, an honorary Obergruppenführer of the dreaded SA stormtroopers and served during the war as Governor-General and Gauleiter of Thuringia. As General Plenipotentiary for the Deployment of Labor, he forcibly recruited over five million slave laborers, labeled as Ostarbeiter, in Nazi-occupied territories, most of whom were then overworked to death. According to Jacques-Bernard Herzog, an assistant prosecutor at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, ‘This former merchant mariner, the father of ten children and brought to high office by the Hitlerian revolution, ordered that the laborers be fed in strict proportion to their performance at work. A primitive mentality like his could find justification for any indignity: he and he alone faithfully executed the commands of the Führer. He claimed to have known nothing of the atrocities committed in the concentration camps. I then showed him a photograph of a visit he undertook in the company of Himmler to the concentration camp at Buchenwald in Weimar, for which he himself was responsible as Gauleiter for the entire region. With unbelievable stupidity, he claimed that his visit had been limited to the camp’s outbuildings, and that he had never set foot in the camp itself.’