Donovans 01 - Amber Beach

collectors and its own mythology.”
    “The czars traded all over the world,” she said. “Could some high-quality non-Baltic amber have been used in making the original Amber Room?”
    “Anything is possible.”
    “Is it probable?”
    “Not really. The amber discoveries in Mexico and Puerto Rico are recent. The Amber Room dates from Prussian times, the early eighteenth century. Besides, why trade halfway around the world for goods you can get at home for a great price?”
    “Meaning?”
    “The Baltic amber mines were an imperial monopoly.”
    “Mother,” she muttered. “What you’re saying is, no matter what the color or clarity, every bit of amber in the Amber Room came from the Palmnicken mines.”
    “Or other mines along the shores of the Baltic Sea. Lithuania and Kaliningrad have the best mines, but not the only ones.”
    “Well, there goes that theory.” She frowned. “What—”
    “My turn,” he interrupted. “Do you have proof that the Donovan family is part of Kyle’s scheme?”
    “Nothing to take to court. It’s our working hypothesis. Do you have a better one?”
    “No. Are you looking for the whole Amber Room?”
    “Who says we’re looking for it at all?”
    “That’s the problem with interrogation. You can’t ask questions without giving away information. Are you looking for the whole room? ”
    Silence. Then Ellen shrugged. “They can’t say I didn’t warn them about you. At the moment, all we care about is the panel that Kyle stole.”
    “Does he have the whole room?”
    “We don’t know.”
    “Give me your best estimate.”
    “We think he may or may not be somebody’s cat’s-paw for the sale of the entire room. Either way, he ended up with a panel from the room as a calling card to excite the international market.”
    “Bloody hell. Who was the corpse that washed up in the San Juans, the one with Third World dental work?” Jake asked.
    “Former KGB from the former Soviet Union.”
    “What was he doing lately?”
    “People.”
    “Anyone in particular or was he an equal opportunity killer?”
    “He worked for one of the Moscow mafiya chieftains for a while, then went freelance.”
    “Why was he after Kyle?”
    “No answer.”
    “What do you have on Marju?”
    “She was the usual loyal daughter of a downtrodden, diluted, bastardized Baltic country. The losers keep track of feuds, wars, and bloodlettings going back centuries. They’re good haters.”
    Jake already knew that. What he didn’t know was whether Marju’s brand of patriotism went beyond speaking an arcane language and taking up traditional Lithuanian crafts.
    “How serious was she about freeing Lithuania?” he asked.
    “From what we’ve discovered, good old Grandpa did a thorough job of infecting his granddaughter with a heavy dose of Father Country claptrap. She went to the usual ‘secret’ meetings, which were duly reported to the Russians by Lithuanian informers.”
    “There are meetings and then there are conspiracies. Which were these?”
    “Babe, they haven’t had a useful conspiracy in Lithuania since God wore knickers. There was lots of shouting over how our poor great-great-great-granddads were screwed, plus retellings of even more ancient rape and robbery.”
    “They would be better off shouting for a currency of their own, one not based on the Russian ruble,” Jake said.
    “Lacks sex appeal.”
    “What about—”
    “Back to the missing amber,” Ellen interrupted. “Have you heard any rumors about the Amber Room?”
    “Sure.”
    Again Jake saw the shift in her, as though she had just come into hard focus.
    “Tell me what you’ve heard,” she said.
    “You may have the rest of the day, but I don’t.”
    “If I do, you do.”
    For a moment his impatience almost got the better of him. Then he reminded himself how much easier life would be if Ellen or someone like her wasn’t sticking to him like lice.
    “A few people say that the room never left Saint Petersburg, and therefore was lost when we bombed the place to a smoking ruin at the end of the war. Most people believe that the Nazis dismantled the Amber Room with hacksaws and pry bars in 1941, packed up the lot, and shipped it to Kaliningrad.”
    “And?”
    “That’s when the real fun begins. The crates the Amber Room was packed in vanished sometime in 1945. No one has seen them since. The bean counter types say the whole thing went up in smoke when we bombed the hell out of the city.”
    Ellen grimaced.