The Amber Room Read Free Page A

moment.
    â€œSpent three hours sitting in line at the clinic,” Kurtcomplained. “Probably caught the plague or something. You should have seen the lot in there. Pathetic.”
    The third person at their table was not impressed. Erika, as she was now known, was the former assistant chief jailer at the notorious Dresden women’s prison. Like Ferret and Kurt, she was now just another bit of flotsam washed up on the new tide of democracy.
    Erika pinched the Russian cigarette’s filter, pressing the cardboard tube into a tighter hole to restrict the bitter smoke. She motioned toward Ferret, speaking as if the little man were not there. “Take a look at those old papers. What’s he working on?”
    â€œOur freedom.” Kurt had obeyed the Ferret’s frantic midnight call and left town with a second van loaded to the hilt with stolen Stasi files. “How did it go last night?”
    â€œYou see the creep at the end of the bar, no, don’t turn around. The blue suit with ice for eyes. He’ll be over in about three seconds for his touch.”
    â€œThe cops saw you?”
    â€œNot me.” She punched her cigarette into ashes. “Your buyers didn’t have a clue.”
    â€œThey’re not mine.” Kurt swung one arm over the back of his chair, risked a casual glance toward the bar, waved at somebody who wasn’t there. “The one with the rug on his head?”
    â€œHe’s been my contact,” Erika replied. “Until yesterday it all ran smoothly. But he’s got a lever now, and he’s going to use it.”
    The police who frequented the tavern were those who valued the universal language and pocketed a percentage of every deal cut on the tavern’s far side. For them a regular visit to its crowded depths was necessary—they had to keep a careful eye on their egg-laying taxi-driving geese.
    The routine was well known. Truckers brought the black-market wares in from all over the globe, but mostly from the faltering East. Taxi drivers found the local buyers. In thetumultuous days since the nation of East Germany foundered off the maps and into history, cities like Schwerin had taken on the smell and feel of the Wild West. This left a lot of room for policemen unsure of future paychecks to increase their pocket change.
    Contact with the undercurrent of gray goods was far from difficult, especially since most of the newer taxi drivers were former comrades in one guise or another. These days, each new face behind the wheel of a cab brought a new story—one entire table in the taxi drivers’ corner this evening was made up of former army colonels, another of air force pilots. Communist Party henchmen formed a good solid block, most of them from the innumerable middle levels—the paper pushers and wheel greasers and slogan shouters who had neither the clout nor the foreknowledge to protect themselves when their house of cards came crashing down.
    Another contingent of new nighttime taxi drivers, as well as street sweepers and bricklayers and every other job where identification papers were not too carefully inspected, were former Stasi mid-level spies. Stasi was the popular nickname given to the MFS, or Ministerium für Staats Sicherheit , the Ministry for State Security. The East German secret police had provided a model for numerous smaller nations around the world, wherever money was tight and security was deemed of far greater importance than human rights.
    And now it was gone.
    The police who huddled by the counter and kept a moneylender’s eye on the nighttime traffic had seen what happened to the Stasi—four hundred thousand jobs gone in the blink of an eye. They knew the prevailing opinion of cops; since the Wall’s collapse they were universally known as Honecker’s Henchmen. They saw the West German police flash by in their Mercedes patrol cars, and sneering contempt for Ossie cops—Ossie was slang for a