Donovans 01 - Amber Beach by authors_sort Read Free Book Online

that doubled and redoubled the play of light throughout the magical room. When the room was intact, walking into it must have been like walking into a shimmering golden paradise suspended within the vast, icy gray of the Russian winter.
    The Germans shipped their unique golden loot out of Saint Petersburg to Kaliningrad. From there, it vanished, thus beginning a treasure hunt that would endure as long as human imagination and greed or until the lost Amber Room was recovered, whichever came first.
    “The table was fake?” Ellen asked.
    “The mosaic inlay was real amber. The table itself was real and very well made, but it had never been part of the czar’s Amber Room.”
    “How can you be certain?”
    “It’s my job.”
    “Convince me.”
    Jake thought it over for a split second and decided to be gracious. That way he had a fallback position.
    “Quantities of Baltic amber are hard to come by,” he said, “unless you’re very well connected with a Baltic government or a local mafiya chieftain, take your pick. Mexican and Costa Rican amber are available to anyone with money. Whoever crafted the forged table was forced to use some clear amber from the New World.”
    “How can you tell the difference between New and Old World stuff?”
    “Ask your experts.”
    “You’re here. They’re not.”
    Wistfully he looked at the sky. Clouds were thickening off toward the Olympics, but there was still plenty of time to try out the Tomorrow before the weather got nasty.
    “Baltic amber is called succinite because of its high percentage of succinic acid,” he said. “It’s unique among ambers. In fact, some purists claim that succinite is the only real amber. All the rest is something else.”
    “All Baltic ambers are unique for the succinic acid content, no exceptions?” she asked.
    “None that matter.”
    “Tell me about the ones that don’t matter.”
    Jake looked at his watch. He would rather have been photocopying Kyle’s log than telling Ellen what any amber dealer could have told her. He hoped that a little patience now would pay big dividends later on.
    “About ten percent of Baltic ambers don’t have succinic acid,” he said, “but they didn’t end up in the czar’s palace.”
    “Why not?”
    “That kind of Baltic amber is too soft, too brittle, or too ugly for decorative use. It was turned into varnish or medicine or burned as incense. The amber I saw in the forged table was as clear and radiant as liquid sunshine. First-class amber in the New World. The Old World still prefers bastard amber.”
    “Bastard?”
    “Opaque or semi-opaque. Depending on its color and ‘feel,’ nontranslucent amber is called butter, bone, ivory, fatty, cloudy, semi-bastard—”
    “I get the picture,” she interrupted. “A lot of names.”
    “A lot of variations in color and transparency. Amber’s link with human culture is long and richly textured, especially in the Baltic regions. They spent as much time describing and naming minute differences in amber as we did counting angels and pinheads.”
    Polished red fingernails tapped in slow counterpoint to the dying wind while Ellen ran what she had just heard through her first-class brain.
    “Are color and clarity a reliable way to tell Baltic from other amber?” she asked.
    “No. What I just gave you only skims the surface. There are literally hundreds of words in the Baltic languages describing varieties of amber. Each variation of clarity and/or color has its own passionate 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