The Amber Room by Steve Berry Read Free Book Online Page A

be more than enough propaganda to serve the needs of the state.
    He climbed black iron stairs to the fourth floor. They were narrow in the Soviet style, indicating to the knowledgeable, like himself, that the building was post-revolutionary. A call yesterday from Italy informed him that the depository would be open until 3:00P .M. He’d visited this one and four others in southern Russia. This facility was unique, since a photocopier was available.
    On the fourth floor a battered wooden door opened into a stuffy space, its pale green walls peeling from a lack of ventilation. There was no ceiling, only pipes and ducts caked in asbestos crisscrossing beneath the brittle concrete of the fifth floor. The air was cool and moist. A strange place to house supposedly precious documents.
    He stepped across gritty tile and approached a solitary desk. The same clerk with wispy brown hair and a horsy face waited. He’d concluded last time the man to be an involuted, self-depreciating, nouveau Russian bureaucrat. Typical. Hardly a difference from the old Soviet version.
    “Dobriy den,”
    
    he said, adding a smile.
    “Good day,” the clerk replied.
    In Russian, he stated, “I need to study the files.”
    “Which ones?” An irritating smile accompanied the inquiry, the same look he recalled from two months before.
    “I’m sure you remember me.”
    “I thought your face familiar. The Commission records, correct?”
    The clerk’s attempt at coyness was a failure. “Da.Commission records.”
    “Would you like me to retrieve them?”
    “Nyet.I know where they are. But thank you for your kindness.”
    He excused himself and disappeared among metal shelves brimming with rotting cardboard boxes, the stale air heavily scented with dust and mildew. He knew a variety of records surrounded him, many an overflow from the nearby Hermitage, most from a fire years ago in the local Academy of Sciences. He remembered the incident well. “The Chernobyl of our culture,” the Soviet press labeled the event. But he’d wondered how unintentional the disaster may have been. Things always had a convenient tendency of disappearing at just the right moment in the USSR, and the reformed Russia was hardly any better.
    He perused the shelves, trying to recall where he left off last time. It could take years to finish a thorough review of everything. But he remembered two boxes in particular. He’d run out of time on his last visit before getting to them, the depository having closed early for International Women’s Day.
    He found the boxes and slid both off the shelf, placing them on one of the bare wooden tables. About a meter square, each box was heavy, maybe twenty-five or thirty kilograms. The clerk still sat toward the front of the depository. He realized it wouldn’t be long before the impertinent fool sauntered back and made a note of his latest interest.
    The label on top of both boxes read in Cyrillic,EXTRAORDINARY STATE COMMISSION ON THE REGISTRATION AND INVESTIGATION OF THE CRIMES OF THE GERMAN -FASCIST OCCUPIERS AND THEIR ACCOMPLICES AND THE DAMAGE DONE BY THEM TO THE CITIZENS,COLLECTIVE FARMS ,PUBLIC ORGANIZATIONS ,STATE ENTERPRISES ,AND INSTITUTIONS OF THE UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLIC .
    He knew the Commission well. Created in 1942 to resolve problems associated with the Nazi occupation, it eventually did everything from investigating concentration camps liberated by the Red Army to valuing art treasures looted from Soviet museums. By 1945 the commission evolved into the primary sender of thousands of prisoners and supposed traitors to the gulags. It was one of Stalin’s concoctions, a way to maintain control, and eventually employed thousands, including field investigators who searched western Europe, northern Africa, and South America for art pillaged by the Germans.
    He settled down into a metal chair and started sifting page by page through the first box. The going was slow, thanks to the volume and the heavy Russian and