‘This place makes me feel good, it does,’ he said as he set to work drawing us ‘into the zone’.
I am not a party animal. I prefer to go to bed long before midnight. I like to wake early and put pen to paper. I didn’t want another intoxicated Slavic evening, dropping my notes in a strawberry vodka punchbowl. I wasn’t going to risk my book advance at the baccarat table. Instead I settled down to watch Lev earn his cut by helping the others to buy chips, place bets and lose their shirts.
As the evening advanced a slightly mesmeric compulsion seemed to possess him. He started to move faster, to speak in half-sentences, to call for more champagne. He encouraged the Yorkshireman to play two tables at once. He flirted with the French woman until her partner sauntered back from the toilet. He failed to convince the Americans that he owned a ranch in Montana. He pressed another glass into my hand with the words, ‘Go on, partner. Give the wheel a spin. The night is young.’
I didn’t and, around eleven, I decided not to write about Kaliningrad. On the road, a travel writer meets people, makes observations and collects stories. A parallel journey, equally real, is then made at his or her desk. There, experience and memories are distilled in a process that is inevitably partial and impressionistic. But I’d stumbled on no promising material, sensed no moment that needed to be infused with meaning and value. I would cut both my losses and the chapter, and move on in the morning.
To pass the last hour of the tour, I made my way to the in-house theatre to watch the Tomsk Baby ‘Twerk’ Dance Team. In essence, the twerk – or booty – dance obliged performers to shove their rumps in the audience’s face, while jiggling other bits of their anatomy. It was a primitive and sexist display, choreographed to a grinding beat, and – in one of those coincidences common to both life and art – the dancers were dressed as cowgirls. As they shook their tasselled butts and whipped back their long hair, Lev sat down beside me.
‘You’re not going to play tonight?’ he asked.
I shook my head.
‘So why come to Kaliningrad?’
I gave him half an answer, explaining my interest in history.
‘Then you know about Baltic gold?’ he guessed.
His so-called ‘Baltic gold’ was amber, fossilised tree resin that sold for more than its weight in real gold. Ninety per cent of the world’s supply was found in and around Kaliningrad.
‘China is the biggest buyer. Germans are also good. They pay five or six times more for an insect in the stone. Why else would this be called Amberland?’ Lev was engaging and likeable but he was looking for an angle, scheming how to lighten my wallet. A sudden thought – or was it dollar signs? – sparked in his eyes and he bent forward to whisper, ‘You say you’re interested in history?’
I nodded.
‘Sir, let me tell you there is nothing, nothing like the Amber Room.’
‘The lost Amber Room?’
‘Lost? Who says it’s lost?’ said Lev, pushing back his hat and tapping his temple. ‘A man only needs to know where to look, and to be willing to pay.’
At the start of the eighteenth century the Amber Room was gifted by Prussia’s Frederick William I to Peter the Great. Russian artisans then enhanced the work until it contained over six tonnes of amber, backed with gold leaf and mirrors. During the Second World War, the Germans looted it from the Catherine Palace near St Petersburg and brought it to Königsberg, after which the ‘Eighth Wonder of the World’ vanished. Some eyewitnesses claimed it was loaded onto the MV Wilhelm Gustloff, the German evacuation ship that was sunk by a Soviet submarine with the loss of 10,000 lives. Others reported that it was destroyed during the RAF bombing. In any event, for more than seventy years its whereabouts had been a mystery to all. Except it seemed to Lucky Lev.
At midnight he scooped us up. He sat with the Yorkshireman in the taxi’s front seat. I squeezed into the back with the French couple. The Americans went home as they wouldn’t pay the extra fee.
Kaliningrad’s streets were deserted now, swept clear of ancient buses and military convoys. Fewer than half the city’s street lights – and none of the street signs – were illuminated and soon I was as lost as the Amber Room, until the taxi swung over Kant Island – once called Kneiphof from the Old Prussian word for swamp – and I recognised the House of Soviets.
In the moonlight the brutalist building brought to mind a giant robot buried up to its shoulders. Lev led us to a gap in the corrugated hoarding, ushering us into the closed site with a torch he’d bought from the driver. Underfoot the ground was wet with melted snow and the French woman slipped in her heels.
Beyond a cracked concrete fountain, Lev found a flight of steps. He led us down into a decaying hall of crumbling walls and sodden mattresses. The lift shaft had no doors. The ceiling was as cracked as crazy paving. In the light of our mobile phones the building looked post-apocalyptic, empty, dead.
‘Do you know the way?’ I asked Lev as he made for a metal door.
‘I am risk taker,’ he replied and I wondered if he’d ever been there before.
The House of Soviets was meant to be Kaliningrad’s showcase. But as the concrete colossus had risen above the skyline its heavy foundations had sunk into the marshy earth, even after the building’s height was scaled back to twenty-one floors. Lev seemed to believe that if he could reach the castle’s surviving underground passageways – uncovered by recent digs and said to be as much as four storeys deep – he would find the secret hiding place of the Amber Room.
We dropped down another flight of stairs, deeper into the ground, along dank and dripping passageways with earthen floors. In the subterranean labyrinth I wondered if we should have unravelled a ball of thread, as Theseus did when he went to slay the Minotaur.
The Yorkshireman’s iPhone was the first to lose power and, after another few minutes, my low battery icon began to flash. In its dimming light I reached out to touch the wall for reassurance and Lev, seeing my hesitation, gave me the torch. The warmth of the air surprised me but not my creeping claustrophobia. As I imagined the weight of earth – and dodgy Soviet concrete – massing on my shoulders, my sense of adventure began to desert me.
‘Come on, sir,’ he chided.
I was ready to turn back. There was nothing for me to write about. But then Lev turned another dank corner and met an old wall. He whooped, reaching out to touch its interlocking face stones. It was the work of masons, almost certainly German, definitely not Soviet. Lev felt his way along the cut stones until he felt a rough opening. A hole had been hacked through the skin of the old wall and into a surviving castle tunnel.
‘Almost there,’ he cheered, lifting himself up to scramble through the hole. Again the peculiar mesmeric compulsion seemed to possess him. ‘Almost there.’
But we were nowhere near anywhere. Obviously the passage had already been discovered and explored by official archaeologists as well as amateur treasure hunters. In all likelihood they’d found nothing. Certainly they had been better prepared than our intoxicated troupe. As I expressed my reservations, Lev’s feet vanished into the hole. There was a splash and then an almighty roar.
‘My phone. My fucking phone.’
The deeper castle tunnel was flooded, as it must have been since the end of the war. In it Lev thrashed about, dunking down into the inky water in the hope of finding his mobile. He felt nothing, and now we had only one torch.