The Amber Room Page 0,14

shops, art studios, and cafes lined the busy five kilometer route. Flashing neon and elaborate kiosks sold everything from books to ice cream and heralded the rapid advance of capitalism. What had Somerset Maugham described Dingy and sordid and dilapidated.

Not anymore, he thought.

Change was the reason he was able to even come to St. Petersburg. The privilege of scouring old Soviet records had been extended to outsiders only recently. He'd made two previous trips this year-one six months ago, another two months back-both to the same depository in St. Petersburg, the building he now entered for the third time. It was five stories with a rough-hewn stone facade, grimy from engine exhaust. The St. Petersburg Commercial Bank operated a busy branch out of one part of the ground floor, and Aeroflot, the Russian national airline, filled the rest. The first through third and fifth floors were all austere government offices: Visa and Foreign Citizen's Registration Department, Export Control, and the regional Agricultural Ministry. The fourth floor was devoted exclusively to a records depository. One of many scattered throughout the country, it was a place where the remnants of seventy-five years of Communism could be stored and safely studied.

Yeltsin had opened the documents to the world through the Russian Archival Committee, a way for the learned to preach his message of anti-Communism. Clever, actually. No need to purge the ranks, fill the gulags, or rewrite history as Khrushchev and Brezhnev managed. Just let historians uncover the multitude of atrocities, thievery, and espionage-secrets hidden for decades under tons of rotting paper and fading ink. Their eventual writings would 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