“Hardly.”
“But apparently enough to spontaneously wade into the sea. What else do you know?”
“Not much.”
“Inform me.”
“I know that Tatiana Petrovna thought it was worth risking her life to come to Kaliningrad for a notebook that no one can read. That she fell off a balcony the day she returned to Moscow. That honest journalists have enemies and Tatiana had more than most.”
“I suppose experts and computers have been brought in to decipher the code.”
“Maybe. That won’t help,” Arkady said.
“You don’t think so?”
“I don’t think it’s a code. You can no more read it than read someone else’s mind.”
“Do you have enemies too?”
“Could you be more specific?”
“People who would push you off a balcony.”
“Well, I haven’t been in Kaliningrad very long,” Arkady said. “Give me time.”
Without warning, Maxim turned the ZIL onto a road riddled with potholes. A truck boomed by like a rhino, spilling sand and water.
“Where are we?” Arkady asked.
The words had barely left Arkady’s mouth when the horizon rose. The steering wheel of the ZIL twisted over ruts as hard as cement and the car came to a precipitous stop looking down at the spectacle of a strip mine and giant machinery at work.
“Gold? Coal?” Arkady asked.
“Amber,” said Maxim.
It didn’t take a large crew to operate a strip mine. One man to control a front-end loader, another in a bulldozer that pushed the earth this way and that. The maestro was a man on foot aiming a high-pressure hose with the aid of a tiller driven into the ground. Loose soil was hunchbacked; black slag rose in peaks. Meanwhile, an earthmover maintained a pattern of roads that descended six levels from top to bottom. Between the grinding of engines and jet of water, a meteor could have hit the mine and no one would have noticed.
Maxim said, “Ninety percent of the world’s amber comes from Kaliningrad. Control Kaliningrad and you control the world’s production of amber. That’s worth some degree of fuss.”
“Who controls it?”
“Grisha Grigorenko did, until somebody shot him. Who knows, maybe there’s a new war? Or maybe a man with your talents can start one.”
22
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