"Watson-TheAmberRoom" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watson Ian)

His next remark amazed me. "Maybe it needs a special perception to find the
room."

I must have gaped at him.

Rylov said in halting English, "You not truly write novel. To write novel is a
lie. You want to find the room." The dance music bawled around me, isolating us
in a mad oasis. "Why you want to find room, Herr Burn? Because of treasure
value?"

"No!"

Because Amber fell from the sky. Because she beckoned me from within the golden
room. I fingered my talisman.

"It's a personal matter," I said. "An emotional matter." I hesitated before
confessing: "I dream. I dream of finding it."

"By magic," said Antonov. I thought he was mocking me. Yet the next minute he
began to discourse about the Third Reich and about psychics. For a while I
imagined that he might be proposing a new plot for my phantom novel. Now that
communism and state atheism had collapsed, was not occultism all the vogue in
Russia?

Accompanied by nods from Mr. Mystery, Antonov explained, "The Nazis persecuted
most occultists, Mr. Burn, yet some they pampered. . . ."

Seemingly the German navy had financed a major scientific expedition to the
Baltic in the hope of determining by radar the concave curvature of the Hollow
Earth. The inglorious failure of this demented project did not deter the Naval
Research Institute in Berlin from lavishing the finest wines and cigars upon
psychics while those visionaries swung pendulums over charts of the Atlantic --
this, in response to mounting losses of U-boats. And who knew what had been the
upshot of the Nazi-sponsored psychic expedition to Tibet?

The point of all this was that Antonov and his associates had evidence of a rite
being performed within the amber room in Konigsberg Castle under the eye of Dr.
Alfred Rohde and a high-ranking Nazi -- with the aim of concealing the future
whereabouts of the room. The otherworldly treasure would be hidden amidst
mountains, of course -- I was right on that account -- but also in some veiled
domain adjacent to the mundane world...till someone of vision could rediscover
it with suitable aid.

"The name of the doctor who poisoned Rohde and his wife was Erdmann, Mr. Bum.
The name means Earthman, by contrast with the occult world of spirit." Antonov
leered at me, sweating. "And also by contrast with the sky?"

"Why," I asked, "did the Germans take such pains to hide the room?"