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The letterhead is embossed with a crest: two horses rearing above a name and address, Baron Eduard von Falz-Fein, Villa Askania Nova, Vaduz, Liechtenstein. We have never heard of him, but for someone who clearly knew Stein intimately we are surprised that he makes no reference in this letter to Elisabeth Stein's recent death or to the attack on Stein himself. We are also surprised to see that George Stein must have been receiving two wage cheques for his Amber Room investigation from opposite ends of the political spectrum, one from the Stasi and another from a baron whose villa was named after a region in the southern Ukraine, making it possible that he was a White Russian exile. Maybe Stein was playing one off against the other and someone had had enough. Maybe this was the reason Stein was tortured and his wife found hanged.

There is one document left in our Ministry of Truth file, a KGB communique to the Stasi Secretariat. It abruptly states:

We... wish to let you know that according to a statement received from the authorized department at Section 5 of our Establishment, the search for the Amber Room has been discontinued on the territory of the Soviet Union... This decision was taken according to a resolution by the Council of Ministers of the RSFSR [Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic], adopted in October 1983. All the Organizations and Authorities which took part in the measures and searches will no longer occupy themselves with these tasks.58

Barely a year after George Stein was brutally assaulted and just months after Elisabeth Stein was found hanged, the Council of Ministers, the highest executive body in the Russian Federation, ordered the end of all searches for the Amber Room, bringing to a close thirty-seven years of secret investigations in a single paragraph. But for some reason they had failed to tell the Stasi for over two years, since this KGB communique was dated 15 April 1986.

11

The Hamburg phone book brims with 'Stein's. But there are none with the initial 'G' listed as living in the village of Stelle. Maybe the family fled the tragic house in whose cellars Elisabeth Stein was found hanged and in whose living room George Stein was drugged and tortured by men apparently seeking or protecting the Amber Room.

There is nothing to do but ring them all.

Do you know George Stein, we ask repeatedly. One male voice eventually answers 'Who's this?' At least he hasn't hung up. We are calling in connection with the Amber Room. Das Bernsteinzimmer. 'My father can't speak to you,' the man replies.

His father? Have we reached the right number for George Stein? 'Well, I - 1 suppose so. I - 1 - 1 am his son. I better see you. Not at the house, it is impossible. I - I will meet you outside Hamburg station tomorrow night. I sell strawberries in the day. My name? I am Robert, Robert Stein,' the man stammers in broken English, before replacing the handset.

George Stein's son had volunteered no description of himself and the next evening thousands of commuters mill around the Hamburg terminus. But at 8.10 p.m., as a stream of roller-bladers swoosh past, a lopsided man with wild hair and a beard, his black jeans held up by leather braces, wades through their midst, sending them flying, his eyes zeroing in on the copy of Bernsteinzimmer Report we hold in our hands.

'Ja, ja, Robert Stein. Sorry, I - I missed the train,' he mumbles. We sit at a station cafe and he looks over his shoulder before talking. 'Das Bernsteinzimmer broke our family. My mother said to my father, "You're a fruit farmer." Four children and 4,000 bushes. But our father ignored us and now I work on another man's farm. People say I - 1 am like him, that I am crazy. No, it is not true. I am finished with das Bernsteinzimmer story. I - I do not want to be a lost-treasure artist. I sell strawberries. Police came to the house in Stelle and took away thousands of pages from my father's archive. They said he had stolen them. "Good, I said. Take it all away."'

Had the authorities come to the house as a result of Elisabeth