• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1812 0

when it is no longer appropriate to be flirting with little girls." No more Casanova. I went to see cousin Vladimir Nabokov in New York, where I proposed to my first wife.' In 19 50 the Baron married Virginia Curtis-Bennet, the daughter of Sir Noel, a president of the International Olympic Committee and mandarin at the British treasury. I asked the Archbishop of Canterbury's permission for an Orthodox service with a Russian choir. We married in the Savoy Chapel. It was a sensation, dears. All the royalty came.

Baron Eduard von Falz-Fein reporting at the 193 6 Munich Olympics

'But later, oh, we fought like cats. She tried to convince me that everything English was best, like your chocolate and cars, but it is not so. I told my darling, "Don't be silly. Only Swiss chocolate is the finest in the world. Your cars are tin cans." Eventually a very fine American author, Paul Gallico, rescued me. He took her off my hands. Afterwards they married and moved to Monte Carlo and started hanging out with Princess Grace. After Gallico died, Prince Rainier took my former darling on as Dame d'Honour du Chateau. When Princess Grace died, my former darling looked after the royal children. Quelle tragedie. She is still there and we are the best of friends. Whenever I come down to Monte Carlo I'm very nicely treated. The Prince invites me for lunch.'

So extraordinary is the story of this life that if it were not for the grand piano that prominently displays the photographic evidence, Baron Eduard von Falz-Fein could pass as a slick confidence trickster. But here he is as a young hack in the Berlin Olympics press box with swastikas flying around his head; dining with Princess Grace in Monte Carlo; and then walking across the piste in the 1960S with British royals, Prince Philip and Prince Charles; even in a clinch with Joan Crawford.

The Baron's mobile phone trills a fragment from Swan Lake. It is the office of Mr Yushchenko, the Ukrainian Prime Minister, and he fields the call in halting Russian before hanging up and finally turning to the subject of the stolen art. I began looking for art stolen from Russia in the 19 50s. I found a Gobelin tapestry from the tsar's family that had been looted from the Livadia Palace. I outbid the Japanese for it, at a sale in Bonn. Mon dieu, mon dieu, what a welcome the Russians gave me when I returned it to the palace.' The Baron's eyes prick with tears: 'Dum, didum, didum. Thousands of people there to see me give back what had been stolen. Little me, a poor refugee living in Liechtenstein!'

And what of George Stein, we ask?

'Yes, yes, I'm coming to him. After I found the Gobelins I got a call from a Soviet writer stationed in Bonn. He was a working for Literaturnaya Gazeta. Mon dieu, Julian Semyonov.' The Baron strikes his forehead in horror. He is talking about the Soviet crime writer whose letters and articles about George Stein we have read in the Stasi files.

'The first time Julian Semyonov came here he stayed fifteen days. Sat there, where you are, on the red sofa, drinking half a bottle of vodka for breakfast and then falling asleep until lunch. Julian cost me a fortune, creeping around the house looking for gluggables. I never touched a drop or smoked a single cigarette in my entire life. When Julian woke up, all we talked of was the Amber Room. He said he needed my help to find it. In 1975 he introduced me to George Stein, who had returned the Pskov icons to Moscow. I thought Stein was a little crazy but we had a common interest. He had a theory about a mine in Volpriehausen, near Gottingen. Irreplaceable amber buried in that pit. So exciting. George Stein said: "I know where the Amber Room is. Give me some money and I'll go and find it for you.'" So after the West German government had turned him down, George Stein had sought out a private source of finance to pursue the story planted by the Stasi.

Was it worth it, we ask?

The Baron walks over to an enormous antique carved oak chest, a family heirloom from the Ukraine that is filled with a jumble of paperwork. 'Our archive,' he declares.