The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [141]
The Baron hands us a photograph of Semyonov, a bull-necked man with a bushy black beard. I like to think I played a small part in his career.'
Was Semyonov KGB, we ask?
'My dears, I wouldn't be so rude as to ask and he never volunteered. Let's just say he went on a lot of foreign holidays.
Julian Semyonov
'Amber Room fever hit the West in the 1970S and journalists, detectives and writers flocked to join our little committee: Georges Simenon, the Beige who lived in Paris making a fortune from his character Inspector Maigret. Simenon was a friend of Julian Semyonov's too. We also had darling "Red Countess" Marion Donhoff, the Grand Dame of the East Prussian resistance. Somehow George Stein had convinced her that their fathers had been great friends in Konigsberg.
'So, through Marion we had the influential Die Zeit on our side. There were others circling on the periphery. A little Englishman from the intelligence services, MI6, perhaps he was called Eldridge. Or was it Aldridge? Oh, I don't know.' The Baron's eyes are gleaming like a child's on Christmas morning. 'It was all done with our own money, a lot of money, crazy money. For a time the Amber Room held such a fascination for all of us. It was like a drug. And I poured money in.'
Marion Donhoff
The Baron pulls newspaper cuttings out of the old chest. By the early 1980S 'the Amber Room committee' was hogging increasing amounts of newsprint, its activities gobbled up by the West German, British and American press, willing it on to find the Russian treasure ahead of the Communists. Komsomolskaya Pravda, 1983: 'Face to Face - an Interview with George Stein'. The Sunday Times, 20 October 1985: 'The Theft of the Amber Room'. Digs in Carinthia. Hunting in the Odenwald, east of Mannheim. Secrets buried in classified US Army files in Washington. Julian Semyonov and Baron Falz-Fein debating the Amber Room mystery over cups of champagne at Maxim's in Paris. The Baron staying over at cousin Vladimir Nabokov's, researching the last months of the war. And the Baron's committee infecting others with the Amber Room bug, spawning feverish speculation about where the treasure lay buried. Magazines. Books. TV documentaries.
Did the Baron know that much of Stein's intelligence was coming from the Stasi, possibly Moscow? We show him some of the papers we have found in the Ministry of Truth.
He shrugs. 'Paul Enke. He told us he was from the Ministry of the Interior. I didn't know for sure that he was Stasi. But we had our suspicions since Enke could never come out of East Berlin. We always had to go there, as tourists through Checkpoint Charlie.'
But what of the Volpriehausen episode, where George Stein relied on a fake telex from 'Rudi Ringel's' father to prove that the Amber Room was buried in the pit? We show the Baron the report of 'Rudi Ringel's' interrogation by Uwe Geissler in E979 that revealed how 'Ringel's' father was in reality an invalided post office guard. The Baron pushes it away. 'I'm an old man now. Talk to the ones continuing our search.' His eyes well up as he embarks on what sounds like a well-rehearsed story. I had to get involved. When I was a little boy, only five, my grandfather the General took me to see the Amber Room and said, "When you are a bigger boy you will remember that I showed you one of the wonders of the world." I never forgot. And when I came to a time in my life where I could help return it, I saw it as my duty. To give back the Amber Room.' He stands up. 'Now I must go to a meeting.'
We show the Baron the Stasi report that accused Stein of doctoring documents to fit his theories.
'No one paid more heavily