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Initially no one took up Eichwede's idea and criticism of Russia intensified when, in January 1996, it was admitted to the Council of Europe.6 The action should have resolved arguments over looted art works as Russia was now bound by international restitution law that forced it to cooperate with Germany over returns. All looted archives and art works belonging to member states were to be given back.

But Culture Minister Nikolai Gubenko, who had thwarted Baldin's attempts at returning the 364 drawings to Bremen in 1989, was still determined that nothing from Russia would go to a nation that had wrought destruction on the Soviet Union. He convinced the Duma to set in passage a bill to nationalize all cultural properties seized by the Red Army during the war so that German treasures would be redefined as 'reparations for damages incurred'.

Eichwede pops a Russian chocolate into his mouth. 'What a nightmare. Then, in the summer of 1997, I got another phone call. In the middle of the night. Half an hour later I was sitting in a dubious restaurant in a Bremen backstreet with a man who, quite frankly, was mentally destroyed. Now I come to your topic. This man told me that his father, a Wehrmacht veteran, had fought outside Leningrad in 1941 and had stolen part of the Amber Room and that he still had it.'

We look aghast.

Eichwede stifles our attempt to ask another question. 'It sounds ridiculous but it was true. This man, Hans Achterman, had a Florentine stone mosaic depicting the senses "Touch and Smell" in his bedroom.'

A stone mosaic from the Amber Room. Anatoly Kuchumov had found only three of the Amber Room's four Florentine stone mosaics in Konigsberg in 1946. One had been missing and Kuchumov had reasoned, wherever that was, so were the panels of the Amber Room.

Eichwede continues: 'Achterman told me that while watching a television documentary about the Amber Room in 1978 featuring hobby-Historiker George Stein, he recognized a picture of the missing mosaic when it flashed up on the screen. It was identical to the one that lay in his parents' attic. At the time he did nothing. He was frightened. However, eight years later, with his father dead and local newspapers carrying stories about priceless German artefacts stuck in Russia, Achterman thought he could make some money. By 4 a.m. we were talking cash for the mosaic.

'Achterman dithered. Eventually as the sun rose, the restaurant manager came over and said, "Hans, you're discussing with a professor who understands these issues. This is your one chance. For God's sake, tell him how much you want for the stone mosaic." We started at 400,000 DMs and got down to 250,000. I wrote the agreement on the back of a beer mat and then, with the pen in his hand, Hans Achterman changed his mind and left me there. With the cigarette butts.'

Although Achterman went to ground, news of the reappearance of the missing stone mosaic from the Amber Room travelled fast when the German police announced they would arrest him for theft. The Daily Telegraph reported: 'One of the greatest art mysteries of the century, the whereabouts of the sumptuous Amber Room, took a new twist yesterday after the discovery in Germany of a mosaic, believed to have been part of the priceless palace treasure.'7

US News reported: 'Missing: Priceless Room Last Seen in World War. Bits of Tsarist Treasure Mysteriously Resurface.'

Having endured eight years of vilification over the Bremen pictures and the 'Trojan Gold', Russia leapt on the PR opportunity. Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin called for the mosaic's return. It was evidence that the Germans were still clinging on to his country's most precious treasure. There was hysterical speculation in the Russian press that the Amber Room was about to be found - in Germany. All of the hoary old stories about its disappearance - an elite unit of Nazis evacuating the room from Konigsberg to a secret location codenamed BSCH - were regurgitated. But of course the