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By Root 1876 0

of an expert at identifying potential sources. The archive of a patriot, particularly someone of Anatoly Kuchumov's standing, and a mystery of the calibre of the Amber Room are commodities of immeasurable value. A Soviet hero or legend doesn't die as much as evanesce - partly classified and mostly stolen. Therefore, even before Kuchumov was in the ground, many of those he considered his peers had, no doubt, begun salting away his papers, mementoes of his life and work, in the hope that at some time they could be cashed in.

Information is hard currency in post-Soviet Russia, a trend bolstered by Russian academics who are able for the first time to comb through the past and Western academics who pay handsomely for exclusive access to history that they crate up and export.

The professor suggests we meet at Kolobok (The Ginger-Bread Man), a canteen near Sovetskaya 7, where every lunchtime staff pinned into red pinafores serve up thousands of uniform platters of mutton khatlyeta and shuba, small cubes of salty fish dressed in a coat of beetroot and dill.

Is there such a thing as a Russian Who's Who, we ask the professor as she munches and we calculate how to reach Kuchumov's contemporaries? 'Very funny,' she says. 'Whose business was it to know who's who? We learned to suppress our curiosity.'

How should we proceed, we ask?

'Do nothing,' she says. This weekend our friend will visit her dacha outside St Petersburg, populated by artists and museum curators. She will poke around. See what turns up.

Do nothing. We walk back to our apartment that straddles the new and old worlds. One half (kitchen and bathroom) has been renovated with pearlescent wallpaper, heated floors and mirror tiles, while the other (bedroom, dining room and living room) is gnarled boards and greasy plaster. A long-forgotten dog leash hangs by the door. A tuneless upright piano with its Empire candelabras stands in the living room. Photographs of another family: children, a picnic, a tryst beside a lake. A cabinet of crystal - belonging to whom? - tinkles as the icy wind in the courtyard plucks at the windows. These are the remnants of people we don't know and yet they live among us, former residents of Sovetskaya 7, spectres that we often sense but never meet, like everything else in our Russian life: Anatoly Kuchumov and his most important charge, the missing Amber Room.

The phone rings and we rush to it. We have placed it halfway down the hall, stretched to the very end of its cable. This time we manage to whip off the handset. The caller hangs up.

Lying fitfully in someone else's bed, we wonder if it was the director's office at the Catherine Palace. We will check with them in the morning.

First light on a winter's day, worn and dreary like hospital laundry. Our fax machine creaks into life: 'Appointment confirmed with Dr Ivan Petrovich Sautov, Director, Catherine Palace, LO a. m. 2 February 2002.' Tomorrow.

We are delighted and nervous. There are so many stories about Dr Sautov's flamboyance in this city that it is just conceivable he started some of them himself. One of his former colleagues, forced out of the Catherine Palace, likes to call him the Tsar. It is said that on his fiftieth birthday he lined the long road to Tsarskoye Selo with pageboys bearing cups of vodka. His colleagues may have been flabbergasted but surely they would also have been awed, which we presume would have been the effect that Sautov wanted to achieve.1

Attached to our invitation to meet the Director are his credentials: Ivan Petrovich, fifty-five, born into a military family in Tallinn, Estonia, graduate of the prestigious Leningrad Institute of Engineering, where Alexander Kedrinsky's studies were brought to an abrupt halt. For thirteen years Sautov served as head of the State Inspection of Landmark Preservation. In 1987 he was promoted after being unanimously proposed to the post of director of Catherine Palace, at the Tsarskoye Selo. The word 'unanimously' is underlined. He took up his position while Kuchumov was still a senior consultant there, which means