The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [8]
In dachas and apartments, on park benches and in faceless offices, memories came alive, loosened by vodka, sweet black tea and white beer. For every official file, diary or briefing paper said by archives and libraries to be missing or inaccessible, we found draft or duplicate documents stashed away in living rooms and in hallways. For every government album that had been emptied or was lost, we discovered framed photos above mantelpieces and in bedroom drawers.
Six decades of secret and often frantic searching for the Amber Room came alive, as did the extraordinary efforts of those who struggled to suppress the truth about its fate. Our first faltering weeks in Russia grew into a two-year investigation and finally, having travelled thousands of miles from St Petersburg to Moscow, London to Washington, and from Holland, through Germany to Liechtenstein and Austria, following a paper trail that took us into the parallel worlds of the KGB and the East German Stasi, we arrived in the beat-up Russian enclave of Kaliningrad and at the heart of an extraordinary cover-up.
It was here, in a dying city on the Baltic, as the winter began to thaw, that the final pieces of the Amber Room mystery came together and we were forced to confront the truth about a story that would challenge the way we perceive the Soviet Union and its place in the Cold War.
1
I am a complicated man,' he says through teeth that gleam like May Day medals. A little finger prods at the bridgework, poking the Soviet dental engineering back into shape. I committed fifty years to the Great Task - the reason why you are here. Correct?'
The old man's rolling Russian Rs clatter like falling pencils, reminding us that we have not yet explained why we are here, where we should not be, in the staff quarters of a palace museum on the outskirts of St Petersburg. We have barely recovered from getting in: squeezing between the guarded great gates crowned by double-headed eagles, tapping in a key code at an inconspicuous door, talking our way past a babushka huddled against the December freeze in five coats who, in her fur-lined hood, swayed like a cobra. Once inside we clanked up four flights of cast-iron stairs, past gargoyles with broken noses - casualties of war that have waited more than sixty years for restoration - until we found the old man sitting in silence in his vast studio, sporting a fine, red jersey. On the wall behind him hangs an intricate blueprint, a curious bird's-eye view, labelled: 'Imperial Prussian Study'.
Straight away he begins, a series of disconnected thoughts springing from thin, dry lips: I could have retired, like some I could name. But a man like me, whose work is of national importance, can never really retire. Then I had my second heart attack.' He accentuates the words as if reading from a public copy of the Leningradskaya Pravda, which the state once pasted to the notice-boards beside Ulitsa Nekrasova, where, we have been told, he used to sip bitter coffee in a Georgian cafe called Tblisi.
The old man ruffles a small hand over his white hair. I am a patriot. And yet here I am considering talking to you. Pah.' He grinds a filtertipped cigarette into a viscous beaker of coffee and glowers out of the window at the blizzard that tears across the parkland of the tsars. His baggy face is a map of broken capillaries.
The original design for the Amber Room, 1701
The Catherine Palace estate. Here, Peter the Great, who battled Sweden in 1702 to capture the region, built a simple manor that he presented to his fiancee, Catherine, to mark their engagement in 1708. Fifteen miles further north, his new model European capital of St Petersburg was also rising out of the mosquito-ridden delta of the River Neva. Today