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castle throughout the year, and had their home on the ground floor of the keep. Hübner’s nearest neighbors were two enormous Rottweilers whose doghouse was at the foot of the west wall. Every morning, an old gardener came in from the village along with the cleaning lady - as Läufer had personally verified when carrying out on-site surveillance. The assumption was that, during the three months a year that Hübner stayed at the castle, staff numbers were significantly higher, but their wages didn’t appear in the castle’s official accounts.
    It was slightly more difficult to identify the firm which installed the security system, but it eventually turned out to be the White Knight Company, an old acquaintance of mine whose outdated working methods didn’t lose me any sleep at all. A couple of days later, Läufer supplied me with the layout of the whole alarm set-up, including all its series and model reference numbers.
    The checkered history of the Krylov painting, researched by Roi, was quite a bit more interesting. From the various references and comments in specialized journals, art history books and the archives of various gallery owners and collectors that were friends of his, we knew that the painting was kept in the State Russian Museum in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) for over twenty years, until it was looted and taken to Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) in October 1941, during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. The Nazis had formed two special commando units to carry out the systematic looting of art treasures: the
Sonderkommando Künsberg
, under the command of Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s Foreign Minister, and the
Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg
, controlled by Alfred Rosenberg, the
Reichsminister
for the Occupied Eastern Territories. Both units were charged with ensuring that the works of art, including those in the museums of Leningrad and Moscow, were kept ‘out of danger’ - a rescue operation which of course required their removal to Germany.
    In the early months of 1945, when the Red Army was closing in on Königsberg in one of the bloodiest offensives of the Second World War, an expeditionary force loaded with looted treasures abandoned the threatened city and headed for Thuringia, whose governor was the much-feared
Gauleiter 3
Fritz Sauckel, responsible for the Weimar-Buchenwald concentration camp, and later condemned to death at the Nuremberg Trials and hanged. Shortly before his execution, this General Plenipotentiary for the Deployment of Labor claimed that these works of art appropriated in the closing stages of the war had left Weimar in April 1945, headed for Switzerland. But this was never confirmed and nothing more was ever heard of them.
    It was more than strange that, twenty years later, a canvas entitled
Muzhiks
, painted by a Russian painter called Ilya Krylov, suddenly reappeared in the modest catalog of artworks owned by a former Nazi bigwig who had been transformed into a more than respectable bakery magnate - a certain Helmut Hübner. Pretty incredible, right? In Thuringia, or perhaps in Switzerland, the painting had found its way through unknown channels into Hübner’s hands - although it was even more horrifying to discover that the multimillionaire manufacturer of the world’s most famous cookies, not to mention oh-so-sensitive art collector, turned out to be a sanitized ex-Nazi.
    Donna now had all the information she needed at her disposal. She set herself to work and produced a canvas which was so perfect that the rest of us could only gape in admiration. We all received two scanned photographs, completely indistinguishable, and she asked us to pick out the original. All of us failed dismally - all of us except for Läufer. But even he eventually had to admit that, far from using his impressive knowledge as a specialist in artwork authentication, he had simply flipped a coin for it after downing a good few beers.
    Donna began her career as a professional painter