The Ludwig Conspiracy

  He stood alone in the ostentatious entrance hall, right in front of an equestrian statue of Louis XIV. On the ceiling above him, one of the Sun King’s favorite sayings was prominently displayed between two frescoes showing chubby little cherubs.

  Inferior to no one, Steven translated silently to himself. The very opposite of how I feel right now.

  The bookseller looked around the hall but found no hint of how to solve the problem of the cipher. However, one thing struck him: the entire castle was a tribute to Greco-Roman antiquity on one hand, and the French baroque on the other. It was full of portraits of French noblemen. There was a hall of mirrors like the Sun King’s, and a four-poster bed with a canopy as tall as a high-diving board. Most amusing of all was the dining room with the famous dumbwaiter in the middle of it. It consisted of a flap through which the dining table, already set, could be brought up into the middle of the royal chamber by means of an ingenious mechanism. Steven imagined the king sitting up at night on his own, dining there with mirrors and lighted candles reflecting to infinity all around him.

  And after that he lies on the Moroccan divan, smoking his chibouk, that long-stemmed Turkish pipe, or he rolls about on bearskins in a wooden hut while his servants have to perform, dressed as ancient German tribesmen for his benefit. Sorry, Frau Lengfeld, but the man was way out of his mind.

  Steven was so deep in thought that he didn’t immediately notice the art detective’s light touch.

  “Well, find out anything?” she asked encouragingly.

  Gloomily, Steven shook his head. “No Marot, and nothing remotely like a clue.”

  Sara sighed. “Same here. I ran around the park until I was worn out. Hunding’s hut, the Temple of Venus, the hermitage, the chapel, the Fountain of Neptune . . . This whole park is a damn labyrinth. And the upper part has already been closed to visitors. I guess this whole venture was doomed to fail all along. Sorry.”

  She went out, lit herself a cigarette, and dropped wearily onto a park bench. “If we at least knew what we ought to be looking for. A sequence of numbers, a sentence, a picture. But at random like this? All we know is that the clue has something to do with the word LOVE.”

  “I was thinking about that just now,” Steven said. “The Caesar code—the one I told you about at breakfast this morning—obviously wasn’t Marot’s chosen cipher. But there’s a considerably more complicated one. It’s known as the Vigenère cipher. If I remember correctly, it was rather popular in the mid-nineteenth century, so Marot would have known it.” Steven closed his eyes to concentrate. “In the Vigenère cipher, a different shift value is used for each of the letters to be coded, arising from the respective letters of the keyword. That avoids code letters appearing with too much frequency and giving away which letters they represent.”

  Sara groaned. “This is beyond me.”

  “It’s very simple, really. Look at this.” Steven broke a twig off one of the bushes near the castle and started writing in the gravel. After a minute he had two words, one above the other.

  RIDDLE

  LUDWIG

  “Now, let’s suppose the word we want to write in code is RIDDLE. And our keyword is LUDWIG,” Steven began. “L is the twelfth letter of the alphabet, so the R of RIDDLE moves twelve letters forward, and it becomes . . .” He thought for a moment before writing down another letter. “It becomes C. The next letter in RIDDLE is I, so count out another twelve letters from C and it becomes U. Then D becomes G, the next D becomes S, and so on.” He scribbled a few more letters in the gravel and looked at the result with satisfaction.

  PUZZLE

  LUDWIG

  AOCVTK

  “Well, it certainly looks as jumbled as the sequences of letters in Marot’s diary,” Sara said. “So you could be right. All we need is the right keyword.”

  “LOVE, maybe?” Steven suggested.

  “Possibly. But I’d say that’s too obvious. It must be some other word, one that . . . well, that sort of symbolizes love.”

  “Symbolizes?” the bookseller asked. “What’s that supposed to mean? There are thousands of—”

  Suddenly he stopped. Sara looked at him in surprise.

  “What is it?”

  “I think I really do know a word like that,” Steven said, and pointed to the white temple on the hill in front of them. “Didn’t you say that’s the Temple of Venus? And there’s a Grotto of Venus somewhere around. This place is full of statues of Venus, and I saw a couple of paintings of Venus in the castle itself.”

  “The goddess of love,” Sara said. “Why didn’t I think of her myself?”

  Steven grinned. “Maybe because you don’t know enough about the subject?”

  “Very funny, Herr Lukas. Let’s see if we’re on the right track with VENUS as the keyword, and never mind the wisecracks. If you’re right, I’ll prove you wrong with a kiss.”

  “I think you need something called a Vigenère square for decoding words.” Steven tried to remember. “With a bit of thought, and a good sharp pencil, I guess we—”

  “Are you nuts?” The art detective giggled so loudly that several tourists turned to look at them. “What are computer programs for? I’m sure we’ll find a website to do it for us.” With a last glance at the Temple of Venus, she turned toward the park’s exit. “I suggest we get a room over in the hotel and make ourselves comfortable in the lobby.”

  “Suppose they don’t have a computer there?”

  Sara Lengfeld looked at the bookseller with a mixture of pity and horror. “Oh, Herr Lukas, Herr Lukas,” she murmured. “Sometimes I really think you’re living in the wrong century.”

  The hotel was slightly run-down and old-fashioned, as if its best days were long behind it. An elderly waiter moved through the first-floor restaurant, where there were not many guests. Yellowed photographs of Bavarian landscapes hung in the stairwell. Somewhere someone was playing a zither. However, the hotel did have a computer in the lobby, if not the latest model. At the hotel bar, Sara ordered a martini, which was too warm, and then she began tapping away at the keyboard, while Steven watched her curiously.

  “It says here that Blaise de Vigenère was a sixteenth-century French diplomat who wrote several books on cryptography,” she said as she stared with concentration at the scratched screen. “The cipher named after him was regarded as impossible to decode for a long time, until it was finally cracked, first by a British mathematician and then by a Prussian officer in 1863. Today of course it’s simpler. Voilà!” Sara leaned back with satisfaction, pointing to a table on the monitor. “Here’s a program we can use to crack Monsieur Vigenère’s cipher.”

  “Let’s try it with LOVED first,” Steven suggested. “Just to be on the safe side. It says there you need five letters in the keyword.”

  Sara nodded, then typed the first coded word from Marot’s diary, QRCSOQNZO, into the computer. In the “Key” field she typed LOVED. After only a few seconds they had the solution.

  Input QRCSOQNZO

  Key LOVED

  Output BFXWRBBUS

  “Well, that obviously didn’t work,” Sara said, disappointed. “It would have been too simple, I suppose. Now let’s try VENUS.”

  She carefully typed in the five characters, but all she got back was another tangle of nonsensical letters.

  “Shit. Maybe I typed something in wrong.” Sara tried again, but with the same result.

  “Try APHRODITE,” Steven said. But again the result was nonsense words, and it was the same with AMOR, EROS, HEART, and a dozen other love-related words.

  Sara sipped her martini silently, while Steven racked his brain for more possible keywords. “Damn,” he finally exclaimed. “And I was sure I was on the right track with the Vigenère cipher.”

  “You could still be, and it’s just that we don’t have the right word yet,” Sara said. “I don’t think we ought to give up.”

  She looked at some leaflets she had picked up in the ticket office, which described the Fairy-tale King’s other ca
stles. “At least this is the smallest of the castles that Ludwig built,” she said. “I guess we can be glad we don’t have to search Herrenchiemsee or Neuschwanstein.”

  Sighing, the bookseller got off the hotel sofa. “I guess there’s nothing I can do but decode a few more pages of the diary,” he said wearily. “After all, by the last point I reached, our friend Theodor hadn’t arrived at Linderhof. Maybe Marot’s account will put us on the track of the right word yet.” He nodded, suddenly determined. “I’d better start right away. Did you reserve me a room?”

  “Well, as it happens, I have good news and bad news for you.” Sara drained her warm martini and nibbled the olive. “Yes, I did manage to get a room, which wasn’t easy, because Manstein Systems has booked almost the entire hotel. And no, it’s not a room for you; it’s a room for both of us. It’s up in the attic and was really meant for the hotel staff. I’m afraid there was nothing else free. I just hope you don’t snore as much as you did last night.”

  THE ROOM WAS about the size of a walk-in closet. It contained a double bed that took up most of the space, a television set, and a wobbly table at which Steven sat hunched over the diary on a chair that was much too low. A dusty bedside lamp was the only source of light. If he looked out the window, he could just make out the mountains on the other side of the valley in the evening twilight. They cast shadows that reached out to the hotel like long fingers. In another few minutes, Linderhof would be in darkness.

  The bookseller had taken out the diary and his notepad, and he was now staring in the lamplight at the twining shorthand, which looked to him much more familiar this time. Where had he stopped?

  For a long time I could still hear the bark of von Strelitz’s pistol in my ears. It was not to be the last time I heard it . . .

  Steven tried to concentrate, in spite of the long, tiring day. Sara had seen to it that there was a plate of ham sandwiches and a bottle of red wine within reach, but he didn’t have much of an appetite. Absently, he let his eyes wander over the worn bedspread beside him, an empty bag of chips, and finally Sara, who was following some kind of soap opera on TV, listening to the sound through headphones, while she leafed through the castle brochures.

  Women and multitasking, I’ll never understand how they do it . . .

  “That’s garbage you’re watching,” Steven finally said. The faint murmur of conversation from the headphones was getting on his nerves. The falling darkness made him nervous; it reminded him of the dark cellar of his shop where he had killed a man only the night before. Steven felt he had to talk to someone, even if that someone was a chips-munching creature staring at a TV set with blank interest.

  “Surfing instructors, barbecues, big-breasted blondes,” he grumbled, pointing to the TV screen. “What subject did you study?”

  “What?” Sara took the headphones off. “Are you talking to me?” When she saw his glare of annoyance, she involuntarily had to smile.

  “Men don’t understand,” she replied dryly. “We need this sort of thing to put us into a trancelike state that enables us to reach a condition of higher consciousness.” She winked. “Anyway, this garbage is from your native land. Let’s have a little more patriotism from you, Herr Lukas.”

  “If that’s America, then I’m glad my parents came back to Germany when I was a child.”

  “Back to Germany?” Sara frowned.

  “We have German roots.” Steven sipped the hotel’s house red and twisted his mouth. The burgundy, as he expected, was not good, but all the same it gave him a pleasant sense of repletion. It felt good to talk; it had been so long since he had told anyone about the past. The events of the last few days had brought memories of his childhood back to his mind.

  No silence, he thought. Silence brings back memories. Silence and darkness. Like being in my bed as a child when footsteps creaked along the corridor.

  “My grandfather emigrated during the Nazi period,” he began hesitantly. “But my father, his son, could never entirely rid himself of feeling that he was German. As an adult, he came back here with his family.” He smiled wearily. “My mother was a German student he met at Boston University, where he was her lecturer in English Literature.”

  Sara’s right eyebrow shot up. “I assume he read her Shakespeare at home. So a weakness for books runs in your family?”

  “Books and a sense of being German,” Steven said. “Sometimes I feel more German than the Brothers Grimm.” He hesitated a moment before going on. “And where do you feel at home, Frau Lengfeld? On the Internet or in Berlin’s Wedding district?”

  Sara laughed. “Nowhere, I’m afraid. No one’s proud of coming from Wedding. You feel proud of leaving it behind.”

  “And you do that best with TV and the Internet?” Steven inquired.

  “Well, they’re both windows to other worlds,” Sara said. “If you only have comics and a Snow White book to read as a child at home, the Internet offers fantastic possibilities.” She put her headphones back on. “Now, go on reading, Mr. Grimm. For a shy bookworm, you’re very inquisitive.”

  Steven couldn’t stay annoyed. Sometimes the bristly, outspoken art detective beside him seemed like a being from another world. All the same, he found himself liking her more and more. It had been a long time since he’d been so closely involved with another person for such an extended period. Most of the time he lived with his books and parchments, glad to be left alone. Sara was right to say he could come from another century. Sometimes he felt like an outcast, a scholar from a distant age not yet ruled by cell phones, computers, and text messaging.

  With a tingling sense of excitement and anticipation, the bookseller turned to the coded notes. As he leafed through the pages, flecked with age, he once again felt the familiar slight dizziness. But his fear of silence had gone, giving way to a quiet longing. In Steven’s eyes, the past really was more colorful and exciting than the gray twenty-first century.

  Especially the past of Theodor Marot.

  13

  FALKHQR

  On that September evening of the year 1885, in some dark corner of the Munich suburb of Au, I found myself in greater difficulties than ever before in my life. The king must be warned at once! I was sure that as soon as he discovered the ministers’ intentions, he would come to Munich by the fastest possible route to confront his enemies.

  The power of the bureaucracy had grown apace over the last few years. Ludwig himself had played a part in that by avoiding the capital city of Bavaria, which he regarded as a stinking sewer. It was years since he had been in Munich, and he took no interest at all in politics. So his ministers concocted their own plans, placing only treaties and other such documents that needed the royal signature before the king, and in other respects determining the fate of the country on their own. They were the real monarchs; Ludwig was no more than a shadow king living in his own world of dreams.

  What could I do? I was sure that von Strelitz already had the rail stations and telegraph offices watched. My one chance of reaching the king, therefore, was a fast horse. I stole back to the cab and unharnessed the exhausted nag. But I soon realized that I would never get back to Linderhof on this lame horse. I needed another, faster mount—but where would I find one? With my head bent so as not to attract attention, I went through the streets with the lame horse, under the eyes of the hungry, dirty inhabitants of that part of the city.

  The poorest of the poor lived in the Au district. Like ghosts shunning the light of day, the houses huddled low by the steep wall of the valley of the Isar River. Many of them were no more than tiny hostelries where the families of day laborers lived, sometimes ten to a single room. The millstream of the Au flowed sluggishly past; refuse and dead rats drifted in its clouded waters. A gray cloud of smoke from the wood stoves of the houses and the countless coal-burning furnaces of the factories hung over the whole district.

  After a while, I found an inn that did not look quite as dilapidated as the others. It was called Lilienbräu and lay close to the millstream.
The small windows were smeared with soot, but the enamel inn sign looked new. The noise of drinkers came out of the taproom now that it was early evening, and a few people were bawling out a song to the music of an untuned fiddle.

  I tied up my nag to a hook and entered the inn. A dozen eyes turned at once to stare at me suspiciously, and conversations and the song died away. I was looking into the faces of debilitated factory workers, drinking away their meager wages here before staggering home to their hungry families.

  “A fine gentleman, eh?” growled a sturdy, bald man in a dirty leather apron, obviously a driver for a brewery. “Don’t he like it no more up there in the city, or what brings him here?”

  Laughter broke out. I looked down at my black overcoat, slightly torn now. I had lost my top hat during the wild pursuit, but all the same the workmen realized at once that I came from a higher social class.

  “I’m a cabby, no fine gentleman,” I said. “My horse is lame, and I need . . .”

  “Better take Hartinger’s donkey,” crowed one of the men. “You won’t find nothing better, not here in the Au, you won’t!”

  Once again the men roared with laugher. Some of them banged their tankards heavily on the scratched tables, but soon their fleeting interest in me was gone. I was about to go out again and look for another inn when an elderly gray-haired man, who had been standing at the bar in silence, turned to me, bowing and scraping. He wore a shabby black tailcoat and a battered bowler hat, and there was an impertinent glint in his eye.

  “Could be I might have a hoss for the gennelman,” he growled, drawing on a stumpy cigar. “Could be, could be. Wouldn’t come cheap, though.”

  “As I mentioned before, I’m a cabdriver, and . . .”

  “Huh!” The man spat into a bowl on the bar counter. “You don’t fool me, my young dandy! I been a cabby myself, and you talk like the nobs, not like us. So what’ll you pay?”