The Ludwig Conspiracy

  Suddenly applause came from their right, where the magician had just taken two white doves out of his top hat. In his black tailcoat and with his face painted white, he looked like a music hall artiste from an earlier century. Steven caught himself thinking again, how he would have liked to live at that time. A time without laptops, cell phones, PowerPoint presentations. A world where the gentlemen still wore top hats and tailcoats, like that magician with his white face.

  The magician . . .

  Something about him intrigued Steven, and he looked again, more closely. At that very moment the stranger with the top hat turned his head, and their eyes met. The magician’s face was white with makeup; his eyebrows, eyelids, and lips gleamed moist and black. This, together with his tailcoat and hat, gave him the uncanny appearance of a human being who had turned into a scarecrow.

  Steven started with surprise. He knew the man.

  He didn’t know where, but he was sure that he had seen him before.

  “Sara,” he whispered in a dry voice. “The magician over there. I think I’ve met him already.”

  Sara, looking bored, shrugged. “At the circus, maybe?”

  “No, no. Somewhere different. I think he’s watching us.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Steven nodded and went on looking at the thin, heavily made-up stranger, who was now bringing a long red scarf out of his hat. “Just about sure.”

  “Then we’d better find out what he wants as quickly as possible,” Sara whispered. “I tell you what, we’ll go walking in the park and see if he follows us. Maybe then we’ll find out more about what he wants.”

  She took Steven’s sleeve, and together they strolled toward the fountain from which a huge jet of water shot up at regular intervals. There were not many people here now. Steven looked around, but the magician had disappeared behind the marquee. The sound of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons drifted softly down to them.

  “Maybe I was wrong,” said Steven thoughtfully, taking a deep breath. “I’m getting paranoid.”

  “Don’t let it bother you,” Sara said. “That sometimes happens with advancing age.”

  “Very funny, Frau Lengfeld. Very funny indeed. He was staring at me, though. I’m sure of it.”

  “Herr Lukas, if I took everyone who stared at me for a potential criminal, all I’d think about would be running away. Maybe he just thinks you look cute in your Silver Surfer mask, hmm?”

  “For God’s sake, can’t you keep your big mouth shut for once?”

  Angrily, Steven tore his mask off and marched through the park toward the Temple of Venus. He wanted to be alone. The whole situation was too much for him; he wasn’t used to this kind of life. Three days ago his greatest adventure had been getting his hands on a complete Grimms’ Fairy Tales, and now he was being menaced at every turn by Cowled Men and magicians with their faces painted white. If he didn’t take care, he’d end up as crazy as Ludwig himself, rocking on the water in a shell-shaped boat and breakfasting in the treetops.

  This whole diary was pure farce. Presumably Theodor Marot had just scribbled any random letters to lend a touch of mystery to what he was writing. The way it looked right now, the book threatened to become a slushy romance, anyway. Vows of love carved in the trunk of a linden tree! It was the opposite of what Steven had hoped for from the diary. Romantic confessions of an academic late bloomer.

  The linden tree . . .

  In his fury the bookseller had marched on without looking right or left, and now he faced the mighty tree. Its leaves rustled gently in the wind. He looked up at the tall trunk and tried to imagine Marot eating there with the king more than a hundred years ago, meeting Maria, and finally carving her name in the bark of the tree.

  A glimmer of an idea surfaced in his mind. Could the name possibly still be there? Or had Marot simply invented the whole love story? Steven went closer to the tree trunk. The floodlights from the marquee were so bright that they cast a faint light on the tree, far away from them as it was. The bookseller walked around the linden tree, brushing away a few cobwebs and a handful of dry leaves clinging to the bark. Suddenly, at chest height, his fingers passed over notches forming separate letters and figures. They were weatherworn and had grown together, but even after nearly three human lifespans they were still legible.

  MARIA 10.9.1885

  The sudden realization struck Steven like a blow.

  SARA WATCHED STEVEN disappear into the dark of the terraced garden and shook her head.

  Men could be so touchy. She had often irritated the opposite sex with her remarks. Usually her occasional lovers couldn’t cope with the fact that she had a quicker mind and wasn’t going to do as they said. It had been like that with her last boyfriend, David. The relationship had lasted just six months; then she had found his empty phrases increasingly getting on her nerves—and he himself, in a brief moment of acumen, had correctly interpreted her silence, her tight smile, and her raised eyebrows, and had disappeared from her life. By now David was probably drifting around some London club or other, making eyes at silly floozies and playing house music.

  Steven was different. He was clever, well-read, and obviously didn’t feel it was a problem if she took the lead now and then. But she felt as if he came from another planet. Even more: if women were from Venus and men were from Mars, then Steven came from Pluto, if not from the faraway Horsehead Nebula.

  Which made him very interesting.

  Smiling, she turned away and went back to the castle. The unworldly bookseller would soon calm down again. Meanwhile, she could look around on her own for once without his company. Sara looked at her watch. The aria sung by the famous tenor, who must surely be wickedly expensive to hire, would be over by now. So it couldn’t hurt to pay the Grotto of Venus a visit.

  She took off her mask and her high-heeled shoes, which were already giving her blisters, and, carrying them, set off on the way to the upper part of the park. As soon as she rounded the corner of the castle, she was completely alone. A carpet of violet and blood-red flowers spread out around her, while ahead a stern statue of Neptune with his trident looked down at her. He stood in the middle of a fountain fed by a splashing waterfall that cascaded down from the slope above. To the right and left of the waterfall, pathways roofed by foliage led up to the Grotto of Venus.

  Sara took the left-hand path, which had a shimmering white statue of a woman watching over it. Immediately it was pitch-dark all around her. She was briefly tempted to turn back and look for an easier path. But then she decided to trust her other four senses and simply go on. She heard gravel crunching beneath her feet. There was a last hint of summer in the air. After a while, her eyes became accustomed enough to the darkness for her to make out at least outlines close at hand. Leaves brushed her face; faint moonlight shone through the branches.

  It must already have looked like this here more than a hundred years ago, she thought with sudden nostalgia. I could almost expect to see the king himself turning the next corner.

  Suddenly Sara heard footsteps on the gravel behind her.

  “Is there anyone there?” she asked hesitantly, but there was no reply.

  She waited for a minute but sensed nothing unusual. When she finally went on, all was peaceful at first. But then she heard the crunch of footsteps again.

  “Herr Lukas!” Sara called. “This isn’t funny! I really would have expected better from you. Just because I said you were getting on in years, you don’t have to sulk like a little kid. So just you listen to . . .”

  Sara stopped as the footsteps behind her suddenly sped up. They were coming up the leafy path straight toward her. Now she could make out a gigantic figure about sixteen feet away. Even blacker than the surrounding darkness, the figure was a bear of a man, with broad shoulders and a long coat, from which he now produced something that looked like a small piece of cloth.

  The next moment the giant was upon her.

  Sara fell to the ground, buried under the colossus. She breathed in the punge
nt smell of his leather coat and tried to escape from under the man. But it was as if a rock were lying on top of her. Something hard pressed against her thigh.

  My God, he’s going to rape me! Here I am at a glittering millionaires’ party with the interior minister of Bavaria, and this guy wants to rape me. I don’t believe it.

  She tried to scream, but the giant pressed his hairy hand down on her mouth.

  “Where’s the book?” she heard him growl. His voice was surprisingly melodious; Sara was reminded of a sonorous radio announcer. “The book, you slut! You know what I’m talking about.”

  Sara froze. She was finding it difficult to swallow. This wasn’t a rape; it was an attack! Although she doubted whether that improved her situation much. Probably the opposite.

  “I . . . I don’t know what you’re talking about at all,” she gasped. “I don’t know anything about any . . .”

  The man hit her hard in the face. She felt warm blood running over her lips. Sara whimpered and was instantly ashamed of herself.

  “All right, all right, I’ll tell you!” The words came out of her mouth like a croak. “The secondhand bookseller has it. He’s over there at the old hermitage!” It was a feeble evasion, but the man swallowed it. All the same, he hit her again in the pit of the stomach, so hard that she almost vomited.

  “What are you two doing here?” he growled. “What’s in that book to make you go poking around this place? What’s hidden here?”

  “I . . . I swear I don’t know. There was an indication, but . . . but we’ve been looking for it since yesterday and we’ve found nothing. If anything was hidden, it must be somewhere else.”

  “If you’re lying to me, I’ll break every bone in your body. Understand? Every single bone!”

  Sara nodded, and she felt tears and blood running down her cheeks. She remembered that the late Bernd Reiser’s pistol was in her case back at the hotel. Stupidly, she had decided not to take it to the party with her—a mistake that she now regretted with all her heart.

  “And now we’re just dropping off to sleep,” growled the bear, and now his voice sounded quite gentle again. “Shut your eyes and breathe deep. Here comes the sandman.”

  A white handkerchief with a slightly sweet smell appeared in front of Sara’s face. She felt her senses failing her; all at once the world around her was like a wall of white rubber.

  Chloroform! It’s chloroform!

  Sara reared up. At the last moment, she managed to turn her head aside. She dug her hands into the gravel and tried to crawl away, but the giant’s hands took her in their viselike grasp and hauled her inexorably back. Her fingers scraped over the gravel like the tines of a rake; one by one, Sara’s green-painted nails broke.

  Suddenly she felt a hard, smooth object between her fingers. It took her several precious seconds to work out that it was one of her high-heeled shoes. She had dropped it when the man attacked.

  Without a second thought, she took firm hold of the shoe and hit out behind her at random. She felt the sharp heel, which was only about the diameter of a penny, meet resistance and finally go through something soft.

  There was a slippery sound, and then a hollow scream.

  The hands let go of her, and Sara scrabbled out from under the giant like a lame beetle. When she frantically looked around, she saw the man with his hands to his face, writhing in pain. Blood flowed out between his fingers; he was groaning. Finally he turned and looked at her.

  Sara uttered a low scream.

  For the first time, she could see his face. It was as if a childhood nightmare had come into the park to take her away. Before her, in the darkness of the leafy path, she saw the grotesque face of a wicked medieval knight. The stranger had a small, neatly trimmed beard, a scar on his right cheek, and long black hair plaited into a braid. His left eye flashed with hatred.

  His right eye was a black hole.

  My God, I’ve put out his eye with the heel of my shoe.

  “You bitch! I’ll send you to hell for this!”

  The giant straightened up, bellowing. With his one eye, he looked like an angry Cyclops. Sara didn’t stop to think but plunged into the foliage at the side of the leafy path. Twigs and leaves brushed her face; she felt for a moment as if long, sticky arms were trying to hold her back, and then, finally, she was out on the other side.

  Sara staggered into the sheltering darkness of the park, while she could still hear the cyclops roaring behind her. She almost thought she could sense the eyes of the shining white statues on her back, all those marble nymphs, dryads, and gods watching over Linderhof like guardian spirits.

  They seemed to be following her flight with amusement.

  MARIA 10.9.1885

  Steven Lukas rubbed his eyes, and stared again at the letters carved into the trunk of the tree. The bark had grown, trying to obliterate the wounds made to it more than a century ago, but the word could still be made out easily.

  MARIA . . . Was that possible?

  Suddenly it all made sense. The love story in Marot’s diary, the name in the linden tree, the capital letters. This must be the keyword! And he would almost have overlooked it. Not VENUS, not AMOR or EROS, but simply MARIA was the word that would decode the problem capitals in Marot’s text. In fact the clue had been contained in the first word, LINDERHOF; a linden tree in which the name of Marot’s secret love was carved forever. What was it that Marot had written at the end of the last chapter?

  How was I to guess, at the time, that this girl would determine the fate of so many of us long after our deaths?

  Steven looked around, searching. He must find Sara and tell her about his discovery. She would be able to try out his assumption with her new laptop. Then at last they would . . .

  Suddenly Steven stopped, intuitively sensing that he was under observation. Very slowly, he turned his head until he was looking back in the direction of the party.

  Beyond the basin of the fountain, about twenty yards away, stood the magician.

  He had a torch in his hand and waved it to Steven. His top hat was gone, so that Steven saw only the hair smoothed down with gel and the high forehead where the white makeup suddenly stopped. Now the man held the torch directly in front of his face. He was smiling, and his white teeth shone in the flickering light. All at once Steven knew where he had seen him before. He had talked to him once, and it had not been a pleasant conversation. Steven remembered the man’s words clearly.

  I am interested in eyewitness accounts from the time of King Ludwig the Second. Do you have anything of that nature?

  The magician standing by the side of the fountain was none other than the man in the traditional Bavarian suit—the man who had asked about the book in his shop, and who was presumably the leader of the Cowled Men. Now he was gesticulating as if to demand Steven’s attention, and the next moment he had a black cloth in his hand.

  Damn it all, it’s not a cloth; it’s . . .

  The magician waved the hood back and forth like the severed head of a man on the block. The hood was like those worn by the Cowled Men.

  In panic, Steven turned and ran up the garden terraces planted with colorful flowers to the Temple of Venus. As he reached the top, bathed in sweat, the magician still stood down by the fountain, waving—a tiny dot in the bright moonlight.

  SARA RACED THROUGH the dark grounds of the castle toward the lights of the marquee. In front of her, not a hundred yards away, people were laughing, talking to one another, listening to Vivaldi. None of them, obviously, had noticed a fight taking place very close to them. When the art detective finally reached the lights, she stopped for the first time and looked around her.

  The colossus had disappeared; the nightmare seemed to be over.

  Sara took a deep breath and adjusted her dress, which was torn at the back and on one side. Her face and arms were scratched and dirty from the leaves, gravel, and earth; several of her fingernails were broken. Her stomach still hurt from the heavy blow it had suffered, but otherwise she s
eemed to be intact. All the same, she couldn’t stop shivering.

  I’ve put a man’s eye out. I’ll never forget that noise.

  She stared across at the other party guests and wondered what to do. Alert the stewards at this Manstein Systems party? Call the police? There would certainly be questions; she would have to explain who she was and what she was doing there. Sooner or later the officers would ask about her companion, they would find out about Steven, and that would be the end of her search.

  Once again her eyes wandered over the male guests, most of them in black, with their masks, cigars, and champagne glasses. Where the hell was Steven? She couldn’t see him near the fountain, and there was no sign of him on the castle forecourt either. Sara could only hope that he hadn’t run into another of those fanatics. She had to find him and then get out of there as fast as possible, with or without the keyword.

  The keyword!

  She felt a panicked surge of heat as she remembered that the diary was still in the safe in their hotel room. It wouldn’t be long before that crazy knight or one of his henchmen began wondering where Sara and Steven had actually spent the last night. And the colossus didn’t give the impression of a man who would find that a hotel safe presented him with insuperable difficulties.

  After scrutinizing the terrain one last time, Sara hurried to the waiting coaches and had herself chauffeured to the hotel. The building’s facade was adorned all over with little colored lights that cast warm light over the forecourt. Both inside and outside, guests were partying to the sound of loud laughter. Sara saw the corpulent and obviously tipsy tenor at the hotel bar with a couple of giggling blondes; older couples moved in time with a Strauss waltz in the blue and white breakfast room. Crowded with all the guests in their festive clothes, the hotel that had seemed so sleepy yesterday seemed to radiate an uncanny brightness.

  Sara hurried up the stairs and stopped briefly at the door to their room. She put her ear to the thin wood but heard no suspicious noise on the other side. Finally she quietly unlocked the door, pushed down the handle, and swung the door inward without a sound.