The Ludwig Conspiracy

  The room was empty.

  Relieved, Sara went to the safe in the wall directly beyond the door. She opened it and took out the diary; before setting out, they had hidden the little treasure chest, her laptop, and Steven’s notes under the mattress. Once again she listened intently in case anyone was coming upstairs. The sound of music and laughter rose from the ground floor, but otherwise all was quiet.

  Sara flung the book, the little chest, and everything else in her small case, along with her few items of clothing. To be on the safe side, she put the late Bernd Reiser’s pistol in her purse. Then she quietly zipped up the case and turned back to the door, where she almost collided with a man in the dark. She uttered a hoarse scream before breathing a sigh of relief.

  It was Steven Lukas.

  “We have to talk, Frau Lengfeld,” the bookseller gasped, his voice cracking. “The Cowled Men were lying in wait for us. It was the magician. And now I know what the keyword is. It’s . . .”

  “Wonderful. You can tell me all about it in the car. Now, come on.”

  Steven looked at her in surprise. “But why . . . ?”

  “Because there’s a knight six feet tall trying to steal the journal, and I’ve put out one of his eyes, that’s why.” Sara was already running downstairs with her case. “I’ll tell you all the rest on the drive. Come on, for heaven’s sake.”

  Steven followed her. They forged a way through the dancing, laughing hotel guests in the foyer, hurried across the forecourt, and at last they sat, exhausted, in Sara’s Mini Cooper. For a few seconds there was nothing to be heard but their breathing and the soft sound of a waltz. The hotel stood among the forest like a gigantic Christmas tree decorated with thousands of ornaments; only a few yards behind it, all was pitch-dark.

  “So you’ve cracked the code?” Sara finally asked, starting the engine. She put the car into first gear with shaking fingers. “Great. Now we can finally say goodbye to this castle with its deranged inhabitants—one-eyed giants, magicians, fat tenors . . . Talk about a degenerate society.”

  Tires squealing, the Mini rounded the corner of the hotel building.

  HALF AN HOUR LATER, the car was driving steadily through the darkness of the Ammergau Alps, and Sara was on her third menthol. The fir trees stood like silent giants on the sides of the road, and few cars came the other way toward them. The only sound was the quiet humming of the engine.

  They had told each other what had happened to them in the park, and Steven had also told her his theory about the keyword. The art detective had switched places with Steven and was now in the passenger seat with the new MacBook on her lap, the monitor shimmering with a ghostly effect in the night. She felt cold. The memory of the giant on the leafy pathway sent shivers down her spine.

  “And you’re sure the magician was that guy in Bavarian costume who came into your shop?” Sara asked yet again.

  Steven nodded as he drove through the dense forest. “One hundred percent sure. He’s the leader of the Cowled Men. When I ran, he showed me his hood.”

  “But why would he do that?”

  “How do I know? To scare me? To let us know that they’re after us?”

  Sara sighed. “That knight certainly scared me. I guess he’s something like a watchdog for those lunatics, and it’s his job to get hold of the book for them.”

  “But suppose he has nothing to do with the Cowled Men at all?” Steven suggested. “Remember those two guys in the cellar of my shop? We still don’t know who they were. And you said yourself you wouldn’t really expect such crimes from the Cowled Men. Suppose it only seems to be about the death of Ludwig the Second? Suppose that’s just a front? I’m beginning to feel that there’s something much bigger at stake.”

  “Like what?”

  They both fell silent as the Mini rolled on through the clear, starlit night with its quiet hum.

  “Let’s think about something nicer,” said Sara at last. “For instance, your theory about the keyword.” With a couple of rapid clicks at her MacBook she opened the decoding program she’d downloaded. “MARIA, then,” she murmured. “Why not?”

  “It’s the keyword. I know it,” Steven said, trying to concentrate at the same time on the dark road ahead of him. “Everything points to MARIA. Of course, that assumes that the journal really is using the Vigenère code.”

  “And if it isn’t?”

  “Then I abandon the book and go to the police. My nerves can’t take any more. This is the last try—right or wrong.”

  Sara laughed quietly. “I’m afraid it’s too late to turn back now, Herr Lukas. Those men don’t look like they’d give up so easily. Even if the police believed you—we’ve already found out too much, and these other guys don’t like it. Think what they did to my uncle.”

  “Are you suggesting that my only options are spending the rest of my life on the run or dying painfully by torture?” Steven asked wearily.

  “Not if we move faster than our pursuers. If we solve the mystery, we may find out who’s behind it.” Sara tried to smile. “Now, let’s see what dear Maria’s dirty little secrets are.”

  She drew deeply one last time on her menthol cigarette, threw the stub out of the window, and tapped letter after letter into her laptop.

  “The first coded word was QRCSOQNZO,” she said, lost in thought.

  “We’ve known that for ages. Don’t pile on the tension like that.”

  “Hold your horses,” Sara said. “My MacBook may have four processors with two point six gigahertz each, but I have to do the typing myself. That takes . . .”

  She stopped, staring at the word on the screen.

  “What is it?” Steven’s voice almost broke. “Was I right? Is MARIA the keyword? Come on, say something!”

  Sara nodded as she gazed at the screen. “Bingo, Herr Lukas,” she whispered. “Looks like we get to play another round of the game. Which doesn’t mean that we’ll be any the wiser.”

  “What do you mean?” Steven asked, baffled.

  “See for yourself.”

  The bookseller cast the screen a quick look as he drove. The next moment he almost drove the Mini down a steep slope. He wrenched the wheel around just in time.

  Input QRCSOQNZO

  Output ERLKOENIG

  “ERLKOENIG?” Steven shook his head, puzzled.

  “A ballad by Goethe about a father, his sick child, and the Erl-King,” Sara said. The laptop had slid off her knees. Grimacing with pain, she rubbed her elbow. “And please keep your eyes on the road.”

  “I know who the Erl-King is, Frau Lengfeld. But what, for heaven’s sake, does the title of a poem, however famous, tell us?”

  Sara shrugged. “You’re the antiquarian bookseller. My line is art, not interpreting the boring poems you have to read in school.” She picked her laptop up from the dark footwell where the screen was still shimmering away. “Thank God this thing is shock-proof.”

  “Try the other words.”

  Sara typed the next coded words into the computer and finally leaned back. “Oh, wonderful,” she muttered. “BELSAZAR, THAL, ZAUBERIN, LORELEI, WINSPERG, FLUCH, RING, SIEGERICH, TAUCHER, FISCHER, LEGENDE, BALLADE . . . Can you make sense of any of that?”

  “‘Belsazar,’ ‘Lorelei,’ ‘Taucher’ . . . They’re all titles of German ballads,” Steven said after a little hesitation. “‘Belshazzar,’ ‘Lorelei,’ ‘The Diver.’ Then ‘Fisherman,’ ‘Der Fischer,’ ‘The Angler,’ as far as I know, it’s by Goethe, too, and ‘Fluch,’ ‘curse,’ may refer to Ludwig Uhland’s ballad ‘The Singer’s Curse,’ ‘Des Sängers Fluch.’ But what’s the point of it all?” He struck the wheel angrily, raising a plaintive little toot from the horn. “Damn it, I’m beginning to think that Marot was simply having a joke with the whole book.”

  “He goes to a lot of time and trouble for a joke.” Sara whistled quietly through her teeth. “I don’t suppose ‘WDC’ is the title of another poem, is it?”

  Steven frowned. “What do you mean?”

 
“I’ve just entered another coded word, from the next chapter. You haven’t transliterated it yet. Looks like we need a different code from here on.”

  “Oh shit,” Steven quietly said. “And where are we going to find that?”

  Sara rapidly leafed through Marot’s well-worn diary. “I don’t know shorthand,” she said at last, “but I can read words in capital letters all right. And the next words that Marot wrote that way are HERRENCHIEMSEE and KOENIG. Presumably we won’t find out about the titles of those poems until we go to Herrenchiemsee. And as an additional hint, our friend Marot left us that worn-out old word KOENIG for the king.”

  “Ludwig’s castle on the lake, the Chiemsee.” Steven laughed despairingly. “My God, that’s a whole island! How on earth are we going to find anything there?”

  “I don’t know,” Sara said, staring while lost in thought at the two cones of light cast by the headlights on the road ahead. “But I think this is the time to ask someone for help. Someone who really knows his way around all this Ludwig stuff.” She pointed to an exit road that suddenly appeared before them in the darkness. “Turn off there to the right. We’re going to see Uncle Lu.”

  LANCELOT HELD HIS hand over his right eye socket, from which reddish fluid still ran. His pain and hatred threatened to drive him mad. She had escaped him. A woman! How the hell could that have happened?

  It had been pure luck that he’d recognized her in her mask, among all the guests. Erec and Bors had taken a lot of photos of her outside the antiquarian bookseller’s shop, but most of them had been shaky or blurred. Basically, it had been his unusually strong hunting instinct at work again. As a former bodyguard, he had developed a sense of what people were like as a whole. He recognized victims by the way they walked and held themselves, or by their nervous movements. Sometime he even thought he could smell fear in their sweat.

  As the bookseller had not been with her, it had taken Lancelot some time to recognize the woman. Then he hadn’t been able to get close to her among all the guests. But when she finally started along the leafy pathway, he had thought she would be easy game.

  She’ll pay for this. By God, she’ll pay for it.

  Half-blinded, he staggered toward the castle, almost knocking into a couple of lovers who fled, screeching, at the sight of him. Finally the giant ducked down behind a hedge and scrutinized the loud, lively activity of the guests from there. There wasn’t a sign of the bitch and the bookseller.

  Where could they be?

  Next moment Lancelot remembered what the woman had said just now: they’d already been searching since yesterday and found nothing. So they’d stayed overnight, and where did people stay overnight here?

  Lancelot’s glance moved slowly to the hotel, and he smiled. If his luck held, the birds hadn’t flown yet, and he could give them a nice surprise in their room. He would also call a doctor from the hotel, although he was afraid there would be no saving his eye. But someone would have to pay for that. The giant brushed the dirt off his suit, pressed his white handkerchief to his bloodstained eye socket, and hurried toward the Castle Hotel.

  The night porter on duty at reception was tired and unshaven. He had seen too many guests at too many glittering parties already. But when Lancelot leaned over to him, he held his breath.

  “What . . . what can I do for you?” he stammered.

  “My wife has a room here, with her lover, if you see what I mean . . .” Lancelot’s lips distorted into a menacing grin. “The slut’s a brunette, wearing a low-cut evening dress and a little red jacket, kind of thing a tart would wear. I’d like to have the key of that room.”

  “Was that . . . did the other guy do that?” the porter hesitantly asked, pointing to the bloodstained handkerchief held over the right-hand side of Lancelot’s face. When the giant nodded, the trembling man handed him the key.

  “Room 113,” he whispered, secretly picturing what this monster would do to his wife up in the top-floor bedroom. Maybe he’d better call the police?

  Without another word, Lancelot ran upstairs. But when he saw the door standing ajar, he knew he had come too late.

  Hell and damnation. They’re gone!

  The room was empty, the beds unmade, two dirty plates and two wineglasses stood on the table; that was all. But on the floor near the door lay something that looked as if it had been forgotten in their headlong flight. Lancelot bent and picked it up.

  It was an envelope full of crumpled brochures. They showed, in bright color, Ludwig’s three castles: Linderhof, Herrenchiemsee, and Neuschwanstein. The brochures looked well-worn, as if someone had spent a long time poring over them.

  Suddenly Lancelot remembered something else that the woman had said.

  If anything was hidden, it must be somewhere else . . .

  Lancelot smiled. For a brief moment the pain of his eye socket was forgotten. He pocketed the brochures and went downstairs to call a doctor.

  That bitch was going to wish she’d never been born.

  16

  IT WAS THE LAST BUILDING in a hamlet somewhere in the Bavarian Allgäu area. A low-built, crooked house with a little front garden, where the last sunflowers of the year were blooming, stood right beside the outskirts of the forest. With its weathered fence, its window shutters painted sky blue, and the old stone chimney from which thick black smoke was rising, it reminded Steven of a witch’s house. He could practically smell gingerbread. It was early morning; the sun was slowly rising behind the mist clinging to the trees.

  “So this is where the leading expert on Ludwig lives?” Steven asked skeptically. “I’d have expected a minicastle, or a late nineteenth-century villa.”

  “Albert Zöller may be slightly eccentric, but no one knows more about the Fairy-tale King.” Sara wearily massaged her temples and suppressed a yawn. “Almost everyone who writes a book about Ludwig the Second makes a pilgrimage to this place sooner or later. Uncle Lu’s knowledge is legendary. Leave the car there in front, beside the old oak.” She pointed to a stunted tree not far from the house. “Over the last few years, he’s retreated from public life more and more. We won’t alarm him more than we have to.”

  “What, by arriving in a car?” Steven raised his eyebrows in surprise.

  “Let’s say he’d probably rather see us arrive in a horse-drawn cab. But you’ll pass nicely as a gentleman of the old school.”

  The art detective smiled, while Steven looked critically down at himself. He had decided to keep his evening suit from yesterday on; he liked it much better than Sara’s ex-boyfriend’s casual, loose-fitting garments. Over it he wore a close-fitting black coat that they had also bought yesterday afternoon. In fact the bookseller did look a little like a nineteenth-century gentleman on the verge of middle age.

  All I need is a top hat and a walking stick, he thought, and my grandfather would be proud of me.

  Sara had changed her clothes. Her green woolen dress and hooded jacket were slightly creased, mainly because she and Steven had spent the last few hours sleeping in the car at a roadside picnic area. However, after two cigarettes and a cardboard cup of coffee from a gas station in the Allgäu, the art detective now made a remarkably fresh impression.

  “Are you really sure we ought to let this Zöller in on our secrets?” Steven asked as he parked the Mini under the colorful fall leaves of the oak tree. “I mean, I’m still wanted by the police.”

  “I don’t think Uncle Lu would turn us in. And even if he did, we have to take the risk. If we must, we’ll just go back on the run.” Sara got out and went toward the crooked little house. She pushed the garden gate, which opened on squealing hinges. “If we want to crack the cipher, then we need the help of Albert Zöller. He and my uncle have known each other for decades, and they were always in touch about Ludwig. As far as I know, before he retired, Zöller was an engine driver for German Railways, but the Fairy-tale King has always been his passion. Paul thought that Uncle Lu was way ahead of the experts in his knowledge of the king’s last years. He’s d
rawn up a precise account of every day of Ludwig’s life.”

  “Why ‘Uncle Lu’?” Steven asked as he followed Sara through the front garden, with its harvested vegetable and herb beds. “His name’s Albert, right?”

  Sara turned with a twinkle in her eye. “Can’t you work that out for yourself?”

  She pulled a rusty chain near the entrance, and a bell rang. After a while they heard heavy, dragging footsteps. When the door finally opened, Steven instinctively took a step back. The man standing in front of them in a crumpled shirt and stained pants was nearly six feet tall. He was broadly built, not to say stout, with fleshy cheeks through which little red veins ran. His full head of hair was salt-and-pepper colored and as untidy as if he had just got out of bed. Steven guessed Albert Zöller’s age as at least seventy. It was clear to the bookseller at once why Sara called him Uncle Lu.

  If the Fairy-tale King had lived a few decades longer, he’d have looked just like Zöller. The thought, unbidden, shot through his mind. Well, he’d probably have died of gout and heart disease first. This man must have a remarkable constitution.

  “Yes?” the bear in front of them growled. He wore rimless reading glasses that looked ridiculously small on his broad face. Despite the early hour, Sara and Steven had obviously disturbed his studies. “If you’re Jehovah’s Witnesses, go to hell. I’m the Antichrist.”

  Sara bobbed an old-fashioned curtsey. “Forgive us for calling on you so early, Herr Zöller. I’m Professor Paul Liebermann’s niece, and . . .”

  “Liebermann?” The gruff old man’s face instantly became friendlier. He looked at Sara with concern. “My God, I read about that gruesome murder in the newspaper. Dear old Paul. I . . . I’m so sorry.” His voice had a pleasantly Bavarian note to it, almost like the voice of a kindly fairy-tale uncle.