The Ludwig Conspiracy

  Lancelot breathed in the fresh air of the lake deeply.

  At least he had one card to play. He knew the second keyword—and he knew where the trio was going next.

  Neuschwanstein.

  All was not yet lost. Lancelot would get back on the trail. But this time he would take Tristan and Gawain with him, maybe Galahad and Mordred as well. He’d take a whole damn army if need be.

  Next time they wouldn’t get away.

  Once again he stared at the boat slowly moving away over the Chiemsee, which lay before him, an infinitely black, surging surface, its waves crowned by white foam. Then he limped back into the woods.

  When his cell phone rang a little later, it took Lancelot some time to fish it out of his blood-soaked pants pocket. It was the king. In a hasty whisper, Lancelot explained what had happened in the castle. Then he said no more for quite a long time as he listened in silence.

  The Royal Majesty was not angry. The Royal Majesty had a plan.

  25

  THE BED IN THE OLD boathouse creaked and squealed if Steven moved so much as a centimeter. It was so narrow that he was in constant danger of either falling out or forcing Sara over the side of the bed. It also stank of old fish.

  He stared at the rotting ceiling and tried to find some peace and calm, in spite of the rain pattering down and the events of the last few hours. Alois, the fisherman, had given them the key to his old boathouse down in Prien harbor. After they had hidden the Mini in a nearby garage and told Uncle Lu about their experiences in the museum, the old man had disappeared with Alois into a bar somewhere to give him a slightly doctored account of the last few hours. Meanwhile, Sara and Steven had crept into the crooked boathouse, hoping that the killer wouldn’t find them there. But whenever the shutter over the window rattled, Steven imagined he saw the one-eyed giant suddenly appearing in the hut.

  Far worse, however, were the memories that overwhelmed him like flashes of lightning.

  Steven kept seeing his parents’ burning villa before him, heard the crackling of the flames and his mother’s shrill scream from the library. When he closed his eyes, there was a furious girl with long blond braids, trying to scratch his eyes out. But whenever the picture was about to become clearer, it dissipated. There was nothing beyond it but endless black.

  Damn you, dreams. Why have you come back?

  “Can’t you get to sleep either?” Steven asked, after he had been tossing and turning for what felt like an eternity.

  The art detective sat bolt upright in bed. “Thanks for asking,” she snapped. “Even ignoring the lice in this place, a deranged giant in a gas mask tried to murder me tonight. And when I close my eyes, I see the leader of the Cowled Men wallowing in his own blood. So, no, I can’t get to sleep either.”

  Steven switched on the rusty lamp beside the bed and turned to Sara. Her hair was tousled and still damp after their flight from the island. It had small leaves in it. He looked at her in silence for quite a long time.

  “We still don’t know who that colossus is,” he said at last, lost in thought as he stroked Sara’s hair. “No friend of the Cowled Men, anyway, that much is clear now. I wonder if he was following us from Uncle Lu’s house in that green Bentley?”

  A particularly violent gust of wind rattled the shutter, and the rain slapped against the wood like a wet cloth. Sara gave a nervous start. She reached for her crumpled pack of cigarettes beside the bed and lit herself a partly smoked one. “No idea. Maybe, or maybe it was some third party we don’t even know about. Or friends of Albert Zöller keeping us under observation.”

  “Do you still think he has something to do with your uncle’s murder?” Steven shook his head. “Forget it—he saved our lives just now, putting on that Ludwig act. We ought to be grateful.”

  “All the same.” Sara drew deeply on her cigarette. “There’s something wrong. Uncle Paul knew Zöller. So why didn’t he turn to him for advice if Uncle Lu knows so much about the king? Instead, my uncle went straight to the Cowled Men.”

  “But then something must have happened,” Steven replied. “That guy who called himself the steersman of the Cowled Men did say that his contact with Paul Liebermann was suddenly broken. And the professor came to my shop instead because he needed material to help him decipher the shorthand.”

  “Oh hell.” In annoyance, Sara ground out her cigarette on one of the bedposts and threw the cigarette butt on the floor. “I’m sure my uncle would know what those poems and roman numerals mean. It’s like the farther we go, the more we’re groping around in the dark.”

  “And the greater the danger that we’ll pay for this adventure with our lives,” Steven said. “Whoever’s behind it all, I never should have gotten involved.”

  “Damn it, Steven, don’t you see?” Sara looked him straight in the eye. “Solving the puzzle is our only chance. Or do you want to tell the police about what happened in the museum?”

  Steven ran his hands through his hair. Once again a wave of memories was rolling toward him. “I just don’t know how much longer I can stand this. I feel as if something is reaching out to me, something . . .” He hesitated briefly before going on. “Something even worse than that nightmare in the museum. A dark place, a black hole deep inside me. And it has something to do with that damn diary. Sometimes I think I’m turning as crazy as Ludwig himself.”

  Another gust of wind shook the thin wooden walls of the boathouse. The wind whistled through the shutters, and to Steven it sounded like the wailing of a small child.

  A child crying out for his parents, he thought. Crying out for his parents, who died long ago.

  Sara leaned over him and covered his face with little kisses. “Whatever it is, Steven, you can tell me,” she whispered. “Okay, so I’m no psychiatrist, but I can listen just as well as Dr. Freud.” She tried to smile and then turned serious again. “Does it have something to do with the way you fell apart back there? With the weird stuff you were stammering? Something about a fire and a library. And a teahouse. What do you mean, a teahouse, Steven?”

  The bookseller shook his head. “It . . . it’s so long ago. I was only six at the time. I can . . . I can hardly remember.”

  “Try.”

  He took a deep breath. “My childhood memories don’t really begin until we were living in Germany,” he began hesitantly. “We were living in a big house in Cologne—it had belonged to my maternal grandparents before us. My father was crazy about the library, which dated from the early 1870s. And so was I . . .” Steven closed his eyes. “To this day I can see it: the tall oak bookshelves, the rolling ladder that allowed you to soar along the rows of books like an eagle, the yellowing oil paintings on the walls, the shimmer of dust outside the window . . .” He looked at Sara again and sighed. “I was new to Germany. I didn’t have any friends to play with, and that library, in the empty house with all its high-ceilinged corridors and rooms, became my playroom, my secret realm. I taught myself to read in the library, using an illustrated edition of the fables of La Fontaine and a stained old edition of the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. Even then I liked to hide away behind heavy tomes. They offer me protection, as maybe you can imagine. But back then . . . back then they brought death.”

  Sara looked at him, wide-eyed. “What happened?”

  “A few months after we moved into the villa, my father threw a housewarming party, a ball,” Steven went on. “There were a few distant branches of the family in Germany, and friends and colleagues—the kind of guests you invite to a party like that. It was to be a glamorous occasion. The men all wore tuxedos or tails, the women wore evening gowns, a small chamber orchestra played Haydn, Mozart, and Schubert in the salon. I . . . I remember being bored. So I went up to the library on the second floor to be alone. I couldn’t reach the light switch, so I lit a candle. No, not a candle—it was a Chinese lantern. And there was this safe behind an old oil painting of Bismarck . . .” He paused and tried to recollect. “That night the safe happened to be open. My father must
have forgotten to close it . . .”

  “You looked inside?” Sara interrupted him.

  Steven nodded. “There was something in there, but I . . . I simply don’t remember what it was. From that point on, there’s this black void in my head. But if I concentrate, I always see a girl with blond braids trying to scratch my eyes out. Her white dress is burning; I hear crackling and hissing; there’s acrid smoke everywhere . . .”

  “My God,” Sara said breathlessly. “You accidentally set the library on fire. That’s why you went into shock in the museum. The smoke aroused your memory.”

  Steven pulled the thin woolen blanket tightly around himself and nodded. “The next thing I remember is running through my grandparents’ garden, which was decorated with Chinese lanterns. I ran and ran to this little teahouse at the end of the garden. I . . . I was thinking that Mom and Dad would never forgive me, so I crept away and hid there.”

  It was some time before he mustered the will to continue. The fall wind, howling and whistling, rattled the shutters over the windows as if to prevent Steven from telling any more of his story.

  “When they realized that the house was on fire, my parents fled into the garden with their guests,” he said, his voice flat and emotionless. “But when they didn’t find me out there, they went back into the house in spite of the flames. They kept calling my name—I could hear them from the teahouse. But I was too frightened to answer. Dad could get very cross if I damaged any of his books, and now the whole library was blazing, the whole house. I crawled under the table and put my hands over my ears. My parents’ screams are the last thing I remember . . . their screams from the burning library . . .”

  “They died in the fire?” Sara asked quietly. “Both of them?”

  Steven nodded. “Because I didn’t answer them. They must have gone looking for me until they were trapped by the fire, and finally the smoke smothered them. When the firefighters arrived, one of them heard me crying in the teahouse and finally found me under the table. Then I was adopted by a family who had been friends of my parents.”

  He smiled wearily. “I could have done worse. My adoptive father was Hans Lukas, a highly regarded professor of English literature at Munich University, and my adoptive mother, Elfriede, was the soul of kindness. They both died only two years ago, one not long after the other. My birth parents had left me a handsome inheritance, which I squandered on old books. All the same . . .” Steven briefly wiped his eyes. “All I still remember of my real mother is that she knew wonderful fairy tales and songs from her native Cologne. I suppose my love of Germany is based on those memories. Maybe I’m still looking for those fairy tales in my books.” He laughed despairingly and struck his forehead. “Now I really do sound like a patient on a therapist’s couch. I hope you’ve been busily writing all this down.”

  “Idiot.” Sara gently swatted him on the nose. “Don’t joke. I’m glad you told me. Maybe I understand you a little better now.”

  Steven smiled. “I’d like that. You know, I don’t think we go so badly together. Who knows, when this adventure is over, maybe there could be something more permanent between us.” He was staring at her thoughtfully. “And maybe it’s time you told me your own secrets, Miss Mystery. I have a feeling I’m not the only one here with a dark hole in my past.”

  Sara laughed quietly. “Another time. One patient on the couch per session, okay? Tomorrow we’re going to go to Neuschwanstein and finish this thing.”

  She passed her finger over his lips, then kissed him lightly in the hollow of his throat. “Until then, the two of us will have to find some way to pass the time.”

  Directly after that, Steven stopped caring about the way the bed creaked and squealed.

  WHILE SARA SLEPT soundly beside him a couple of hours later, Steven lay with his heart thudding and his eyes open, staring at the ceiling. The events of the last few days, feeling Sara so close, his memories of the fire at the villa in Cologne more than thirty years ago, all combined to keep him awake.

  What really happened back then? Why are the images coming back?

  By now the rain had stopped. Steven turned restlessly in the bed, finally gave up, and reached for the diary lying on the floor beside him. The book was like a drug that he couldn’t do without, like a magic powder out of a fairy tale. He had a feeling that he wouldn’t be able to rest until he had read it to the end.

  26

  JTI, JG

  I must now write an account of the king’s death, and I swear to God that every word is true. Even if the ministers, the newspapers, the whole world claims otherwise, I know what happened. I and a handful of others who, however, hold their peace out of fear or because they are already dead. We were threatened, some of us were bribed, or made compliant in other ways. But I cannot keep silent any longer, and so I am now going to tell the true story.

  After that terrible incident at Herrenchiemsee, I lost sight of the king for a long time. He did not want me near him now, so I confined my meetings with him to the few times that I accompanied Dr. Loewenfeld on a visit. Otherwise I listlessly went about my work at the Surgical Hospital in Munich, and pored over scientific books in my small attic room in the Maxvorstadt district, while only one name rang through my head.

  Maria.

  My love for her grew and grew in the months that followed, and so I traveled as often as possible to Linderhof, where she went about her work in a small farmhouse not far from the castle, and continued to keep the king company. Ludwig had forgiven Maria more quickly than me, and so she was usually somewhere near him. I did not venture to appear before both of them together yet, but whenever His Majesty set off to spend a few days at NEUSCHWANSTEIN and Hohenschwangau, Maria stayed behind at Linderhof on her own, and then my hour came.

  I gave her small but precious gifts and sweetmeats. I rode with her through the Ammergau woods. Once we were caught in a thunderstorm and had to spend the night in a barn, but it was a chaste night, for I sensed that Maria still resisted confessing her love to me. I was sure that this reluctance was connected in some way with her son, Leopold, and that she was still devoted to the child’s father, even if he had abandoned them both. But if I broached the subject to her, she remained obstinately silent, and so I finally gave up, hoping that in time even that deep wound would heal.

  On a cold winter’s evening, when the king was once again roaming the forests in his fairy-tale sleigh, I found her under the linden tree where we had first met. Its branches groaned under the weight of the snow they bore. Maria’s face showed that she had been weeping, and tears still ran down her cheeks.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked in concern, stroking her hair, where a few snowflakes glittered. “Is it young Leopold? Has the boy been up to mischief again?”

  She shook her head and blew her nose noisily. “I’m anxious about the king,” she said softly. “Day by day he’s getting . . . stranger. It’s as if he is moving more and more into another world. At first I thought it was just that he’s different from us ordinary mortals, but recently . . .” She broke off, and looked at me sadly. “Tell me, Theodor: outside the Grotto of Venus in the fall, you said that his enemies wanted to put him in a madhouse. Is that true? Do the king’s ministers want to have him certified insane? And what will become of him then?”

  “I . . . I can’t tell you any details,” I murmured. “I mustn’t, for your own safety. But there’s still hope.” I caught her hands. “If Ludwig would only go to Munich, if he would give up some of his whims and fancies. Can’t you speak to him? He still seems to listen to you, at least.”

  Wearily, Maria shook her head. “Ludwig lives in a country of his own, like Emperor Barbarossa under tons of rock deep below the Kyffhäuser hills. Not even I can reach him now.”

  THE LONG WINTER passed, and at last spring came. Rumors that the king had lost his wits swelled louder and louder. Lutz and the other ministers had done all they could to ruin His Majesty’s reputation. Articles about Ludwig’s state of mind and his vast bu
rden of debt were published in newspapers at home and abroad; his earlier obsession with Richard WAGNER was discussed again. Ribald songs about deranged “Herr Huber” were sung in the taverns of Munich, and the police did not intervene.

  However, the king did nothing to quell these rumors, looking like the very image of a lunatic. On my few official visits, I saw that he was declining ever more swiftly. His teeth were falling out by the dozen, his neglected mouth stank, he ate huge quantities of food, and loudly abused the lackeys and ministerial officials who persisted in refusing him money for his castles. After his former equerry Richard Hornig had declined to rob banks for him, he sent couriers and dispatches to places as far afield as Constantinople, Tehran, and Brazil; he toyed with the idea of emigrating to a Pacific island and continuing his building there; he ordered officials to set up a secret army in preparation for a coup d’état; he shouted, raged, and scolded like a small child whose toy has been taken away—but whatever he did, he was not granted another pfennig.

  Our small circle of conspirators watched this conduct with horror, but we were powerless. The attempts of Kaulbach and Loewenfeld to win Dr. Gudden over to our side had been fruitless. Instead, we learned through our contacts that the lackeys at court were still assiduously fishing compromising notes of the king’s out of wastebaskets and even the toilet. In addition, Prince Luitpold had publicly declared himself ready to assume the regency. It was five minutes to midnight, and the clock was inexorably ticking on.

  Finally the bombshell exploded.

  Late in the afternoon of 9 June 1886, I received a letter from Dr. Loewenfeld in which he earnestly asked me to travel to Lake Starnberg at once. Richard Hornig had a villa there in Allmannshausen, where we few who were still the king’s friends met on occasion to discuss what could be done. It was clear from Loewenfeld’s letter that this was a matter of the utmost importance; the doctor spoke of life and death.