The Ludwig Conspiracy

  With his mind at rest again, he put the little wooden box in his shabby brown leather briefcase, put on his wool coat, left the shop, and locked up behind him. The wind and rain immediately blew in his face; the light drizzle had turned heavy. Steven put up the hood of his wool coat and marched away. It wasn’t far to his apartment in the Schlachthof district of Munich, but it was no pleasure walking through this rain. Countless office workers with umbrellas and waterproof ponchos hurried past him as they emerged from the complex of office buildings that had only recently been built on the old site where trade fairs used to be held; the new supermarkets were teeming with late customers, hastily making their evening purchases and disappearing into the multistory parking lots with frozen pizzas and boxes of sushi.

  Only a few streets farther on, everything was noticeably quieter. Ahead of and below Steven lay the Theresienwiese, the open space where Oktoberfest was held. Now, just after the end of that annual event, it spread out before him, deserted and desolate. The giant wheel and a few of the festival tents hadn’t been entirely dismantled yet, and they rose like metal skeletons on the flat, asphalted grounds. From up where Steven was, the silent rides and boarded-up snack booths could have been abandoned buildings in a ghost town.

  In spite of the many puddles, Steven decided to cut across the Theresienwiese on his way home. It would cut short the walk through the rain by a good ten minutes. He turned right, where a white temple with a statue of Bavaria rose. The bronze statue, almost sixty-five feet tall, with a lion and a wreath of oak leaves, always reminded Steven slightly of the American Statue of Liberty. A homeless man had spread out a few layers of newspaper in one corner of the temple, right under the bust of King Ludwig I. He was lying on them and babbling to himself. Otherwise, silence reigned, a silence that seemed curiously alien to Steven after the noise of the city.

  He cautiously climbed down the broad, slippery steps of the temple. A loose balloon, whirled up by the wind, flew past him and finally disappeared in the darkness. There was a smell of spilled beer and garbage. In this weather, there seemed to be no other pedestrians out and about on the broad space, covered as it was with puddles.

  When Steven was about halfway across the Theresienwiese, he suddenly heard a sound behind him. It sounded like a soft, hoarse voice calling.

  He spun around in alarm and saw three figures standing there, right under the statue of Bavaria. They wore dark capes and hoods that made them look like black-robed Ku Klux Klan members. All three hooded men held burning torches that flickered wildly in the wind. Steven closed his eyes and then opened them again, but the figures were still there.

  Very odd. It’s not Halloween yet.

  And the figures were obviously too large to be kids. They made Steven think more of trained thugs in monastic habits. Once again he felt the same strange fear that had come over him earlier, in the shop. He turned to look ahead and went hesitantly on. But after a few feet, he quickened his pace, and soon he was running. Behind him, he could hear footsteps in the pouring rain.

  The men were following him.

  Looking briefly behind him, Steven saw three red dots in the darkness, bouncing up and down, slowly but inexorably coming closer. Were these men really after him? Could it be because of that strange little treasure chest? Heart thudding, Steven ran on. He tasted the metallic tang of blood in his mouth.

  He hurried across the deserted Theresienwiese. In the dark, it looked like a huge black lake threatening to swallow him up. To his right and left, alleyways opened up, leading to empty beer tents, and in front of them switchback tracks reared up like the bones of a dinosaur. The opposite side of the plaza, bordered by shining streetlamps, seemed endlessly far away; behind every one of the abandoned snack bars, in every niche, behind every caravan, Steven thought he saw a hooded figure scurrying by.

  He stepped into a puddle, tripped over the raised edge of a manhole cover, and fell flat in cold, shallow water. The briefcase slipped from his hands. As he frantically groped for it, he could hear footsteps coming up behind him. They were distinctly closer now; he heard the sound of shoes slapping down on the wet asphalt. Where was the damn briefcase? Something crunched very close, as if someone had stepped on the pieces of a broken beer stein, and then there was a snort and a cough. Something deep inside Steven told him that he mustn’t lose the briefcase, not under any circumstances, even if he didn’t know why.

  At last his hand felt familiar leather, caught between a couple of garbage bags left lying around. Steven seized the bag, got to his feet, gasping for breath, and ran on until, at last, he reached the safety of the light from the streetlamps. Still breathless, the bookseller stumbled past a few stunted linden trees, and then finally reached the Bavaria Ring on the other side of the Oktoberfest site.

  When he turned around once more, the men and their torches had disappeared. Car horns were honking, a set of traffic lights changed to green, passersby pushed busily past him.

  He was back in the bustling city.

  Who or what in the world had that been?

  Steven was trembling all over. Until now, he had always felt very safe in Germany’s most beautiful and expensive city. Finding that someone had intended to rob him in the city center itself, and indeed not just someone but several weird characters in monastic habits, suddenly made him see Munich with new eyes. All at once the narrow streets of the residential area where he lived, the flickering streetlamps, and the tall old buildings that had been spared by the war seemed to him strange and uncanny.

  ANOTHER FIFTEEN MINUTES, and Steven was finally back at his apartment building in Ehrengutstrasse.

  He leaned against the front door, briefly closed his eyes, and listened to the familiar sounds of his home—the distant ringing of trolley bells, the horns of cars, the laughter of the many people out drinking in the local bars. In the middle of the night or very early in the morning, before dawn, Steven sometimes heard the mooing of cattle and calves and the squealing of pigs on their last journey to the slaughterhouses from which the district took its name. Now and then there was even a smell of blood in the air. All the same, he couldn’t imagine living anywhere else in the city. Here in the Isarvorstadt area, with the old South Cemetery, the winding alleyways, and the magnificent bridges across the nearby river, Steven thought he could still sense the spirit of past centuries—a Munich that now existed only in a few corners of the city.

  The kind of Munich that this man Theodor Marot would have known, he suddenly thought. Is what he wrote in that little book so valuable that I’m being followed already by whoever wants it?

  Tired and still shivering, Steven climbed the many well-worn stairs to the top floor of the building. Only when he had closed the door of his apartment behind him did he notice that his pants were torn and that he was bleeding in several places. His hands were dirty, the wool coat was as wet as a dishcloth, and his briefcase was damp and spattered with mud.

  He decided to drink his first glass of wine before the pasta was ready.

  2

  A GOOD HOUR AND THREE-QUARTERS of a bottle later, Steven Lukas, showered and in clean clothes, was sitting on his beloved old shabby leather sofa in his attic apartment. Outside, rain beat against the window, and the wind blew more strongly. Steven could see the light of the Munich Olympiad tower through the drops on the pane, while the red brick buildings of the Schlachthof district were discernible only in outline.

  As usual, he had had to start by clearing a dozen or so books off the cushions. The coffee table was overflowing with empty teacups, the remains of sandwiches, and newspapers from the last few days with the pages coming apart. In contrast to his bookshop, Steven’s apartment had no sense of order. Sunday the cleaning lady would come and disparage his way of life once again. It was a ritual for fat Joanna to preach to him, in her Polish accent, about the dangers of a bachelor existence.

  Steven’s last real relationship had been four years ago, and by now he was used to thinking of books as better partners than women. br />
  Steven closed his eyes and enjoyed Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto in B-flat major as the music came softly over his old Philips record player. The nearly empty bottle of Montepulciano stood in front of him. By now he had calmed down a bit. Probably there was some perfectly simple explanation for the incident on the Theresienweise. The hooded figures were most likely teenagers out to scare any passersby they happened to meet. And he had run away like a headless chicken. The kids were probably still laughing themselves silly over the old fool in the muddy puddle.

  Steven shook his head at his own cowardice, then turned to the book in code from the little treasure chest. Fortunately, neither the box nor its contents had been damaged when he fell over. As Steven ran his fingers over the cover with its ivory carvings, he again felt that vague sense of having seen the little book somewhere before. It was like a faded picture from a long-forgotten time. But when he searched his memory, he could find nothing—only a slight dizziness, and a strange, bitter smell as if something had been left burning.

  By this time he was sure that the curious hieroglyphics were some kind of secret writing, but no matter how hard he thought about it, he couldn’t work out just what it was. It was true that in the course of his life as an antiquarian bookseller, he had once read a treatise about nineteenth-century cryptology, but as far as he could remember, it was generally a case of exchanging certain written characters for others, with numbers also playing a part at times. The signs in front of him, however, were more reminiscent of those old Germanic runes that made no sense at first glance. Steven put on his glasses and looked more closely at the first signs.

  What on earth was that supposed to be? A child’s scribble? Very occasionally, conventional characters, all of them capitals, appeared among the signs, but they didn’t form actual words. They were as much of a mystery to Steven as the runes. He leafed through the book, counting at least five of these sequences of uppercase letters distributed through the early pages, and more farther on. The first three were the following:

  VZLMCTLIT

  NECAALAI

  FHRT

  Steven drank some more wine and looked again at the title page, while outside the rain continued to patter against the windowpanes.

  Memoirs of Theodor Marot, Assistant to Dr. Max Schleiss von Loewenfeld.

  He decided to ignore the mysterious inscriptions inside the book for now, went over to his desk, and opened the laptop. It started with a hum. Once it was up and running, he typed the name Theodor Marot into a search engine, but all he found was an Austrian swimming club and a site selling construction equipment in Canada. He was much more successful with Max Schleiss von Loewenfeld; the search engine came up with about two hundred hits. When Steven clicked on the first of them, his heart began to beat considerably faster.

  The websites informed him that Dr. Schleiss von Loewenfeld had been King Ludwig II’s personal physician, and before that had treated Ludwig’s father, King Maximilian II. According to a scholarly blog that Steven found, Loewenfeld had been considered one of the best Bavarian doctors of his time. He bore the title of privy counselor to the king, and he died at the end of the nineteenth century at almost ninety years old, rich and respected. A black-and-white photograph showed an elderly gentleman with nickel-framed glasses and a thoughtful expression, his coat neatly buttoned up, holding a top hat. His striking beard was reminiscent of Abraham Lincoln.

  Steven put one of the photos from the box beside his shimmering laptop. Like all the other pictures, it had obviously been taken in a studio. There were dummy columns in the background, and a curtain cord. The young man seated beside the king wore a well-cut suit, his dark hair combed to one side; he had attractive, soft features that made him look almost girlish. By now Steven was convinced that the young man in the picture was none other than the royal physician’s assistant.

  Hello, Theodor Marot, pleased to meet you. What story do you have to tell? Are your memoirs so explosive that you had to write them in secret code? Or so . . . delicate?

  Thoughtfully, Steven picked up the lock of hair lying beside the photographs in the little wooden treasure chest with its black cloth lining. The hair tied with a ribbon must have been raven black long ago.

  As black as the king’s hair.

  Steven finished his wine and put the journal, the photographs, and the lock of hair back in the box. Then he opened another bottle to help his thinking along.

  It looked very much as if the contents of the little box were worth far more than he had first thought.

  HIS HEADACHE THE next morning told Steven that the Montepulciano had been a bit stronger than he was used to. Eyes closed, it took him some time to locate the radio alarm clock that was cheerfully playing Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik. With a well-aimed swing of his hand, Steven killed Wolfgang Amadeus stone dead, sat up groaning, and ran a hand through his untidy gray hair. There were some days when you felt that you were forty with particular clarity.

  The little wooden box was still standing beside his bed on the desk. It had spent the night in his dreams. He vaguely remembered a gigantic royal cloak that threatened to smother him. Men in black hoods had also been there, prodding him with red-hot fingers.

  Steven rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, stood up, and limped into the kitchen, where the dirty dishes of the last few days were stacked. He carefully picked an antique edition of the satirical magazine Simplicissimus off the table and blew a few croissant crumbs off the front page. This copy of the journal had appeared just before the First World War and deserved better than to get jam on it. Humming quietly to himself, the bookseller filled the espresso jug to the top with freshly ground coffee and twiddled the knob of the radio until he found a classical music concert. The music soothed him instantly. His knees were still sore, and someone was knocking against his forehead from inside his skull, but at least the memories of his bad dreams had gone away. Steven massaged his temples and listened to the deep notes of a cello, while he thoughtfully sipped his heavily sweetened espresso. Yesterday’s events—first the visit of that guy in the Bavarian-style costume, then the hooded men—had upset his stomach. And then, of course, there was the little treasure chest itself, with its sensational contents. Only why had the mere sight of it shaken him so badly?

  Well, he’d take a closer look at it all back in the shop. If this man Marot really had taken a royal secret to his grave, Steven would make a few phone calls, earn good money, and then, so far as he was concerned, Frau Schultheiss could go and open her boutique in the downmarket Hasenbergl district. As an expert on the literary history of Bavaria, Steven knew that rumors of King Ludwig II’s homosexuality had come up time and again. To him, it made no difference one way or the other, but he was sure that plenty of newspapers would come up with a large sum of money for actual evidence—money that could pay the rent on his shop for a good long while.

  After a long, hot, almost boiling shower, he put on a new brown corduroy suit, with a white shirt and a tweed bow tie, put the little treasure chest back in his leather briefcase, and set off for the Westend district. The rain clouds had disappeared overnight, the leaves on the chestnut trees in the beer gardens were red and yellow, and the people coming toward him had friendly expressions on their faces. As Steven strolled over the Theresienwiese, populated this morning by cyclists and pedestrians, it was hard to imagine that a few teenagers wearing hoods had scared him so badly here only a few hours ago. The almost summery warmth and the mild sunlight helped to banish his headache, and his mood improved with every step he took. It was one of those mornings that herald a very pleasant day.

  But even as Steven was still more than fifty yards away from his antiquarian bookshop, he guessed that, on the contrary, this was going to be one of the lousiest days of his whole year.

  A SMALL GROUP OF curious onlookers stood in front of a pile of broken glass that had once been the display window of his shop. A few books lay out in the street, looking like limp, dead flies, their leather bindings splayed
. Pages of parchment had been torn out and were splashed with mud. But that was nothing compared to the chaos that Steven saw when he looked through the broken window into the bookshop itself.

  It looked as if a medium-sized and very specific earthquake had wreaked havoc in there.

  One of the tall bookshelves had fallen over, and books, maps, engravings, and folio volumes covered the floor like a sea of paper. Steven saw the eighteenth-century book on chess that he had only just bought; someone had slit the leather spine lengthwise. A dirty footprint left by a boot adorned the dramas of Molière; other books had come apart entirely, and their pages were crumpled or torn out. A gust of wind whirled a few ragged pages up in the air like withered leaves. The mahogany table in the backroom of the shop was the only piece of furniture still in place. The scene was so appalling, so unreal, that Steven stood there for a long time as if turned to stone, staring into his shop. It was the thought of a single book that brought him back to life.

  Oh God, not the Grimm. Not the Grimms’ Children’s and Household Tales.

  Taking no notice of the onlookers, he stumbled to the door and unlocked it. He tried to make his way into the shop but was prevented by the pile of books pressing against the inside of the door. For a while the people outside watched, spellbound, as Steven fought a desperate battle against a mass of printed paper and parchment. He continued these useless efforts until someone placed a hand on his shoulder.

  “Is this your shop?”

  The female police officer in front of him was still young, maybe in her midtwenties, and she looked genuinely concerned. Her older male colleague was waiting, with a bored expression, in the police car parked at the curb with its blue light switched on.

  As Steven nodded silently, the police officer went on calmly. “We’ll have to investigate this break-in, although it looks more like a few young hooligans out to make trouble than anything else.”