The Ludwig Conspiracy

  “Never mind that,” Steven snapped. “There’s a dead man here. And I killed him.”

  “He was about to kill someone else.” After a moment’s hesitation, Sara put the amulet in her pocket. “And he was aiming a gun at me. Don’t forget that.”

  Steven was still staring at the corpse and the pool of blood, which by now had grown to a fairly large puddle. Finally he stood up and turned to the door. “Anyway, we have to call the police.” He turned to Sara. “Could I use your phone? Mine’s somewhere up in the office.”

  The art detective brought out a black smartphone. At the sight of its splintered display, she cursed.

  “Shit, this won’t be any good except to throw at someone.” She pressed a couple of keys, but in vain. “Must have been smashed when I fell. Great—and it cost me three hundred euros.”

  “We can go up to my office and call from there,” Steven suggested. “The best thing will be if we . . .”

  “And what are you planning to tell the police?” Sara asked sharply. “That you were looking for a seventeenth-century book about deciphering secret writing, and you just happened to kill the Hulk here with an iron bar in the process?”

  “It was self-defense. You said so yourself. He was going to kill that other guy.”

  Sara looked around and shrugged. “What other guy? I don’t see anyone else here.”

  “But . . .”

  “Herr Lukas,” she said in a mollifying tone, “this story is complicated enough as it is. What were the two of us doing down here in your stockroom so late at night? Who was the man who ran away? What does it all have to do with that book? Trust me, I know the cops. They aren’t just going to pat us on the back and let us go. They’ll take us into custody, and then the questioning will start.” She took a deep breath before going on. “I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. We’ll wipe your fingerprints off that iron bar, we’ll go home like good little kids, and we’ll act as if we were never here. And tomorrow some neighbor will discover the break-in and an unfortunate thief who got killed fighting over the loot. What do you think of that?”

  Steven stared at the art detective incredulously. Her ruthlessness was troubling him more and more.

  “You want me to sneak away like a criminal?” he asked, baffled.

  Sara’s eyebrows shot up. “Could you cut the drama? I’m only trying to help you. Both of us.”

  Steven massaged his temples. Once again, his eyes traveled over the corpse lying in the bright red puddle of blood. The sight was surreal among the white pages of the books.

  Like spilled red ink, he thought. Or melted red sealing wax. Blood sticking to my fingers.

  He took a deep breath. “Okay,” he said quietly. “We’ll play it your way. I have enough problems right now, anyway. I don’t need a horde of suspicious police officers after me.”

  “Glad to hear it. Believe me, you’ll thank me yet.”

  Sara knelt down, her face briefly contorting in a painful grimace. She peered behind the bookshelves until at last she found the bloodstained iron bar. Fishing the murder weapon out from between two crates, she carefully wiped it down with a handkerchief.

  “Here we are.” Sara gingerly placed the bar beside the body, stopped for a moment and finally took the pistol from the giant’s lifeless fingers. With a practiced hand, she secured the trigger-guard and put the gun in her jacket pocket.

  “I have a feeling we may be able to use this,” she said, turning back to Steven. “Now let’s go look for that decoding book.”

  As if in a trance, the bookseller nodded. He had entirely forgotten what they were really here for. At last he clambered cautiously over the puddle of blood, to rummage around in the back part of his archive, where he stored scientific books from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His hands shook; he thought every little sound was someone on the stairs—maybe the other intruder? He imagined that the dead man might rise from the floor any moment like a zombie and strangle him with his strong hands.

  “Damn it, how long is this going to take?” Sara asked. “That hoodie character may call the police himself, and then we’re screwed.”

  “I . . . just one second . . .”

  Steven went along the rows of books arranged alphabetically by their authors’ last names. At last he found Shelton’s Tachygraphy on the top-right shelf of a bookcase. It was an inconspicuous, fat volume with a leather binding. He took it out and stowed it under his cord jacket as if he were shoplifting it.

  “Finally. Now let’s get out of here,” Sara said, already on her way up the stairs. “We can say a prayer for Hulk in the car, okay?”

  A GOOD HOUR LATER, clad only in sweatpants and a washed-out woolen sweater, Steven sat in Sara’s office, sipping a cup of black tea.

  The art detective had convinced him that his own apartment wasn’t safe at the moment. If the men in tracksuit jackets had found his bookshop, they’d have no difficulty in tracking down his home address as well. Steven was too worked up to sleep anyway; the past twenty-four hours had completely upended his life. So, gritting his teeth, he had agreed to stop off at Sara’s office, even if only for a cup of tea and some clean clothes.

  Steven bit his lip. He couldn’t get the body in his bookshop out of his head. Even though it had been in self-defense, he had killed a man, and this woman who called herself an art detective carried on as if nothing had happened. It was true that Sara was affected to some extent—she had already put back her second whisky—but all things considered, she seemed to take the incident in the cellar pretty much in her stride. Who was this woman really?

  Realizing he was staring at her, Sara smiled at him and pointed behind her. “I guess I’d better make us something to eat,” she said. “My mother always said the world looks different when you have something inside you. Not that it was true, but that could have been just my mother’s terrible cooking.”

  “How can you think about eating right now?” Steven asked indignantly. “I just killed someone! Is that all part of a day’s work for you?”

  “I assure you, it isn’t.” Sara cocked her head and looked at him thoughtfully. “But it could be that my skin’s rather thicker than yours. Where I grew up, violence was the order of the day.”

  “Let me guess,” said Steven sarcastically. “New York’s Bronx? Soweto in Johannesburg?”

  Sara grinned. “The Wedding district of Berlin. Ever been in that part of the city? One-third immigrants, one-third unemployed. If you never got a bloody nose, no one wanted to play with you. The best entertainment was when the police raided some junkie’s apartment. We used to find used syringes in the sandbox in the playground near where we lived.” She drew in the air as if smoking an invisible cigarette. “That guy down in your stockroom looked just like one of the dealers who were always kicking us kids off the swings.”

  Steven nodded thoughtfully. “I assume your parents weren’t much help?”

  “My parents?” Sara laughed under her breath. Abstractedly, she examined her green-painted nails. “I helped my parents, not the other way around. Ever had to get your mother, drunk as a skunk and babbling, into bed and then undressed?”

  “I . . . I’m afraid I can’t say I have, no,” Steven muttered. “Not an experience I’ve ever had.” He hesitated for a moment before going on. “But couldn’t your uncle do anything? I mean, he was a university professor. You’d think he . . .”

  “You didn’t know my mother,” Sara said roughly. “Uncle Paul did all he could, but if people like that are going to drink, then they will, and if you give them money, they won’t buy clothes for their kids; they’ll buy cheap booze.” She rose to her feet abruptly. “Now, excuse me, please. The kitchen calls.”

  Steven watched Sara disappear into the kitchen. He couldn’t understand this woman. She seemed to be surrounded by invisible armor. Whenever he tried to be friendly, she retreated. It was as if Sara was a magnet, attracting him briefly and then pushing him away again.

  Sighing, Steven turned back to
the leather-bound volume of Shelton’s Tachygraphy on the table in front of him. It was not the original edition but a revised version from 1842. Luckily, it would serve its purpose just as well as the original work, maybe even better. Steven had already leafed through it. The text was in an old-fashioned English that the bookseller knew from other books of that period. But he had problems with the curious scribbles that Shelton had established as shorthand in England in the seventeenth century.

  Steven knew a little about stenography. At university he had attended lectures on Johann Gabelsberger, whose nineteenth-century shorthand system was at the root of modern German shorthand. But Shelton’s signs were different, reminiscent of the scribblings of a five-year-old.

  Steven sighed and took another sip of his strong tea. It would probably be some time yet before he was in a position to decipher Marot’s diary. And what the curious sequences of capital letters that appeared on a number of pages might mean was a complete mystery to him.

  “Sandwiches?” Sara came out of the kitchen with a tray full of them. She was smiling now. “I went all out with the mustard sauce. Not that that means much with me.”

  Repulsed, Steven shook his head. The consistency of the grainy sauce dripping from the salmon sandwiches reminded him of the blood on his stockroom floor. “Thanks, that’s very kind of you,” he murmured. “But somehow I’ve lost my appetite in these last few hours. I hope your decision not to call the police was really right.”

  “Oh, it was. Definitely.” With a sandwich oozing sauce in her hand, the art detective gestured at the book in front of Steven, a volume nearly two hundred years old. “Getting anywhere yet?”

  Steven instinctively pushed Shelton’s Tachygraphy a little farther to the right. “Mind that sauce,” he said. “This isn’t some tabloid.”

  “Sorry.” Smiling, Sara put the plate down. “I was forgetting that you have such an erotic relationship with books.”

  “I just don’t like it when they get mustard all over them,” Steven replied. “Apart from which I wouldn’t want to get grease spots on these distinguished garments.” He pointed to his T-shirt and the old jogging pants that hung loose around his thighs. “Belonged to you once, did they?”

  “You’d better be joking.” Sara’s eyebrows shot up in indignation. “Who do you think I am, Miss Piggy? My last ex left them here. I guess he was a bit larger than you.” She shrugged. “His stuff has been waiting in my old clothes collection ever since. Somehow I find it harder to part with them than with their owners.”

  Steven smiled. “Not particularly easy to be in a relationship with you?”

  “Let’s just say I’m high maintenance,” Sara said. “I’m not about to cuddle up to someone on the sofa while he watches Formula One. Plus, most men don’t like their girlfriends to be smarter than they are.” Grinning, she let her eyes go to the T-shirt Steven was wearing, which was adorned with the logo of some grunge band. “I’ll admit that David was quite cute, but a time comes when you want to talk to your boyfriend about something other than surfing, trendy clubs, and house music.”

  “Well, you don’t have to worry about that with me,” Steven said, raising one hand as if taking an oath. “I can’t surf, I don’t know any trendy clubs, and I can’t stand house music. And no doorman would ever let me in in this getup anyway.”

  Suddenly he thought of his bloodstained corduroys, now in a garbage bin in the hallway, and all at once he was serious again.

  “That guy in the tracksuit jacket,” Steven said. “Bernd Reiser . . . what could he have been looking for in my bookshop?”

  “I assume he was posted there to lie in wait in case you came back,” Sara said. “First thing tomorrow I’m going to check up on that inscription, Tmeicos Ettal, and the swan on the amulet. There’s something not quite right about it. It looks more like something a twelve-year-old girl would wear, not some bruiser.” She reached eagerly for another sandwich. “But it’s the other guy who bothers me more. I’d been thinking it was only the thugs we know who are after the book. But obviously there are other interested parties.”

  “You think the man in the black hooded sweater was already down in my stockroom looking for the book, and Reiser took him by surprise?” Steven asked.

  Sara shrugged her shoulders and bit into her salmon sandwich, sending out a spray of sauce. “Or the other way around,” she said with her mouth full. “In any case, there are obviously several people who’d like to get hold of your little box and the book inside it.”

  “Or else the man in the hoodie was a perfectly normal burglar who saw the smashed display window and took the opportunity to come in,” Steven suggested.

  “A thief with a weakness for Rilke and Flaubert? I don’t know about that.” Sara swallowed her mouthful and pointed to the old book on stenography. “One way or another, we’re a step ahead of those guys. Unlike them, we know how to decipher the notes made by our friend Theodor Marot.”

  “We don’t know anything yet.” Steven wearily rubbed his red-rimmed eyes. “First of all I have to make my way through three hundred pages of stuff about tachygraphy. Ask me again in a few hours.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to get some sleep first?”

  “I’m far too worked up to sleep.” The bookseller pushed the comfortable leather chair over to the table and opened the book to the first page. “And you’ve made me very curious.”

  “Okay.” Sara went over to the leather sofa and threw a thin woolen rug over herself. “Just wake me up when you know who the murderer is.”

  She yawned, stretched, and closed her eyes. Steven hadn’t even heard that last remark because he was so immersed in the introduction to Shelton’s shorthand. He soon realized that it wasn’t as difficult as he had assumed. While it would be weeks before he could write Shelton’s shorthand fluently, he was able to decipher it surprisingly quickly. The signs were repeated; many words were simply abbreviated or a single sign stood for them. Steven realized that he hadn’t completely forgotten the stenography lectures he’d attended at university. After two hours, he decided to attempt deciphering Marot’s notes. He would simply regard the notebook as an exercise to be solved. Later, he could go back to the strange sequences of capital letters that began occurring on the second page.

  The bookseller opened the diary, and once again that sense of familiarity immediately came over him, together with an unfounded fear. His throat constricted, and he felt slightly nauseated. What was it about this book? Was it magic in some way? Or was he simply seeing ghosts?

  Laboriously, he tackled word after word. At first he had to consult Tachygraphy constantly, but as time went on he got faster and faster. He worked his way through the lines like a scythe cutting through tall grass. When he couldn’t entirely decipher certain sentences, he tried to reconstruct the sense of them. Word by word, paragraph by paragraph, Steven wrote it all out in a notebook on Sara’s desk, mingling his own style with the old-fashioned expressions of the assistant physician.

  For the next few hours Steven was entirely immersed in the world of Theodor Marot. Before his mind’s eye, horse-drawn cabs rattled along narrow, dirty alleyways, gentlemen in tails and overcoats raised their top hats in civil greeting, women in corsets and full skirts swayed in time to the music of a Johann Strauss waltz. Steven saw fairy-tale castles, festive banquets, shimmering grottoes; he heard the shrill giggling of a melancholic king and the resounding music of Richard Wagner; he breathed in the aroma of thousands of candles burning in a ballroom; he tasted Bordeaux a hundred and fifty years old.

  But above all, Steven sensed that this well-worn little notebook was in the process of telling him an extraordinary story—a mystery that only a small and select circle had known before; a secret written from the heart of the royal physician’s assistant, as if he were making a confession.

  The bookseller thought he could still see Theodor Marot’s fears behind the lines of text, like traces of blood not quite washed out of a white vest.

  8
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  Berg, 21 June 1886

  QECSOQNZO

  My name is Theodor Marot. I am assistant to the royal physician, Dr. Max Schleiss von Loewenfeld, and one of the king’s true friends, of whom His Majesty had far too few. We tried to save him, but we failed. Tears fall on these pages, like sand shaken to blot the ink, but even they cannot undo the fact that the king is dead and his enemies are victorious. May these notes help to bring the truth to light, painful as it is.

  As I write this, the great men of the land are gathering for the funeral banquet in the royal residence, where they will fall, like carrion crows, on oxtail soup, saddle of veal, and roast venison. They will wipe their greasy mouths and congratulate one another over coffee on the success of their intrigues. For the king is dead, and he has taken his secret with him to the grave. Only we few know what really happened, and if the ministers should ever learn this, we must all fear a shot delivered without warning. Not until the last of us has followed Ludwig to the grave can they be sure that no word of what happened will reach the general public, that they can go on ruling the country undisturbed. Their puppet, the prince regent, is sent off hunting and hiking while these gentlemen play politics on the grand scale.

  They laid the king to rest in the church of St. Michael in Munich on Saturday, two days ago. Although Dr. Loewenfeld is presumably a filthy traitor in the eyes of the ministers of state, we were both permitted to accompany the funeral procession, together with the other doctors. It was probably a final favor, before they force Loewenfeld to retire on the grounds of his age, and leave me free for anyone to gun down.

  Briennerstrasse, that magnificent street, was so full of people that day that the hearse, drawn by eight black horses, could hardly make any progress. Many wept, all the shops were closed, and black banners hung from the windows, whipping back and forth in a stormy wind. It was as if, on that day, the people of Munich wanted to give their king all the love that they had withheld from him for the decades of his life. But it was too late now.