The Ludwig Conspiracy (16 page)

“Suppose they don’t have a computer there?”

Sara Lengfeld looked at the bookseller with a mixture of pity and horror. “Oh, Herr Lukas, Herr Lukas,” she murmured. “Sometimes I really think you’re living in the wrong century.”

The hotel was slightly run-down and old-fashioned, as if its best days were long behind it. An elderly waiter moved through the first-floor restaurant, where there were not many guests. Yellowed photographs of Bavarian landscapes hung in the stairwell. Somewhere someone was playing a zither. However, the hotel did have a computer in the lobby, if not the latest model. At the hotel bar, Sara ordered a martini, which was too warm, and then she began tapping away at the keyboard, while Steven watched her curiously.

“It says here that Blaise de Vigenère was a sixteenth-century French diplomat who wrote several books on cryptography,” she said as she stared with concentration at the scratched screen. “The cipher named after him was regarded as impossible to decode for a long time, until it was finally cracked, first by a British mathematician and then by a Prussian officer in 1863. Today of course it’s simpler. Voilà!” Sara leaned back with satisfaction, pointing to a table on the monitor. “Here’s a program we can use to crack Monsieur Vigenère’s cipher.”

“Let’s try it with LOVED first,” Steven suggested. “Just to be on the safe side. It says there you need five letters in the keyword.”

Sara nodded, then typed the first coded word from Marot’s diary, QRCSOQNZO, into the computer. In the “Key” field she typed LOVED. After only a few seconds they had the solution.

“Well, that obviously didn’t work,” Sara said, disappointed. “It would have been too simple, I suppose. Now let’s try VENUS.”

She carefully typed in the five characters, but all she got back was another tangle of nonsensical letters.

“Shit. Maybe I typed something in wrong.” Sara tried again, but with the same result.

“Try APHRODITE,” Steven said. But again the result was nonsense words, and it was the same with AMOR, EROS, HEART, and a dozen other love-related words.

Sara sipped her martini silently, while Steven racked his brain for more possible keywords. “Damn,” he finally exclaimed. “And I was sure I was on the right track with the Vigenère cipher.”

“You could still be, and it’s just that we don’t have the right word yet,” Sara said. “I don’t think we ought to give up.”

She looked at some leaflets she had picked up in the ticket office, which described the Fairy-tale King’s other castles. “At least this is the smallest of the castles that Ludwig built,” she said. “I guess we can be glad we don’t have to search Herrenchiemsee or Neuschwanstein.”

Sighing, the bookseller got off the hotel sofa. “I guess there’s nothing I can do but decode a few more pages of the diary,” he said wearily. “After all, by the last point I reached, our friend Theodor hadn’t arrived at Linderhof. Maybe Marot’s account will put us on the track of the right word yet.” He nodded, suddenly determined. “I’d better start right away. Did you reserve me a room?”

“Well, as it happens, I have good news and bad news for you.” Sara drained her warm martini and nibbled the olive. “Yes, I did manage to get a room, which wasn’t easy, because Manstein Systems has booked almost the entire hotel. And no, it’s not a room for you; it’s a room for both of us. It’s up in the attic and was really meant for the hotel staff. I’m afraid there was nothing else free. I just hope you don’t snore as much as you did last night.”

T
HE ROOM WAS
about the size of a walk-in closet. It contained a double bed that took up most of the space, a television set, and a wobbly table at which Steven sat hunched over the diary on a chair that was much too low. A dusty bedside lamp was the only source of light. If he looked out the window, he could just make out the mountains on the other side of the valley in the evening twilight. They cast shadows that reached out to the hotel like long fingers. In another few minutes, Linderhof would be in darkness.

The bookseller had taken out the diary and his notepad, and he was now staring in the lamplight at the twining shorthand, which looked to him much more familiar this time. Where had he stopped?

For a long time I could still hear the bark of von Strelitz’s pistol in my ears. It was not to be the last time I heard it . . .

Steven tried to concentrate, in spite of the long, tiring day. Sara had seen to it that there was a plate of ham sandwiches and a bottle of red wine within reach, but he didn’t have much of an appetite. Absently, he let his eyes wander over the worn bedspread beside him, an empty bag of chips, and finally Sara, who was following some kind of soap opera on TV, listening to the sound through headphones, while she leafed through the castle brochures.

Women and multitasking, I’ll never understand how they do it . . .

“That’s garbage you’re watching,” Steven finally said. The faint murmur of conversation from the headphones was getting on his nerves. The falling darkness made him nervous; it reminded him of the dark cellar of his shop where he had killed a man only the night before. Steven felt he had to talk to someone, even if that someone was a chips-munching creature staring at a TV set with blank interest.

“Surfing instructors, barbecues, big-breasted blondes,” he grumbled, pointing to the TV screen. “What subject did you study?”

“What?” Sara took the headphones off. “Are you talking to me?” When she saw his glare of annoyance, she involuntarily had to smile.

“Men don’t understand,” she replied dryly. “We need this sort of thing to put us into a trancelike state that enables us to reach a condition of higher consciousness.” She winked. “Anyway, this
garbage
is from your native land. Let’s have a little more patriotism from you, Herr Lukas.”

“If that’s America, then I’m glad my parents came back to Germany when I was a child.”

“Back to Germany?” Sara frowned.

“We have German roots.” Steven sipped the hotel’s house red and twisted his mouth. The burgundy, as he expected, was not good, but all the same it gave him a pleasant sense of repletion. It felt good to talk; it had been so long since he had told anyone about the past. The events of the last few days had brought memories of his childhood back to his mind.

No silence,
he thought.
Silence brings back memories. Silence and darkness. Like being in my bed as a child when footsteps creaked along the corridor.

“My grandfather emigrated during the Nazi period,” he began hesitantly. “But my father, his son, could never entirely rid himself of feeling that he was German. As an adult, he came back here with his family.” He smiled wearily. “My mother was a German student he met at Boston University, where he was her lecturer in English Literature.”

Sara’s right eyebrow shot up. “I assume he read her Shakespeare at home. So a weakness for books runs in your family?”

“Books and a sense of being German,” Steven said. “Sometimes I feel more German than the Brothers Grimm.” He hesitated a moment before going on. “And where do
you
feel at home, Frau Lengfeld? On the Internet or in Berlin’s Wedding district?”

Sara laughed. “Nowhere, I’m afraid. No one’s proud of coming from Wedding. You feel proud of leaving it behind.”

“And you do that best with TV and the Internet?” Steven inquired.

“Well, they’re both windows to other worlds,” Sara said. “If you only have comics and a Snow White book to read as a child at home, the Internet offers fantastic possibilities.” She put her headphones back on. “Now, go on reading, Mr. Grimm. For a shy bookworm, you’re very inquisitive.”

Steven couldn’t stay annoyed. Sometimes the bristly, outspoken art detective beside him seemed like a being from another world. All the same, he found himself liking her more and more. It had been a long time since he’d been so closely involved with another person for such an extended period. Most of the time he lived with his books and parchments, glad to be left alone. Sara was right to say he could come from another century. Sometimes he felt like an outcast, a scholar from a distant age not yet ruled by cell phones, computers, and text messaging.

With a tingling sense of excitement and anticipation, the bookseller turned to the coded notes. As he leafed through the pages, flecked with age, he once again felt the familiar slight dizziness. But his fear of silence had gone, giving way to a quiet longing. In Steven’s eyes, the past really was more colorful and exciting than the gray twenty-first century.

Especially the past of Theodor Marot.

FALKHQR

O
n that September evening of the year 1885, in some dark corner of the Munich suburb of Au, I found myself in greater difficulties than ever before in my life. The king must be warned at once! I was sure that as soon as he discovered the ministers’ intentions, he would come to Munich by the fastest possible route to confront his enemies.

The power of the bureaucracy had grown apace over the last few years. Ludwig himself had played a part in that by avoiding the capital city of Bavaria, which he regarded as a stinking sewer. It was years since he had been in Munich, and he took no interest at all in politics. So his ministers concocted their own plans, placing only treaties and other such documents that needed the royal signature before the king, and in other respects determining the fate of the country on their own. They were the real monarchs; Ludwig was no more than a shadow king living in his own world of dreams.

What could I do? I was sure that von Strelitz already had the rail stations and telegraph offices watched. My one chance of reaching the king, therefore, was a fast horse. I stole back to the cab and unharnessed the exhausted nag. But I soon realized that I would never get back to Linderhof on this lame horse. I needed another, faster mount—but where would I find one? With my head bent so as not to attract attention, I went through the streets with the lame horse, under the eyes of the hungry, dirty inhabitants of that part of the city.

The poorest of the poor lived in the Au district. Like ghosts shunning the light of day, the houses huddled low by the steep wall of the valley of the Isar River. Many of them were no more than tiny hostelries where the families of day laborers lived, sometimes ten to a single room. The millstream of the Au flowed sluggishly past; refuse and dead rats drifted in its clouded waters. A gray cloud of smoke from the wood stoves of the houses and the countless coal-burning furnaces of the factories hung over the whole district.

After a while, I found an inn that did not look quite as dilapidated as the others. It was called Lilienbräu and lay close to the millstream. The small windows were smeared with soot, but the enamel inn sign looked new. The noise of drinkers came out of the taproom now that it was early evening, and a few people were bawling out a song to the music of an untuned fiddle.

I tied up my nag to a hook and entered the inn. A dozen eyes turned at once to stare at me suspiciously, and conversations and the song died away. I was looking into the faces of debilitated factory workers, drinking away their meager wages here before staggering home to their hungry families.

“A fine gentleman, eh?” growled a sturdy, bald man in a dirty leather apron, obviously a driver for a brewery. “Don’t he like it no more up there in the city, or what brings him here?”

Laughter broke out. I looked down at my black overcoat, slightly torn now. I had lost my top hat during the wild pursuit, but all the same the workmen realized at once that I came from a higher social class.

“I’m a cabby, no fine gentleman,” I said. “My horse is lame, and I need . . .”

“Better take Hartinger’s donkey,” crowed one of the men. “You won’t find nothing better, not here in the Au, you won’t!”

Once again the men roared with laugher. Some of them banged their tankards heavily on the scratched tables, but soon their fleeting interest in me was gone. I was about to go out again and look for another inn when an elderly gray-haired man, who had been standing at the bar in silence, turned to me, bowing and scraping. He wore a shabby black tailcoat and a battered bowler hat, and there was an impertinent glint in his eye.

“Could be I might have a hoss for the gennelman,” he growled, drawing on a stumpy cigar. “Could be, could be. Wouldn’t come cheap, though.”

“As I mentioned before, I’m a cabdriver, and . . .”

“Huh!” The man spat into a bowl on the bar counter. “You don’t fool me, my young dandy! I been a cabby myself, and you talk like the nobs, not like us. So what’ll you pay?”

I decided not to let myself in for any more argument and brought a few coins from my coat pocket.

The old cabby chuckled. “That all you got? Guess you could buy a calf and ride away on that.”

“I’m afraid I have no more at the moment. You can have the horse that’s tied up outside.”

He peered through the window, then took a deep puff on his cigarillo and enveloped me in smoke. “That one outside the door?” His chuckle gave way to a severe fit of coughing that shook his whole body. Very likely he was in the early stages of consumption. “That jade’s no good to no one but the knacker,” he finally croaked. “Won’t do no business that way.”

Reluctantly, I decided to let him into at least part of my plan. Unobtrusively, I opened my shirt and showed the ragged, sick man the golden amulet with the likeness of Ludwig that hung around my neck. On the back of it was a white swan with the royal seal. Ludwig himself had given it to me as a sign of his trust. Only a select few owned such a pendant.

“Very well,” I whispered. “No, I am not a cabdriver. I am here on the king’s business. And I need a horse—a fast one. The king will reward you more than generously later.”

“On the king’s business, eh?” The old man’s eyes glittered as he examined the golden amulet with the ivory intarsia work. “Even if that’s the truth, the king’s stark raving mad, ain’t got no money left. Even the sparrows on the rooftops whistle that. So what’ll Herr Huber, like we call Ludwig in the taverns, what’ll Herr Huber pay me with, then?”