The Ludwig Conspiracy (28 page)

Think of the girls, the champagne, fishing for tuna. Damn big tuna. Their blood will dye the sea red . . .

Lancelot suddenly remembered that he was to deliver that bookseller alive. His glance fell on the small crate at the stern of the dinghy, and he couldn’t keep back a grin. A good thing he had kept some of the gear he’d used in Serbia; he had a hunch that he could use it today. At least it would speed things up a good deal; the man wouldn’t have the faintest chance of defending himself.

And no one had said a word about letting that woman leave the island alive.

F
OR THE FIRST TIME
in days, Steven didn’t feel afraid of anything.

They were lying side by side on a carpet of red and yellow leaves, watching a spotted woodpecker send its messages out into the wood in Morse code. Steven could smell the nicotine seeping through the pores of Sara’s skin. Curiously enough, he found it exciting, like a new perfume that he didn’t yet recognize.

She had kissed him for a long time, and then placed a finger on his lips to close them, as if any wrong word spoken now would destroy the magic between them. Eventually, they began talking about their favorite songs, about American soap operas unknown to him, and the stupidest weather forecasters they’d seen. They disagreed on whether
Psycho
or
North by Northwest
was the best Hitchcock movie of all time. They talked about everything except the present and their own past lives, and for just under an hour they were far, far away from Marot’s diary, the Cowled Men, the magician, and the blinded giant. Only now did Steven realize how long it was since he had exchanged more than a few words with another human being. He had retreated into his books as if into a cocoon.

“What’s it like to grow up without books?” he asked Sara, who was cracking beechnuts beside him and munching the kernels with relish.

She laughed. “Is that how I seem to you? A female nerd raised by computers?” She looked at him, shaking her head. “What on earth do you think of me? I’m more interested in the contents of a book than its form, that’s all. Why would I need a library when I can download all those volumes to my tablet instead?”

“Maybe because it’s pleasant to leaf through books, smell them, sleep with books beside you?” Steven said. “Because books are like nourishment for oddballs like me, and I’ve always had them around me? Somehow I can’t get used to the idea that all that will soon be a thing of the past.”

“You’re incorrigibly nostalgic,” Sara said with a sigh. “But guess what? I like that. You’re someone a person could hold on to when time goes racing by too fast.” She spat out a couple of beechnut kernels. “Besides, it’s not what you think. I did read a lot as a child. I often went to the municipal library in Wedding instead of going to school; I told them I had to study there for my homework.” Lost in thought, she cracked another of the dry nuts. “I immersed myself in adventure stories to forget the world outside. Later, my father brought home illustrated books on painting. If you have graffiti and dog turds on your doorstep, a painting by Caravaggio is like a warm, refreshing shower.”

“Is your father a painter, then?” Steven asked.

This time Sara’s laughter was a touch too shrill. “
A painter?
I think he’d have liked to be an artist. To this day he’s addicted to art. My mother is addicted to alcohol and my father to art, and it hasn’t necessarily made either of them happy.” She abruptly got to her feet and picked up a heap of colorful leaves, dropping them again to rain down on Steven.

“If you were marooned on the proverbial desert island,” she asked him, “which three books would you take with you?”

Steven swept the leaves off his forehead. “Only three? That’s a difficult question. Let me think.” He paused, and then finally went on. “Thomas Mann’s
The Magic Mountain,
even though I’ve read it three times already. Robert Musil’s thousand-page epic
The Man Without Qualities,
at least that would last a long time, and then . . .” He stopped, his expression suddenly darkening.

“You’d take Marot’s diary, wouldn’t you?” Sara whispered. “The book’s gotten under your skin.”

Steven did not reply for a long time, and then he hesitantly nodded. “There’s something about it. It’s like black magic, a kind of curse, and I’m afraid I won’t be able to shake it off until I’ve come to the end of the diary. Sometimes I think . . .”

The long drawn-out sound of a ferry’s siren brought them back to reality. Startled, Sara looked at the time.

“Hell, four in the afternoon already,” she said, brushing the leaves off her dress. “I suggest you get back to that curse of yours. You’re supposed to have the bit about Herrenchiemsee decoded by this evening. Meanwhile Uncle Lu is arranging for us to have a private guided tour.”

“How about you?” asked Steven, who was obviously finding it hard to leave their enchanted world in the beech wood. “What will you do?”

“Look around the island for a while.” She kissed him gently on the mouth one last time and then turned to leave. “You don’t want me holding your hand while you work on it, do you? See you at the castle at six. Look after yourself.”

With a final wave, she disappeared among the trees, and Steven was left alone. He ran his hands through his hair, his mind in a whirl. He was clearly in love, a tingling spreading through him right down to his toes. But he had no idea whether Sara felt the same. Steven was reminded of Maria and Theodor. Marot couldn’t be sure either whether the young maidservant felt anything more than friendship for him. Why were women always so complicated?

The thought of the assistant physician reminded Steven of the diary that had cast its spell on him. Still in bewilderment, and with a sense that he was floating on clouds, he sat down on the bench under the beech tree and returned to reading the memoir of a man long dead, a man who was turning more and more into a distant ally of his, a companion linked to him over the years by this book. By now he had stopped transferring the transliteration of the shorthand to his notebook. The entries held him spellbound, too much so for him to have time to make a transcript.

Steven could almost believe he heard Theodor Marot speaking to him between the pages, the whisper as he turned them like the whispering of the conspirators, and he felt as if the king himself might step out of the volume and give him a friendly wave.

After only a few lines, the bookseller was back in the nineteenth century.

NFTQM, WQI, GQT

W
e traveled to the Chiemsee on the railroad, going by way of Starnberg and Munich. Ludwig and I sat at the very front, in a royal car with furnishings in no way inferior to those of the king’s castles. It was as if we were coasting through Bavaria in a golden salon. Snorting like a dragon from the world of the sagas, the locomotive made its way past meadows and fields where a few peasants stood around here and there, waving their hats to us.

Nostalgically, I remembered the brief time before the two great wars, first against Prussia, then against France. At that time, Ludwig still appeared in public, and the people cheered for the tall, good-looking young man who was their king. But in the last few years, Ludwig had turned away from his people. With a curiously storklike gait, which he obviously considered majestic, he occasionally stalked down the lines of elderly dignitaries and young officers, but otherwise he remained alone, surrounded only by his closest companions. It was a self-chosen internal exile that he had left, at the most, only for his friend Richard Wagner, whom he revered and who had died two years earlier.

In silence, eyes closed, he sat hunched in his compartment, and so I finally decided to go several cars down the train, where I met Maria with several of the servants. The loud merriment here made the silence in the king’s private car all the more uncanny.

“If you know the king so well,” I said, sitting down beside Maria on the wooden bench, “then tell me what Ludwig thinks he’s doing. He acts like a man from another world.”

Maria smiled and looked out at the landscape passing by us. “He
is
a man from another world,” she replied. “He comes from a time long before ours. At heart he’s a boy acting in his own play. With knights, castles, and wicked dwarves. Those are the ministers as he sees them, wicked dwarves.” She laughed and pointed to a couple of the footmen in our compartment who were standing at the windows, open-mouthed, while putting their heads outside to feel the wind. “We race through the world, drawn by iron horses. We build machines and factories. But Ludwig stands still and lets all that pass him by. He’s like a king from one of those Brothers Grimm fairy tales. Sometimes he reads them to me, and then I’m Snow White and he is the prince turned into a shaggy bear by a bad fairy’s spell.”

“Prince? Bear?” I shook my head in dismay. “Maria, the king is not a child anymore. He has a country to rule . . .”

“A country that has stopped dreaming,” Maria said, interrupting me. “Don’t you understand, Theodor? Ludwig dreams for us because we have forgotten how to dream. To him, a king is not just someone who signs documents and moves armies from place to place; he is a dream, an idea.”

“An
idea?
” I said skeptically. “Did he tell you so? Does he teach you such things?”

“At least he doesn’t treat me like a stupid woodcarver’s daughter, as you do.”

Maria fell silent and stared out of the window.

Sighing, I decided not to continue this conversation. After a while I returned to the king, who was still sitting with his eyes closed. He looked like a monument to himself.

In the evening we reached Prien on the Chiemsee, and from there we crossed to Herrenchiemsee by water. While Maria and the rest of the domestic staff drove to the castle in a jolting cart, I stayed with Ludwig at the island’s little harbor.

I soon noticed that the building work was not far advanced. A little locomotive, whistling and hissing noisily, towed a few trucks laden with stones and timber up to the castle. But even from the bank it was clear that large parts of the building were not yet completed. The side wings looked curiously naked, mere shells, and what would be an avenue in the future was nothing but a dirty transport road. On the western side of the castle, craftsmen were at work hammering and filing the basin of the fountain, and the canal was only half dug. Nonetheless, you could already guess at the design of this castle, in which Ludwig hoped to emulate and honor his great example, the Sun King, as a Bavarian Versailles.

“The sun rises exactly here and sets over there, on the other side of the island.” Ludwig, now in high good humor again and leaping about among the workmen like an excited child, indicated a place on an imaginary axis leading from the avenue to the canal. “The castle lies exactly between them,” he called to me, laughing. “I can see the chariot of the heavens rising and falling from my bedroom. Isn’t that wonderful, Marot?
Mon Dieu!
”

All at once Ludwig’s expression changed. Imperiously, he beckoned to an overseer of the building work in a black coat. “Here, you! What’s gone wrong with the figures there on the Fountain of Fortuna? The triton is holding his hand
up.
Didn’t I give clear instructions for him to hold it down, like the one in Versailles?”

Looking anxious, the man made him a deep bow. “Majesty, forgive us, but there were several different designs, and . . .”

“Different designs?” Ludwig’s face flushed red as a lobster. “What’s the meaning of this? Only the latest design counts, the one I commissioned myself. What impertinence! By God, this is lèse majesté!” And with his strong arms he suddenly snatched up an easel lying on the ground and began belaboring the overseer with it. “Take that figure away!” he cried like a man possessed. “This instant! Ruemann must cast a new one, the way I damn well told him to.”

I hurried over to Ludwig and tried to get the little wooden easel away from him before he beat the poor man to death. “Stop, Your Majesty!” I cried. “It wasn’t his mistake. Stop before there’s an accident!”

Ludwig suddenly stopped beating the man and looked at me in surprise. For a moment, I thought he was about to thrash me in the same way. But he dropped the easel and turned away from the unfortunate overseer. “You . . . you’re right, Marot,” he gasped. “I mustn’t let myself get so carried away. But there’s so much at stake here, an idea towering above all human conceptions. Do you understand? One sometimes must exercise severity.”

“An idea?” I hesitantly asked. I remembered what Maria had been trying to explain to me on the train.

“You’ll see. This very night you’ll see.” The king beckoned over a second overseer, who approached only with reluctance. “This evening all the candles in the Hall of Mirrors are to burn,” he ordered in a loud voice. “For me and for my dear companion here.”

“But that’s almost two thousand candles,” the man cautiously objected. “I don’t know whether we . . .”

“This evening at eight, and I’ll suffer no contradiction.” Ludwig took my arm and drew me away from the building work. “Come with me, Marot. We will take a simple meal in the monastery. I need a friend now.”

WQI, ID

By winding, narrow pathways we approached the old monastery of the Augustinian Canons, which had housed a now-defunct brewery. On the floor formerly occupied by the canons and princes, Ludwig had had a few rooms furnished in Spartan fashion, and from this vantage point he intended to supervise the building for the next two weeks. I myself was given one of the rooms on the second floor, but the king told me to accompany him at once to his meal, which we took in one of the magnificent halls of the old monastery. Reluctantly, I followed him. I had really hoped to eat down in the kitchen with Maria and Leopold.

It was a ghastly dinner. The king did not eat; he gorged. Gravy and crushed green peas spattered his beard and his coat, but it did not occur to Ludwig to clean himself up with a cloth. He tipped great drafts of wine down his throat, and the red liquid ran over his chin and down to his collar. Only on rare occasions did the king dine in a company of any size, and if he did, he would hide himself behind mountains of plates and glasses. He shoveled everything down his throat like some Bacchanalian god of ancient times, as if the food would extinguish an inner fire.