The Ludwig Conspiracy (31 page)

“You’re right.” Albert Zöller stopped in front of a huge entrance portal at the end of the corridor and took out the key ring. He searched for the biggest key with his greasy fingers and inserted it in the lock. Squealing, the heavy double doors swung open.

“Then we’ll see what our friend Theodor made of it at the time,” Uncle Lu said. “Let’s hope love didn’t paralyze his brain.”

Two hours later, they stood in the king’s magnificent council chamber on the second floor, their heads together over a worn old map spread out on a table covered by a blue velvet cloth.

Night had fallen outside. The few lights left on after the castle closed bathed the gilded stucco hall in a fairy-tale light. When Steven looked out of the windows, which were the height of a man, and stared into the darkness, he thought he saw something intermittently flickering outside. He assumed it was distant lightning portending a coming storm. But it could equally well be the reflection of their own flashlights in the countless windowpanes and mirrors of the castle.

Or someone else’s flashlight,
Steven thought.
This castle is massive.

“Let’s see,” Uncle Lu said, tapping the ground plans of some of the rooms shown on the map. “We’ve been in the Great Hall of Mirrors, the Hall of Peace, the Hall of War . . .”

“Don’t forget that bedroom with the blue globe and the four-poster bed in it,” the bookseller said wearily. “As well as the writing room and the Blue Salon.”

“We’ve been in every damn room on the first floor,” Sara groused. “Even the ones that were never completed. My feet hurt with all this walking, and still we’ve found nothing.
Niente. Nada.
”

“There must be something we’ve overlooked,” Steven said. “I’m sure the keyword is here. It’s obvious that all the rooms in the castle revolve around Louis the Fourteenth. That’s clear from the diary, and there was the word KING as a clue. So we must . . .”

Suddenly he gave a start.

“What is it?” Sara asked. “Did you think of something?”

Steven shook his head. “I heard a sound, footsteps somewhere. Could someone have followed us?”

“Only the night watchman,” Zöller calmly replied. “And Franz is a good friend of mine. He knows we’re looking around here, but we ought not to put too much of a strain on his patience. So you’d better go on, Herr Lukas.”

With some hesitation, Steven nodded. He was still thinking of the two men he had seen on the castle forecourt. Had they really been only ordinary tourists, or were they, too, in the castle now? Were they the Cowled Men whom Sara thought she had seen? Exhausted, Steven rubbed his temples and tried to concentrate on the puzzle. Very likely Uncle Lu was right, and by now he was simply too jumpy for such adventures.

“Marot mentions all the pictures, statues, and busts of the Sun King,” he went on. “The entire castle is a tribute to Louis the Fourteenth, furnishings included. The code word
must
have something to do with him.”

“But you’ve already tried all the words we thought of on your laptop,” Zöller said.
“King Ludwig, Sun . . .”

“
Versailles
?” Sara suggested. “It may be too long, but let me try it.”

She took the laptop out of her bag and typed in the word. There was a soft beep.

“Fuck,” she said. “If
NZC
is the title of a poem, then it has to be a pretty modern one, definitely not from the Romantic period.” She tried typing in a few more words but soon gave up, swearing to herself.

“Can’t you think of anything?” she asked Zöller, her nerves obviously on edge. “After all, you’re supposed to be the expert.”

Uncle Lu rolled his eyes. “I’m an expert on Ludwig the Second, not on your word games.”

“We won’t get anywhere like this,” Steven said. He stared at the almost life-sized portrait of the Sun King behind the writing desk. It showed Louis XIV in his blue coronation cloak, with a pattern of little golden crosses, wearing a full-bottomed wig and with a cane held solemnly in one hand. He seemed to be looking down on the three of them, trying to solve their puzzle with something close to mockery.

“I’m sure that guy up there is trying to tell us something,” Steven murmured. “But for the life of me I can’t figure out what. The keyword must be something that’s hidden and obvious at the same time, like the name
Maria
carved into the bark of the linden tree.”

“What other rooms are there on this floor?” Sara asked, turning to Uncle Lu. “Could be we’ll find something in them.”

Zöller frowned. “As far as I know, only the robing room and bathroom were even half finished. Oh, and the kitchen with the apparatus working the magic table. Technically very interesting, but not the sort of room where you might expect to find a clue.”

“All the same, I think we ought to take a look.” Sara was already hurrying to the door, while Uncle Lu, grumbling, rolled up his map. “If only to see what kind of a wardrobe Ludwig had.”

They went back to the first floor down a flight of stairs still in a rough state of construction. Now, at night, the echo of their footsteps sounded even more sinister than earlier in the evening when there were still a few other people in the now-empty building. Steven thought he heard soft voices, and gravel crunching outside the windows. He pressed his nose flat against one of the dim panes, but all he could see through it was the tops of linden trees, looking in the dark like the shaggy heads of gigantic rock trolls.

“Oh, come along,” Zöller grumbled. “I told you it’s only the night watchman. You’ll get me shitting my own pants next.”

Steven followed the others into a room where the beams of their flashlights revealed a huge metal structure. It looked to Steven like Dr. Frankenstein’s dissecting table. Only at second glance did he notice the crank and the weights on either side of it. The platform extended upward to the ceiling.

“We’re directly under the dining room here,” Uncle Lu explained. “Ludwig used this hydraulic elevator to bring the already-set table up to the dining room above. The famous magic table straight out of the fairy tales. Not bad, eh? But take a look at this.” He led Steven and Sara into a bathroom with a marble bath the size of a small hotel swimming pool.

“Ludwig’s bathtub. The basin holds more than thirteen thousand gallons of water,” Zöller said. “Presumably the king and his men friends . . . er, disported themselves here. But the room was never completed . . . Which means that Marot won’t have seen it, and he can’t have left a message here. I’m baffled, I’m afraid. End of guided tour.”

“Nothing unusual in the robing room either,” Sara called from a nearby room. “Apart from the fact that so many mirrors would have a terrible effect on my getting dressed in the morning. Seeing
one
big bum is quite enough. Here I’d see an infinite number of them. Not at all good for the ego . . .” Shrugging, she rejoined them in the bathroom.

Steven passed one hand wearily over his eyes. “I’m still sure we’ve overlooked something. Let’s go through all the rooms again in our heads. The Great Hall of Mirrors, the porcelain room, the Blue Salon . . .”

Another sound stopped him. This time it came from the right, where the stairs led up to the second floor. When Steven turned around, he saw the night watchman, shining his flashlight straight into his face.

“No offense meant,” the man intoned, “but I have to go over to the old monastery now. How much longer do you need?”

“Not long, Franz,” Zöller replied. “We’ll just take a quick look through again, and then we ought to be finished.”

“Heavens above, Lu!” the night watchman said. “You got any idea the trouble you could land me in? If admin hears that I’m letting private guests into the place at night, I’ll be fired. What are you doing here, anyway?”

“Helping the king, Franz. That’s all I can tell you.” Albert Zöller raised his hands in a placatory gesture. “Give us another hour and then we’ll be off.”

“Okay,” the watchman said. “But only if you’ll appear as Ludwig in the gondola again at our next meeting.” He switched off the flashlight and turned away. “I’m going over to the monastery now. When I come back, I’ll look in on the museum next door. I’d like you to be out of here by then.”

“Just a moment,” Steven said, when the night watchman had left. “The museum. We haven’t been there yet.”

Uncle Lu’s brow wrinkled, and he studied the map again. “But what’s the point? Yes, it’s here in the castle, but it wasn’t here when Ludwig was, so Marot can’t have left any clue in there. More likely we’d find something in the garden, but we’d have to wait until tomorrow for that.”

“But the rooms themselves
were
here at the time,” Sara objected. “Steven’s right. We ought at least to take a look at the museum.”

“Oh, very well, Frau Lengfeld,” Uncle Lu growled. “You and Herr Lukas go to the museum, and I’ll rattle through the rooms on the second floor again. Let’s meet by the cash desk in an hour’s time. If we haven’t found anything by then, we’ll give up for the night. I can’t keep Franz waiting any longer, and that’s my last word.”

Still grousing quietly, the old man moved away and disappeared behind the metal structure of the magic table. The lightning of the coming thunderstorm flashed beyond the windows.

S
ARA AND STEVEN WAITED
until Uncle Lu’s footsteps had died away on the stairs. Now the only sounds were the occasional click of the emergency lighting and their own breathing. In silence, they hurried back along the corridor to the reception desk, from which a narrow passage led to the east wing of the castle. They ducked under a barrier and entered the dark museum.

“Not that I think we’ll find much here,” Steven said, “but I’d like to go to bed feeling we really have tried everything.”

“And it’s good for the two of us to be on our own,” Sara whispered.

Steven grinned. “Did Marot’s tryst with Maria inspire you? If so, we’d better be quick before Zöller . . .”

“Idiot!” Sara snapped. “That’s not what I meant. We need to talk about Uncle Lu.”

Steven raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Why?”

“Up to now he’s played pretty dumb for a genuine Ludwig expert, don’t you think? As if he didn’t want us to find anything out. And he spent a long time chatting to those guys from security just now. All dyed-in-the-wool Ludwig fans, like that eccentric fisherman who brought us over in his boat. And at midday, he suddenly disappeared for half an hour.”

“You mean . . .”

“I mean maybe it was a mistake for me to let someone like Zöller in on the whole story. How do we know he wouldn’t like to have the diary for himself? For himself or some organization that he’s working for in secret. That green Bentley only began following us
after
we’d visited Zöller.”

“The Cowled Men. You really think he’s working with them? He himself described them as a bunch of idiots.”

“Maybe only to divert suspicion from himself. In any event, we ought to keep our eyes open.”

They entered a long corridor, where nothing but vague outlines could be seen in the dim emergency lighting. Outside the windows, distant lightning flashed, and thunder rumbled from the other side of the lake. The king’s christening robe, coronation cloak, and death mask hung in glass cases beside the corridor walls. In one niche Steven saw yellowed photographs charting the course of Ludwig’s physical decline. He looked thoughtfully from one to another. On the extreme left was a lanky youth with a slightly feminine cast of countenance, a cigarette in his fingers coquettishly stretched out in front of him. On the extreme right was a fat, bloated man in a Bavarian hat, one of the last photographs of Ludwig, taken just before his death. The contrast sent a shudder down the bookseller’s spine. What could happen in the life of a person to bring about such a change?

More sparsely lit halls followed, containing furniture, photographs, glass cases, and finally a life-sized marble statue of the king. The statue was in the shadows, so that for a brief moment Steven thought he was looking at a living man. He imagined Ludwig climbing down from his marble pedestal to them, in order to tell them his secret.

The bookseller found the silence around them oppressive; he felt as if he were inside a casket. A black wave of memories lapped against the door of his subconscious mind. Steven saw himself as a boy, standing beside his parents’ grave with red-rimmed eyes.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust . . .

“Is that Neuschwanstein?” he whispered, to take his mind off the memories, looking at the model of a fairy-tale castle set on a plaster rock.

Sara shook her head as she read the plaque affixed to it. “That’s Falkenstein Castle,” she said. “Another castle that Ludwig intended to build near Pfronten. Unfortunately, his death prevented it, although I suspect his ministers would finally have turned off the money tap before that.”

In the dim light, Steven made his way into the next high-ceilinged room, where there were more models. By now he was in control of himself again.

“This is interesting,” he called to Sara, who was still standing in front of the plaster model of Falkenstein Castle. “Here’s a model of a group of statues intended for the Apollo Fountain down by the canal. Exactly where Theodor gave Maria that bunch of flowers.”

Steven looked at the statue of the Greek god on his chariot of the sun. “The sun as a symbol again. I really could have sworn that was the keyword.”

His eyes fell on a decorative vase beside the model. An inscription told him that it, too, came from Herrenchiemsee. Again the sun stood in its glory over the portrait of Louis XIV, which was surrounded by fine porcelain flowers. Farther down was the crest of the Sun King: three golden lilies on a blue field.

Suddenly Steven stopped dead. In his excitement, he almost forgot to breathe.

Three golden lilies . . .

Heart thudding, he remembered the last entry in the diary, the exact passage where Theodor confessed his love to the shy Maria.

The lily has been a symbol of purity and innocence since time immemorial . . .