The Ludwig Conspiracy (49 page)

All at once, Steven felt as if he were behind a wall of opaque glass. He vaguely saw Sara opening her mouth, obviously saying something to him, but he couldn’t hear her. Slowly, he slipped to the floor, clutching the family tree like a child holding his teddy bear as if it were the last thing that could still save him from the all-destroying fire . . . from the stifling, billowing, nightmarish clouds of smoke that slowly withdrew, and showed him, at last, all that he had suppressed for so long.

The book took him back to his childhood. Suddenly he could remember everything . . .

. . . A
SEA OF LEGS
before him, women’s legs under long ball gowns, men’s legs in black front-pleated evening pants, hands patting Steven on the head, someone pushing a plate of wobbly green dessert over to him. They all speak the same kind of clipped English as his mother, very different from his father’s soft English. It sounds like wood breaking in the forest, the same as in the scary fairy tales that Mama is always telling him.

Steven feels bored; he is only just six, and there are no playmates here. Just a lot of uninteresting grownups and a girl who is about ten years old and bigger than he is. She has long blond braids and is wearing a white dress. She gives him a bad-tempered look and hides behind her father . . . Steven has forgotten her name. Daddy says she’s his cousin and they should play together. The girl’s eyes flash like burning coals, and she frightens him. He runs out into the corridor, away from the girl, down the broad spiral staircase . . .

The music of piano and strings can be heard on the second floor. Steven hears the laughter of the guests, sometimes shrill, sometimes menacing, the clatter of cutlery, the clink of glasses, but it gets quieter and more muted the closer he comes to the library at the end of the corridor, which is the room where he plays, his dusty citadel. Many of the books here are more expensive than a car, his father once told him. “One of them is even irreplaceable. You will inherit it one day, but don’t ask questions now. Let Daddy read in peace . . .”

Steven pushes the heavy double doors, and they open with a squeal; everything is dark in here, the switch for the light is much too high up for him . . . but Steven has brought one of the brightly colored Chinese lanterns from the garden with a candle inside it to light the way.

The bookshelves tower up in front of him; he can smell the dust between the pages of the books; he wants to go on reading those animal stories by the man with the funny name. Or the story of the wolf and the seven little goats . . . 

“You’ll know him by his rough voice and his black paws, the mother goat tells her kids . . .”

Suddenly Steven catches sight of a picture above his father’s armchair. It shows an old man with stern, piercing eyes and a huge mustache. He has often seen it up there, but this time it is standing out from the wall a little way, like a small door standing ajar.

Steven cautiously moves the picture aside, and behind it he sees a second door, made of iron. That door is open as well, and there’s a pretty little treasure chest inside it, containing an old book, with a white swan on the cover. It looks like a book of magic spells. Steven decides that he really must ask his parents if they will give him the little treasure chest so that he can keep his plastic knights in it.

He opens the book, and something about it is strange. There are letters in it that he has never seen before. They look like magical signs—maybe it really is a book of magic spells. Steven holds the shining lantern closer to the curly letters; he wants to know what they say; he guesses that it must be something very, very important. This is the book that his father was always talking about . . .

All of a sudden Steven feels a draft of air behind him. He turns around and sees that girl from downstairs standing there in her white dress, with her long blond braids. She points her fingers at the little treasure chest on the floor, and the book with the white swan on the cover in his hands. “Give that here!” she shouts. “It belongs to Grandfather! Give it to me, you bastard, you beast, you thief!”

She falls on Steven and tries to grab the book, but he takes it away from her. They fall to the floor, and she scratches his face. Steven shrieks; her fingernails are boring into his eyelids; she is thrusting them into his eyes like needles; green and yellow flashes go through his head . . . “You bastard, you dirty thief! Give it here! Give it here!”

All at once she cries out in pain and rolls to one side. Steven sees little flames licking at the hem of her dress. The Chinese lantern with the candle flickering inside it lies crushed on the floor beside her. The girl screams and rolls back and forth; the books around her catch fire. The girl sets more and more of the books in the shelves and on the desk alight. Now she looks like an angel falling from heaven, like an angel in a purgatorial fire made of books . . .

Gray smoke rises, enveloping the bookshelves. Steven reaches for the book of magic, puts it in the little wooden chest, and runs out into the corridor, toward a window. With the little chest in his hand, he slides down along the ivy and into the garden. He must get away from there, away from the crackling, smoking books, away from the girl with her burning dress.

At last, on the outskirts of the garden, the dilapidated teahouse emerges in front of him. Steven pushes the crooked door open, crawls in on all fours like a baby, and gets under the table. Mom and Dad will be very cross with him for playing with fire. The library is their greatest treasure, they always say; they will scold him. Steven crawls farther in, behind the dusty, folded garden chairs, and the moldy-smelling tablecloths stacked up in piles in the teahouse, but he holds the little treasure chest tight. He is a stone, a silent stone in the earth, and no one can see him.

All at once he hears many voices coming from the garden, a firefighters’ siren wailing in a crescendo. Steven also hears his parents’ voices: “Steven! Steven!” But he doesn’t dare to call back.

Suddenly they are shouting so loudly that Steven has to cover his ears. No, they are not shouting; they are screaming. Steven shouts back. He shouts, “Stop it!” After all, he is a stone, a mute stone in the earth. But Steven is not mute anymore; he shouts until at last silence reigns. The door opens, and there stands a tall firefighter in his helmet and armor like a real knight. He carries Steven out to his car with the flashing blue light on top. Someone takes the little treasure chest away from him and gives it to one of the police officers. The little chest sways up and down in his hands like a jack-o’-lantern, becomes a tiny dot, and suddenly disappears behind two parked cars.

The little chest . . . the little chest . . . my little chest!

A
LOUD REPORT
brought Steven back to the present. He saw Zöller suddenly fall aside, blood spurting from his body, a great deal of blood. With horror, Steven saw that something had blown the whole left-hand side of Zöller’s face away. The old man was dead before he even hit the floor.

Luise Manstein stood behind the balustrade, with her smoking Derringer in her hands. She leaned against a man-sized opening that had been hidden behind one of the pictures of heroes in the upper part of the great hall.

“Hello, Steven,” she hissed from the balcony, pointing to Zöller’s body. “Did the old man talk in the end?” She looked at her silver wristwatch. “I came to tell you that your time has run out. But what does that matter? You know the truth now.”

The industrialist spread her arms out. In the royal mantle, she looked like a tall, white angel.

Just as she looked back then in her white dress,
Steven thought.
Except that she doesn’t have those blond braids now.

Luise gave an almost childish smile, then swept her arm in a circular gesture around the throne room, with the body of Albert Zöller lying in his own blood in the middle of it.

“Welcome, my dear cousin. Make yourself at home here in our great-great-grandfather’s castle.”

A
S LUISE LOOKED DOWN ON THEM
, the double doors opened, and Lancelot came into the throne room with three of the other bodyguards. Each held a submachine gun
.

“You’re the girl from all those years ago,” Steven said. “The girl with her dress on fire. The girl with the blond braids who tried to scratch my eyes out in the library.”

“Correct. And it’s a great pity that I didn’t succeed. That would have spared us all a lot of trouble.” Luise pointed to Sara’s laptop on the throne room floor. “But now it will all be set right. Looks like you’ve solved the whole puzzle.”

Lancelot had reached the middle of the throne room. He cast a glance at the laptop and frowned.

“It says something about a fourth castle, Your Excellency,” he growled. “And a scion showing the king’s dearest treasures there. Can you make anything of such nonsense?”

Luise was taken aback for a moment; then she began to giggle. Briefly, Steven wondered if she was about to tip over into full-blown insanity.

Or maybe I am.

“Can I make anything of it?” she asked at last. “That’s a good one, very good. Theodor Marot had a real sense of humor.”

“Whatever’s so funny, I hope it chokes you. You and your entire bunch of deranged gorillas.” Sara’s voice was shaking, and tears of rage glittered in the corners of her eyes. “You’re none of you anything but a gang of crazy murderers.” She pointed to Zöller’s body. “That old man was no danger to you, and yet . . .”

Lancelot waved that away. “Stop making such a fuss. He wouldn’t have lived much longer anyway. It was just putting him out of his misery.” He grinned. “Better start worrying about your own future instead, girlie.”

“Stop blathering, paladin, and pick up that diary,” Luise hissed.

Lancelot strode toward Steven, bent slightly, and picked up the little wooden treasure chest from the floor. The bookseller still felt numb. Before him lay Uncle Lu, shot in cold blood, just after he had told Steven his true origin. Yet he did not have the strength to look down at the body of the murdered man.

I am a descendant of Ludwig the Second,
Steven told himself.
How much of Ludwig is there in me? My yearning for past times, my dreams, the way I like to immerse myself in books—is all that a mild form of insanity? Ludwig’s brother, Otto, was raving mad, and so is Luise. What about me? Do I, too, carry the germ?

Suddenly he remembered what Sara had said about him back at Linderhof.

Sometimes I think you’re living in the wrong century, Herr Lukas . . .

“I admit it’s hard to grasp, Steven,” Luise said gently. Still wearing the royal white cloak, which dragged over the floor behind her, she had come down a flight of steps and entered the throne room.

“I myself have known who I am since my earliest childhood. My grandfather was always telling me about it, the way other children get told the story of Baby Jesus. It never meant much to Papa, but I spent most of my time with my dear grandpa. He and I were . . . very like each other.” Luise looked at Steven with a spark in her eye. “My grandfather and yours were brothers, Steven. Brothers and at the same time mortal enemies. May I?” She picked up the bloodstained family tree from the mosaic floor and examined it, wrinkling her brow.

“Leopold, son of Ludwig the Second,” she murmured, running her finger down the line of her and Steven’s forebears. “To the day of his early death on the battlefields of Verdun, Leopold never knew anything about his real father. Marot thought it too dangerous. The prince regent’s agents never rested.” Luise shook her head, lost in thought; she now seemed to be in an entirely different world.

“When the good Theodor died a short time later, working as an army doctor on the Somme, only Maria still knew the secret of the diary. On her deathbed, she left it to her two grandsons. Lothar and Anton, the legitimate heirs of Ludwig, were to bring the truth to light after so many years.”

“If you’ve inherited anything from Ludwig yourself, dear cousin, it can only be insanity,” Steven said. “Insanity and, I hope, an early death.”

“Quiet!” she snapped. “You still don’t understand anything. You and your whole despicable branch of the family. My grandfather Lothar was telling people about his true origins back in the 1930s, but the folk of Oberammergau thought he was crazy, just fantasizing.” She shook her head indignantly. “Your grandfather Anton didn’t want to know anything about it. He disowned his family. They quarreled, and then . . .”

Her voice rose again; her eyes seemed to be spraying fiery sparks. “And then your damn grandfather went to the States and simply took the diary with him, like a cheap souvenir, that . . . that thief, that
bastard!
” She tore the copied family tree into small pieces and threw them in the air, where they sailed down to the floor like a rain of white paper sprinkled with red. “He stole the diary. Grandfather Lothar told me all about it. He described the book and the treasure chest to me in such detail that I saw them in my dreams. He even sent detectives to the States, but they failed to find his damn brother and the book.” She watched the scraps of paper sucking up Zöller’s blood from the floor.

“Unfortunately, my grandfather left us far too early.” She sighed. “Only a few months before you and your wretched family came back to Germany. He’d been looking for his brother’s descendants all that time, and now there, they suddenly were in Cologne, smiling at a housewarming party and trying to shake my hand.” She laughed, and it sounded like the squeal of a ten-year-old. “I kept my eye on you at that party, Steven. After all, you were one of the family of that brood who cheated us of our greatest treasure. When you went up to the library, I followed you. And then I saw you with that book, the one Grandfather was always talking about.
My
book.” Her eyes narrowed to slits. “You got away from me then, Steven. I thought the book had been burned. And you may as well have disappeared from the face of the earth.”