The Ludwig Conspiracy (32 page)

The royal physician’s assistant had not chosen flowers at random for Maria, but very special flowers. They had been
lilies,
white lilies. Could that be mere coincidence?

And Steven also recollected where he had already seen the same flowers—in the council chamber, more precisely on the picture of the Sun King. His cloak had been plastered all over with lilies. He simply hadn’t recognized them as flowers.

I’m sure that guy up there is trying to tell us something. Something that’s hidden and obvious at the same time . . .

“Sara!” he cried as his heart beat faster and faster. “I . . . I think I know what the keyword is.”

“What?”
Sara hurried over to him. “You found it? Here?”

Laughing, Steven shook his head. “It was around us the whole time. Do you remember what flowers Marot picked for Maria? They were lilies. The lily is the crest of the Bourbon rulers, the sign of the Sun King.” He pointed to the flowers on the decorative vase. “See for yourself. Three golden lilies on a blue field!”

“My God,” Sara groaned. “It really was all over the place on the second floor. I even saw it on the benches in the Great Hall of Mirrors.”

“And on the painting in the council chamber,” Steven added excitedly. “The Sun King’s coronation cloak. It was covered with golden lilies. Marot was practically rubbing our noses in it. He built lilies into his story on purpose. Those remarks about innocence and purity should have tipped me off. And what’s more, lilies flower in midsummer, not in October.”

“Three big wet kisses if you’re right.” Frantically, Sara dug her laptop out of the bag, put it on one of the glass cases, and typed the word
Lilies
into the decoding program. A few seconds later disappointment clouded her face.

“Damn!” she swore quietly, turning the screen so that Steven could take a look at it. “Just another jumble of letters.”

Steven stared at the Input and Output fields.

XVI . . .

The bookseller stopped. “Just a moment,” he said finally. “That’s not a tangle of letters—it’s a Roman numeral. Sixteen. Suppose XVI stands for Louis the Sixteenth? After all, he was the Sun King’s grandson, and another Bourbon.”

“You mean . . .” Sara typed the next coded words in the puzzle into her computer, and a row of figures appeared on the screen.

V, XVI, CXIII, LXXXXIII, XV, LXXXXVIII

LIX, VII, XXVIII, LXI, XXX, XII

“You’re right,” she said. “Roman numerals, thirteen of them in all.”

“I wonder whether they’re for some royal dynasty?” said Steven, baffled. “German or French rulers?”

“No idea.” At top speed, Sara entered a few more words from Marot’s diary into the laptop. “All I know is that this can’t be the whole solution to the puzzle. The last third of the diary contains coded letters that can’t be deciphered, with LILIES as the keyword.” She smiled. “I assume you know the next word in Marot’s account written in capitals?”

Steven groaned. “NEUSCHWANSTEIN . . . the third part of the puzzle. Of course, Ludwig built three castles, so there are three places in the puzzle. We might have guessed. And the last keyword?” He went to get the little treasure chest out of his rucksack, but Sara waved him away.

“Don’t bother. I already looked. It’s WAGNER.” Smiling, Sara closed the laptop. “At least we know we’re getting somewhere. So now let’s . . .”

There was a rustling sound behind them. Steven turned around, expecting to see Uncle Lu.

“Herr Zöller, I thought we were meeting . . .” he began. But the words died away on his lips.

Three men were standing in front of a large painting of the Fairy-tale King as if they had just walked out of the picture. They wore Bavarian suits and green hunter’s coats, and two of them wore green Alpine hats. It must have begun to rain outside, because large drops fell from the brims of their hats, forming puddles on the floor. The man in the middle had sparse gray hair and wore an old-fashioned pair of pince-nez. He looked like a schoolteacher in an old movie. At that moment, bright lightning flashed outside the museum windows, followed by a crash of thunder.

“Good evening, Herr Lukas,” the stranger said in a grating voice. “I did say we’d be meeting you again.”

I
NSTINCTIVELY, STEVEN LUKAS
took a step back. The stranger before him was none other than the elderly gentleman who had turned up at his antiquarian bookshop five days ago, the man who, dressed as a magician, had waved the hood of a cowl at him at the party in Linderhof. And presumably also the man he had seen outside by the fountain earlier that evening. So he had not been imagining those voices and footsteps in the castle.

“You . . . you’re the boss of the Cowled Men . . .” Steven stammered. The man nodded while at the same time he watched Sara frantically search her purse.

“If your charming companion is thinking of producing a gun from her makeup case, then you should strongly recommend she do no such thing,” he said. A small black pistol gleamed in his hand. “This is a Walther PPK, a deadly large-caliber toy that I normally use only on wounded wild boar.” The little eyes behind the pince-nez twinkled craftily at Sara and Steven. “My great passion, you see, is hunting, which includes hunting for rare antiquities. Particularly when they have some connection with Ludwig the Second.” With his gun, he indicated Sara’s purse. “Put that down on the floor, please. Believe me, this is all a misunderstanding.”

Cautiously, Sara put down her purse. “A misunderstanding?” she snapped. “You want the book and we have it. So don’t bullshit me, Herr . . .”

She paused, and the man gave her a smug smile. “You may call me Huber, a good Bavarian name. I am what you might call the steersman of our little association. The gentlemen to my right and left are my two valued lieutenants, Herr Meier and Herr Schmidt.” The two men in hunter’s coats bowed. “As for the book,” Herr Huber continued, “you are right, we do want it. But not to take it away from you. On the contrary, we want to help you decode it.”

“Help us?” Steven stared at the leader
of the Cowled Men.

“You heard me.” Herr Huber put the pistol in the side pocket of his Bavarian coat and then raised his hands in a placatory gesture. His face looked gray as rock in the emergency lighting.

“We are a very old order,” he said in a soft Bavarian singsong. “When Emperor Frederick Barbarossa drowned in the river Saleph while on the Third Crusade, his knights wrapped themselves in black cloaks and covered their heads with black hoods. Ever since then, we have paid honor to great emperors and kings. Ludwig was the last of them who stood for those old ideals. We will not rest until his murder has finally been explained and atoned for.” With slow, almost majestic strides, the man who called himself Herr Huber paced through the room and sat down on an armchair with a gilded frame. In his voluminous coat, he reminded Steven of a stern storybook king on his throne. The two lieutenants placed themselves behind their leader. Judging by their physical size, they could well be the two Cowled Men who had chased Steven over the Theresienwiese in Munich.

“Then why are you following us if, as you say, we all want the same thing?” he asked the leader. “Why put on this show?”

Herr Huber shook his head. “You don’t understand.
We
were not following you—that was always the others.”

Steven frowned. “The others?”

“The people who killed the professor, and who are going to kill the pair of you if you don’t watch out for yourselves.” Herr Huber leaned back on his throne. “Let me illuminate the situation for you,” he said. “It was about three weeks ago that Professor Liebermann first got in touch with us. He spoke of Theodor Marot’s diary, a book that has always been rumored to exist and that is said to prove that our king was murdered. And now it did indeed seem to have turned up at an Internet auction, where Paul Liebermann acquired it for a ridiculously small sum. The professor came to us for help with its transliteration.”

“Came to
you
for help?” Sara’s mouth twisted in a mocking smile. “Why would my uncle have done that?”

“Your . . . uncle?” For a moment the leader of the Cowled Men seemed genuinely bewildered, but quickly recovered. “We wondered what part you are playing in this game,” he said. “But to return to your question: among our ranks we have several of the leading experts on Ludwig. Where finding lost files from that time is concerned, we can do it faster than anyone. Professor Liebermann knew that, and so he contacted us. He even came to Munich on purpose to see us. But then he broke contact.”

“Why?” Steven asked, torn between fear and curiosity. He was still staring as if spellbound at the self-styled steersman in his wide-skirted coat. The Cowled Man looked like someone out of a different era, like a sepia picture in an otherwise brightly colored catalog. In addition, he radiated natural authority—but did that mean he could be trusted? Suppose this was a trap? Suppose all these men wanted was to get their hands on Marot’s diary?

“We suspect that someone else got wind of the book and put the professor under pressure,” Herr Huber said. “Maybe Liebermann thought we had something to do with this unknown person. At any rate, he did not get in touch with us again, and we began shadowing him to find out why. And during one of these shadowing operations of ours, it finally happened.”

“What finally happened?” Sara asked impatiently. “This is like pulling teeth.”

“Liebermann left his hotel carrying a package and went straight to Herr Lukas’s antiquarian bookshop. When he came out, a black Chrysler was waiting, and two men dragged him into the car. The book seemed to have disappeared.” The steersman rose from his throne and went over to the white marble statue of Ludwig in the other corner of the room. He gently ran one finger over the king’s stone cloak. “At first we were baffled. But on the evening of the same day, I visited Herr Lukas myself. We had to make sure that he had nothing to do with the professor’s abduction.”

“And chasing me, wearing cowls, across the Theresienwiese?” the bookseller asked. “What was the point of that? You scared me half to death.”

Herr Huber smiled. “That was exactly the point. We wanted to show you that we are not to be trifled with. We were going to increase the pressure on you gradually. If you had really known anything about the abduction, you’d soon have cracked.”

“Thanks a lot,” Steven muttered. “Next time why not wear grim reaper masks and swing a scythe?”

“The fight down in the cellar storeroom of the bookshop wasn’t part of this planned terror scenario, then?” Sara asked.

The steersman shook his head and pointed to the silent lieutenant standing on his left. “That was Herr Schmidt. He went to take another look around your stockroom. And suddenly he came upon that other man . . .” He sighed deeply. “You know the rest. Herr Schmidt owes his life to the two of you. We Cowled Men, therefore, are in your debt.” The man who called himself Schmidt again bowed silently.

“Oh, and that’s why you tried to scare me to death again in Linderhof?” replied Steven. “My heart all but stopped when I recognized you dressed as a magician.”

“What was I to do?” The leader of the Cowled Men turned away from the marble statue. “We knew that some unknown power was after both of you. Fortunately, one of our informants at the ticket office recognized you. I had to make contact with you at Linderhof while remaining incognito, or I would have put myself in danger.” He briefly smiled. “After hunting, my other great passion is for doing magic tricks. None of the security staff noticed that no magician had been hired to perform at the party. And as for the trick with the hood . . .” Herr Huber bowed like a cheap variety artiste. “I’m sorry, but I couldn’t help myself. We Cowled Men have always been inclined toward the theatrical, a quality that, as it happens, we share with the king.”

“You weren’t exactly inconspicuous here on the island either,” Sara said. “I saw all three of you in the monastery. And there was no missing that green Bentley in which you followed us from Albert Zöller’s house.”

The elderly gentleman looked at her in surprise. “Green Bentley? We don’t drive any green Bentley.” He set off with his silent lieutenants into the next dimly lit room. “Your friend Albert Zöller isn’t the only one who knows members of staff here. Two of the security guards are our people, and so are several of the gardeners and the man down at the harbor ticket office. He informed us of your arrival. Unfortunately, we lost track of you for a while, Herr Lukas, and picked up your trail again only outside the castle. Now, follow me this way, please. I want to show you something interesting.”

Sara and Steven entered a smaller room where a wooden boat stood on the left, among some artificial reeds. An oil painting behind it showed a kind of jungle garden stretching into the distance.

“This boat comes from Ludwig the Second’s conservatory, which once stood on the roof of the Residence Palace in Munich,” explained Herr Huber, pointing to a few old photographs on the opposite wall. “Sad to say, the roofed winter garden was demolished soon after the king’s death. It was enormous, almost two hundred thirty feet long, and as tall as a church. There were palms in it, orange and banana trees, a grotto with stalactites, waterfalls, a hut thatched with reeds, and a small lake.” The steersman’s voice almost cracked with emotion. “Imagine such a refuge for our politicians today on the roof of the Reichstag in Berlin. They could walk at their leisure up there, debate, indulge in their dreams. Who knows, perhaps many of their decisions would be quite different.”

“Maybe hookah pipes and hashish ought to be distributed to the parliament?” Sara suggested. “The federal president invites you to a course in drumming and fire dancing.”

The leader of the Cowled Men briefly closed his eyes. “It hurts me to hear such sentiments from the mouth of Professor Liebermann’s niece,” he said. “Your uncle was a great romantic.”