The Ludwig Conspiracy (15 page)

“Did you ever hear of Cowled Men wearing an amulet like it?” Steven asked. The warm October sun dazzled him, and he narrowed his eyes. He had a bad headache. Clearly he hadn’t had enough sleep, and that encounter with the police had been the last straw.

Sara shook her head. “Not that I know of. But that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. There are any number of other nut cases besides the Cowled Men. Societies whose members have sworn eternal loyalty to the king and meet on the anniversary of his death at his memorial cross in Berg. Quite a few of them wish the monarchy were back, and they go about in historical costumes. But I don’t think that makes them capable of murder.” She smiled. “Or anyway, not unless parliament voted for a massive rise in the price of beer.”

Steven sighed. “I love Bavaria. If the country didn’t exist, we Yanks would have to invent it.”

They had left the autobahn and were driving along a steep, winding road over a pass, with spruce woods and gray rocks by the roadside. After several hairpin turns, they finally reached a long, high plain in the Ammergau Alps, framed by a wild, mountainous landscape. Among the meadows, the old Benedictine monastery of Ettal Abbey shone radiantly white. Its sturdy structure reminded Steven of a Romanesque castle. Turning into a valley, they followed the course of a small river past stands of fir trees and freshly mown wildflower meadows where cows and horses grazed. Soon, they came to a large parking lot where a number of cars and buses were already standing.

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Linderhof!” Sara announced, driving into one of the many free parking spots. She looked around in surprise. “Not so much activity here today,” she said. “I suppose the season will be over soon.”

“Or they have some major event going on. Look.”

Steven pointed to four dark blue Audis, in front of which stood several men and women in business suits. A few shouted into their cell phones. Beyond the group, a steward in uniform was closing off part of the parking lot.

“Looks like a state reception,” Sara said, getting out. “Come on, let’s see what’s going on.”

Together, they climbed the steps to the souvenir shop and ticket office, where a group of colorfully clad tourists was already assembled. Steven heard a murmured babble of Japanese, Russian, and American voices. He tentatively glanced at the pane of a display window, which reflected his distorted image in the ridiculous clothes. What he saw made him shudder.

At least I won’t look conspicuous here.

“You’re in luck,” said the woman at the ticket desk, smiling and giving them two tickets to see around the castle. “This is the last day of the season. Unfortunately, the Grotto of Venus and the Moorish kiosk are both closed to the public today. Honestly, you wouldn’t have time to see it all, anyway. We’re closing a little earlier than usual today. In exactly . . .” She looked at her watch. “In exactly two hours.”

Steven almost dropped the ticket he was holding.

Only two hours!
he thought in a panic.
Oh, great! And we have no idea what we’re even looking for except that it’s connected with LOVE.

“Is that by any chance something to do with the well-dressed ladies and gentlemen out there?” he asked quietly, pointing to the parking lot behind them.

The woman at the ticket desk raised one eyebrow and then looked cautiously around.

“VIPs,” she whispered. “Manstein has rented the upper part of the park for a party tomorrow.”

“Er, Manstein? I’m afraid I don’t know . . .”

“Manstein Systems, I assume,” Sara said. “One of Europe’s leading IT companies. Profits in the billions. It gets its microchips built by the Chinese so that it can fire workers over here. Bavaria must really be in some deep financial straits if it’s renting out its castle grounds to unscrupulous industrial magnates.”

The smile disappeared from the face of the girl selling tickets. “As I said, the park will be closed tomorrow, so as far as tourists are concerned, there’s no . . .”

“Okay, fine.” Sara turned to the exit. “All the same,” she added over her shoulder, “the king would be turning in his grave.”

Steven hurried after her, and they walked side by side through the park, past beech and spruce trees, and a small pool of water. Tourists passed them, already on their way home. They still couldn’t see the castle.

“Two hours,” Sara hissed. “How are we going to find a clue about how to crack that code in just two hours? I swear to God I’m never going to buy software from Manstein Systems again. Filthy capitalist firm, renting the park and leaving us commoners outside.”

“This isn’t getting us anywhere,” Steven pointed out, soothingly. “Why don’t we split up? You search the park and I’ll search the castle.”

“You’ve picked the easy option,” Sara grumbled, pointing ahead. “You can easily search the whole castle—unlike the park.”

They crested a rise and looked down into a valley gently falling away below them. To the left, pathways under green foliage bordered a cascade that flowed into a basin of water farther down. To the right, a white temple stood on a hill, with terraced gardens and a pool with a spurting fountain. A white castle sat enthroned in the middle of the valley, looking like a miniature version of Versailles.

Steven stopped in surprise. He had expected an imposing structure, something like Neuschwanstein, or at least Nymphenburg Palace in Munich, but this was no mighty castle. Embedded in the huge park, it looked more like a charming toy.

A king’s toy.

“I’d expected something larger,” he murmured.

Sara smiled at him. “Most say that when they first come here, with the image of Neuschwanstein Castle in their heads. All the same, the king spent most of his final years here at Linderhof. He venerated Louis the Fourteenth, as you know.” She pointed to the fountain, more than sixty-five feet high. “This is a mini-Versailles, Baroque layout of the gardens and all. Ludwig’s favorite playgrounds are in the park itself. The Grotto of Venus, the Moroccan house, the hermitage, and up there, the Temple of Venus and Hunding’s hut.”

“Hunding’s hut?” Steven said, baffled. “Never heard of it.”

“It comes from Wagner’s
Ring of the Nibelung.
Ludwig had it built to the composer’s description. A kind of Germanic log cabin. When Ludwig was in the mood for it, his entourage had to cavort about in animal skins, drink mead from horns, and dance around in a ring.”

Steven wrinkled his brow. “And you still say the king wasn’t nuts?”

“Don’t you ever have dreams, Herr Lukas?” Sara asked, laughing. “Ludwig just had the money to make his come true. He wanted to escape from the world, like so many of us.” She pointed surreptitiously to a group of tourists in shorts and Windbreakers behind them. “Believe me, if we all had enough money to realize our dreams, the world would be a giant amusement park full of space ships, game shows, arcades, and brothels. Myself, I prefer the king’s fantasies.”

A few dozen people had assembled outside the castle, waiting for the next guided tour. Some passed the time by smoking; others photographed themselves and their families in front of every detail of the building. Somewhere a baby was crying.

“What’s that tree?” Steven asked. He pointed to a scrawny linden tree on the right, beyond the pool of water, the only detail that didn’t fit into the perfect symmetry of the castle garden.

Sara shrugged and glanced at the crumpled map that she had picked up at the ticket office.
“Known as the king’s linden
tree,”
she read in a monotone, “
it grew here long before the castle was built
. Blah, blah, blah. Time’s wasting.” She pointed to the crowd in front of the entrance. “The pack is getting restless. We’ll do as you suggested. I’ll look around the park, and you go on one of those guided tours of the castle. Enjoy!” She winked at him again and then disappeared down one of the paths under the arbors.

Sighing, Steven joined the line of overweight American tourists whose accent told him they came from Texas. A man pressed his chewing gum onto the castle wall, and then the procession slowly started moving.

A
N HOUR AND A HALF LATER
, Steven was no wiser than before.

The rooms inside the castle were, in fact, impressive. That didn’t alter the fact that he still didn’t have the faintest idea of what he should be looking for. He had taken three successive guided tours with commentaries in English, in German, and finally in Dutch. He had memorized every detail of those rooms. When he finally asked the tour guide about the name of Marot, she only responded with an annoyed shrug. By now, word had obviously gone around that this American tourist with the baseball cap and leather jacket was an incorrigible Ludwig fan. Steven consoled himself by thinking that he was probably not the only one around. The tour guides had certainly encountered worse.

He stood alone in the ostentatious entrance hall, right in front of an equestrian statue of Louis XIV. On the ceiling above him, one of the Sun King’s favorite sayings was prominently displayed between two frescoes showing chubby little cherubs.

Inferior to no one,
Steven translated silently to himself.
The very opposite of how I feel right now.

The bookseller looked around the hall but found no hint of how to solve the problem of the cipher. However, one thing struck him: the entire castle was a tribute to Greco-Roman antiquity on one hand, and the French baroque on the other. It was full of portraits of French noblemen. There was a hall of mirrors like the Sun King’s, and a four-poster bed with a canopy as tall as a high-diving board. Most amusing of all was the dining room with the famous dumbwaiter in the middle of it. It consisted of a flap through which the dining table, already set, could be brought up into the middle of the royal chamber by means of an ingenious mechanism. Steven imagined the king sitting up at night on his own, dining there with mirrors and lighted candles reflecting to infinity all around him.

And after that he lies on the Moroccan divan, smoking his chibouk, that long-stemmed Turkish pipe, or he rolls about on bearskins in a wooden hut while his servants have to perform, dressed as ancient German tribesmen for his benefit. Sorry, Frau Lengfeld, but the man was way out of his mind.

Steven was so deep in thought that he didn’t immediately notice the art detective’s light touch.

“Well, find out anything?” she asked encouragingly.

Gloomily, Steven shook his head. “No Marot, and nothing remotely like a clue.”

Sara sighed. “Same here. I ran around the park until I was worn out. Hunding’s hut, the Temple of Venus, the hermitage, the chapel, the Fountain of Neptune . . . This whole park is a damn labyrinth. And the upper part has already been closed to visitors. I guess this whole venture was doomed to fail all along. Sorry.”

She went out, lit herself a cigarette, and dropped wearily onto a park bench. “If we at least knew what we ought to be looking for. A sequence of numbers, a sentence, a picture. But at random like this? All we know is that the clue has something to do with the word LOVE.”

“I was thinking about that just now,” Steven said. “The Caesar code—the one I told you about at breakfast this morning—obviously wasn’t Marot’s chosen cipher. But there’s a considerably more complicated one. It’s known as the Vigenère cipher. If I remember correctly, it was rather popular in the mid-nineteenth century, so Marot would have known it.” Steven closed his eyes to concentrate. “In the Vigenère cipher, a
different
shift value is used for each of the letters to be coded, arising from the respective letters of the keyword. That avoids code letters appearing with too much frequency and giving away which letters they represent.”

Sara groaned. “This is beyond me.”

“It’s very simple, really. Look at this.” Steven broke a twig off one of the bushes near the castle and started writing in the gravel. After a minute he had two words, one above the other.

RIDDLE
LUDWIG

“Now, let’s suppose the word we want to write in code is RIDDLE. And our keyword is LUDWIG,” Steven began. “L is the twelfth letter of the alphabet, so the R of RIDDLE moves twelve letters forward, and it becomes . . .” He thought for a moment before writing down another letter. “It becomes C. The next letter in RIDDLE is I, so count out another twelve letters from C and it becomes U. Then D becomes G, the next D becomes S, and so on.” He scribbled a few more letters in the gravel and looked at the result with satisfaction.

PUZZLE
LUDWIG
AOCVTK

“Well, it certainly looks as jumbled as the sequences of letters in Marot’s diary,” Sara said. “So you could be right. All we need is the right keyword.”

“LOVE, maybe?” Steven suggested.

“Possibly. But I’d say that’s too obvious. It must be some other word, one that . . . well, that sort of symbolizes love.”

“Symbolizes?” the bookseller asked. “What’s that supposed to mean? There are thousands of—”

Suddenly he stopped. Sara looked at him in surprise.

“What is it?”

“I think I really do know a word like that,” Steven said, and pointed to the white temple on the hill in front of them. “Didn’t you say that’s the Temple of Venus? And there’s a Grotto of Venus somewhere around. This place is full of statues of Venus, and I saw a couple of paintings of Venus in the castle itself.”

“The goddess of love,” Sara said. “Why didn’t I think of her myself?”

Steven grinned. “Maybe because you don’t know enough about the subject?”

“Very funny, Herr Lukas. Let’s see if we’re on the right track with VENUS as the keyword, and never mind the wisecracks. If you’re right, I’ll prove you wrong with a kiss.”

“I think you need something called a Vigenère square for decoding words.” Steven tried to remember. “With a bit of thought, and a good sharp pencil, I guess we—”

“Are you nuts?” The art detective giggled so loudly that several tourists turned to look at them. “What are computer programs for? I’m sure we’ll find a website to do it for us.” With a last glance at the Temple of Venus, she turned toward the park’s exit. “I suggest we get a room over in the hotel and make ourselves comfortable in the lobby.”