The Ludwig Conspiracy (6 page)

Steven swore quietly. He didn’t get the impression that the men out there were joking. If he gave them the little treasure chest, they would presumably leave him alone. And they’d also just offered him twenty thousand euros. Twenty thousand! That would pay the rent until the Easter after next, maybe even longer. He wouldn’t need customers. He could keep his own company in the shop. His eyes went to the briefcase on the table.

“Two and a half . . .”

“Don’t do it,” the woman whispered, obviously reading his thoughts. “You don’t think they’ll just hand you a few euro bills and let you go, do you? They killed my uncle, and they’ll do the same to you. Faster than you can say
Principal Decree of the Imperial Diet,
my antiquarian friend.”

Steven looked nervously at the barricaded display window. He could see the outlines of two broad-shouldered figures on the other side of it. One of them took a small black object that looked suspiciously like a pistol from under his jacket.

“Three!”

“For crying out loud, what have I gotten myself mixed up with here?”

Steven snatched up his briefcase and ran for the back door with the unknown woman. At the same time, he heard the bookcases along the wall fall to the floor with a crash behind him, and someone climbed through the wrecked window.

They’re going to torch my books. My beautiful books.

Audrey Hepburn hauled him out into the backyard, which was full of garbage cans, bicycles, and old junk, and surrounded by the high walls of buildings. An old neighbor stared curiously down at them over the geraniums in his window box. Bavarian folk music came from a radio nearby. To their left was the wall, as tall as a man, between his and the neighboring property. A paper-recycling bin overflowing with newspapers stood beside it.

“This way,” the strange woman called, hurrying toward the wall.

With catlike agility, she hauled herself up onto the bin, climbed the wall, and the next moment she had disappeared. Hesitating, Steven looked around. When he heard footsteps coming, he heaved himself up on the recycling bin, too, cursing. A brief glance over the wall showed him another yard beyond it, with a broad entrance leading into the street. It was at least six feet to the ground.

“Come on, jump,” the woman urged him. She was already on her way out of the yard. “They’re right behind us.”

Steven could hear shouting behind him now. He closed his eyes, then spread his arms wide, jumped down to the asphalt of the yard next door, stumbled, and ran to the exit, clutching his briefcase close to his body. When he was finally out in the street, the woman closed the double doors after him with a metallic clatter. Next moment there was loud hammering at the doors inside the yard.

“We’ll take my car.” The strange woman ran out into the street. “It’s just around the corner. I only hope you don’t suffer from claustrophobia.”

She made for a yellow Mini Cooper, and opened the door. Then she took off her dark glasses for the first time. The green scarf had slipped back, revealing a sternly pinned-up chignon. Steven put her age at somewhere in her late twenties.

She really does look like Audrey Hepburn,
he thought.
Or Eva Marie Saint in
North by Northwest.
Only I’m no Cary Grant.

“Get in. I’ll take you to my place. You’ll be safe there.” The stranger’s eyes twinkled at Steven. “Don’t worry, I don’t bite. Unlike those guys behind us.”

“Only if you promise to tell me what all this is about,” Steven said breathlessly.

“I promise. But first we’ve got to get out of here.”

He could still hear the furious hammering on the door in the backyard. Audrey Hepburn slammed the car door, turned the ignition key, and stepped on the gas.

Steven had had no idea how fast you could drive a Mini Cooper.

T
HEY RACED ACROSS A
busy square, past a couple of fruit and snack stalls, and then, accompanied by loud honking, turned right onto the Mittlerer Ring. Audrey Hepburn overtook a silver Audi and then stepped on the gas so suddenly that Steven was briefly pressed back in his seat.

This is all a bad dream,
he thought.
Just a bad dream. I’ll wake up in my bed any second now, with a few volumes of poetry and a book by Gabriel García Márquez beside me. I’ll brush my teeth, go into my shop . . .

“Are they following us?”

The voice of the brunette stranger beside him brought him back to reality.

“What?” he asked, dazed. Only now did he realize that the bag with the little treasure chest in it was on his lap.

“I asked if they’re following us. Those guys in the black Chrysler.”

Steven turned around and looked through the rear window at the traffic behind them. Now, at about seven in the evening, a lot of people were on their way home from work, so the streets were crowded. He didn’t see a Chrysler among the mass of cars blinking their indicators, pulling into and out of traffic.

“I think we’ve shaken them off.” The bookseller looked straight ahead again, until finally he began to feel unwell.

“Right. We’ll go back to my place, and then . . .”

“And then nothing. It’s about time you finally dropped all this mystery,” Steven interrupted. “Just tell me straight out what’s going on here. Or I’m getting out of the car right now and taking the bag with me, understand?”

“What, doing ninety on the Mittlerer Ring?
Okay, have fun.”

Steven sighed. Once again he noticed the touch of a Berlin accent in the woman’s voice, sounding rather unusual here in Munich, the capital of Bavaria.

“Look, seriously,” he said, emphatically calm now. “Don’t you think we’re a little too old for this childishness?”

“You may be. I’m not.” The stranger switched down into third gear to get past some lights just as they turned red. “But you’re right. Too much blood has been spilled to call it childish.”

“Blood? What do you . . . ?”

Without slowing down, she reached into the glove compartment and brought out a crumpled newspaper, which she handed to Steven without comment. He saw that it was the day’s evening edition.

“Take a look at page twelve. The story at the top of the page.”

Steven leafed through the paper until he found the place she meant. His pulse instantly sped up. In the middle of the page of newsprint, he saw the slightly blurred picture of a man he knew. It was the likable old man with the gray bundle, who had come to his shop yesterday. A screaming headline in bold twenty-point type leaped out at him.

HORRIFIC DEATH IN THE FOREST
University professor tortured and murdered
Police face a mystery

Steven swiftly skimmed the report, which emphasized the sensational aspects. Its vigorous phrasing told him that sixty-seven-year-old Professor Paul Liebermann of Jena University had died a horrific death. He had been found the previous evening in a forested
area just outside Munich with his head shot to pieces. Before his death, the retired history professor had been drugged, abducted, and tortured. His body had been discovered lying among torn-up pages of a book; further inquiries were being pursued. The police expected to find evidence regarding the remarkable murder weapon. More would follow in tomorrow’s edition. Then there were a few lines about Professor Liebermann’s career, and a couple of risqué assumptions associating him with the red-light district.

“It was a Derringer,” the woman suddenly said.

Steven gave a start and looked up from the newspaper. “What?”

“The murder weapon. I’ve kept my ears pricked. Two .44 caliber rimfire cartridge cases were found at the scene. That kind of cartridge is out of use these days. However, ammunition like that was very common in the nineteenth century, in small ornamented pistols but most of all in the American Derringer. A pretty toy. But Abraham Lincoln was shot with a Derringer just like that.”

Steven frowned. “You mean the murder victim was killed by a weapon that doesn’t exist today?”

“Or by someone who shouldn’t be alive today,” the strange woman replied, and turned into a side street, tires squealing. “Which at least narrows down the suspects.”

“How do you know all this?” Steven asked suspiciously. “You said you were the niece of the professor who came to see me yesterday, but you sound more like a police officer.”

“Wait until we reach my place. I’ll explain it all to you then.”

In silence, they joined the evening traffic that took them down Ludwigstrasse, with its imposing white buildings, to the upmarket Schwabing district of Munich. They passed boutiques, discotheques, trendy bars with the first nocturnal revelers already gathering outside, talking noisily with one another or shouting into their phones. Their journey ended at a quiet side street near the large park of the English Garden.

Audrey Hepburn parked her Mini in a gap so narrow that Steven suspected he wouldn’t even have been able to fit his bicycle into it. With the newspaper in hand, she climbed out and walked toward a low-built, old-fashioned little house with a tiny front garden. Among the modern buildings with their expanses of glass, it looked as if it had fallen out of another time. There was a bronze plate with elaborate lettering beside the door. Steven glanced at it and then looked in surprise at the woman in the black sunglasses.

“Dr. Sara Lengfeld. Art Detection,” he murmured. “Are you really a detective?”

“First and foremost I’m a qualified art historian,” she replied, holding the door open for him. “And let’s get one thing clear right away: my work is deadly boring. I look through art catalogs as thick as your arm, I surf the Internet, I talk on the phone until there’s steam coming out of my ears, and now and then, for a change, I get to go to an exhibition of enormous old paintings where the museum curator eyes me suspiciously over his shoulder.” Her lips narrowed. “So you can forget all the private-eye nonsense you know from movies and books. And anyway, in this case, I think of myself more as a niece than a detective.”

Without another word, she walked into the little house. Steven followed her, looking around in surprise. The building was much larger inside than it appeared from the outside. On the walls of a softly lit corridor painted a pale orange hung prints by German Expressionists side by side works by Toulouse-Lautrec and modern photographs of nudes. Passing a hallway on his right, Steven saw a small kitchen, and beyond that a bedroom. A door on the left led into a well-lit office that seemed to take up almost half of the first floor. Here, too, there were countless paintings and sculptures illuminated by small halogen lights, giving the room, which had a ceiling almost nine feet high, the look of an exclusive art gallery.

“What is all this?” Steven asked. “The Museum of Modern Art?”

“God, no, only my office.” The young woman smiled. “I know, the rubber plant is missing. But the view makes up for that.”

Steven looked appreciatively out of the large panoramic window, with its view of bushes, trees, and the English Garden beyond. The woman really did have good taste, even if it wasn’t entirely in line with his own. In the middle of the office stood a showy kidney-shaped table from the fifties, piled high with art catalogs, file folders, empty Chinese food containers, and dirty coffee cups. A computer covered with yellow Post-it notes was enthroned among the mess.

“Sorry, I haven’t gotten around to tidying up yet,” Sara Lengfeld said. She cleared a few brochures and art books off the broad leather sofa before sinking down on it with a weary sigh. “It’s been a busy few days.”

Steven sat down beside her and briefly admired her long legs, one crossed over the other. She wore comfortable shoes. Sara had taken off her bright green rain cape and her scarf; her sunglasses stuck in her brunette hair like an extra pair of eyes. She had on jeans and a close-fitting woolen pullover that came down over her hips. Only after some delay did Steven remember why he was there.

“The dead man in the newspaper,” he began hesitantly. “Is he really your uncle?”

She nodded. “My mother’s older brother. We lost touch a long time ago. Until very recently, the last time I saw him he was reading
Pinocchio
to me.” She smiled wanly. “I’m something of a loner, you see. It runs in the family. Maybe it comes with my work as well.”

“And what exactly do you do?” Steven inquired.

“I look for lost art. Stolen works, art that was looted, paintings thought to have disappeared years ago. Every year six billion dollars’ worth of art is stolen, but most of it turns up again eventually. At auctions, in galleries and museums, in private collections.” Getting to her feet, she tossed Steven one of the big catalogs on the table. “It’s my job to find those paintings. That earns me a percentage of their real value—and usually a volley of furious insults from the supposed owners,” she added with a grin. “See, the people who have the paintings generally have no idea that they’re stolen. When I go into a gallery, the curator makes the sign of the cross three times and puts a laxative in my prosecco.”

Steven put the catalog aside and looked around. “Obviously a lucrative job. But what does it have to do with your uncle?”

At once Sara was serious again. “How about if I see what’s in that bag of yours first?”

Carefully, Steven handed her the little treasure chest. She opened it and took a quick look at the photographs and the lock of black hair. Then, lost in thought, she leafed through the yellowed pages of the notebook. Almost reverently, she ran her fingers over the velvet binding with the ivory decoration.

“So it’s really true,” she murmured at last.

“True?” Steven asked. “What’s true?”

The art detective went on staring at the book, as if trying to recognize something in it. Only after a long while did she look up again.

“Uncle Paul had a rather unusual hobby. He collected literature about King Ludwig the Second, especially literature to do with his death. As he saw it, Ludwig’s murder was the greatest unsolved crime in German history.”

“Murder?” Steven said skeptically. “I’ve heard speculation, but . . .”