The Ludwig Conspiracy (10 page)

Steven smiled. “Not particularly easy to be in a relationship with you?”

“Let’s just say I’m high maintenance,” Sara said. “I’m not about to cuddle up to someone on the sofa while he watches Formula One. Plus, most men don’t like their girlfriends to be smarter than they are.” Grinning, she let her eyes go to the T-shirt Steven was wearing, which was adorned with the logo of some grunge band. “I’ll admit that David was quite cute, but a time comes when you want to talk to your boyfriend about something other than surfing, trendy clubs, and house music.”

“Well, you don’t have to worry about that with me,” Steven said, raising one hand as if taking an oath. “I can’t surf, I don’t know any trendy clubs, and I can’t stand house music. And no doorman would ever let me in in
this
getup anyway.”

Suddenly he thought of his bloodstained corduroys, now in a garbage bin in the hallway, and all at once he was serious again.

“That guy in the tracksuit jacket,” Steven said. “Bernd Reiser . . . what could he have been looking for in my bookshop?”

“I assume he was posted there to lie in wait in case you came back,” Sara said. “First thing tomorrow I’m going to check up on that inscription,
Tmeicos Ettal,
and the swan on the amulet. There’s something not quite right about it. It looks more like something a twelve-year-old girl would wear, not some bruiser.” She reached eagerly for another sandwich. “But it’s the other guy who bothers me more. I’d been thinking it was only the thugs we know who are after the book. But obviously there are other interested parties.”

“You think the man in the black hooded sweater was already down in my stockroom looking for the book, and Reiser took him by surprise?” Steven asked.

Sara shrugged her shoulders and bit into her salmon sandwich, sending out a spray of sauce. “Or the other way around,” she said with her mouth full. “In any case, there are obviously several people who’d like to get hold of your little box and the book inside it.”

“Or else the man in the hoodie was a perfectly normal burglar who saw the smashed display window and took the opportunity to come in,” Steven suggested.

“A thief with a weakness for Rilke and Flaubert? I don’t know about that.” Sara swallowed her mouthful and pointed to the old book on stenography. “One way or another, we’re a step ahead of those guys. Unlike them, we know how to decipher the notes made by our friend Theodor Marot.”

“
We
don’t know anything yet.” Steven wearily rubbed his red-rimmed eyes. “First of all
I
have to make my way through three hundred pages of stuff about tachygraphy. Ask me again in a few hours.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to get some sleep first?”

“I’m far too worked up to sleep.” The bookseller pushed the comfortable leather chair over to the table and opened the book to the first page. “And you’ve made me very curious.”

“Okay.” Sara went over to the leather sofa and threw a thin woolen rug over herself. “Just wake me up when you know who the murderer is.”

She yawned, stretched, and closed her eyes. Steven hadn’t even heard that last remark because he was so immersed in the introduction to Shelton’s shorthand. He soon realized that it wasn’t as difficult as he had assumed. While it would be weeks before he could write Shelton’s shorthand fluently, he was able to decipher it surprisingly quickly. The signs were repeated; many words were simply abbreviated or a single sign stood for them. Steven realized that he hadn’t completely forgotten the stenography lectures he’d attended at university. After two hours, he decided to attempt deciphering Marot’s notes. He would simply regard the notebook as an exercise to be solved. Later, he could go back to the strange sequences of capital letters that began occurring on the second page.

The bookseller opened the diary, and once again that sense of familiarity immediately came over him, together with an unfounded fear. His throat constricted, and he felt slightly nauseated. What was it about this book? Was it magic in some way? Or was he simply seeing ghosts?

Laboriously, he tackled word after word. At first he had to consult
Tachygraphy
constantly, but as time went on he got faster and faster. He worked his way through the lines like a scythe cutting through tall grass. When he couldn’t entirely decipher certain sentences, he tried to reconstruct the sense of them. Word by word, paragraph by paragraph, Steven wrote it all out in a notebook on Sara’s desk, mingling his own style with the old-fashioned expressions of the assistant physician.

For the next few hours Steven was entirely immersed in the world of Theodor Marot. Before his mind’s eye, horse-drawn cabs rattled along narrow, dirty alleyways, gentlemen in tails and overcoats raised their top hats in civil greeting, women in corsets and full skirts swayed in time to the music of a Johann Strauss waltz. Steven saw fairy-tale castles, festive banquets, shimmering grottoes; he heard the shrill giggling of a melancholic king and the resounding music of Richard Wagner; he breathed in the aroma of thousands of candles burning in a ballroom; he tasted Bordeaux a hundred and fifty years old.

But above all, Steven sensed that this well-worn little notebook was in the process of telling him an extraordinary story—a mystery that only a small and select circle had known before; a secret written from the heart of the royal physician’s assistant, as if he were making a confession.

The bookseller thought he could still see Theodor Marot’s fears behind the lines of text, like traces of blood not quite washed out of a white vest.

Berg, 21 June 1886

QECSOQNZO

M
y name is Theodor Marot. I am assistant to the royal physician, Dr. Max Schleiss von Loewenfeld, and one of the king’s true friends, of whom His Majesty had far too few. We tried to save him, but we failed. Tears fall on these pages, like sand shaken to blot the ink, but even they cannot undo the fact that the king is dead and his enemies are victorious. May these notes help to bring the truth to light, painful as it is.

As I write this, the great men of the land are gathering for the funeral banquet in the royal residence, where they will fall, like carrion crows, on oxtail soup, saddle of veal, and roast venison. They will wipe their greasy mouths and congratulate one another over coffee on the success of their intrigues. For the king is dead, and he has taken his secret with him to the grave. Only we few know what really happened, and if the ministers should ever learn this, we must all fear a shot delivered without warning. Not until the last of us has followed Ludwig to the grave can they be sure that no word of what happened will reach the general public, that they can go on ruling the country undisturbed. Their puppet, the prince regent, is sent off hunting and hiking while these gentlemen play politics on the grand scale.

They laid the king to rest in the church of St. Michael in Munich on Saturday, two days ago. Although Dr. Loewenfeld is presumably a filthy traitor in the eyes of the ministers of state, we were both permitted to accompany the funeral procession, together with the other doctors. It was probably a final favor, before they force Loewenfeld to retire on the grounds of his age, and leave me free for anyone to gun down.

Briennerstrasse, that magnificent street, was so full of people that day that the hearse, drawn by eight black horses, could hardly make any progress. Many wept, all the shops were closed, and black banners hung from the windows, whipping back and forth in a stormy wind. It was as if, on that day, the people of Munich wanted to give their king all the love that they had withheld from him for the decades of his life. But it was too late now.

What would Ludwig have said if he had been watching it all, as the military men goose-stepped ahead of his casket in their gold-trimmed uniforms? If he had seen all the sycophantic courtiers, civil servants, and lackeys drawn up in rank and file in the funeral procession, faces sad and frowning while inwardly they rejoiced? At that moment I almost wished that the two dozen black-clad Cowled Men would turn on the whole pack of them with their fiery torches, but they walked in silence at the head of the procession, muffled in their ghostly robes, with the king’s coat of arms on their breasts, and the crossbones as a sign of death.

When the casket was carried out of the Residence Palace, the sun briefly broke through the clouds in a last greeting. The people of Munich glanced up at the sky as if Ludwig might wave to them once more from on high. The king had just been laid in his final resting place in the crypt of St. Michael’s when bright lightning struck with such a loud peal of thunder that people fell to their knees, covering their ears with their hands. Many saw it as a sign that Ludwig is still among us, and already there are rumors that he has withdrawn to the depths of the Natternberg near Deggendorf, and will return someday to sit in judgment of his murderers.

But I know that will never happen. The king is dead.

NECAALAI

Sitting down now to describe the events of the last few months, leading to Ludwig’s terrible end, I will begin with his final birthday celebration in August 1885. It was his fortieth. If we had guessed that no other birthday would follow, we would have shed tears and gone on our knees to the king, begging him to see reason at last. As it was, we put up with his whims and joined in his little games, in which each of us had an established part to play.

Ludwig was celebrating his birthday, as he did almost every year, in his hunting lodge on the heights of Schachen in the massive Wetterstein mountain range. The local peasants had lit bonfires on the peaks, so that we were surrounded by a wreath of fire with the wooden hunting lodge at its center. The king had invited only a few of his faithful friends there with him, including his adjutant, Alfred Count Eckbrecht von Dürckheim-Montmartin; the postilion, Karl Hesselschwerdt; and my humble self.

Since I had risen to the post of Loewenfeld’s assistant more than ten years before, the king had frequently invited me to keep him company. We often stayed up until the small hours of the morning, discussing the French court theater, or the poems of Schiller, as well as that remarkable writer Edgar Allan Poe, whom Ludwig loved more than any other contemporary author. I may say that I had become a genuine friend of the king’s in those years. And although his whims and posturing often seemed to me like the games of a boy of twelve, he was my king. There was no one else like this poetic, melancholy, pugnacious man on the earthly globe. An artist as head of state—what other country can claim as much for itself?

On the night of 24 August,
we were sitting up late on the upper floor of the Schachen lodge, in what was known as the Turkish Room. A few years earlier, Ludwig had had this room designed in the style of Moorish palaces. A fountain played, splashing gently; soft, richly ornamented carpets covered the floor, and the walls were decorated with gilded carvings and bright stained-glass windows. Wearing kaftans, we leaned back on cushions and divans, smoking hookah pipes and sipping mocha from tiny cups as thin as parchment. Servants fanned us with peacock feathers, and the music of a shawm came from somewhere.

I was by now used to such spectacles staged by our king, so I was not surprised when he sat up on his cushion, placid as a portly Buddha, and offered me his pipe.

“Dearest Mahmoud, my grand vizier and most loyal of my Mussulmen,” he said, turning to me with a grave expression, “you are too high-strung. Here, inhale some of this delicious tobacco. It will help you to dream a dream out of the
Thousand and One Nights.
”

Smiling, I took the pipe and inhaled deeply. It was not a rare occurrence for the king to address us by historical names, or names of his own invention. In the last few years I had already been Gawain, Gunther, Faithful Eckhart, and Colbert, the French minister. Why not a grand vizier for a change? Through the smoke, I looked at Ludwig’s expansive figure and tried to recall him in his prime.

It was some time since the king had been the well-built warrior who had had all the women at his feet in the first years of his reign. It was true, at almost six feet tall he was still a giant, but by now he weighed well over two hundred pounds. His face was pale and bloated, his eyes cloudy, his mouth fallen in and near toothless. I could smell his fetid breath from where I sat. The brightly colored Turkish costume that he wore in the Schachen hunting lodge did not conceal the fact that Ludwig was more and more letting himself go to seed. Only his hair was unchanged, still as thick and black as it had been when he ascended to the throne more than twenty years ago.

But what alarmed all of us most were the sometimes deluded, sometimes dreamy moods that came over him with increasing frequency. He was a king of the moonlight who made night his day and lived in his own fairy-tale world. Even we, his faithful friends, could get through to him less and less often.

Beside me, Count Dürckheim shifted restlessly on his cushion. Like the rest of us, the usually dashing adjutant with his neatly twirled mustache was wearing a loose silk caftan. Dürckheim hated these masquerades, but he knew that at such moments he could get much farther with his king than in any official meetings.

“Your Majesty, we have to talk,” he began in a serious tone. “I went through the items on your civil list again yesterday. Your debts now amount to almost fourteen million marks, and I think that the building of your castles . . .”

“Dürckheim, how many more times do I have to tell you that I don’t want to hear this tiresome financial drivel on my birthday?” the king snapped at him, and he closed the book of Turkish poetry that he had been about to go on reading. “It’s bad enough to have you pestering me with it in Munich. We’ll continue building the castles—that’s settled. They are the expression of my very being—without them I would not be king.” Suddenly his lips were narrow as two straight lines. “My father, my grandfather, they were all allowed to build such castles,” he hissed. “It’s only my own ministers who act in such a way. On my honor, Dürckheim, if those gentlemen don’t grant me more money, I’ll blow Hohenschwangau sky-high. I won’t endure the shame of it any longer. Money must be forthcoming, never mind how, understand? Have you
understood?
”