The Ludwig Conspiracy(106)
Zöller was already waiting in the back seat of the Mini Cooper. He had bought himself a bag of buttery Bavarian pretzels from a stall and was now munching his way through them. He nodded to Sara and Steven, and offered them his bag of greasy delicacies.
“No, thank you, I feel a bit queasy already,” Steven said, getting into the front passenger seat. Sara got behind the wheel, and the car, squealing, turned the corner.
“I spoke to a few of my people at Herrenchiemsee,” Zöller said, as he desperately tried to stretch the seatbelt over his belly. “No one has heard anything about those two Cowled Men who ran for it, and I guess no one will. The police are sure to want to ask them some tricky questions. Those officers like to poke about in the dark.” He grinned and picked a few crumbs of pretzel out of his teeth. “My friends among the night watchmen have promised to keep us out of it for now. Especially because otherwise it would come to light that they gave me the key.” Zöller tapped Steven’s shoulder from behind. “Find out anything new from the diary?”
The bookseller told him, briefly, what he had read the previous night. But Zöller could not make anything out of the latest diary entry he had deciphered either.
“All common knowledge already,” he grunted. “The arrival in Hohenschwangau of the commission to take the king away, the midnight supper, the arrests . . . All of this was known apart from the conspiracy about Marot and Dürckheim—I’ll admit that I never heard about that before.”
“How about the descriptions of the castle?” Steven asked, pursuing his point as they drove along narrow country roads toward the western Alps. “Marot meets the king in the Singers’ Hall. Maybe the final keyword is something to do with those Parsifal murals in the Hall. Or anyway one of Wagner’s operas. Wagner is the second word written in capital letters, after Neuschwanstein.”
“You can find those sorts of saga characters in every corner of the castle,” Uncle Lu said, wiping his greasy fingers on his pants. “Parsifal, Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Sigurd and Gudrun, Tristan and Isolde . . . The whole of Neuschwanstein is nothing but a setting for Wagner operas. Ludwig wanted to build a memorial to his favorite composer, the man he idolized. Along with all the entire legendary world of the Middle Ages. He’d been fascinated by it since childhood.”
Steven frowned. “But I can’t help noticing that Marot deliberately refers to that world of legend in the Singers’ Hall.” He took out the diary and leafed through it. “Here. He says he feels like Parsifal or Tristan setting out in search of the Holy Grail.”
“Just a moment,” Zöller said. “Tristan doesn’t go in search of the Grail—that’s Parsifal.”
“Yes, but I’m inclined to think that the search for the Grail as a whole stands for our attempt to find the solution to the puzzle. We have to find the keyword, and it’s concealed somewhere in the Wagnerian legends.”
“Oh, wonderful,” Sara groaned. “I can just about remember who killed Siegfried, but if the keyword has to do with any other characters, I’m afraid I have to pass.”
Uncle Lu grinned. “Good thing you have me, then.” He rummaged in the crate of books on the back seat beside him. “There must be a reference book on the old hero sagas in here somewhere. We’ll soon find out what friend Theodor was really trying to say.”
Steven thought of Sara’s research into Zöller’s cell phone. Could kindly Uncle Lu really be plotting against them? But then why had he helped them up to this point? Thinking hard, Steven leaned back in his seat and tried to doze, but the constant bends in the road kept bringing him back from dreams teeming with heroes, magicians, and kings.
They drove westward on small country roads running along the foothills of the Alps. At the sight of the freshly mown flower meadows, the moors, the colorful foliage of the woods in fall, and the old farmhouses standing in the sunlight to the right and left of the road, Steven once again thought he understood why Bavaria liked to think itself a special place. Here at the southernmost tip of Germany, time did indeed seem to stand still. Here you still felt you were in a less complicated time, while the modern world was top-heavy with longing, clichés, and false notions.
And Ludwig the Second is the idol adored by the people here . . .
After a good two hours on the road, they had finally reached the small town of Füssen and approached Neuschwanstein and the older castle of Hohenschwangau that stood opposite it. The two castles clung to the walls of a narrow valley bounded on the south by a small mountain lake. While Hohenschwangau—the castle where Ludwig had spent his childhood—was rather modest in appearance, Neuschwanstein was the quintessential fairy-tale castle. Steven knew, of course, that no medieval castle had ever looked like that, but the building, on its rocky plinth and with its turrets, battlements, and pointed roofs, all as white as confectioner’s sugar, was the archetypal building of the Middle Ages as many wished it to be.