The Ludwig Conspiracy(133)
“Marot, heaven sends you!” he cried. “For God’s sake, pull the trigger!”
Startled by Loewenfeld’s voice, Carl von Strelitz briefly let go of his victim and turned his head to me. His face was a mask of hatred and alarm. A mocking smile played around his lips. He slowly raised his hands, and a coughing, retching Hornig emerged from the lake before him again.
“Don’t do anything stupid,” von Strelitz called to me. “I have influential friends—very influential. You can still decide to back the winning side.” He pointed behind him, to where Dr. Loewenfeld stood up to his waist in the water beside Ludwig’s corpse. “The king is dead, and believe me, that’s the best thing that could happen to your country. A deranged dreamer, that’s what he was. Is a man like that fit to lead Bavaria into the twentieth century?” He laughed and stroked his wet black hair down over his head. “Trust me when I say we’ll meet with challenges to which no dreamer is equal. Bavaria needs a strong king, not a starry-eyed idealist. In a few years, no one will care a whit about Ludwig. So be reasonable, and . . .”
“Go to hell, von Strelitz.”
I pulled the trigger and once again heard the muted, pleasingly quiet report of the air rifle. Carl von Strelitz staggered two steps back, but he stayed on his feet. He stared at me, his eyes full of hatred, one last time; then his gaze moved down in surprise to where blood was staining his white shirt red.
“You damn . . . fool,” he groaned. Then, at last, the agent fell backward and hit the water with a splash, his arms flung wide. Streaks of blood spread out around him like long, red threads.
I stood on the bank as if in a trance. The gun slipped from my hands and fell on the gravel path that ran along the bank. Only Richard Hornig’s coughing brought me back to the present. He had scrambled out of the water by now, but he was still fighting for breath. “God in heaven, Marot! You . . . you saved my life,” he groaned. He was pale as a drowned corpse, but otherwise he seemed to be in good shape. Now he took hold of the body of von Strelitz, scrutinized it disparagingly, and then threw it back into the lake like a piece of rotten wood. “That bastard nearly drowned me. Who in the name of three devils was he?”
“The man who murdered the king,” I said quietly. “We came too late.”
There was a moment of absolute silence, in which only the cawing of a single crow could be heard. A cloud of red had formed around Ludwig’s corpse and was slowly dispersing in the murky water. His thick black hair floated like seaweed in the gentle swell of the lake.
We stood on the bank as if numb, staring at our dead king, at Dr. Gudden, and the Prussian agent, all three of them drifting, face-down, in the water of the lake. Tears glistened in Hornig’s eyes, mingling with the raindrops, and none of us said a word. It was as if the world as we had always known it had stopped turning.
Not until we heard cries in the distance and saw the flickering of torches through the trees did we run into the night, without another word.
ONLY AN HOUR later the five of us sat, brooding, in the smoking room of Baron Beck-Peccoz, who had waited for the king in vain at the gate of his castle park with his carriage. When he heard of Ludwig’s death, he seemed paralyzed by shock at first. Finally, he drove us in the carriage to his estate of Eurasburg, which was very close to Berg Castle. We were now staring, our eyes glazed, at the glowing logs on the hearth, while the stormy rain lashed the windows.
“If there were any traces left to show how the king really died, then they’ll have been removed by now,” said Richard Hornig. “They’ll take the body of the Prussian agent away and make the whole thing look like the suicide of a deranged king. No one will ever know the truth.”
The rest of us nodded in silence. It was as if, after so much hectic activity, apathy had overwhelmed us, leaving us unable to speak of what had happened. The king was dead, and nothing could bring him back.
Suddenly Kaulbach the painter rose to his feet. With shaking fingers, he ground out his cigarette in the ashtray and looked at us one by one. “It was a mistake for us to run like hares,” he said angrily. “We must go to the Starnberg police. At once! This crime can’t go unpunished.”
“Go to the police? Don’t be childish, Kaulbach.” Dr. Schleiss von Loewenfeld shook his head wearily before going on. “Don’t you understand? This thing has been engineered from the very top. Are you really planning to oppose the future prince regent, all the ministers, and the majority of the Bavarian nobility? Only with the king alive and at our side did we stand any chance of reversing the coup d’état. It’s too late now.”