“Sorry,” Steven murmured. “That was really tactless of me.”
Sara waved his apology aside. “That’s okay.” She took out a crumpled pack of menthol cigarettes and lit herself one. Only when she had twice inhaled deeply did she go on.
“Over the last few years, Uncle Paul discovered the Internet. That’s presumably how he heard about a small auction near Nuremberg. An apartment was being cleared, and this curious object was one of the pieces on sale.” She picked up the wooden box and gently rattled it. “Paul was more interested in the diary than the box, because of the name of the man who kept it, Theodor Marot.”
“Assistant to the king’s personal physician, Max Schleiss von Loewenfeld,” Steven put in.
She nodded. “Marot was an ambitious young man from Strasbourg. He’d been working in the surgical hospital in Munich since 1872. That was probably where Loewenfeld got to know him and appointed him his assistant.” She drew deeply on her cigarette again. The smell of burned tobacco and menthol made Steven feel dizzy. And he couldn’t take his eyes off Sara’s green-painted fingernails.
“What makes Marot so interesting for research into Ludwig,” Sara went on, “is that Loewenfeld’s assistant was not only ambitious and clever; he was also extremely handsome. A genuine French dandy with a weak spot for fine art. Ludwig must have fallen for him. Anyway, he appears in the king’s letters over and over after 1875. Some of the chronicles even call him Ludwig’s favorite playmate. And . . .” She paused for dramatic effect, smiling. “Marot was with him in Schloss Berg until the end. There were several witnesses who say that after Ludwig’s death, Marot claimed it was murder.”
Steven gave a low whistle. “When I saw the old photos and the lock of hair, my first thought was that it showed that the king had some kind of homosexual relationship,” he murmured. “But if I understand what you’re saying, there’s far more than that in the diary. Your uncle really believed that it could solve the mystery about Ludwig the Second?”
“He certainly hoped so,” Sara replied. “He bought the chest with the book in it for a few hundred euros in an Internet auction. But when he finally got the package, he realized that the diary had been written in some kind of secret code that he couldn’t read. So he came to Munich to ask for my help.” She ground out her cigarette so energetically that Steven feared she might push it right through the ashtray.
“As an art historian, I know a couple people involved with that kind of thing,” she went on. “But it turned out there was someone else after the book. I’d arranged to meet my uncle yesterday, but he didn’t show up. First, I tried calling him on his cell phone. Finally, I went to his hotel this afternoon, and all hell had broken loose there. Police, a forensic unit, the works. I called a friend in the state investigation bureau, and he told me what had happened.” Lost in thought, she lit another cigarette and stared at a painting of a stack of brightly colored rectangles on the opposite wall. “I never knew Uncle Paul really well, but that threw me for a loop,” she murmured at last. “Tortured and executed just for some damn book.”
“Can I ask how you found me?” Steven asked hesitantly.
A thin smile appeared on Sara’s lips. “Once the police left, I went back to the hotel,” she explained. “I knew that even though Uncle Paul didn’t own a laptop, he liked to surf the Net for old books. And sure enough, the guy at reception remembered an elderly gentleman who’d been using the hotel computer the previous afternoon. So I checked the history, and guess what popped up? Your secondhand bookshop. In connection with none other than Samuel Pepys.”
“You know about Pepys?” Steven asked, surprised.
Sara cast him a mocking glance. “Herr Lukas, I’m a qualified art historian. The fact that I do some detective work on the side doesn’t mean I’m some thick-headed Philistine.”
Steven smiled. He liked this woman’s style, even if he still couldn’t really get a handle on her.
“Pepys,” he summed up, “kept a diary in the seventeenth century that gives an unparalleled view of life in England in the early modern period. So the professor was looking at my website for it. I guess that was why he came to my bookshop. But then why did he leave the box there?”
“Maybe he knew that he was being followed,” Sara said. “Someone was close on his heels. He came to your shop and . . .”
“And exchanged his book for one of mine.” Steven snapped his fingers. “That must be it. A collection of German ballads was missing from my shelves after he left. Not bad thinking on your uncle’s part.”