Sara rubbed her eyes; they were reddened by weariness and the smoke from her cigarette. Her mascara was running, but she didn’t seem to notice. “It didn’t do him any good,” she whispered. “They caught him, tortured him, and killed him. And somewhere along the line he must also have given up your name, so now the same people are after you. And it seems pretty clear that these guys won’t pull their punches.”
Steven shook his head. “All this because of a book that might explain the death of a king from a hundred and something years ago? That’s absurd!”
“Believe me, I know the collectors’ scene. Some of them would feed their own mothers to piranhas for a rare-enough work.”
“I’m afraid it wasn’t the first time they tried getting at me,” Steven replied after a pause.
The art detective frowned. “What do you mean?”
Steven told her about the odd stranger in the traditional Bavarian suit, and the subsequent mysterious encounter on the Theresienwiese.
“The men were wearing black hoods?” Sara asked. Suddenly she was very agitated. Her face went paler.
Steven nodded. “Black hoods, and they were carrying torches. Why? Do you know who they were?”
With her cigarette in the corner of her mouth, Sara Lengfeld went over to the computer and clicked away for a few minutes. She beckoned to Steven to come and look at something on the screen.
“I don’t know if I’m right,” Sara said, pointing to the monitor. “You’d better look at this for yourself.”
Steven stared at the computer. He saw three figures in black capes and pointed hoods standing in front of a wooden cross sticking up from a shallow lake surrounded by reeds. Each of them held two burning torches making the shape of an X. Their eyes were narrow slits.
The bookseller held his breath. The men who had been following him on the Theresienwiese yesterday had looked just like that.
“If those were the men,” Sara Lengfeld said, stubbing her second cigarette out in a coffee cup, “then we’ve really got a problem on our hands.”
5
THE KING WAS CROSSING a lake that reflected green and blue light. Stalactites hung from the roof like frozen tentacles. Frescoes of angry knights covered the rocky walls, their swords raised in battle, their mouths open in a soundless cry.
The boat silently glided in toward the bank where two paladins were waiting. With their dark green tracksuit jackets and precise crewcuts, they looked like travelers from some bizarre future in this underground world.
“Well? Erec, Bors?” the king said over a rendition of Richard Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” that boomed through the grotto from sinfully expensive Dolby loudspeakers hidden in the rock. “Have you found what I’m waiting for so eagerly?”
“It . . . it’s not easy, Your Excellency,” began the taller of the two men, whom the king had addressed as Erec. “We turned the whole place upside down, but the book wasn’t there.”
“It wasn’t there?” the king said quietly. “What does that mean? Did you question that bookseller?”
“We couldn’t during the day,” said Bors, the other bodyguard, a wiry little man with pockmarks and a squashed boxer’s nose. “The police were all over because of the break-in. But we paid the guy a visit in the evening. We’re more or less sure he had the book with him then.”
“Had?”
“Well, yes.” Bors looked nervously up at the roof, as if afraid that one of the stalactites might break off and skewer him. Which was a manner of death preferable to what he faced if that damn book didn’t turn up soon. “He . . . he was there with some woman, no idea who she was,” he continued, stammering. “They made off together, I guess with the book. We took a couple of photos of her when she was standing outside the bookshop. They talked for a few minutes and . . .”
“Of course we checked where this Lukas lives right away,” Erec chimed in. “We searched the whole place, but there was nothing there. Not the guy, not the woman, not the book.”
“And where are they now?” The king’s voice was still low, but it took on a threatening undertone that the henchmen knew only too well.
“We left men watching his apartment and the bookshop,” Erec murmured, his broad shoulders drooping like injured wings. “Gareth, Ywain, and Tristan. He can’t get away from us. Sooner or later he has to turn up.”
The king adjusted the royal signet ring and blinked very slowly. Little beads of sweat ran down the foreheads of the two bodyguards. The grotto was as hot as a sauna. To reach this place they had had to pass two security barriers. They had descended into the depths in an elevator, then hurried through the throne room with its mighty Bohemian glass chandeliers, and passed countless windows that looked out on a painted scene of a mountainous landscape in bright daylight. Neither of the men could have said how much their boss’s eccentric hobby had cost to date. Behind the king’s back, they sometimes joked about The Royal Highness’s crazy notions, which had recently been getting even crazier. But no matter how deranged the king was, they took care that none of their comments ever reached the royal ears. The pay was too good for that.