Steven hurried after her, and they walked side by side through the park, past beech and spruce trees, and a small pool of water. Tourists passed them, already on their way home. They still couldn’t see the castle.
“Two hours,” Sara hissed. “How are we going to find a clue about how to crack that code in just two hours? I swear to God I’m never going to buy software from Manstein Systems again. Filthy capitalist firm, renting the park and leaving us commoners outside.”
“This isn’t getting us anywhere,” Steven pointed out, soothingly. “Why don’t we split up? You search the park and I’ll search the castle.”
“You’ve picked the easy option,” Sara grumbled, pointing ahead. “You can easily search the whole castle—unlike the park.”
They crested a rise and looked down into a valley gently falling away below them. To the left, pathways under green foliage bordered a cascade that flowed into a basin of water farther down. To the right, a white temple stood on a hill, with terraced gardens and a pool with a spurting fountain. A white castle sat enthroned in the middle of the valley, looking like a miniature version of Versailles.
Steven stopped in surprise. He had expected an imposing structure, something like Neuschwanstein, or at least Nymphenburg Palace in Munich, but this was no mighty castle. Embedded in the huge park, it looked more like a charming toy.
A king’s toy.
“I’d expected something larger,” he murmured.
Sara smiled at him. “Most say that when they first come here, with the image of Neuschwanstein Castle in their heads. All the same, the king spent most of his final years here at Linderhof. He venerated Louis the Fourteenth, as you know.” She pointed to the fountain, more than sixty-five feet high. “This is a mini-Versailles, Baroque layout of the gardens and all. Ludwig’s favorite playgrounds are in the park itself. The Grotto of Venus, the Moroccan house, the hermitage, and up there, the Temple of Venus and Hunding’s hut.”
“Hunding’s hut?” Steven said, baffled. “Never heard of it.”
“It comes from Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung. Ludwig had it built to the composer’s description. A kind of Germanic log cabin. When Ludwig was in the mood for it, his entourage had to cavort about in animal skins, drink mead from horns, and dance around in a ring.”
Steven wrinkled his brow. “And you still say the king wasn’t nuts?”
“Don’t you ever have dreams, Herr Lukas?” Sara asked, laughing. “Ludwig just had the money to make his come true. He wanted to escape from the world, like so many of us.” She pointed surreptitiously to a group of tourists in shorts and Windbreakers behind them. “Believe me, if we all had enough money to realize our dreams, the world would be a giant amusement park full of space ships, game shows, arcades, and brothels. Myself, I prefer the king’s fantasies.”
A few dozen people had assembled outside the castle, waiting for the next guided tour. Some passed the time by smoking; others photographed themselves and their families in front of every detail of the building. Somewhere a baby was crying.
“What’s that tree?” Steven asked. He pointed to a scrawny linden tree on the right, beyond the pool of water, the only detail that didn’t fit into the perfect symmetry of the castle garden.
Sara shrugged and glanced at the crumpled map that she had picked up at the ticket office. “Known as the king’s linden tree,” she read in a monotone, “it grew here long before the castle was built. Blah, blah, blah. Time’s wasting.” She pointed to the crowd in front of the entrance. “The pack is getting restless. We’ll do as you suggested. I’ll look around the park, and you go on one of those guided tours of the castle. Enjoy!” She winked at him again and then disappeared down one of the paths under the arbors.
Sighing, Steven joined the line of overweight American tourists whose accent told him they came from Texas. A man pressed his chewing gum onto the castle wall, and then the procession slowly started moving.
12
AN HOUR AND A HALF LATER, Steven was no wiser than before.
The rooms inside the castle were, in fact, impressive. That didn’t alter the fact that he still didn’t have the faintest idea of what he should be looking for. He had taken three successive guided tours with commentaries in English, in German, and finally in Dutch. He had memorized every detail of those rooms. When he finally asked the tour guide about the name of Marot, she only responded with an annoyed shrug. By now, word had obviously gone around that this American tourist with the baseball cap and leather jacket was an incorrigible Ludwig fan. Steven consoled himself by thinking that he was probably not the only one around. The tour guides had certainly encountered worse.