He stood alone in the ostentatious entrance hall, right in front of an equestrian statue of Louis XIV. On the ceiling above him, one of the Sun King’s favorite sayings was prominently displayed between two frescoes showing chubby little cherubs.
Inferior to no one, Steven translated silently to himself. The very opposite of how I feel right now.
The bookseller looked around the hall but found no hint of how to solve the problem of the cipher. However, one thing struck him: the entire castle was a tribute to Greco-Roman antiquity on one hand, and the French baroque on the other. It was full of portraits of French noblemen. There was a hall of mirrors like the Sun King’s, and a four-poster bed with a canopy as tall as a high-diving board. Most amusing of all was the dining room with the famous dumbwaiter in the middle of it. It consisted of a flap through which the dining table, already set, could be brought up into the middle of the royal chamber by means of an ingenious mechanism. Steven imagined the king sitting up at night on his own, dining there with mirrors and lighted candles reflecting to infinity all around him.
And after that he lies on the Moroccan divan, smoking his chibouk, that long-stemmed Turkish pipe, or he rolls about on bearskins in a wooden hut while his servants have to perform, dressed as ancient German tribesmen for his benefit. Sorry, Frau Lengfeld, but the man was way out of his mind.
Steven was so deep in thought that he didn’t immediately notice the art detective’s light touch.
“Well, find out anything?” she asked encouragingly.
Gloomily, Steven shook his head. “No Marot, and nothing remotely like a clue.”
Sara sighed. “Same here. I ran around the park until I was worn out. Hunding’s hut, the Temple of Venus, the hermitage, the chapel, the Fountain of Neptune . . . This whole park is a damn labyrinth. And the upper part has already been closed to visitors. I guess this whole venture was doomed to fail all along. Sorry.”
She went out, lit herself a cigarette, and dropped wearily onto a park bench. “If we at least knew what we ought to be looking for. A sequence of numbers, a sentence, a picture. But at random like this? All we know is that the clue has something to do with the word LOVE.”
“I was thinking about that just now,” Steven said. “The Caesar code—the one I told you about at breakfast this morning—obviously wasn’t Marot’s chosen cipher. But there’s a considerably more complicated one. It’s known as the Vigenère cipher. If I remember correctly, it was rather popular in the mid-nineteenth century, so Marot would have known it.” Steven closed his eyes to concentrate. “In the Vigenère cipher, a different shift value is used for each of the letters to be coded, arising from the respective letters of the keyword. That avoids code letters appearing with too much frequency and giving away which letters they represent.”
Sara groaned. “This is beyond me.”
“It’s very simple, really. Look at this.” Steven broke a twig off one of the bushes near the castle and started writing in the gravel. After a minute he had two words, one above the other.
RIDDLE
LUDWIG
“Now, let’s suppose the word we want to write in code is RIDDLE. And our keyword is LUDWIG,” Steven began. “L is the twelfth letter of the alphabet, so the R of RIDDLE moves twelve letters forward, and it becomes . . .” He thought for a moment before writing down another letter. “It becomes C. The next letter in RIDDLE is I, so count out another twelve letters from C and it becomes U. Then D becomes G, the next D becomes S, and so on.” He scribbled a few more letters in the gravel and looked at the result with satisfaction.
PUZZLE
LUDWIG
AOCVTK
“Well, it certainly looks as jumbled as the sequences of letters in Marot’s diary,” Sara said. “So you could be right. All we need is the right keyword.”
“LOVE, maybe?” Steven suggested.
“Possibly. But I’d say that’s too obvious. It must be some other word, one that . . . well, that sort of symbolizes love.”
“Symbolizes?” the bookseller asked. “What’s that supposed to mean? There are thousands of—”
Suddenly he stopped. Sara looked at him in surprise.
“What is it?”
“I think I really do know a word like that,” Steven said, and pointed to the white temple on the hill in front of them. “Didn’t you say that’s the Temple of Venus? And there’s a Grotto of Venus somewhere around. This place is full of statues of Venus, and I saw a couple of paintings of Venus in the castle itself.”
“The goddess of love,” Sara said. “Why didn’t I think of her myself?”