The Ludwig Conspiracy(58)

They seemed to be following her flight with amusement.





MARIA 10.9.1885

Steven Lukas rubbed his eyes, and stared again at the letters carved into the trunk of the tree. The bark had grown, trying to obliterate the wounds made to it more than a century ago, but the word could still be made out easily.

MARIA . . . Was that possible?

Suddenly it all made sense. The love story in Marot’s diary, the name in the linden tree, the capital letters. This must be the keyword! And he would almost have overlooked it. Not VENUS, not AMOR or EROS, but simply MARIA was the word that would decode the problem capitals in Marot’s text. In fact the clue had been contained in the first word, LINDERHOF; a linden tree in which the name of Marot’s secret love was carved forever. What was it that Marot had written at the end of the last chapter?

How was I to guess, at the time, that this girl would determine the fate of so many of us long after our deaths?

Steven looked around, searching. He must find Sara and tell her about his discovery. She would be able to try out his assumption with her new laptop. Then at last they would . . .

Suddenly Steven stopped, intuitively sensing that he was under observation. Very slowly, he turned his head until he was looking back in the direction of the party.

Beyond the basin of the fountain, about twenty yards away, stood the magician.

He had a torch in his hand and waved it to Steven. His top hat was gone, so that Steven saw only the hair smoothed down with gel and the high forehead where the white makeup suddenly stopped. Now the man held the torch directly in front of his face. He was smiling, and his white teeth shone in the flickering light. All at once Steven knew where he had seen him before. He had talked to him once, and it had not been a pleasant conversation. Steven remembered the man’s words clearly.

I am interested in eyewitness accounts from the time of King Ludwig the Second. Do you have anything of that nature?

The magician standing by the side of the fountain was none other than the man in the traditional Bavarian suit—the man who had asked about the book in his shop, and who was presumably the leader of the Cowled Men. Now he was gesticulating as if to demand Steven’s attention, and the next moment he had a black cloth in his hand.

Damn it all, it’s not a cloth; it’s . . .

The magician waved the hood back and forth like the severed head of a man on the block. The hood was like those worn by the Cowled Men.

In panic, Steven turned and ran up the garden terraces planted with colorful flowers to the Temple of Venus. As he reached the top, bathed in sweat, the magician still stood down by the fountain, waving—a tiny dot in the bright moonlight.





SARA RACED THROUGH the dark grounds of the castle toward the lights of the marquee. In front of her, not a hundred yards away, people were laughing, talking to one another, listening to Vivaldi. None of them, obviously, had noticed a fight taking place very close to them. When the art detective finally reached the lights, she stopped for the first time and looked around her.

The colossus had disappeared; the nightmare seemed to be over.

Sara took a deep breath and adjusted her dress, which was torn at the back and on one side. Her face and arms were scratched and dirty from the leaves, gravel, and earth; several of her fingernails were broken. Her stomach still hurt from the heavy blow it had suffered, but otherwise she seemed to be intact. All the same, she couldn’t stop shivering.

I’ve put a man’s eye out. I’ll never forget that noise.

She stared across at the other party guests and wondered what to do. Alert the stewards at this Manstein Systems party? Call the police? There would certainly be questions; she would have to explain who she was and what she was doing there. Sooner or later the officers would ask about her companion, they would find out about Steven, and that would be the end of her search.

Once again her eyes wandered over the male guests, most of them in black, with their masks, cigars, and champagne glasses. Where the hell was Steven? She couldn’t see him near the fountain, and there was no sign of him on the castle forecourt either. Sara could only hope that he hadn’t run into another of those fanatics. She had to find him and then get out of there as fast as possible, with or without the keyword.

The keyword!

She felt a panicked surge of heat as she remembered that the diary was still in the safe in their hotel room. It wouldn’t be long before that crazy knight or one of his henchmen began wondering where Sara and Steven had actually spent the last night. And the colossus didn’t give the impression of a man who would find that a hotel safe presented him with insuperable difficulties.

After scrutinizing the terrain one last time, Sara hurried to the waiting coaches and had herself chauffeured to the hotel. The building’s facade was adorned all over with little colored lights that cast warm light over the forecourt. Both inside and outside, guests were partying to the sound of loud laughter. Sara saw the corpulent and obviously tipsy tenor at the hotel bar with a couple of giggling blondes; older couples moved in time with a Strauss waltz in the blue and white breakfast room. Crowded with all the guests in their festive clothes, the hotel that had seemed so sleepy yesterday seemed to radiate an uncanny brightness.