The Ludwig Conspiracy(60)

“And if it isn’t?”

“Then I abandon the book and go to the police. My nerves can’t take any more. This is the last try—right or wrong.”

Sara laughed quietly. “I’m afraid it’s too late to turn back now, Herr Lukas. Those men don’t look like they’d give up so easily. Even if the police believed you—we’ve already found out too much, and these other guys don’t like it. Think what they did to my uncle.”

“Are you suggesting that my only options are spending the rest of my life on the run or dying painfully by torture?” Steven asked wearily.

“Not if we move faster than our pursuers. If we solve the mystery, we may find out who’s behind it.” Sara tried to smile. “Now, let’s see what dear Maria’s dirty little secrets are.”

She drew deeply one last time on her menthol cigarette, threw the stub out of the window, and tapped letter after letter into her laptop.

“The first coded word was QRCSOQNZO,” she said, lost in thought.

“We’ve known that for ages. Don’t pile on the tension like that.”

“Hold your horses,” Sara said. “My MacBook may have four processors with two point six gigahertz each, but I have to do the typing myself. That takes . . .”

She stopped, staring at the word on the screen.

“What is it?” Steven’s voice almost broke. “Was I right? Is MARIA the keyword? Come on, say something!”

Sara nodded as she gazed at the screen. “Bingo, Herr Lukas,” she whispered. “Looks like we get to play another round of the game. Which doesn’t mean that we’ll be any the wiser.”

“What do you mean?” Steven asked, baffled.

“See for yourself.”

The bookseller cast the screen a quick look as he drove. The next moment he almost drove the Mini down a steep slope. He wrenched the wheel around just in time.





Input QRCSOQNZO

Output ERLKOENIG





“ERLKOENIG?” Steven shook his head, puzzled.

“A ballad by Goethe about a father, his sick child, and the Erl-King,” Sara said. The laptop had slid off her knees. Grimacing with pain, she rubbed her elbow. “And please keep your eyes on the road.”

“I know who the Erl-King is, Frau Lengfeld. But what, for heaven’s sake, does the title of a poem, however famous, tell us?”

Sara shrugged. “You’re the antiquarian bookseller. My line is art, not interpreting the boring poems you have to read in school.” She picked her laptop up from the dark footwell where the screen was still shimmering away. “Thank God this thing is shock-proof.”

“Try the other words.”

Sara typed the next coded words into the computer and finally leaned back. “Oh, wonderful,” she muttered. “BELSAZAR, THAL, ZAUBERIN, LORELEI, WINSPERG, FLUCH, RING, SIEGERICH, TAUCHER, FISCHER, LEGENDE, BALLADE . . . Can you make sense of any of that?”

“‘Belsazar,’ ‘Lorelei,’ ‘Taucher’ . . . They’re all titles of German ballads,” Steven said after a little hesitation. “‘Belshazzar,’ ‘Lorelei,’ ‘The Diver.’ Then ‘Fisherman,’ ‘Der Fischer,’ ‘The Angler,’ as far as I know, it’s by Goethe, too, and ‘Fluch,’ ‘curse,’ may refer to Ludwig Uhland’s ballad ‘The Singer’s Curse,’ ‘Des Sängers Fluch.’ But what’s the point of it all?” He struck the wheel angrily, raising a plaintive little toot from the horn. “Damn it, I’m beginning to think that Marot was simply having a joke with the whole book.”

“He goes to a lot of time and trouble for a joke.” Sara whistled quietly through her teeth. “I don’t suppose ‘WDC’ is the title of another poem, is it?”

Steven frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I’ve just entered another coded word, from the next chapter. You haven’t transliterated it yet. Looks like we need a different code from here on.”

“Oh shit,” Steven quietly said. “And where are we going to find that?”

Sara rapidly leafed through Marot’s well-worn diary. “I don’t know shorthand,” she said at last, “but I can read words in capital letters all right. And the next words that Marot wrote that way are HERRENCHIEMSEE and KOENIG. Presumably we won’t find out about the titles of those poems until we go to Herrenchiemsee. And as an additional hint, our friend Marot left us that worn-out old word KOENIG for the king.”

“Ludwig’s castle on the lake, the Chiemsee.” Steven laughed despairingly. “My God, that’s a whole island! How on earth are we going to find anything there?”