Tired and still shivering, Steven climbed the many well-worn stairs to the top floor of the building. Only when he had closed the door of his apartment behind him did he notice that his pants were torn and that he was bleeding in several places. His hands were dirty, the wool coat was as wet as a dishcloth, and his briefcase was damp and spattered with mud.
He decided to drink his first glass of wine before the pasta was ready.
2
A GOOD HOUR AND THREE-QUARTERS of a bottle later, Steven Lukas, showered and in clean clothes, was sitting on his beloved old shabby leather sofa in his attic apartment. Outside, rain beat against the window, and the wind blew more strongly. Steven could see the light of the Munich Olympiad tower through the drops on the pane, while the red brick buildings of the Schlachthof district were discernible only in outline.
As usual, he had had to start by clearing a dozen or so books off the cushions. The coffee table was overflowing with empty teacups, the remains of sandwiches, and newspapers from the last few days with the pages coming apart. In contrast to his bookshop, Steven’s apartment had no sense of order. Sunday the cleaning lady would come and disparage his way of life once again. It was a ritual for fat Joanna to preach to him, in her Polish accent, about the dangers of a bachelor existence.
Steven’s last real relationship had been four years ago, and by now he was used to thinking of books as better partners than women.
Steven closed his eyes and enjoyed Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto in B-flat major as the music came softly over his old Philips record player. The nearly empty bottle of Montepulciano stood in front of him. By now he had calmed down a bit. Probably there was some perfectly simple explanation for the incident on the Theresienweise. The hooded figures were most likely teenagers out to scare any passersby they happened to meet. And he had run away like a headless chicken. The kids were probably still laughing themselves silly over the old fool in the muddy puddle.
Steven shook his head at his own cowardice, then turned to the book in code from the little treasure chest. Fortunately, neither the box nor its contents had been damaged when he fell over. As Steven ran his fingers over the cover with its ivory carvings, he again felt that vague sense of having seen the little book somewhere before. It was like a faded picture from a long-forgotten time. But when he searched his memory, he could find nothing—only a slight dizziness, and a strange, bitter smell as if something had been left burning.
By this time he was sure that the curious hieroglyphics were some kind of secret writing, but no matter how hard he thought about it, he couldn’t work out just what it was. It was true that in the course of his life as an antiquarian bookseller, he had once read a treatise about nineteenth-century cryptology, but as far as he could remember, it was generally a case of exchanging certain written characters for others, with numbers also playing a part at times. The signs in front of him, however, were more reminiscent of those old Germanic runes that made no sense at first glance. Steven put on his glasses and looked more closely at the first signs.
What on earth was that supposed to be? A child’s scribble? Very occasionally, conventional characters, all of them capitals, appeared among the signs, but they didn’t form actual words. They were as much of a mystery to Steven as the runes. He leafed through the book, counting at least five of these sequences of uppercase letters distributed through the early pages, and more farther on. The first three were the following:
VZLMCTLIT
NECAALAI
FHRT
Steven drank some more wine and looked again at the title page, while outside the rain continued to patter against the windowpanes.
Memoirs of Theodor Marot, Assistant to Dr. Max Schleiss von Loewenfeld.
He decided to ignore the mysterious inscriptions inside the book for now, went over to his desk, and opened the laptop. It started with a hum. Once it was up and running, he typed the name Theodor Marot into a search engine, but all he found was an Austrian swimming club and a site selling construction equipment in Canada. He was much more successful with Max Schleiss von Loewenfeld; the search engine came up with about two hundred hits. When Steven clicked on the first of them, his heart began to beat considerably faster.
The websites informed him that Dr. Schleiss von Loewenfeld had been King Ludwig II’s personal physician, and before that had treated Ludwig’s father, King Maximilian II. According to a scholarly blog that Steven found, Loewenfeld had been considered one of the best Bavarian doctors of his time. He bore the title of privy counselor to the king, and he died at the end of the nineteenth century at almost ninety years old, rich and respected. A black-and-white photograph showed an elderly gentleman with nickel-framed glasses and a thoughtful expression, his coat neatly buttoned up, holding a top hat. His striking beard was reminiscent of Abraham Lincoln.