The Ludwig Conspiracy(74)

And as the oath sealed my lips anyway, I decided to hold my peace.





19





STEVEN HAD BEEN READING Marot’s diary for more than two hours, as if in a trance, when he suddenly heard a sound behind him. He straightened up. Twigs cracked underfoot on the secluded, shady path through the trees. Could some tourists have lost their way and strayed to this remote spot on the island? Or were the Cowled Men after him again? Maybe by now the police had tracked him down? Steven shuddered at the thought of the green Bentley that had followed them to Prien on the Chiemsee.

Who in God’s name are all these people taking such a keen interest in the book?

Cautiously, the bookseller put the diary down and scanned his surroundings from his place on the bench behind the mighty tree trunk. He almost expected to meet the magician, or the one-eyed knight, in this dark fairy-tale wood. But it was only Sara who came toward him, waving.

“So here you are,” she cried cheerfully. “I see you found an idyllic place to sit and work on the diary.”

“Most of all it’s a timeless place.” Steven closed his notebook. “I’d say this spot looks just the way it did more than a hundred years ago, except that the beech trees have grown a bit.”

“Well? Find anything out?” Sara’s voice had a serious note in it now. “Any clue to help us work out what Marot could have meant by writing KING in capital letters?”

Steven shook his head. “No clue at all. Right now Marot is still in Berg, meeting the last few men still loyal to the king. It’s an exciting political thriller, but there’s nothing to give us the next keyword.” Briefly, he told her about the pages of the diary that he had just read. Sara listened in silence, then leaned back and let a stray sunbeam fall on her face.

“Nothing to report from our end either,” she told him. “We didn’t find a single clue, in the monastery or in the other buildings.” She laughed softly. “Not a single word on a whole damn island. Might as well be looking for a needle in a haystack. But I did find something else.”

She paused for a moment before going on, in a low voice. “You remember the green Bentley over at the harbor? Just now I met three men whose car it could have been. When I was looking around the old monastery with Uncle Lu, they were always just a couple of rooms behind us. I could be wrong, but I think they’re snooping around after us. Now, guess what those gentlemen were wearing.”

“What?”

“Old-style Bavarian gear, like that charming character who paid you a call in your antiquarian bookshop.”

“The Cowled Men!” Steven exclaimed. “That’s all I need.”

Sara raised a hand, soothing him. “Take it easy. As long as we’re with other people, we ought to be safe. And no one followed me here on my way to find you—I’m sure of that.”

“Where’s Uncle Lu?” Steven asked.

“Stuffing himself in the restaurant and chatting up the waitresses. He can get on your nerves with his know-it-all attitude.” Sara made a face. “That’s why I walked around on my own, too, for a while, hoping the keyword would simply materialize on the ground in front of me.”

“My guess, anyway, is that if we find it at all, it’ll be in the castle,” Steven said. “And by this evening, I hope to have read the next passage.”

Sara smiled at him. All of a sudden the bookseller felt his heart rise. He wasn’t used to having women smile at him like that these days.

“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” she said in a low voice. “Reading that old book. You’d have liked to live in those days.”

Steven shrugged his shoulders. “What, having teeth drawn without anesthetic, getting TB, raking out the stove at five in the morning early in January, that sort of thing? Not to mention the high rate of infant mortality, and the filth and smoke in the cities. I don’t know if it’s as alluring as all that.” His eyes twinkled as he looked at Sara. “But you’re right. Sometimes I really do think I’d have felt more at ease in the nineteenth century. A poor poet surrounded by a great many books, in a little cottage. Not a bad lifestyle.”

“Quite a romantic one, anyway.”

Sara was looking at him in a strange way. She had now moved very close to Steven on the bench, and that made him feel hot and cold at the same time. Yet again, he had to admit to himself that his original dislike of Sara and her brash style had given way to a certain fascination.

For some time neither of them said anything, and there was nothing to be heard but the twittering of the birds in the trees. Steven felt the trunk of the beech tree behind his back, and he thought that Theodor and Maria could have sat in this very place, under the very same beech tree.