Steven put one of the photos from the box beside his shimmering laptop. Like all the other pictures, it had obviously been taken in a studio. There were dummy columns in the background, and a curtain cord. The young man seated beside the king wore a well-cut suit, his dark hair combed to one side; he had attractive, soft features that made him look almost girlish. By now Steven was convinced that the young man in the picture was none other than the royal physician’s assistant.
Hello, Theodor Marot, pleased to meet you. What story do you have to tell? Are your memoirs so explosive that you had to write them in secret code? Or so . . . delicate?
Thoughtfully, Steven picked up the lock of hair lying beside the photographs in the little wooden treasure chest with its black cloth lining. The hair tied with a ribbon must have been raven black long ago.
As black as the king’s hair.
Steven finished his wine and put the journal, the photographs, and the lock of hair back in the box. Then he opened another bottle to help his thinking along.
It looked very much as if the contents of the little box were worth far more than he had first thought.
HIS HEADACHE THE next morning told Steven that the Montepulciano had been a bit stronger than he was used to. Eyes closed, it took him some time to locate the radio alarm clock that was cheerfully playing Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik. With a well-aimed swing of his hand, Steven killed Wolfgang Amadeus stone dead, sat up groaning, and ran a hand through his untidy gray hair. There were some days when you felt that you were forty with particular clarity.
The little wooden box was still standing beside his bed on the desk. It had spent the night in his dreams. He vaguely remembered a gigantic royal cloak that threatened to smother him. Men in black hoods had also been there, prodding him with red-hot fingers.
Steven rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, stood up, and limped into the kitchen, where the dirty dishes of the last few days were stacked. He carefully picked an antique edition of the satirical magazine Simplicissimus off the table and blew a few croissant crumbs off the front page. This copy of the journal had appeared just before the First World War and deserved better than to get jam on it. Humming quietly to himself, the bookseller filled the espresso jug to the top with freshly ground coffee and twiddled the knob of the radio until he found a classical music concert. The music soothed him instantly. His knees were still sore, and someone was knocking against his forehead from inside his skull, but at least the memories of his bad dreams had gone away. Steven massaged his temples and listened to the deep notes of a cello, while he thoughtfully sipped his heavily sweetened espresso. Yesterday’s events—first the visit of that guy in the Bavarian-style costume, then the hooded men—had upset his stomach. And then, of course, there was the little treasure chest itself, with its sensational contents. Only why had the mere sight of it shaken him so badly?
Well, he’d take a closer look at it all back in the shop. If this man Marot really had taken a royal secret to his grave, Steven would make a few phone calls, earn good money, and then, so far as he was concerned, Frau Schultheiss could go and open her boutique in the downmarket Hasenbergl district. As an expert on the literary history of Bavaria, Steven knew that rumors of King Ludwig II’s homosexuality had come up time and again. To him, it made no difference one way or the other, but he was sure that plenty of newspapers would come up with a large sum of money for actual evidence—money that could pay the rent on his shop for a good long while.
After a long, hot, almost boiling shower, he put on a new brown corduroy suit, with a white shirt and a tweed bow tie, put the little treasure chest back in his leather briefcase, and set off for the Westend district. The rain clouds had disappeared overnight, the leaves on the chestnut trees in the beer gardens were red and yellow, and the people coming toward him had friendly expressions on their faces. As Steven strolled over the Theresienwiese, populated this morning by cyclists and pedestrians, it was hard to imagine that a few teenagers wearing hoods had scared him so badly here only a few hours ago. The almost summery warmth and the mild sunlight helped to banish his headache, and his mood improved with every step he took. It was one of those mornings that herald a very pleasant day.
But even as Steven was still more than fifty yards away from his antiquarian bookshop, he guessed that, on the contrary, this was going to be one of the lousiest days of his whole year.
A SMALL GROUP OF curious onlookers stood in front of a pile of broken glass that had once been the display window of his shop. A few books lay out in the street, looking like limp, dead flies, their leather bindings splayed. Pages of parchment had been torn out and were splashed with mud. But that was nothing compared to the chaos that Steven saw when he looked through the broken window into the bookshop itself.