“Helping the king, Franz. That’s all I can tell you.” Albert Zöller raised his hands in a placatory gesture. “Give us another hour and then we’ll be off.”
“Okay,” the watchman said. “But only if you’ll appear as Ludwig in the gondola again at our next meeting.” He switched off the flashlight and turned away. “I’m going over to the monastery now. When I come back, I’ll look in on the museum next door. I’d like you to be out of here by then.”
“Just a moment,” Steven said, when the night watchman had left. “The museum. We haven’t been there yet.”
Uncle Lu’s brow wrinkled, and he studied the map again. “But what’s the point? Yes, it’s here in the castle, but it wasn’t here when Ludwig was, so Marot can’t have left any clue in there. More likely we’d find something in the garden, but we’d have to wait until tomorrow for that.”
“But the rooms themselves were here at the time,” Sara objected. “Steven’s right. We ought at least to take a look at the museum.”
“Oh, very well, Frau Lengfeld,” Uncle Lu growled. “You and Herr Lukas go to the museum, and I’ll rattle through the rooms on the second floor again. Let’s meet by the cash desk in an hour’s time. If we haven’t found anything by then, we’ll give up for the night. I can’t keep Franz waiting any longer, and that’s my last word.”
Still grousing quietly, the old man moved away and disappeared behind the metal structure of the magic table. The lightning of the coming thunderstorm flashed beyond the windows.
22
SARA AND STEVEN WAITED until Uncle Lu’s footsteps had died away on the stairs. Now the only sounds were the occasional click of the emergency lighting and their own breathing. In silence, they hurried back along the corridor to the reception desk, from which a narrow passage led to the east wing of the castle. They ducked under a barrier and entered the dark museum.
“Not that I think we’ll find much here,” Steven said, “but I’d like to go to bed feeling we really have tried everything.”
“And it’s good for the two of us to be on our own,” Sara whispered.
Steven grinned. “Did Marot’s tryst with Maria inspire you? If so, we’d better be quick before Zöller . . .”
“Idiot!” Sara snapped. “That’s not what I meant. We need to talk about Uncle Lu.”
Steven raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Why?”
“Up to now he’s played pretty dumb for a genuine Ludwig expert, don’t you think? As if he didn’t want us to find anything out. And he spent a long time chatting to those guys from security just now. All dyed-in-the-wool Ludwig fans, like that eccentric fisherman who brought us over in his boat. And at midday, he suddenly disappeared for half an hour.”
“You mean . . .”
“I mean maybe it was a mistake for me to let someone like Zöller in on the whole story. How do we know he wouldn’t like to have the diary for himself? For himself or some organization that he’s working for in secret. That green Bentley only began following us after we’d visited Zöller.”
“The Cowled Men. You really think he’s working with them? He himself described them as a bunch of idiots.”
“Maybe only to divert suspicion from himself. In any event, we ought to keep our eyes open.”
They entered a long corridor, where nothing but vague outlines could be seen in the dim emergency lighting. Outside the windows, distant lightning flashed, and thunder rumbled from the other side of the lake. The king’s christening robe, coronation cloak, and death mask hung in glass cases beside the corridor walls. In one niche Steven saw yellowed photographs charting the course of Ludwig’s physical decline. He looked thoughtfully from one to another. On the extreme left was a lanky youth with a slightly feminine cast of countenance, a cigarette in his fingers coquettishly stretched out in front of him. On the extreme right was a fat, bloated man in a Bavarian hat, one of the last photographs of Ludwig, taken just before his death. The contrast sent a shudder down the bookseller’s spine. What could happen in the life of a person to bring about such a change?
More sparsely lit halls followed, containing furniture, photographs, glass cases, and finally a life-sized marble statue of the king. The statue was in the shadows, so that for a brief moment Steven thought he was looking at a living man. He imagined Ludwig climbing down from his marble pedestal to them, in order to tell them his secret.
The bookseller found the silence around them oppressive; he felt as if he were inside a casket. A black wave of memories lapped against the door of his subconscious mind. Steven saw himself as a boy, standing beside his parents’ grave with red-rimmed eyes.