The Ludwig Conspiracy(90)
Steven groaned. “NEUSCHWANSTEIN . . . the third part of the puzzle. Of course, Ludwig built three castles, so there are three places in the puzzle. We might have guessed. And the last keyword?” He went to get the little treasure chest out of his rucksack, but Sara waved him away.
“Don’t bother. I already looked. It’s WAGNER.” Smiling, Sara closed the laptop. “At least we know we’re getting somewhere. So now let’s . . .”
There was a rustling sound behind them. Steven turned around, expecting to see Uncle Lu.
“Herr Zöller, I thought we were meeting . . .” he began. But the words died away on his lips.
Three men were standing in front of a large painting of the Fairy-tale King as if they had just walked out of the picture. They wore Bavarian suits and green hunter’s coats, and two of them wore green Alpine hats. It must have begun to rain outside, because large drops fell from the brims of their hats, forming puddles on the floor. The man in the middle had sparse gray hair and wore an old-fashioned pair of pince-nez. He looked like a schoolteacher in an old movie. At that moment, bright lightning flashed outside the museum windows, followed by a crash of thunder.
“Good evening, Herr Lukas,” the stranger said in a grating voice. “I did say we’d be meeting you again.”
23
INSTINCTIVELY, STEVEN LUKAS took a step back. The stranger before him was none other than the elderly gentleman who had turned up at his antiquarian bookshop five days ago, the man who, dressed as a magician, had waved the hood of a cowl at him at the party in Linderhof. And presumably also the man he had seen outside by the fountain earlier that evening. So he had not been imagining those voices and footsteps in the castle.
“You . . . you’re the boss of the Cowled Men . . .” Steven stammered. The man nodded while at the same time he watched Sara frantically search her purse.
“If your charming companion is thinking of producing a gun from her makeup case, then you should strongly recommend she do no such thing,” he said. A small black pistol gleamed in his hand. “This is a Walther PPK, a deadly large-caliber toy that I normally use only on wounded wild boar.” The little eyes behind the pince-nez twinkled craftily at Sara and Steven. “My great passion, you see, is hunting, which includes hunting for rare antiquities. Particularly when they have some connection with Ludwig the Second.” With his gun, he indicated Sara’s purse. “Put that down on the floor, please. Believe me, this is all a misunderstanding.”
Cautiously, Sara put down her purse. “A misunderstanding?” she snapped. “You want the book and we have it. So don’t bullshit me, Herr . . .”
She paused, and the man gave her a smug smile. “You may call me Huber, a good Bavarian name. I am what you might call the steersman of our little association. The gentlemen to my right and left are my two valued lieutenants, Herr Meier and Herr Schmidt.” The two men in hunter’s coats bowed. “As for the book,” Herr Huber continued, “you are right, we do want it. But not to take it away from you. On the contrary, we want to help you decode it.”
“Help us?” Steven stared at the leader of the Cowled Men.
“You heard me.” Herr Huber put the pistol in the side pocket of his Bavarian coat and then raised his hands in a placatory gesture. His face looked gray as rock in the emergency lighting.
“We are a very old order,” he said in a soft Bavarian singsong. “When Emperor Frederick Barbarossa drowned in the river Saleph while on the Third Crusade, his knights wrapped themselves in black cloaks and covered their heads with black hoods. Ever since then, we have paid honor to great emperors and kings. Ludwig was the last of them who stood for those old ideals. We will not rest until his murder has finally been explained and atoned for.” With slow, almost majestic strides, the man who called himself Herr Huber paced through the room and sat down on an armchair with a gilded frame. In his voluminous coat, he reminded Steven of a stern storybook king on his throne. The two lieutenants placed themselves behind their leader. Judging by their physical size, they could well be the two Cowled Men who had chased Steven over the Theresienwiese in Munich.
“Then why are you following us if, as you say, we all want the same thing?” he asked the leader. “Why put on this show?”
Herr Huber shook his head. “You don’t understand. We were not following you—that was always the others.”
Steven frowned. “The others?”
“The people who killed the professor, and who are going to kill the pair of you if you don’t watch out for yourselves.” Herr Huber leaned back on his throne. “Let me illuminate the situation for you,” he said. “It was about three weeks ago that Professor Liebermann first got in touch with us. He spoke of Theodor Marot’s diary, a book that has always been rumored to exist and that is said to prove that our king was murdered. And now it did indeed seem to have turned up at an Internet auction, where Paul Liebermann acquired it for a ridiculously small sum. The professor came to us for help with its transliteration.”