“We still don’t know who that colossus is,” he said at last, lost in thought as he stroked Sara’s hair. “No friend of the Cowled Men, anyway, that much is clear now. I wonder if he was following us from Uncle Lu’s house in that green Bentley?”
A particularly violent gust of wind rattled the shutter, and the rain slapped against the wood like a wet cloth. Sara gave a nervous start. She reached for her crumpled pack of cigarettes beside the bed and lit herself a partly smoked one. “No idea. Maybe, or maybe it was some third party we don’t even know about. Or friends of Albert Zöller keeping us under observation.”
“Do you still think he has something to do with your uncle’s murder?” Steven shook his head. “Forget it—he saved our lives just now, putting on that Ludwig act. We ought to be grateful.”
“All the same.” Sara drew deeply on her cigarette. “There’s something wrong. Uncle Paul knew Zöller. So why didn’t he turn to him for advice if Uncle Lu knows so much about the king? Instead, my uncle went straight to the Cowled Men.”
“But then something must have happened,” Steven replied. “That guy who called himself the steersman of the Cowled Men did say that his contact with Paul Liebermann was suddenly broken. And the professor came to my shop instead because he needed material to help him decipher the shorthand.”
“Oh hell.” In annoyance, Sara ground out her cigarette on one of the bedposts and threw the cigarette butt on the floor. “I’m sure my uncle would know what those poems and roman numerals mean. It’s like the farther we go, the more we’re groping around in the dark.”
“And the greater the danger that we’ll pay for this adventure with our lives,” Steven said. “Whoever’s behind it all, I never should have gotten involved.”
“Damn it, Steven, don’t you see?” Sara looked him straight in the eye. “Solving the puzzle is our only chance. Or do you want to tell the police about what happened in the museum?”
Steven ran his hands through his hair. Once again a wave of memories was rolling toward him. “I just don’t know how much longer I can stand this. I feel as if something is reaching out to me, something . . .” He hesitated briefly before going on. “Something even worse than that nightmare in the museum. A dark place, a black hole deep inside me. And it has something to do with that damn diary. Sometimes I think I’m turning as crazy as Ludwig himself.”
Another gust of wind shook the thin wooden walls of the boathouse. The wind whistled through the shutters, and to Steven it sounded like the wailing of a small child.
A child crying out for his parents, he thought. Crying out for his parents, who died long ago.
Sara leaned over him and covered his face with little kisses. “Whatever it is, Steven, you can tell me,” she whispered. “Okay, so I’m no psychiatrist, but I can listen just as well as Dr. Freud.” She tried to smile and then turned serious again. “Does it have something to do with the way you fell apart back there? With the weird stuff you were stammering? Something about a fire and a library. And a teahouse. What do you mean, a teahouse, Steven?”
The bookseller shook his head. “It . . . it’s so long ago. I was only six at the time. I can . . . I can hardly remember.”
“Try.”
He took a deep breath. “My childhood memories don’t really begin until we were living in Germany,” he began hesitantly. “We were living in a big house in Cologne—it had belonged to my maternal grandparents before us. My father was crazy about the library, which dated from the early 1870s. And so was I . . .” Steven closed his eyes. “To this day I can see it: the tall oak bookshelves, the rolling ladder that allowed you to soar along the rows of books like an eagle, the yellowing oil paintings on the walls, the shimmer of dust outside the window . . .” He looked at Sara again and sighed. “I was new to Germany. I didn’t have any friends to play with, and that library, in the empty house with all its high-ceilinged corridors and rooms, became my playroom, my secret realm. I taught myself to read in the library, using an illustrated edition of the fables of La Fontaine and a stained old edition of the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. Even then I liked to hide away behind heavy tomes. They offer me protection, as maybe you can imagine. But back then . . . back then they brought death.”
Sara looked at him, wide-eyed. “What happened?”
“A few months after we moved into the villa, my father threw a housewarming party, a ball,” Steven went on. “There were a few distant branches of the family in Germany, and friends and colleagues—the kind of guests you invite to a party like that. It was to be a glamorous occasion. The men all wore tuxedos or tails, the women wore evening gowns, a small chamber orchestra played Haydn, Mozart, and Schubert in the salon. I . . . I remember being bored. So I went up to the library on the second floor to be alone. I couldn’t reach the light switch, so I lit a candle. No, not a candle—it was a Chinese lantern. And there was this safe behind an old oil painting of Bismarck . . .” He paused and tried to recollect. “That night the safe happened to be open. My father must have forgotten to close it . . .”