The Ludwig Conspiracy (37 page)

At last, in the first light of dawn, the traitors approached.

It was a strange picture that presented itself to me in my vantage point by the window. Count von Holnstein; Count Crailsheim, foreign minister of Bavaria; and several other officials came driving up in carriages splashed by dirt and mud. When they climbed out, I saw in the rising mist that the noble gentlemen wore gold-embroidered gala uniforms, with old-fashioned tricorne hats on their heads. Dr. von Gudden, another doctor, and the four madhouse attendants wore plain black, which made them look like hungry ravens. When they realized that the local gendarmes and the peasants had them encircled, they looked anxiously around. Only Count Holnstein preserved his composure.

“We are here to arrest the king and take him to Linderhof!” he called to the crowd, in the tones of one accustomed to command. “For his own protection. It has been proved that Ludwig is insane. From this day on, Prince Luitpold is regent in his place. So make way there and let us into the castle!”

However, the people gathered together outside the main entrance, and angry murmuring was to be heard, as threatening as the sound of an angry animal.

“What you are doing here is a crying shame. A sin and a shame,” said an elderly lady of distinguished appearance wearing a monstrous hat. She seemed to be one of the local landed aristocracy. “Letting these ministers harness you to their own purposes,” she scolded, pointing to the hesitant officials. “Your children will be ashamed in times to come when they hear of this high treason.” She swung her umbrella menacingly, while her little poodle began to yap furiously. People in the crowd cheered for the king.

Count Holnstein looked around for help, sensing that the situation was getting out of control. He nervously mopped the sweat and the rain from his brow, seized one of the hesitating madhouse attendants, and with him went up to the local gendarmes, who had formed a human chain outside the castle gate.

“In the name of Prince Luitpold, rightful regent of Bavaria, will you finally open this gate!” he roared. “Otherwise I’ll have you all—”

At that moment the butt of a rifle hit the madhouse attendant in front. A small bottle fell from his hand to the ground and broke with the soft sound of splintering glass. There was a second of horror, and then wild shouting rose in the air again.

“That smells like chloroform! The dogs want to send us all to sleep! Seize them!”

It was only with difficulty that Count Holnstein, Dr. Gudden, and the others got back to their carriages. The peasants seemed to be on the point of throwing several of the most prominent men in the land into the Pöllat Gorge. By this time even the firefighters had made haste to the king’s aid. The doors of the horse-drawn carriages slammed, the coachmen cracked their whips, and to the accompaniment of angry abuse, the officials fled back to Hohenschwangau. When they had disappeared around the next bend in the road, loud cries of jubilation rang out. The enemy had been routed.

When I returned to the castle courtyard, I saw that the servant Weber, one of the last to be loyal to the king, was talking to a few of the local gendarmes. He seemed to be greatly agitated.

“What is it?” I asked at once. “Surely these officers are not about to arrest the king?”

“On the contrary.” Alfons Weber grinned at me. “His Majesty has just given orders to have that whole gang who were here just now arrested. We’ll pick them up down in Hohenschwangau.” He clapped his hands with glee, like a child. “At last there’s a fresh wind blowing here!” shouted Weber right across the courtyard. “You wait and see, Marot. The king will go to Munich and dispatch all those ministers to the devil. And everything will be all right again.”

I nodded, although I was not yet ready to believe in this peace. However, not two hours later the first to be arrested did indeed stumble into the castle precincts. They were Count Holnstein; Count Crailsheim, the foreign minister of Bavaria; and Count Toerring, whom the ministers had designated the king’s future companion. They still sported their gala uniforms, but now those garments looked like costumes for clowns. The men’s tricorne hats hung askew over their faces, their gait heavy and dragging. True, they were not fettered, and the gendarmes walked a little way behind them, but the crowd lining the road made any idea of flight impossible. They were running a gauntlet that I wouldn’t have wished on my worst enemies.

“I’ll put your eyes out if you don’t go faster!” one Allgäu farmer shouted to Count Crailsheim. A young peasant woman pointed to the staggering prisoners, who were deathly pale, and called to her little boy loud enough for everyone to hear, “When you’re grown-up, you can tell your own children how you once saw the traitors.”

I expected the first stones to fly through the air at any moment, the first flails to smash the heads of the officials like clods of earth, but nothing of the sort happened. And so Holnstein, Gudden, and the other traitors toiled up to Neuschwanstein, where they were locked up together in a sparsely furnished room in the tower building.

I stood in the courtyard, a smile on my lips, and looked up to where the sun was just rising behind the castle walls. The king, it seemed, had been saved.

Only a few hours later, I was to be bitterly disappointed.

A
STRONG AROMA TICKLED
Steven’s nose. He awoke with a start and saw a young woman before him, holding out a mug of steaming coffee. It took him a moment to recognize her as Sara. He had been dreaming again of the girl with the blond braids. They had been struggling, with something lying on the floor between them. When he tried to pick it up, the aroma of coffee had brought him back to reality.

“You grind your teeth horribly in your sleep,” Sara said, smiling. “Did you know that? I hope it wasn’t to do with what you were reading last night.”

Wearily, Steven sat up in bed and gratefully sipped the hot brew as he tried to shake off his dream. “If I was grinding my teeth, it was more likely because of our experiences last night,” he said. Yawning, he told her what he had read before sleep had overcome him at last, long after the first dawn chorus of birds began to twitter.

Sara listened thoughtfully as she took small sips of her own coffee. “As far as I remember, that corresponds almost exactly to what’s already known about Ludwig’s last days,” she said when he had finished. “Maybe Zöller knows more.”

“You trust him again?”

She laughed softly. “Far from it. I saw him down by the lake just now, along with some unshaven character in a Windbreaker and dark sunglasses. They were having a lively discussion about something, but unfortunately I wasn’t able to catch any of it. But, wait until you hear this.” She paused for dramatic effect. “A quarter of an hour later, I managed to get a quick look at Zöller’s cell phone; he’d left his jacket over a chair down by the kiosk. I went through the latest numbers he called, and guess who Uncle Lu called no less that five times recently?”

In spite of the coffee, Steven’s mouth felt dry. “Don’t keep me in suspense like this,” he said. “Who was it?”

“A detective agency.”

For a moment the bookseller looked at Sara, bewildered. “A detective agency?” he finally asked. “Why in the world would Zöller be getting in touch with a detective agency?”

Sara shrugged. “No idea. I called the number and then checked the name of the company on the Internet. It’s a small place in Garmisch, run on a shoestring. Nothing special, it mainly investigates insurance fraud and missing persons. But why would Zöller be calling a detective agency five times? And he made a few calls to the States, but before I could try out any of those numbers, he came back.”

“A detective agency in Garmisch and a few calls to the States . . .” Steven skeptically shook his head. “I don’t know. It could all be a coincidence. Maybe he’s desperately searching for a distant relation and was phoning his sister in the States about it. I’m beginning to think you’re as paranoid as I am.”

“Could be you’re right.” Sara got off the bed. “Could be I’m working myself up about nothing. Either way, it’s about time we were off to Neuschwanstein. It’s after ten already.”

“After ten?” Steven stood up and found that every bone in his body ached. He felt as if he hadn’t slept for more than half an hour. “What day is it?”

“Saturday. Why?”

Steven sighed wearily, buttoning up his shirt. “Exactly the day for an expedition to Neuschwanstein. We probably won’t even be able to see the castle for all the tourists. But so what? Tomorrow will be no better.”

Outside the weather had cleared, the sun shone brightly down from the sky, and only a few puddles of rain on the asphalt still bore witness to last night’s storm. The old Prien steam locomotive was approaching from the village, whistling and hooting, to bring a new set of tourists down to the pier, and it promised to be a beautiful fall day, a final farewell to summer.

Zöller was already waiting in the back seat of the Mini Cooper. He had bought himself a bag of buttery Bavarian pretzels from a stall and was now munching his way through them. He nodded to Sara and Steven, and offered them his bag of greasy delicacies.

“No, thank you, I feel a bit queasy already,” Steven said, getting into the front passenger seat. Sara got behind the wheel, and the car, squealing, turned the corner.

“I spoke to a few of my people at Herrenchiemsee,” Zöller said, as he desperately tried to stretch the seatbelt over his belly. “No one has heard anything about those two Cowled Men who ran for it, and I guess no one will. The police are sure to want to ask them some tricky questions. Those officers like to poke about in the dark.” He grinned and picked a few crumbs of pretzel out of his teeth. “My friends among the night watchmen have promised to keep us out of it for now. Especially because otherwise it would come to light that they gave me the key.” Zöller tapped Steven’s shoulder from behind. “Find out anything new from the diary?”

The bookseller told him, briefly, what he had read the previous night. But Zöller could not make anything out of the latest diary entry he had deciphered either.

“All common knowledge already,” he grunted. “The arrival in Hohenschwangau of the commission to take the king away, the midnight supper, the arrests . . . All of this was known apart from the conspiracy about Marot and Dürckheim—I’ll admit that I never heard about that before.”

“How about the descriptions of the castle?” Steven asked, pursuing his point as they drove along narrow country roads toward the western Alps. “Marot meets the king in the Singers’ Hall. Maybe the final keyword is something to do with those Parsifal murals in the Hall. Or anyway one of Wagner’s operas.
Wagner
is the second word written in capital letters, after
Neuschwanstein
.”

“You can find those sorts of saga characters in every corner of the castle,” Uncle Lu said, wiping his greasy fingers on his pants. “Parsifal, Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Sigurd and Gudrun, Tristan and Isolde . .
.
The whole of Neuschwanstein is nothing but a setting for Wagner operas. Ludwig wanted to build a memorial to his favorite composer, the man he idolized. Along with all the entire legendary world of the Middle Ages. He’d been fascinated by it since childhood.”

Steven frowned. “But I can’t help noticing that Marot deliberately refers to that world of legend in the Singers’ Hall.” He took out the diary and leafed through it. “Here. He says he feels like Parsifal or Tristan setting out in search of the Holy Grail.”

“Just a moment,” Zöller said. “Tristan doesn’t go in search of the Grail—that’s Parsifal.”

“Yes, but I’m inclined to think that the search for the Grail as a whole stands for our attempt to find the solution to the puzzle. We have to find the keyword, and it’s concealed somewhere in the Wagnerian legends.”

“Oh, wonderful,” Sara groaned. “I can just about remember who killed Siegfried, but if the keyword has to do with any other characters, I’m afraid I have to pass.”

Uncle Lu grinned. “Good thing you have me, then.” He rummaged in the crate of books on the back seat beside him. “There must be a reference book on the old hero sagas in here somewhere. We’ll soon find out what friend Theodor was really trying to say.”

Steven thought of Sara’s research into Zöller’s cell phone. Could kindly Uncle Lu really be plotting against them? But then why had he helped them up to this point? Thinking hard, Steven leaned back in his seat and tried to doze, but the constant bends in the road kept bringing him back from dreams teeming with heroes, magicians, and kings.

They drove westward on small country roads running along the foothills of the Alps. At the sight of the freshly mown flower meadows, the moors, the colorful foliage of the woods in fall, and the old farmhouses standing in the sunlight to the right and left of the road, Steven once again thought he understood why Bavaria liked to think itself a special place. Here at the southernmost tip of Germany, time did indeed seem to stand still. Here you still felt you were in a less complicated time, while the modern world was top-heavy with longing, clichés, and false notions.

And Ludwig the Second is the idol adored by the people here . . .

After a good two hours on the road, they had finally reached the small town of Füssen and approached Neuschwanstein and the older castle of Hohenschwangau that stood opposite it. The two castles clung to the walls of a narrow valley bounded on the south by a small mountain lake. While Hohenschwangau—the castle where Ludwig had spent his childhood—was rather modest in appearance, Neuschwanstein was the quintessential fairy-tale castle. Steven knew, of course, that no medieval castle had ever looked like that, but the building, on its rocky plinth and with its turrets, battlements, and pointed roofs, all as white as confectioner’s sugar, was the archetypal building of the Middle Ages as many wished it to be.

How many, in fact, became clear to Steven only when they made for one of the large parking lots in the valley. The narrow road between the two castles was lined with hotels, restaurants, souvenir shops, and overpriced snack bars. Along it surged a noisy crowd of Americans, Japanese, nouveaux riches Russians, and people of a dozen other nationalities on their way to the ticket office.