The Ludwig Conspiracy (9 page)

The man toppled, twitched a little, and then lay still, his fingers still clutching the pistol.

My God, what have I done?
Steven thought.
What on earth have I done?

The bar dropped from his hands and rolled away behind a bookcase. For a moment there was an unnatural silence. Steven was hesitantly approaching the lifeless body when the second man suddenly jumped up and shoved him aside. The bookseller stumbled back over a bookshelf and fell to the floor.

“Hey!” Sara shouted, but the stranger pushed her away with his elbow and ran upstairs. Steven caught a brief glimpse of a black hooded sweatshirt with some kind of slogan on it, and then the man was gone.

“Put the light on, for Christ’s sake,” Sara gasped. She clutched her right side; obviously the stranger had hit her harder than it had looked. Steven made his way out of the stockroom, groping about until he finally found the fuse box on the back wall of the corridor. Running his hand over the switches, he could tell that they were all pressed down. He clicked them up, there was a brief crackle, and then the corridor was suddenly bathed in bright light.

“Someone’s been at the fuse box . . .” he began. But Sara was already speaking, her voice low and strangely husky.

“Forget the damn fuse box. Take a look at this.”

Steven went back into the cellar, now brightly lit, and saw a chaotic scene: overturned bookshelves, crates, books with pages torn out. Among them lay the powerful stranger with the pistol. Only now, in the light, could the bookseller see him properly. He was a giant, almost six feet tall, in jeans, work boots, and a dark green tracksuit jacket. A pool of red blood had formed around his fashionably shaved skull. It was quickly spreading and had almost reached the nearest books. The man’s eyes stared at the ceiling like two blue glass marbles.

“My God, he’s dead,” Steven said, kneeling over the lifeless body. His corduroy pants were soaking up blood, but he didn’t notice. “I killed him. I’ve killed a man.”

Sara came closer and cautiously touched the body with the toe of one of her ballet flats. The art detective, pale and trembling, was still clutching her stomach where the man had driven his elbow into it as he ran away.

“It’s one of those thugs who was after us a few hours ago, no doubt about it,” she said to herself. “But then who was the other one?”

She hesitated, then bent down to the dead man and, firmly compressing her lips, searched his pockets. At last, using just her fingertips, she pulled a wallet from his tracksuit jacket.

Sara held the opened wallet up to her eyes and peered at it. “His ID says his name is Bernd Reiser. Ever heard of him?”

Steven shook his head. Without much hope, he pressed his fingertips to the man’s carotid artery, but there was no pulse. His own pulse raced; he was incapable of rational thought. Meanwhile, Sara seemed to have regained her composure. Secretly, the bookseller admired how coolly she searched the dead body, although at the same time it made him wonder.

What is this woman? Art detective? More like a female Philip Marlowe . . .

“A man might think you’ve done something like this before,” he said. “Part of standard art detective training, is it? Robbing dead bodies?”

“Not that it’s any business of yours,” Sara replied without looking up, “but you can assume that I have a certain amount of experience.”

“As an
art
detective? But . . .”

“Well, what have we here?” Sara drew out a small pendant from under the dead man’s T-shirt. Engraved on it was the image of a golden swan, wings outspread. Under it there was an ornate inscription.

“Tmeicos Ettal,”
she said thoughtfully, letting the pendant on its chain swing in front of Steven like a hypnotist’s pendulum. “I wonder what that means? It’s not in any language I know. Could it . . .”

“Never mind that,” Steven snapped. “There’s a dead man here. And I killed him.”

“He was about to kill someone else.” After a moment’s hesitation, Sara put the amulet in her pocket. “And he was aiming a gun at me. Don’t forget that.”

Steven was still staring at the corpse and the pool of blood, which by now had grown to a fairly large puddle. Finally he stood up and turned to the door. “Anyway, we have to call the police.” He turned to Sara. “Could I use your phone? Mine’s somewhere up in the office.”

The art detective brought out a black smartphone. At the sight of its splintered display, she cursed.

“Shit, this won’t be any good except to throw at someone.” She pressed a couple of keys, but in vain. “Must have been smashed when I fell. Great—and it cost me three hundred euros.”

“We can go up to my office and call from there,” Steven suggested. “The best thing will be if we . . .”

“And what are you planning to tell the police?” Sara asked sharply. “That you were looking for a seventeenth-century book about deciphering secret writing, and you just happened to kill the Hulk here with an iron bar in the process?”

“It was self-defense. You said so yourself. He was going to kill that other guy.”

Sara looked around and shrugged. “What other guy? I don’t see anyone else here.”

“But . . .”

“Herr Lukas,” she said in a mollifying tone, “this story is complicated enough as it is. What were the two of us doing down here in your stockroom so late at night? Who was the man who ran away? What does it all have to do with that book? Trust me, I know the cops. They aren’t just going to pat us on the back and let us go. They’ll take us into custody, and then the questioning will start.” She took a deep breath before going on. “I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. We’ll wipe your fingerprints off that iron bar, we’ll go home like good little kids, and we’ll act as if we were never here. And tomorrow some neighbor will discover the break-in and an unfortunate thief who got killed fighting over the loot. What do you think of that?”

Steven stared at the art detective incredulously. Her ruthlessness was troubling him more and more.

“You want me to sneak away like a criminal?” he asked, baffled.

Sara’s eyebrows shot up. “Could you cut the drama? I’m only trying to help you. Both of us.”

Steven massaged his temples. Once again, his eyes traveled over the corpse lying in the bright red puddle of blood. The sight was surreal among the white pages of the books.

Like spilled red ink,
he thought.
Or melted red sealing wax. Blood sticking to my fingers.

He took a deep breath. “Okay,” he said quietly. “We’ll play it your way. I have enough problems right now, anyway. I don’t need a horde of suspicious police officers after me.”

“Glad to hear it. Believe me, you’ll thank me yet.”

Sara knelt down, her face briefly contorting in a painful grimace. She peered behind the bookshelves until at last she found the bloodstained iron bar. Fishing the murder weapon out from between two crates, she carefully wiped it down with a handkerchief.

“Here we are.” Sara gingerly placed the bar beside the body, stopped for a moment and finally took the pistol from the giant’s lifeless fingers. With a practiced hand, she secured the trigger-guard and put the gun in her jacket pocket.

“I have a feeling we may be able to use this,” she said, turning back to Steven. “Now let’s go look for that decoding book.”

As if in a trance, the bookseller nodded. He had entirely forgotten what they were really here for. At last he clambered cautiously over the puddle of blood, to rummage around in the back part of his archive, where he stored scientific books from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His hands shook; he thought every little sound was someone on the stairs—maybe the other intruder? He imagined that the dead man might rise from the floor any moment like a zombie and strangle him with his strong hands.

“Damn it, how long is this going to take?” Sara asked. “That hoodie character may call the police himself, and then we’re screwed.”

“I . . . just one second . . .”

Steven went along the rows of books arranged alphabetically by their authors’ last names. At last he found Shelton’s
Tachygraphy
on the top-right shelf of a bookcase. It was an inconspicuous, fat volume with a leather binding. He took it out and stowed it under his cord jacket as if he were shoplifting it.

“Finally. Now let’s get out of here,” Sara said, already on her way up the stairs. “We can say a prayer for Hulk in the car, okay?”

A
GOOD HOUR LATER
, clad only in sweatpants and a washed-out woolen sweater, Steven sat in Sara’s office, sipping a cup of black tea.

The art detective had convinced him that his own apartment wasn’t safe at the moment. If the men in tracksuit jackets had found his bookshop, they’d have no difficulty in tracking down his home address as well. Steven was too worked up to sleep anyway; the past twenty-four hours had completely upended his life. So, gritting his teeth, he had agreed to stop off at Sara’s office, even if only for a cup of tea and some clean clothes.

Steven bit his lip. He couldn’t get the body in his bookshop out of his head. Even though it had been in self-defense, he had killed a man, and this woman who called herself an art detective carried on as if nothing had happened. It was true that Sara was affected to some extent—she had already put back her second whisky—but all things considered, she seemed to take the incident in the cellar pretty much in her stride. Who was this woman really?

Realizing he was staring at her, Sara smiled at him and pointed behind her. “I guess I’d better make us something to eat,” she said. “My mother always said the world looks different when you have something inside you. Not that it was true, but that could have been just my mother’s terrible cooking.”

“How can you think about eating right now?” Steven asked indignantly. “I just killed someone! Is that all part of a day’s work for you?”

“I assure you, it isn’t.” Sara cocked her head and looked at him thoughtfully. “But it could be that my skin’s rather thicker than yours. Where I grew up, violence was the order of the day.”

“Let me guess,” said Steven sarcastically. “New York’s Bronx? Soweto in Johannesburg?”

Sara grinned. “The Wedding district of Berlin. Ever been in that part of the city? One-third immigrants, one-third unemployed. If you never got a bloody nose, no one wanted to play with you. The best entertainment was when the police raided some junkie’s apartment. We used to find used syringes in the sandbox in the playground near where we lived.” She drew in the air as if smoking an invisible cigarette. “That guy down in your stockroom looked just like one of the dealers who were always kicking us kids off the swings.”

Steven nodded thoughtfully. “I assume your parents weren’t much help?”

“My parents?” Sara laughed under her breath. Abstractedly, she examined her green-painted nails. “I helped my parents, not the other way around. Ever had to get your mother, drunk as a skunk and babbling, into bed and then undressed?”

“I . . . I’m afraid I can’t say I have, no,” Steven muttered. “Not an experience I’ve ever had.” He hesitated for a moment before going on. “But couldn’t your uncle do anything? I mean, he was a university professor. You’d think he . . .”

“You didn’t know my mother,” Sara said roughly. “Uncle Paul did all he could, but if people like that are going to drink, then they will, and if you give them money, they won’t buy clothes for their kids; they’ll buy cheap booze.” She rose to her feet abruptly. “Now, excuse me, please. The kitchen calls.”

Steven watched Sara disappear into the kitchen. He couldn’t understand this woman. She seemed to be surrounded by invisible armor. Whenever he tried to be friendly, she retreated. It was as if Sara was a magnet, attracting him briefly and then pushing him away again.

Sighing, Steven turned back to the leather-bound volume of Shelton’s
Tachygraphy
on the table in front of him. It was not the original edition but a revised version from 1842. Luckily, it would serve its purpose just as well as the original work, maybe even better. Steven had already leafed through it. The text was in an old-fashioned English that the bookseller knew from other books of that period. But he had problems with the curious scribbles that Shelton had established as shorthand in England in the seventeenth century.

Steven knew a little about stenography. At university he had attended lectures on Johann Gabelsberger, whose nineteenth-century shorthand system was at the root of modern German shorthand. But Shelton’s signs were different, reminiscent of the scribblings of a five-year-old.

Steven sighed and took another sip of his strong tea. It would probably be some time yet before he was in a position to decipher Marot’s diary. And what the curious sequences of capital letters that appeared on a number of pages might mean was a complete mystery to him.

“Sandwiches?” Sara came out of the kitchen with a tray full of them. She was smiling now. “I went all out with the mustard sauce. Not that that means much with me.”

Repulsed, Steven shook his head. The consistency of the grainy sauce dripping from the salmon sandwiches reminded him of the blood on his stockroom floor. “Thanks, that’s very kind of you,” he murmured. “But somehow I’ve lost my appetite in these last few hours. I hope your decision not to call the police was really right.”

“Oh, it was. Definitely.” With a sandwich oozing sauce in her hand, the art detective gestured at the book in front of Steven, a volume nearly two hundred years old. “Getting anywhere yet?”

Steven instinctively pushed Shelton’s
Tachygraphy
a little farther to the right. “Mind that sauce,” he said. “This isn’t some tabloid.”

“Sorry.” Smiling, Sara put the plate down. “I was forgetting that you have such an erotic relationship with books.”

“I just don’t like it when they get mustard all over them,” Steven replied. “Apart from which I wouldn’t want to get grease spots on these distinguished garments.” He pointed to his T-shirt and the old jogging pants that hung loose around his thighs. “Belonged to you once, did they?”

“You’d better be joking.” Sara’s eyebrows shot up in indignation. “Who do you think I am, Miss Piggy? My last ex left them here. I guess he was a bit larger than you.” She shrugged. “His stuff has been waiting in my old clothes collection ever since. Somehow I find it harder to part with them than with their owners.”