“Dr. Sara Lengfeld. Art Detection,” he murmured. “Are you really a detective?”
“First and foremost I’m a qualified art historian,” she replied, holding the door open for him. “And let’s get one thing clear right away: my work is deadly boring. I look through art catalogs as thick as your arm, I surf the Internet, I talk on the phone until there’s steam coming out of my ears, and now and then, for a change, I get to go to an exhibition of enormous old paintings where the museum curator eyes me suspiciously over his shoulder.” Her lips narrowed. “So you can forget all the private-eye nonsense you know from movies and books. And anyway, in this case, I think of myself more as a niece than a detective.”
Without another word, she walked into the little house. Steven followed her, looking around in surprise. The building was much larger inside than it appeared from the outside. On the walls of a softly lit corridor painted a pale orange hung prints by German Expressionists side by side works by Toulouse-Lautrec and modern photographs of nudes. Passing a hallway on his right, Steven saw a small kitchen, and beyond that a bedroom. A door on the left led into a well-lit office that seemed to take up almost half of the first floor. Here, too, there were countless paintings and sculptures illuminated by small halogen lights, giving the room, which had a ceiling almost nine feet high, the look of an exclusive art gallery.
“What is all this?” Steven asked. “The Museum of Modern Art?”
“God, no, only my office.” The young woman smiled. “I know, the rubber plant is missing. But the view makes up for that.”
Steven looked appreciatively out of the large panoramic window, with its view of bushes, trees, and the English Garden beyond. The woman really did have good taste, even if it wasn’t entirely in line with his own. In the middle of the office stood a showy kidney-shaped table from the fifties, piled high with art catalogs, file folders, empty Chinese food containers, and dirty coffee cups. A computer covered with yellow Post-it notes was enthroned among the mess.
“Sorry, I haven’t gotten around to tidying up yet,” Sara Lengfeld said. She cleared a few brochures and art books off the broad leather sofa before sinking down on it with a weary sigh. “It’s been a busy few days.”
Steven sat down beside her and briefly admired her long legs, one crossed over the other. She wore comfortable shoes. Sara had taken off her bright green rain cape and her scarf; her sunglasses stuck in her brunette hair like an extra pair of eyes. She had on jeans and a close-fitting woolen pullover that came down over her hips. Only after some delay did Steven remember why he was there.
“The dead man in the newspaper,” he began hesitantly. “Is he really your uncle?”
She nodded. “My mother’s older brother. We lost touch a long time ago. Until very recently, the last time I saw him he was reading Pinocchio to me.” She smiled wanly. “I’m something of a loner, you see. It runs in the family. Maybe it comes with my work as well.”
“And what exactly do you do?” Steven inquired.
“I look for lost art. Stolen works, art that was looted, paintings thought to have disappeared years ago. Every year six billion dollars’ worth of art is stolen, but most of it turns up again eventually. At auctions, in galleries and museums, in private collections.” Getting to her feet, she tossed Steven one of the big catalogs on the table. “It’s my job to find those paintings. That earns me a percentage of their real value—and usually a volley of furious insults from the supposed owners,” she added with a grin. “See, the people who have the paintings generally have no idea that they’re stolen. When I go into a gallery, the curator makes the sign of the cross three times and puts a laxative in my prosecco.”
Steven put the catalog aside and looked around. “Obviously a lucrative job. But what does it have to do with your uncle?”
At once Sara was serious again. “How about if I see what’s in that bag of yours first?”
Carefully, Steven handed her the little treasure chest. She opened it and took a quick look at the photographs and the lock of black hair. Then, lost in thought, she leafed through the yellowed pages of the notebook. Almost reverently, she ran her fingers over the velvet binding with the ivory decoration.
“So it’s really true,” she murmured at last.
“True?” Steven asked. “What’s true?”
The art detective went on staring at the book, as if trying to recognize something in it. Only after a long while did she look up again.
“Uncle Paul had a rather unusual hobby. He collected literature about King Ludwig the Second, especially literature to do with his death. As he saw it, Ludwig’s murder was the greatest unsolved crime in German history.”
“Murder?” Steven said skeptically. “I’ve heard speculation, but . . .”
“Herr Lukas,” Sara interrupted, “what exactly do you know about King Ludwig the Second?”
Steven shrugged. “He was a cranky Bavarian king who slowly lost himself in a dream world, built some fairy-tale castles, and was finally certified insane and deposed. Soon after that, he died in a way that’s unexplained to this day.”
“A rather abbreviated account, but generally speaking correct. Though you could say that Ludwig the Second wasn’t just any Bavarian king. He was the Bavarian king. At least as far as his popularity was concerned.” Sara took one of the black-and-white photographs out of the little chest and held it in front of Steven’s nose. He noticed that the art detective had painted her fingernails green.
“There’s no other German monarch as well-known as this man,” she said, smiling. “The perfect mirror to reflect our hopes and imagination. A dreamer who actually had the money to put those dreams into practice.”
“But politically he . . .” Steven began to object.
“Was a total failure. Yes, I know.” The art historian sighed. “If we judged Ludwig the Second solely by his political achievements, no one would give a damn about him now. But what are politics compared to the fairy-tale castle that you see at the beginning of every Disney movie? And then there was his death.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, mysteries are always intriguing,” she replied, carefully returning the photograph to the little chest. “I’m sure you have your own ideas about his death.”
“My own ideas? All I know is the official version,” Steven said. “As best I remember, after he was declared insane and deposed, the king was taken to Berg Castle on Lake Starnberg. While he was there, he gave his psychiatrist the slip. The psychiatrist ran after him and finally caught up with him on the banks of the lake. They fought and Ludwig drowned the doctor, then committed suicide in the lake.”
“In waist-high water?”
Steven frowned. “What do you mean?”
“The water King Ludwig is supposed to have drowned himself in would have only come up to his waist,” the art detective replied. “Ludwig was an excellent swimmer. Not to mention that no water was found in his lungs.”
“You mean . . .”
“I don’t mean anything at all,” Sara went on. “I’m just stating the facts. And those are only a couple of the inconsistencies surrounding Ludwig’s death. They all nurture his legend. Did you know that the doctors who came to the scene weren’t allowed to examine the two bodies? And that the pocket watch belonging to the psychiatrist—Bernard von Gudden—didn’t stop until an hour later than the king’s? Then a bunch of witnesses either died in strange ways, or went missing, or suddenly became rich overnight. And, and, and . . .” She waved the subject away. “Whole libraries could be filled with the books that have been written about the strange events of the thirteenth of June 1886.”
“I had no idea that qualified art historians went in for conspiracy theories,” Steven said. “Clearly, you’ve inherited a taste for your uncle’s unusual hobby. But I guess that would suit a detective.”
Sara gave him an icy stare from her gray eyes. “Herr Lukas, if you take me for a fool, you’re mistaken. I do indeed specialize in nineteenth-century art, b
ut aside from that, I couldn’t care less how Ludwig the Second died. As far as I’m concerned, he could have drowned in a cream pie, heavily made up and wearing high heels. What I do care about is my uncle’s death. And that’s what it’s all about here, right?”
“Sorry,” Steven murmured. “That was really tactless of me.”
Sara waved his apology aside. “That’s okay.” She took out a crumpled pack of menthol cigarettes and lit herself one. Only when she had twice inhaled deeply did she go on.
“Over the last few years, Uncle Paul discovered the Internet. That’s presumably how he heard about a small auction near Nuremberg. An apartment was being cleared, and this curious object was one of the pieces on sale.” She picked up the wooden box and gently rattled it. “Paul was more interested in the diary than the box, because of the name of the man who kept it, Theodor Marot.”
“Assistant to the king’s personal physician, Max Schleiss von Loewenfeld,” Steven put in.
She nodded. “Marot was an ambitious young man from Strasbourg. He’d been working in the surgical hospital in Munich since 1872. That was probably where Loewenfeld got to know him and appointed him his assistant.” She drew deeply on her cigarette again. The smell of burned tobacco and menthol made Steven feel dizzy. And he couldn’t take his eyes off Sara’s green-painted fingernails.
“What makes Marot so interesting for research into Ludwig,” Sara went on, “is that Loewenfeld’s assistant was not only ambitious and clever; he was also extremely handsome. A genuine French dandy with a weak spot for fine art. Ludwig must have fallen for him. Anyway, he appears in the king’s letters over and over after 1875. Some of the chronicles even call him Ludwig’s favorite playmate. And . . .” She paused for dramatic effect, smiling. “Marot was with him in Schloss Berg until the end. There were several witnesses who say that after Ludwig’s death, Marot claimed it was murder.”
Steven gave a low whistle. “When I saw the old photos and the lock of hair, my first thought was that it showed that the king had some kind of homosexual relationship,” he murmured. “But if I understand what you’re saying, there’s far more than that in the diary. Your uncle really believed that it could solve the mystery about Ludwig the Second?”
“He certainly hoped so,” Sara replied. “He bought the chest with the book in it for a few hundred euros in an Internet auction. But when he finally got the package, he realized that the diary had been written in some kind of secret code that he couldn’t read. So he came to Munich to ask for my help.” She ground out her cigarette so energetically that Steven feared she might push it right through the ashtray.
“As an art historian, I know a couple people involved with that kind of thing,” she went on. “But it turned out there was someone else after the book. I’d arranged to meet my uncle yesterday, but he didn’t show up. First, I tried calling him on his cell phone. Finally, I went to his hotel this afternoon, and all hell had broken loose there. Police, a forensic unit, the works. I called a friend in the state investigation bureau, and he told me what had happened.” Lost in thought, she lit another cigarette and stared at a painting of a stack of brightly colored rectangles on the opposite wall. “I never knew Uncle Paul really well, but that threw me for a loop,” she murmured at last. “Tortured and executed just for some damn book.”
“Can I ask how you found me?” Steven asked hesitantly.
A thin smile appeared on Sara’s lips. “Once the police left, I went back to the hotel,” she explained. “I knew that even though Uncle Paul didn’t own a laptop, he liked to surf the Net for old books. And sure enough, the guy at reception remembered an elderly gentleman who’d been using the hotel computer the previous afternoon. So I checked the history, and guess what popped up? Your secondhand bookshop. In connection with none other than Samuel Pepys.”
“You know about Pepys?” Steven asked, surprised.
Sara cast him a mocking glance. “Herr Lukas, I’m a qualified art historian. The fact that I do some detective work on the side doesn’t mean I’m some thick-headed Philistine.”
Steven smiled. He liked this woman’s style, even if he still couldn’t really get a handle on her.
“Pepys,” he summed up, “kept a diary in the seventeenth century that gives an unparalleled view of life in England in the early modern period. So the professor was looking at my website for it. I guess that was why he came to my bookshop. But then why did he leave the box there?”
“Maybe he knew that he was being followed,” Sara said. “Someone was close on his heels. He came to your shop and . . .”
“And exchanged his book for one of mine.” Steven snapped his fingers. “That must be it. A collection of German ballads was missing from my shelves after he left. Not bad thinking on your uncle’s part.”
Sara rubbed her eyes; they were reddened by weariness and the smoke from her cigarette. Her mascara was running, but she didn’t seem to notice. “It didn’t do him any good,” she whispered. “They caught him, tortured him, and killed him. And somewhere along the line he must also have given up your name, so now the same people are after you. And it seems pretty clear that these guys won’t pull their punches.”
Steven shook his head. “All this because of a book that might explain the death of a king from a hundred and something years ago? That’s absurd!”
“Believe me, I know the collectors’ scene. Some of them would feed their own mothers to piranhas for a rare-enough work.”
“I’m afraid it wasn’t the first time they tried getting at me,” Steven replied after a pause.
The art detective frowned. “What do you mean?”
Steven told her about the odd stranger in the traditional Bavarian suit, and the subsequent mysterious encounter on the Theresienwiese.
“The men were wearing black hoods?” Sara asked. Suddenly she was very agitated. Her face went paler.
Steven nodded. “Black hoods, and they were carrying torches. Why? Do you know who they were?”
With her cigarette in the corner of her mouth, Sara Lengfeld went over to the computer and clicked away for a few minutes. She beckoned to Steven to come and look at something on the screen.
“I don’t know if I’m right,” Sara said, pointing to the monitor. “You’d better look at this for yourself.”
Steven stared at the computer. He saw three figures in black capes and pointed hoods standing in front of a wooden cross sticking up from a shallow lake surrounded by reeds. Each of them held two burning torches making the shape of an X. Their eyes were narrow slits.
The bookseller held his breath. The men who had been following him on the Theresienwiese yesterday had looked just like that.
“If those were the men,” Sara Lengfeld said, stubbing her second cigarette out in a coffee cup, “then we’ve really got a problem on our hands.”
5
THE KING WAS CROSSING a lake that reflected green and blue light. Stalactites hung from the roof like frozen tentacles. Frescoes of angry knights covered the rocky walls, their swords raised in battle, their mouths open in a soundless cry.
The boat silently glided in toward the bank where two paladins were waiting. With their dark green tracksuit jackets and precise crewcuts, they looked like travelers from some bizarre future in this underground world.
“Well? Erec, Bors?” the king said over a rendition of Richard Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” that boomed through the grotto from sinfully expensive Dolby loudspeakers hidden in the rock. “Have you found what I’m waiting for so eagerly?”
“It . . . it’s not easy, Your Excellency,” began the taller of the two men, whom the king had addressed as Erec. “We turned the whole place upside down, but the book wasn’t there.”
“It wasn’t there?” the king said quietly. “What does that mean? Did you question that bookseller?”
“We couldn’t during the day,” said Bors, the other bodyguard, a wiry little man with pockmarks and a squashed boxer’s nose. “The police were all over because of t
he break-in. But we paid the guy a visit in the evening. We’re more or less sure he had the book with him then.”
“Had?”
“Well, yes.” Bors looked nervously up at the roof, as if afraid that one of the stalactites might break off and skewer him. Which was a manner of death preferable to what he faced if that damn book didn’t turn up soon. “He . . . he was there with some woman, no idea who she was,” he continued, stammering. “They made off together, I guess with the book. We took a couple of photos of her when she was standing outside the bookshop. They talked for a few minutes and . . .”
“Of course we checked where this Lukas lives right away,” Erec chimed in. “We searched the whole place, but there was nothing there. Not the guy, not the woman, not the book.”
“And where are they now?” The king’s voice was still low, but it took on a threatening undertone that the henchmen knew only too well.
“We left men watching his apartment and the bookshop,” Erec murmured, his broad shoulders drooping like injured wings. “Gareth, Ywain, and Tristan. He can’t get away from us. Sooner or later he has to turn up.”
The king adjusted the royal signet ring and blinked very slowly. Little beads of sweat ran down the foreheads of the two bodyguards. The grotto was as hot as a sauna. To reach this place they had had to pass two security barriers. They had descended into the depths in an elevator, then hurried through the throne room with its mighty Bohemian glass chandeliers, and passed countless windows that looked out on a painted scene of a mountainous landscape in bright daylight. Neither of the men could have said how much their boss’s eccentric hobby had cost to date. Behind the king’s back, they sometimes joked about The Royal Highness’s crazy notions, which had recently been getting even crazier. But no matter how deranged the king was, they took care that none of their comments ever reached the royal ears. The pay was too good for that.
The Ludwig Conspiracy Page 5