The Ludwig Conspiracy by Oliver Pötzsch Read Free Book Online Page A

his head shot to pieces. Before his death, the retired history professor had been drugged, abducted, and tortured. His body had been discovered lying among torn-up pages of a book; further inquiries were being pursued. The police expected to find evidence regarding the remarkable murder weapon. More would follow in tomorrow’s edition. Then there were a few lines about Professor Liebermann’s career, and a couple of risqué assumptions associating him with the red-light district.
    “It was a Derringer,” the woman suddenly said.
    Steven gave a start and looked up from the newspaper. “What?”
    “The murder weapon. I’ve kept my ears pricked. Two .44 caliber rimfire cartridge cases were found at the scene. That kind of cartridge is out of use these days. However, ammunition like that was very common in the nineteenth century, in small ornamented pistols but most of all in the American Derringer. A pretty toy. But Abraham Lincoln was shot with a Derringer just like that.”
    Steven frowned. “You mean the murder victim was killed by a weapon that doesn’t exist today?”
    “Or by someone who shouldn’t be alive today,” the strange woman replied, and turned into a side street, tires squealing. “Which at least narrows down the suspects.”
    “How do you know all this?” Steven asked suspiciously. “You said you were the niece of the professor who came to see me yesterday, but you sound more like a police officer.”
    “Wait until we reach my place. I’ll explain it all to you then.”
    In silence, they joined the evening traffic that took them down Ludwigstrasse, with its imposing white buildings, to the upmarket Schwabing district of Munich. They passed boutiques, discotheques, trendy bars with the first nocturnal revelers already gathering outside, talking noisily with one another or shouting into their phones. Their journey ended at a quiet side street near the large park of the English Garden.
    Audrey Hepburn parked her Mini in a gap so narrow that Steven suspected he wouldn’t even have been able to fit his bicycle into it. With the newspaper in hand, she climbed out and walked toward a low-built, old-fashioned little house with a tiny front garden. Among the modern buildings with their expanses of glass, it looked as if it had fallen out of another time. There was a bronze plate with elaborate lettering beside the door. Steven glanced at it and then looked in surprise at the woman in the black sunglasses.
    “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