The Magic Circle

by Katherine Neville

  Now here was Bambi tiptoeing around the lodge in the dead of night in her lavish lingerie, popping in with a bottle of brandy to reveal to me—behind Laf’s back—a few things he might not have known himself, and a lot he hadn’t bothered to mention. Since Bambi pointedly said she and Laf “understood one another completely,” I had to assume I was the only one in this cross-family matrix who didn’t have a clue what was going on. But I was damned well going to find out.

  Luckily, I possessed a valuable secret weapon: my hollow leg. That is to say, despite my inferior age, weight, and experience, I could drink any number of cowpunchers under the bar, tossing down two-shot tequila bangers all night, and still stand up, walk out the swinging doors, and recall the next morning everything that was said the night before. So a half-bottle of Rémy Martin posed no challenge to me. I was hoping this talent would prove handy in my interrogation of Bambi. I poured us another round of drinks.

  By three A.M. the brandy was gone, and so was Bambi. She’d passed out in midsentence, sitting bolt upright in her chair, but I got her on her feet again and walked her back to the maze of suites at the far side of the lodge. I couldn’t leave her in my room and risk having her wake up in a few hours to find me gone. But in three hours of sisterly if drunken cross-examination, I’d learned more than expected, including some real eye-openers.

  Wolfgang Hauser wasn’t Austrian; he and his sister were Germans born in Nürnberg, raised there and in Switzerland, and later educated in Vienna, he in science and she in music. Their family, though not wealthy, was one of the oldest in Europe. They’d had the von in their name for hundreds of years, though Wolfgang had dropped his, Bambi explained, because he felt it was inappropriate to use in his business dealings. Their lives, as described by her, seemed idyllic compared with my own—until they got involved with the family Behn.

  Bambi, it turned out, had been my uncle Laf’s protégé for more than ten years, from the age of fifteen. When everyone realized how gifted she was, and when he’d offered to hire the best coaches and structure her education and training himself, Bambi’s family had let her go live at Laf’s house in Vienna. Wolfgang had often visited his sister there, so Laf’s assertion that he hardly knew him couldn’t be true.

  But something happened only seven years ago that changed even this limited familial relationship. Wolfgang had finished his degrees some years earlier, and his first job fresh out of school, as a nuclear industry consultant, took him away more and more often from Vienna. Then one day seven years ago, on returning from a trip, Wolfgang dropped by to visit his sister at Uncle Laf’s apartment overlooking the Hofburg. Wolfgang told Laf and Bambi he was leaving his old job for a new one he’d accepted with the International Atomic Energy Agency. He wanted to take the two of them to lunch at a nearby restaurant to celebrate.

  “After lunch,” said Bambi, “Wolf asked that we will go with him to the Hofburg. He took us to the Wunderkammer to see the jewels, and then we visited the famous collections from ancient Ephesus that are now there, and to the Schatzkammer to look at the Reichswaffen.”

  “To the treasury, to look at the royal armaments,” I said.

  I hadn’t forgotten the story Laf told me in the hot pool only that morning about his visit, more than seventy-five years ago, to these same chambers of the Hofburg—in the company of Adolf Hitler.

  “Ja,” said Bambi. “My brother took us to see a sword and a spear, and he asked your uncle, ‘Did you and Pandora know all about the sacred hallows?’ But Lafcadio said nothing, so Wolf said that he’d for a long time been interested in these objects himself. The story was well known in Nürnberg: Adolf Hitler had taken many of them out of the Imperial treasury in Vienna—for example, the First Reich insignia, the Imperial Crown, the Orb and Scepter, the Imperial Sword, and so on—and he carried them off to the Nürnberger Castle. It was the first thing Hitler did just after he made the—how one says?—the Anschluss.”

  “Germany’s ‘annexation’ of Austria in 1938,” I said.

  Was it only coincidence that exactly one year ago—in March of 1988, on the fiftieth anniversary of this same coup—my aunt Zoe arrived in Vienna with her fellow World War II “peacekeepers,” and there made the acquaintance of Herr Professor Dr. Wolfgang K. Hauser? I thought not, especially when Bambi told me Laf had violently turned off the tap on Wolfgang and refused to see him again or let him in the house after Wolfgang insisted that if, as a favorite of Hitler, Pandora had kept her costly Hofburg apartment throughout the war, and kept performing at the Vienna Opera, it might be because of something important that Pandora herself knew about the hallows. Something connecting them with Nürnberg, even with Hitler himself.

  “You and Wolfgang grew up in Nürnberg, where all the Nazis were put on trial just after the war. Were these objects mentioned in the hearings, then?”

  “I don’t know,” Bambi said, resting one elbow on the table to steady herself. “The judgments at Nürnberg—the war—this all happened before Wolfgang and I were born. But even after the war everyone in Nürnberg knew about the relics. They were kept in a chamber in the castle. Hitler believed they were somehow sacred and contained mysterious powers connected with the old German bloodlines. Hitler had an apartment there at Nürnberg, just for when he visited to attend the rallies. The apartment was near the center of town beside the opera house, and its windows faced the castle so he could always look across from his rooms, toward where the hallows lay. They were often put on public display at those big Nazi Party political rallies at the zeppelin field. They stayed at Nürnberg and they weren’t returned back to Austria until after the war—”

  “Of course—Nürnberg!” Until that moment I’d completely forgotten, but now it suddenly flashed into my mind: All that film footage of nighttime rallies with flags and huge banners and strobe lights against the night sky, and thousands of people lined up in squared-off blocks to form a living chessboard—all those famous rallies had been held in Nürnberg. This raised another question.

  I looked at the cognac and saw that the bottle was nearly empty, but I didn’t want Bambi to conk out before I learned what I needed to know, so I poured the rest into my own glass.

  “Why Nürnberg?” I asked her. “It’s just a provincial city a bit off the beaten path, hundreds of miles from anywhere, isn’t it? Why would Hitler bring these objects to such an out-of-the-way spot—or hold his rallies there, for that matter?”

  Bambi looked at me, her eyes still wide but now clouded a bit from the cognac.

  “But Nürnberg is the axis,” she said. “Didn’t you know?”

  “Axis? You mean it’s where the Axis powers met during the war? I thought they usually met at Rome or Vienna or—”

  “I mean it is the axis,” she said. “The World Axis, the spot where all geomantic lines of power are thought to meet. Its ancient name was Nornenberg—the Mountain of Norns. In our history, the three Norns, goddesses of Fate—Wyrd, Verthandi, Skuld: Became, Becoming, Shall Be—are said to have lived since the dawn of time within this very mountain. They hold the spindle of fate; they weave the story of our destiny in a fabric made entirely of runes. These women are like judges, and their runic tapestry is the real Judgment of Nürnberg, for the tale they write will decide the world’s fate in the last days: die Gotterdammerung—the twilight of the gods—the tale of what will happen at the end of time.”

  Maybe it was naive to imagine I could unkink knots in so tortuous a labyrinth, just by trying to untangle my own familial relationships. But I couldn’t help noticing that my nearest relatives did seem to be plunged up to their eyeballs in this National Socialist-mythological-cosmic Scheiss.

  It wasn’t surprising that someone who was a stranger to me, like Bambi, would know so many repugnant things about my family of which I myself had been wholly unaware. After all, I’d spent a lifetime trying to distance myself from them. It now appeared I’d had plenty of legitimate, if hitherto unknown, reasons to have done so.

  But I had to wonder—if what B
ambi said was true—how Laf, Pandora, and Zoe had fared so well after Hitler’s demise. In postwar Paris, Frenchwomen who’d been too palsy with the Gestapo got their heads shaved and were marched through the streets and jeered at. Musicians in many countries, if they’d even performed before the Nazis during the occupation, were publicly disgraced after the war, their reputations ruined. And those who’d been really close to power, as Wolfgang believed that Pandora had, got long prison terms or were hanged. This raised an important question: If Pandora did stay in Vienna, and was even Hitler’s favorite opera star throughout the war, as Bambi said, why would Laf have mentioned her name in the same breath—much less stress the fact that Zoe knew the Führer well, too—instead of distancing himself and his branch of our family as far as possible?

  There was yet another odd and almost frightening coincidence in this interfamily saga. It was the last thing I glimpsed in my mind, just before grabbing a few hours of shut-eye in preparation for my date in the meadow with that flock of sheep.

  Bambi had told me it was seven years ago, therefore in 1982, when this confrontation between her brother Wolfgang and my uncle Laf took place in Vienna. But it was also exactly seven years ago, 1982, when my uncle Ernest died: the very year when Sam had inherited the rune manuscript and then suddenly vanished, never to be heard from again. Until now.

  In the predawn light the expanse of snow glimmered an eerie bluish white against the backdrop of dark and sinister woods. The moon still hung like an ornament in the star-spangled Prussian blue sky. The air smelled cold and dangerous, as it always did at this time of year just before dawn. It had continued snowing well into the night, and there were no fresh tracks in the meadow. I skated to the center of the open space, whipped backward on my skis, and peered into the woods.

  Just then, a snowball struck me in the back with enough force to knock my cap loose and send a cold shower down my neck. When I turned, I saw a form cut briefly from the forest line; it passed for a flicker through the moonlight and then slipped back into the woods. But one upraised arm told me it was Sam, and that I should follow him. I grabbed my hat, stuffed it in my pocket, two-footed it across the pasture, and plunged in among the mesh of silvery fir and birch where I’d seen him vanish.

  I stopped to listen. An owl hoot came from up a slight embankment, so I followed it deeper to where the darkness was nearly impenetrable. When I stopped again, unsure where to go next, I heard his whisper close by:

  “Ariel, take this and follow me.”

  I felt him take me by the wrist and place the basket of his ski pole in my hand, and he went before me in darkness. With my two poles clutched in my other hand, I followed blindly, unable to see where he was leading me. We slalomed through trees for a long while, then started our ascent to the high meadow. When at last we came out into the wide space, the sky had lightened to cobalt blue and I could almost make out Sam’s outline ahead of me.

  He swung around on his skis and slipped his ski tips between mine like interlocked fingers, and he threw his arms around me just as I’d done to him on that mountain nearly eighteen years ago. He smelled of leathery tanned skin and woodsmoke. He buried his face in my loose hair and whispered,

  “Thank God, Ariel. You’re alive, you’re safe—”

  “No thanks to you,” I muttered against his shoulder.

  Then he held me away and peered at me in the predawn darkness, the only light the milky moonglow and that strange shimmer from the snow beneath.

  I hadn’t seen Sam in more than seven years. He was still so boyish then. It should have occurred to me that he might have changed in all that time. But here he stood: tall, broad-shouldered, ruggedly good-looking, with Earnest’s chiseled profile, his mother’s long dark hair tumbling about his shoulders, and the mysterious beauty of those silvery eyes that seemed to be lit from within. I realized with discomfort that this was no longer my youthful mentor and blood brother who stood before me, but an incredibly handsome man. And the surprised way Sam was looking at me just now told me that his reaction to me must be pretty much the same.

  “What happened to that little stringbean with the scuffed knees who used to follow me around everywhere?” he said with a strangely awkward smile. “Good lord, hotshot—you’re a knockout!”

  “You almost knocked me out with that snowball,” I said, feeling just as awkward. I actually found it hard to look at Sam until I could get used to the idea that he and I were suddenly completely grown up.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, still regarding me as if I were almost a stranger. “I feel that’s all I can say to you anymore, Ariel—how truly sorry I am that all this has happened. How sorry I am that I ever got you involved.”

  “Sorry doesn’t help,” I said, quoting Jersey’s line once again. But I smiled, and he smiled back. Then I knew I had to tell him at once.

  “Sam,” I said, “I have something to be sorry for, too, something I’m sorrier for than I’ve ever been about anything in my life. I hope it hasn’t ruined everything for you or put us both in greater danger, but I’ve done something really stupid and foolish and awful and wrong. I left someone else alone all night with the rune manuscript—”

  Sam had been looking at me with a growing expression of horror as I read out this lengthy litany of abject remorse—until I got to the specifics at the end. And then the surprise was mine.

  “What rune manuscript?” said Sam.

  I had this really interesting fantasy that if my heart took enough of these sudden deep plunges into my lower abdomen, it would sooner or later stop ticking altogether and just keep bouncing up and down like a yo-yo. But a few miles of Nordic skiing with Sam through the high meadows worked like a thorax message. By the time we reached the cabin, I was okay—or at least I’d regained my ability to speak.

  And I’d learned the reason Sam had changed our meeting plan for today. He’d felt himself in enough danger lately to avoid hotels, so ever since his “death” he’d been sleeping in hunting cabins, duck blinds, and field lean-tos scattered all over Idaho, abandoned or in disuse at this time of year. Arriving at Sun Valley a bit earlier than I, Sam had learned there wasn’t that sort of shelter near the ski mountain, so he’d scouted until he found this one, about a two-mile ski from the main road. But most of the area was so open I could easily have been tailed, unless I arrived so early there was barely light enough to see.

  Once we’d reached the deserted cabin where Sam spent the night, we snapped off our skis, banged the snow from our bindings, planted our skis and poles in the snow around back, and went inside, where Sam stirred up the dying coals of last night’s fire and threw on a few more logs. The place had no other heat nor any plumbing, only pump water just outside the door. Sam jacked the handle to fill a tin pot with water, put it on the fire for instant coffee, and drew up a stool beside the rump-sprung chair where I’d already taken a seat.

  “Ariel, I know you may not understand a lot of what I’ve done, or why I’ve done it,” he began, “but before I begin to explain about all that’s happened, I need to catch up on last week: why you didn’t show up for our phone call, what you know about the missing package, and whatever you’ve learned so far from Laf.”

  “All right,” I agreed reluctantly, despite the million questions I needed to ask. “But first—if you didn’t send the manuscript I spoke of, then I need to know something right now, because I’ve met someone who told me he sent it to me himself. Have you ever heard of a Dr. Wolfgang K. Hauser?” Seeing Sam’s quick twist of a smile, I added, “So you do know him!”

  But Sam shook his head. “It was just—I don’t know—I guess it’s just the way you said his name.” Sam was looking at me with an oddly closed expression. “I think I imagined you always as my little blood brother, my twin soul,” he went on. “But just now I felt … What I mean is, who exactly is this guy, Ariel? Is there something going on here you’d like to tell me about?”

  I could feel the hot blood suffusing my face. That damned Irish skin I’d inherited
from Jersey showed every pulsating emotion the second it happened. I put my hands over my face. Sam reached over and pulled them down. I opened my eyes.

  “Good lord, Ariel, are you in love with him?” he said. He jumped up and started pacing around in a circle, rubbing his forehead with his hand, while I sat there not having a clue what to say.

  Sam sat down again and leaned toward me with urgency.

  “Ariel, apart from anything else I may privately feel about the situation, this is hardly the moment for a blossoming romance! You’ve said you just met this man. Do you know anything about him at all? What’s his background? Have you any idea just how dangerous this untimely ‘friendship’ of yours might prove to us both?”

  I was so upset by this outburst, I felt like throwing something at him. I jumped to my feet just as the coffeepot boiled over. Sam grabbed a glove to rescue it from the fire. This gave us both a quick moment to settle down.

  “I didn’t say I was in love with anyone,” I told Sam in the calmest voice I could muster.

  “You didn’t have to,” said Sam.

  He was fiddling with the coffeepot, not looking at me. Then he turned so I couldn’t read his face, and he started to measure instant java into cups. As if he were speaking to himself, he finally said:

  “I’ve only just realized that I understand your emotions, right now, far better than I seem to understand my own.”

  When he turned back to me with the two cups of coffee, he was wearing a slightly strained smile. He handed me my cup and then ruffled my hair as he used to do when we were kids.

  “God, I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he said. “I have no right to tell you who to care for, or to cross-examine you the way I’ve just done. I guess I was surprised, that’s all. But you’re smart enough not to fall for someone who might put us both in danger. And who knows? Maybe there’s some link in this situation that will help us out of the mess I’ve gotten us into, once we can figure it out. By the way, this Wolfgang K. Hauser—I’m simply curious—did he tell you what the ‘K’ stands for?”