The Magic Circle

by Katherine Neville

  I couldn’t forget what Sam told me after describing how Theron Vane had been killed in his place by that bomb, an idea he’d repeated when warning me not to be obvious about haunting the post office or the mailbox. He said once anyone knew how and where to get their hands on a copy of these manuscripts, it might be easier if one of us were dead. I now understood that his cautionary reserve wasn’t because the parcel he’d mailed me was the only extant version of these documents—but rather because Sam was the only person who knew where Pandora’s originals were hidden. This strongly suggested to me that the folks who were after the documents didn’t just want to know their contents—but to be certain no one else did. So those documents now in the hands of Wolfgang and the Pod would be the unique version—if Sam were dead. It didn’t take much to figure out what came next in the scenario. For once, I tried not to shut my eyes.

  “The Pod’s in cahoots. Your telegram warned me, but I got it too late,” I told Olivier. “Wolfgang has the manuscripts, though you both tried to warn me of him, too.”

  “I believe that my brother has genuinely fallen in love with you,” said Bambi. “Had he met you earlier, this love might have forced him to reconsider his values and have saved him. Wolfgang is an educated person with high ideals, if the wrong ones. I think it surprised him to find he also has strong passions. But it’s far too late for salvation, or even for talk. Where is my brother right now?”

  “He went to the office from the airport,” I said. “I was to meet him there shortly—”

  “Then we must act at once,” Bambi said. “If he’s discovered that Olivier is not there either, he may come directly here. If he believes that you know where your cousin hid the original manuscripts, then you’ll be in terrible danger. My brother must be stopped before he kills anyone again.”

  I stared at her in horror as Olivier put his hand gently on my arm. What in God’s name was she saying? But of course I knew. I suppose, somehow, I always must have known.

  “We were never quite sure,” Olivier was telling Bambi.

  I heard a slight buzzing in my ears as if I might black out. Then I heard Bambi’s voice off somewhere in the distance.

  “Yes, I’m certain of it. My brother Wolfgang murdered Samuel Behn.”

  The man with whom I’d passed those nights of tempestuous love-making was a cold-blooded killer who, all the while I was in his arms, had believed he’d murdered Sam. I felt like taking a big slug of absinthe laced with opium, or even some of that hemlock that carried Socrates off to nirvana—though it might be more propitious right now to take to the road. But to where?

  Olivier seemed about to make a suggestion when we heard a strange sound. We looked at each other for an instant before realizing what it was: our rarely used front doorbell at the far side of the house. Since the front door was separated from the road by a ninety-degree dropoff “front yard,” most people came to the rear door, off the drive.

  We rushed to the high dormer windows surrounding my potato-cellar living room and peeked out. We could see only the road, not the person who was standing on the front stoop. A large Land Rover with Idaho plates was parked up there behind Bambi’s car. It had the profile of a standing grizzly bear stenciled on the front fender. I smiled. Maybe things were finally starting to look up, after all.

  “Do you recognize it?” Olivier asked me.

  “Not the car—just the bear. You get the door,” I told him, “while Bambi and I round up Jason and grab some decent coats and shoes for all of us. We may be headed up-country for a while.”

  “But who is it?” asked Olivier. “We can hardly afford to open the door at this point, unless you’re absolutely sure who it is.”

  “I’m sure,” I told him. “It’s a bear who drove here all the way from Lapwai—five hundred miles. He’s an emissary of my dear, late cousin Sam.”

  Bambi and Olivier both seemed a little taken aback by Dark Bear’s appearance. Like most Nez Percé, Dark Bear was an extraordinarily handsome man, with his straight nose, cleft chin, strong features, long legs and broad shoulders, his braids of dark hair ribboned with white, and those silvery eyes beneath dark brows that, like Sam’s, seemed like bright crystals that could see into the heart of time.

  He was wearing a fringed, beaded jacket with a blanket tossed over one shoulder. He crossed to me and took my hand firmly but warmly in his.

  As I’ve said, Dark Bear was never a huge fan of mine, due in large part to my strange side of the family. But this handshake was clearly intended to communicate his understanding and appreciation that I was helping Sam. Of course, neither he nor Sam yet knew how royally I’d already screwed up. I introduced Dark Bear to the others.

  Dark Bear, never one to mince words, told me, “He has heard your heart and knows what decision you have taken. He approves. He asks you to come.”

  Sam had somehow read my mind from afar. I wasn’t surprised: Sam had always been able to tap into my mind long-distance. And hadn’t I felt him walking in my psychological moccasin prints these past weeks?

  “There was no mention of others,” Dark Bear added, motioning to Olivier and Bambi. “I was to bring only you.”

  This put me in a quandary. Here were two people who were ready to tell me the truth—a truth that might prove instrumental not only to my safety but to Sam’s as well.

  “Who does he mean by ‘he’?” asked Olivier. “Where’s he taking you, and why doesn’t he want us to come along?”

  Before I could think how to reply, Bambi resolved the problem—though I admit I wasn’t quite sure how she did it.

  “I am Halle’s daughter,” she told Dark Bear. “I’ve come from Vienna to reveal what I know about the man who was Sam’s father and Ariel’s stepfather—Earnest Behn.”

  “Ah,” said Dark Bear with no expression. “I understand.”

  I threw Jason in my backpack and gave him a pat. I didn’t want to leave him alone in the house when I wasn’t sure where we were going or how long we’d be gone. I slung the pack over my shoulder along with my regular satchel, gathering up what I thought we might need for a hike in the mountains with Jason along for the ride. I hopped onto the front seat of Dark Bear’s Land Rover while Olivier and Bambi took the back. This enabled me, turning to listen to Bambi’s story, simultaneously to watch the rear window and be sure we weren’t followed.

  “Okay, folks,” I said to Bambi and Olivier, once we’d pulled out of town and were headed north along the Continental Divide. “I can’t tell you where we’re going, because I don’t know myself. But I know who Dark Bear is taking us to meet. I therefore assure you this is no boondoggle. We’re getting to the bottom of everything, once and for all.”

  Olivier was regarding me with a puzzled expression, then slowly the dawning light crept over his face.

  “My God!” he cried. “Do you mean to say he’s not really dead?”

  I nodded slowly. At least I’d managed to do one thing in all this time: keep Sam’s living, breathing existence a secret from just about everyone on the planet. But all that was about to change, as it must if we were to unravel this mess.

  “But if Sam is alive … then whom did Wolfgang kill?” asked Bambi, quicker on the uptake than I’d thought when we’d first met.

  I glanced at Olivier uncomfortably.

  “Oh no,” said Olivier, as he suddenly got the picture. “All this past month, I’ve felt something was horribly wrong. It wasn’t usual for us to communicate personally while on assignment, but I knew Theron Vane had gone to San Francisco the same week your cousin was killed. It seemed odd to receive no news at all, after the brutal murder of someone who was helping with a case I’d been working on myself for five years. I even thought to contact Theron on my own, but I decided there must be some good reason why he was keeping silent.” He smiled grimly. “It now appears that there was.”

  As we wound our way up into the thickly forested pine country with its swift, dark rivers and sheer drops of sparkling waterfalls glimpsed between the tree
s, I inhaled the pine scents and listened to Bambi’s story. As she told it, the last few pieces of the puzzle I’d been both hunting and dodging for so long finally fell into place.

  “My mother Halle was raised by her father, Hillmann von Hauser,” she said. “As you see, Wolfgang and I, too, use our grandfather’s name.”

  “I understood, from a phone call with my mother Jersey, that you and Wolfgang had two different fathers,” I said, not really wanting to make a public issue of Bambi’s illegitimate paternity by my own obnoxious father, Augustus. But I was the one to be let in for another surprise.

  “Different fathers, yes, but with the same family name,” Bambi told me. “Wolfgang’s father, my mother Halle’s legal husband, was actually Earnest Behn.”

  I was no longer shocked by such revelations about my family. But in view of what Bambi had said earlier about Wolfgang being the instrument of Sam’s death, I knew this was truly important, since it meant that Sam and Wolfgang shared the same father, Earnest. They were half brothers—just as Bambi and I were sisters through my father, Augustus. I glanced at Dark Bear, who noticed it from the corner of his eye as he drove, and nodded in affirmation.

  “Yes, I knew of this,” he said. “I knew Earnest Behn for many years. Earnest was a very handsome man, and rich. He came to northwest Idaho, well before the war, to purchase mining properties, fifty thousand acres north of Lapwai containing numerous untapped mountains and caves filled with mineral resources—a large chunk of Mother Earth to be so exploited. The war, of course, made him even richer.

  “After the war, when Earnest was in his mid-forties, he returned to Europe, married the young woman Halle, and stayed in Europe for some time. They had a son, Wolfgang. Suddenly Earnest returned to his property north of Lapwai, without the woman or child. He said they had died. He asked permission to marry my daughter Bright Cloud, whom he had known from her childhood. She was very attracted to him, but it was … uncustomary. Earnest Behn was a white man from foreign lands. How did we know he would be willing to learn our ways? How did we know he would not leave the country again, perhaps never to return?

  “When I asked him if he loved my daughter, Earnest Behn said he believed himself incapable of love—a remark that, to be plain, my people cannot understand. To admit such a thing is as much as saying you are already dead. He promised he would care for my daughter, however, and that any child they had between them would be raised on the reservation among our people—a promise he failed to keep. For when Bright Cloud died, Sam’s father took him from the reservation. Then he married your mother Jersey, and we feared Sam would be lost to us forever.”

  Dark Bear said this without bitterness, though he looked as if he were deep in thought. Then he added, “Earnest Behn said something else very strange, just before his marriage to my daughter. He said: ‘I pray it may remove the stain of my pollution.’ He never said what he meant, nor would he ever accept to take the sweat lodge for purification.”

  Something about that rang a bell.

  “You said Earnest Behn bought property in America before the Second World War,” I said. “When exactly was that?”

  “It was in 1923,” said Dark Bear.

  The date had unarguable significance—though after a quick calculation, it didn’t make sense.

  “But Earnest was born in 1901,” I said. “By 1923, that would make him only twenty-two. Why would his father entrust such a young man with buying and managing so much land in a foreign—”

  But Olivier and Bambi were looking at me with wide eyes.

  “My God,” I said.

  So this was the “pollution” our family never spoke of, clearly with good cause—as if bigamy, kidnapping, incest, fascism, and murder weren’t enough. By the end of our two-hour ride through the Bitter-root Range of the Rockies, supplementing my own knowledge with Dark Bear’s and Bambi’s, I’d pieced together a good deal. And I realized I owed both my grandmothers an apology—especially Zoe.

  Hitler’s Munich putsch took place on November 9, 1923. At the time, no war was in sight—but Hieronymus Behn knew there would always be war. And he also knew which side he planned to be on. He sent Earnest to America to establish a mining presence there. Ten years later, in 1933—the year Hitler became chancellor of Germany—Hieronymus sent his other son, by then twenty-one years old: my father Augustus. These two young men were planted like moles, burrowing into the mountains and caves of the New World, stockpiling important minerals against a time when the world would enter another war.

  One flew east: my father to Pennsylvania. And one flew west: Earnest to Idaho. And one flew over the cuckoo’s nest. That was Zoe.

  Though Zoe might have deserted her parents to run off with the Gypsies, it seems that by the time she was grown, Hieronymus Behn wanted his daughter and only true blood descendant to “breed with good blood.” It was he who sent his colleague and friend Hillmann von Hauser to Paris to seduce her. Whatever the circumstances of their relationship from Zoe’s viewpoint, her daughter Halle was taken from her and raised by the father and his dutiful if barren Germanic wife. Zoe married a wild Irishman and had another child: my mother Jersey.

  So if Hieronymus Behn essentially kidnapped my father Augustus from Pandora, he also appropriated the two sons his sister-bride Hermione had conceived with Christian Alexander: Laf by adoption, and Earnest by changing his birth certificate to name Hieronymus as the real father. This meant that Zoe’s two daughters, my mother Jersey and her sister Halle, were Hieronymus Behn’s only true grandchildren. It therefore made sense, as the story unfolded, that Hieronymus plotted to marry them off to these two appropriated “sons”—Halle to Earnest, and Jersey to Augustus. Through this manipulation, Hieronymus hoped to ensure that any future recipients of his fortune and power would be tied to his own bloodline, through Zoe.

  The biggest fly in the ointment, of course, was that he’d married the wrong sisters off to the wrong brothers. My prestige- and power-oriented father Augustus would have been the perfect match for Halle, who had been given the finest Aryan preparation that a beautiful blond girl with Nazi parentage might ask. The product of that liaison was Bambi. Then Earnest and my mother Jersey, when they got together in later life, were as happy as two such exploited and emotionally traumatized people might hope to be.

  So the pollution Earnest could never wash himself clean of was something he only understood fully after he’d married Halle von Hauser. Not just what her daddy had done in the war as an armaments manufacturer—which she was quite proud of—but also where all the minerals had gone that Earnest himself had placed, all those years, in the hands of his own “neutral” Dutch father, Hieronymus Behn.

  Earnest started pulling together, slowly and painfully, the family background that no one fully knew. When it became clear to Earnest that he, Augustus, and Hieronymus had built their enormous fortune on the suffering of others—in Hieronymus’s case, in full awareness of what he was doing—that was bad enough. But when he learned that he’d been used as a tool by the man he’d always regarded as his father—not only to breed a superior race, but to control the world—that knowledge was almost impossible for Earnest to live with.

  The girls’ mother, Zoe, on the other hand, had gone into occupied France to try to persuade her former seducer to let her take her daughter Halle out of German-occupied territory, and had been trapped there, as Pandora and Laf had in Vienna. It must have seemed ironic to Zoe to be sitting across a table from me in Paris beside my own gorgeous Nazi seducer, replaying a version of her life between the wars.

  The true irony, for all these people, was that their connections with Hieronymus Behn and Hillmann von Hauser and Adolf Hitler had, according to Bambi, enabled them not only to survive the war themselves but, in the cases of Pandora and Zoe, to protect or rescue hundreds of people with impunity. This included Pandora’s husband Dacian Bassarides, who’d run a Gypsy shuttle of escapees—with Zoe’s help from Paris—out through southern France.

  “Does Wolfgang k
now anything of this story—or the fact that Sam is really his brother?” I asked Bambi.

  She was silent for a moment, regarding me seriously with her speckled golden eyes.

  “I’m not sure,” she said at last. “But I do know he has been heavily influenced by my mother—the essential reason why Lafcadio has despised him, though he’s been reluctant to discuss it. I have pieced together some of the story from Lafcadio, who must have learned it from Earnest, many years ago, when Earnest came from Idaho to Vienna to confront Pandora. It seems all along Pandora had known the entire story.”

  Of course!

  I remembered Wolfgang’s words when he was gazing out over the Danube as we stood there together beneath the glass ceiling of his castle, just before we made love: “My father took me to see her when I was only a small child. She was singing ‘Das himmlische Leben.’ She looked at me with those eyes—your eyes.”

  “After marrying my daughter,” Dark Bear said, “Earnest Behn returned to Europe twice. When Sam was three years old, Earnest went to speak with Pandora, the mother of his brother Augustus, about an important family matter. The second trip was for Pandora’s funeral, just after Bright Cloud died, and he took Sam along with him. Pandora bequeathed him something he had to retrieve in person, Earnest told me. When he came back to Idaho, he left the reservation for good.”

  I had just one more question. And luckily I was so accustomed by now to off-the-wall answers, I hardly even flinched anymore.

  “How was it that you went to live with Lafcadio, after your mother Halle died?” I asked Bambi. “Did you already know Uncle Laf well?”

  “My mother never died. She’s still quite alive, I’m afraid to say—though I haven’t seen her since I left home ten years ago,” Bambi said, narrowing her eyes. “But I thought you must have understood, all along, that it is she who remains in the shadows, behind everything!”

  If Bambi’s mother, Halle von Hauser, was “behind everything,” as Bambi said—and if she was truly so awful that her husband ran off and married Bright Cloud, and even her daughter Bambi left home at age fifteen to live with Uncle Laf—then it was clear what this suggested about Wolfgang’s connection to the dark side of our family.