The Magic Circle (63 page)

In the decade after the First World War, Hillmann von Hauser and his kind experienced few of the depredations suffered by most Germans. Rather, a group that weathered the storm between the wars very well was a certain set of industrialists and armaments manufacturers like the Krupps, Thyssens, and—why, yes—the Ritter von Hauser himself. Zoe’s daughter Halle was taken to Germany, adopted by her father and his legitimate wife, and sent for much of her education to elite schools in France. As Jersey understood the story, her mother Zoe soon fled to the isle of Jersey, where she met and impetuously married a successful young sheep rancher engaged in the production of Irish wool, and they remained there with their own daughter, Jersey, until the outbreak of the Second World War, when he became a heroic pilot and Zoe returned to France.

Though this missing “pastoral” portion of Zoe’s past didn’t jibe too well with her self-perpetuated legend, it
did
coincide with something of historical import that sent chills up my spine. I hadn’t forgotten what was going on in 1940, the very week Jersey told me Zoe had made her unexpected jaunt back to France: it was the week of the German occupation. Not only was the Ritter von Hauser in Paris—as Jersey said he was, collecting their twelve-year-old daughter Halle—but an even older acquaintance of Zoe’s would also have been present there.

Nor had I forgotten my afternoon with Laf in the hot tub at Sun Valley, when he’d told me Zoe was “never the queen of the night as she liked to portray herself,” that it was all propaganda designed by “the cleverest salesman of our century”—Zoe’s Austrian compatriot Adolf Hitler, who’d come to Paris that same week to have his mug snapped, smiling like a tourist before the Eiffel Tower, as the long-awaited conqueror of the descendants of those Salic-Burgundian Franks of the
Nibelungenlied
.

Whether my grandmother Zoe turned out to be a demimondaine or simply a dancer—whether she’d served with the OSS or French Resistance in the war as Wolfgang claimed, or was more like what Laf said, a Nazi collaborator—by tomorrow the real Zoe Behn would be measured by
me
for the very first time.

Given the environment of secrecy, not to say treachery, in which our family operated, maybe Wolfgang didn’t know that our mothers, Jersey and Halle, were half sisters. It was also possible he was unaware the eighty-three-year-old bombshell Zoe, whom he’d found so charming, was actually his own grandmother. After all, I hadn’t known such things myself until tonight.

But one item Jersey explained was something Wolfgang
couldn’t
have been telling the complete truth about. It had to do with the week of Sam’s funeral. And it made my latest cryptic message from Sam seem even more ominous.

Before the funeral, like Augustus and Grace, Jersey had talked briefly with the executor about the reading of the will; but unlike Augustus and Grace, Jersey had had a reason to do so. She was acquainted with Mr. Leo Abrahams, who’d been Uncle Earnest’s attorney as well as executor of the estate when Jersey was left widowed by Earnest’s death. Now that Sam too was dead, it was understandable Jersey would want to know how, in future, her own income would be paid by the estate her stepson had managed these past seven years. But that wasn’t all.

When Jersey had learned I was likely to be Sam’s major beneficiary, she wanted to find out whether I understood just what that responsibility might entail—for an excellent reason. She herself had a better than average guess of what Sam might have inherited from his father. Maybe my mother hadn’t been quite as drunk as she’d seemed that day at the graveside. In hindsight, her astonishing behavior had certainly given us a breather from Augustus and Grace long enough to have lunch by ourselves. But when Jersey realized I knew zilch, she decided that once the rest of the family left town, she would corner me and fill me in on everything.

Jersey had brought something of her own to the funeral, and though she couldn’t say much right now, the little she
could
communicate was enough. She’d intended to give me what she’d brought after our talk—but I had vanished. So after much soul-searching, she’d wrapped it in butcher paper and twine and mailed it to me, with a note scribbled on the inside of the brown paper. This I’d unfortunately thrown away without seeing. But from Jersey’s brief description, as precise as she could afford to be on our transatlantic trunk line, I knew this was surely the rune manuscript I’d stashed in the Department of Defense Standards manuals at the nuclear site—just before I got those more deadly manuscripts from Sam, now tucked away at the Austrian National Library in Vienna. So Jersey’s document was the very rune manuscript Wolfgang claimed he’d received from Zoe and mailed me
himself
—a manuscript that Laf later assured me neither Wolfgang nor Zoe could possibly have possessed.

My mother and I agreed, for reasons of prudence, that we’d discuss the rest when I got back home. When I rang off the phone, Wolfgang was waiting outside the booth with our bags, and we headed for the airport taxi stand. As our cab swept into the wet black velvet Parisian night, I knew, just as Laf had repeatedly warned, I might be walking into the proverbial lions’ den without my whip.

Indeed, as I now grimly appreciated, it was entirely conceivable Wolfgang had never seen the rune manuscript until that night he’d spent in my room back in Idaho, just after the avalanche, when I myself was drugged and out cold. And if that were true, I understood with a horrible chill exactly what it would mean: that the man sitting beside me in this taxi, rolling down a dark French highway at midnight, might well have deceived me in everything he’d said or done, from the very first moment we’d met.

Our cab pulled up in a narrow street on the Left Bank before the Relais Christine; Wolfgang hopped out, paid the driver, and rang the bell at the gate.

“Our plane was quite late,” Wolfgang told the desk man in rather impeccable French. “We haven’t yet eaten. Could you give us our room key and stow our baggage while we go for a short meal?”

The desk man agreed, Wolfgang exchanged a healthy tip for our room key, and we went on down the one-block street to where lights were still glowing and numerous tables of what seemed ebullient after-theater people were still dining inside a chic, cozy bistro.

Our
coquilles
arrived, filled with a wonderful rich concoction of seafood seasoned with exotic Mediterranean spices. Something about a good meal and a full-bodied wine always seemed to make me truly relaxed and mellow—and to dull my survival instincts exactly when I needed them sharpest.

“It was rather a lengthy phone call you made just now to the States,” Wolfgang finally commented when our crispy green salad showed up afterwards. “Do you speak with your mother often?”

“At least every few years—without fail, rain or shine,” I told him.

“Perhaps this call was related, then, to the call you made earlier to your uncle?” he suggested. “You’ve been uncharacteristically quiet ever since we left Vienna.”

“I
am
often more of a blabbermouth than serves my own good,” I agreed. “But on the subject of my family, I’ve usually been reticent. Of course, now that it turns out you and I are actually
related
, I guess there’s practically nothing we couldn’t discuss with one another. That is, if we both decided to tell the truth, for a refreshing change.”

“Ah,” said Wolfgang quietly, looking down at his plate.

He picked up a crusty roll and broke it in two, studying the pieces in his hands as if expecting them to contain the key to some mystery. At last he looked up at me with those incredible turquoise eyes beneath thick lashes, which always made me more than a little weak in the knees. But I knew I’d better keep my attention focused on mind instead of matter.

“It’s your serve, I believe,” I told him. “But please be advised, this isn’t a set of lawn tennis we’re playing anymore.”

“It’s clear you’ve been told something that reflects badly on me,” Wolfgang said calmly. “But before I try to explain my side of things, I must ask how much of the situation you already know?”

“Why is that always the first question everyone asks me?” I said. I stabbed at my salad a few times, then put down my fork and looked him in the eye. “I think that even if you did meet Zoe Behn for the first time last year, you know she’s your grandmother, which makes her daughters—your mother and mine—half sisters. And I know neither you nor Zoe sent me that rune manuscript. My mother has just informed me
she
did. She may have concealed the truth from me for a very long time—but she’s not an out-and-out liar. I wish I could say the same of you. The one thing I have to thank you for is saving my life in an avalanche. Otherwise, as far as I can see, you’ve misled me from the very moment we met up on that mountain, and I demand to know why—tonight.”

Wolfgang was staring at me with a kind of astonishment. I admit, a few of the waiters and other patrons had glanced in our direction, though I’d kept my voice pretty well under control. Then, unexpectedly, Wolfgang smiled.

“Only
one
thing?” he said with raised brow, ignoring the rest of my tirade. “
I
should have to say, rather, that I have
many
things to thank
you
for. The first, that I have never fallen in love with anyone before now. The second—something I really didn’t expect—that it could be with such a hellcat as you. So I must thank you for—how do you Americans say?—for ‘introducing me to reality.’”

He put his napkin on the table and motioned for our bill. But I was blazing mad and not about to be put off one more time, even by this scathing, if possibly accurate, portrait of myself. I waved the waiter away and picked up my wineglass to emphasize the fact.

“I haven’t finished,” I told Wolfgang firmly.

“Oh yes, you certainly have,” he assured me in exactly the same tone of voice. “Does it not occur to you, Ariel, that I didn’t speak of our relationship earlier because I was warned by everyone of how you feel about the Behn family? That you’ve been distant toward all but your cousin Sam since you were even a little child? Don’t you think I knew beforehand what your reaction would be if I arrived without warning, immediately after this very cousin had died, and said to you, ‘Hallo, it’s me, your cousin Wolfgang whom you’ve never heard of; I’m here to drag you into the bosom of your dangerous family whom you’ve avoided for so long’? And as for the rune manuscript you say I lied to you about, Zoe knew you’d been sent it by your mother because the two of them spoke of it together. Ask her yourself tomorrow, if you don’t believe what I say. I’m sorry, but when I told you it was I who sent it to you, it was the only way I could think of that I could quickly win your trust—”

“Why is it that the only way you can ever think how to ‘win my trust’ is to tell me another lie?” I interrupted Wolfgang’s extremely untimely confession.

But in the back of my mind, I had to admit that much of what he said was true. Handsome and desirable as Wolfgang had seemed to me from the moment I’d first clapped eyes on him, I
had
spent much time and effort trying to avoid proximity at all cost—and for a reason I could hardly have shared with him, then or now: that Sam was still alive and in danger from every quarter I could think of but my own, and I couldn’t afford to trust anyone, anyone at all.

I also couldn’t help noticing there was still one cog that didn’t fit into Wolfgang’s mechanical blueprint.

“Even if all you’ve said is true,” I added, “it doesn’t explain your lie about the Pod.”

“The—pod?” said Wolfgang, confused.

“My boss, Pastor Owen Dart,” I translated. “Why was he so anxious to get me out of town on an assignment to Russia, and then turn around and follow us to Vienna? What was he doing lurking that night in the vineyard below your house? What did you and he speak of that you couldn’t discuss in front of me?”

Perhaps it was my imagination that Wolfgang grew slightly pale. He seemed about to speak, then stopped. I hoped he wouldn’t try to go on pretending that the man in the vineyard was Father Virgilio—but that thought in itself suggested yet another question.

“Who is Virgilio Santorini, anyway?” I asked. “My uncle Laf seems to know of him, but believes he’s a very dangerous man. Why did you have him meet us at the library of Melk?”

“This is hardly the time or place I would have chosen for such a conversation, but at least it’s difficult to eavesdrop,” Wolfgang said with a sigh of frustration. “And everything is nearly over now, so I’m able to tell you whatever you’d like to know—if at least it will finally make you feel you can trust me. Life is very complex, Ariel, and people are often complex beyond our understanding—”

“Wolfgang, for heaven’s sake, it’s nearly two o’clock in the morning. Let’s cut to the chase, okay? Who’s Virgilio, and why was Pastor Dart following us in Vienna?”

“Very well,” Wolfgang said, looking me right in the eye with a you-asked-for-it expression. “Virgilio Santorini is a highly educated, erudite scholar of medieval texts who received his degrees from the Sorbonne and the University of Vienna. He is in fact a priest, but not a librarian of the monastery of Melk. He has complete access to their archive, however, since his family in Trieste donated a large portion of their rare book collection. Their money pays for many restorations now under way on the monastery.”

None of this was surprising. But I was soon grateful for the covering sounds of waiters clattering dishes and some laughing ribaldries in raucous French wafting from a nearby table, for I was hardly prepared to swallow what came next.

“Virgilio Santorini’s family,” Wolfgang went on, “are also among the largest arms dealers in Eastern Europe, specifically Yugoslavia and Hungary, which is how they’ve made their money for generations. What your uncle may have meant when he spoke of danger is the fact that Virgilio’s family is also widely reputed to be connected with a mafia group called Star, a consortium believed to have traffic in weapons-grade nuclear materials. So you see, as I mentioned earlier, people themselves, as well as situations, can be more complex than a simple talk over supper can express.”