The Magic Circle (40 page)

“Gavroche, I’m quite sure of it, if that’s what you wish. But first there is something I must tell you. The god Dionysus loved Ariadne, and because she was a mortal he came to earth for her. But you see, when a great god comes to earth, it can cause all kinds of trouble. So you must be sure never to ask for his help unless you really, truly need it—not like the little boy who cried wolf. Do you see?”

“Okay,” I agreed. “I’ll try—but what kind of trouble? What if I make a mistake by accident? Will something bad happen?”

Laf took my hand in his and looked into my eyes as if he were peering across the aeons.

“Gavroche,” he said. “With eyes like yours, the color of the sea, I assure you that if you ever did make such a mistake, even a god would hesitate to blame you. But your grandmother believed his time was coming quite soon now, this Dionysus. And since he is the god of moisture, of springs and fountains and rivers, if called upon he will come and free the waters. The rains will pour down as in the time of Noah, and rivers will flood their banks.…”

Suddenly I flashed in panic to the boy who’d cried wolf when there was no wolf. Suddenly I dreaded those powers that Laf had said my grandmother could summon and he’d hinted I might, as well.

“Do you mean the world could be flooded and wrecked if somebody just
asked
for help before they really needed it? Somebody like me?” I said.

Laf was silent a moment. When he spoke, he did not reassure me.

“I think, Gavroche, you will know the right moment to ask,” he said softly. “And I’m quite certain the god himself will know precisely when to come.”

I had rarely thought of this episode from my childhood in the past twenty years. But now, as we crossed onto the island and neared our destination, I glanced once more at the canvas satchel on the backseat beside me, the bag containing Pandora’s manuscripts.

We pulled through security and up before the International Atomic Energy Agency. As I stepped from the car still clutching the lethal bag, in my mind echoed, just for an instant, what Uncle Laf had said so long ago in Vienna: that I’d know exactly when to call upon the god. And I wondered if the critical moment was now.

Maybe I wasn’t sure about the critical time, but by lunchtime I had a pretty clear idea where the critical place was located: it was back in the USSR, in a region commonly referred to as the Yellow Steppe. In the geography books it was known as Central Asia.

To hear Lars Fennish tell it—as he and his colleagues
did
tell it, locked with us in an IAEA conference room for our “brief” multiple hours of briefing—it was one of the most mysterious and volatile regions of the world.

This slice of the globe we were talking about, displayed on a four-color map on a nearby wall, included the Soviet Republics of Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan—a group that together possessed some of the world’s highest mountains, a recent record of polycultural and religious ferment, and an ancient history of intertribal warfare and violence.

They possessed some noteworthy neighbors too. Those just across the fence included China, a member of the league of “big five” weapons-wielding nukes; also India, a nation that claimed it possessed no nuclear weapons but had only “exploded a peaceful device” a few years back; not to mention Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran—a trio I’m sure would have been delighted to join the club. Not the most relaxing spot to pay a visit.

The item most crucial to the future of humanity was also the International Atomic Energy Agency’s chief mission: ensuring that weapons-grade materials weren’t diverted toward “proliferation,” or more bombs in the hands of ever more countries. It hadn’t occurred to me until our briefing that this was a goal that could never be achieved by the IAEA, even with the full support of the United States and all our allies, without the added cooperation, even the steel-fisted clout, of an equally supportive and on-board Soviet Union to balance the east-west axis. That the USSR had actually shown such support over the past several decades was my first surprise. My second, a real humdinger, was that it was not the IAEA who’d initiated Wolfgang’s and my mission inside the USSR—the Soviets had invited us in themselves.

It’s true that in recent years, especially in the wake of a catastrophe of Chernobyl’s magnitude, the Russians might have grown a bit more mellow about outside intervention from folks like the IAEA. But
glasnost
and
perestroika
aside, Soviet external relations weren’t quite as cozy as their public relations might suggest. Why would the Soviets suddenly be reversing their earlier cold-war stance and coyly asking us in to inspect their lingerie?

By the time our heavy briefing was completed, I had learned the answer to that and a number of other questions having to do with a mysterious clique I’d never heard of. They were called the Group of
77
and their ambition, it seems, was to join the club that controlled all the weapons-grade material in the world.

It was one
P.M
. when Wolfgang and I finally escaped from the conference room, graciously thanked Lars and friends for torturing us these past three hours, and headed off to have lunch. With little sleep or breakfast followed by hours of intensive briefing, I was more than ready for some solid food and a little
gemütlich
atmosphere. Luckily, Viennese coffeehouses almost never stop serving chow.

We left our luggage at IAEA headquarters to be picked up later, and got a taxi. We were dropped at the canal and headed on foot to the landmark Café Central, where Wolfgang said he thought they’d still be holding our reservation for lunch. Though I felt awkward lugging my heavy shoulder bag through the cobbled streets of Vienna, at least I’d worn comfortable shoes. And it helped to walk. Before we’d gone far, the bracing fog from the canal had cleared my head enough so I could focus my thoughts a bit.

“Fill me in a bit more on this Group of
77,
” I suggested to Wolfgang. “They sound like some kind of Third World hit squad trying to grab all the liquid plutonium they can get their hands on. Where did they come from?”

“Here in Vienna we’ve known about them for a long time,” he told me. “They began as seventy-seven developing countries, all members of the UN, who drew together in the early sixties as a lobbying group to promote cooperation among Third World countries. Today, though they still call themselves the Group of
77
, they have nearly doubled their membership and have learned to vote as a bloc; as a result they’ve grown much more powerful. Although many of them also belong to the IAEA, the agency is insulated from such special interest groups by the fact that its board members mainly come from highly industrialized nuclear nations who remain prudent about with whom to share or not share atomic expertise.”

“So you think the Soviets are worried the Group of
77
may churn up the Central Asian republics?”

“Perhaps,” said Wolfgang. “There’s a person who could tell us a great deal more, if he chose to do so. He knows these people well. He was to join us at lunch, and I hope he’s waiting there now. The timing was extremely difficult: he’s old and obstinate, and he refused to speak about the matter with anyone but you. That’s why I was upset to think you’d missed that flight from Idaho. A good deal of effort has gone into the coordination of this trip on everyone’s part, you know.”

“It’s starting to look that way,” I agreed. I hadn’t a clue what was going on. As we went through the streets, the fog around us had thickened. Though Wolfgang was speaking, his voice seemed distant, and I only caught the last words.

“… from Paris last night, just when you and I ourselves were traveling here. He thought it was essential to see you in person.”

“Who came from Paris last night?” I asked.

“We’re going to meet your grandfather,” Wolfgang said.

“That’s impossible. Hieronymus Behn has been dead for thirty years,” I said.

“I don’t mean the man you think is your grandfather,” he said. “I mean the man who flew from Paris last night to meet you, the man who sired your father Augustus upon your grandmother Pandora—perhaps the only man she ever deeply loved.”

Maybe it was the fog, maybe my lack of sleep and food, but I suddenly felt dizzy, as if I’d just stepped off a carousel and things were still whirling. Wolfgang put his hand beneath my arm as if to steady me, but his voice went on.

“I wasn’t sure how much to say earlier, but this was the real reason I came to Idaho to find you,” he told me. “As I explained that first day on the mountain, the documents you are heir to
must not
fall into the wrong hands. The man we’re about to meet knows much of the mystery behind them. But first, I thought I must prepare you, for you might be—well, there’s something about him that’s hard to describe, but I’ll try. He seems like an ancient figure possessed of magical powers, like a magus of sorts. But perhaps you already suspect who it is, this grandfather of yours. His name is Dacian Bassarides.”

THE MAGUS

Magus is derived from
Maja,
the mirror wherein Brahm, according to Indian mythology, from all eternity beholds himself and all his power and wonders. Hence also our terms magia, magic, image, imagination, all implying the fixing in a form … of the potencies of the primeval, structureless, living matter. The Magus, therefore, is one that makes the operations of the Eternal Life his study
.

—Charles William Heckethorn,
The Secret Societies

He it is who may owe his bond to the world of images and appearances
—
be sensually, voluptuously, sinfully bound to them, yet be aware at the same time that he belongs no less to the world of the idea and the spirit, as the magician who makes the appearance transparent that the idea and spirit may shine through
.

—Thomas Mann

Man is superior to the stars if be lives in the power of superior wisdom. Such a person, being master over heaven and earth by means of will, is a magus. And magic is not sorcery, but supreme wisdom
.

—Paracelsus

In his own magic circle wanders the wonderful man, and draws us with him to wonder and take part in it
.

—Johann Wolfgang Goethe

Wolfgang wanted to “prepare me” to meet Dacian Bassarides. But how could anything have prepared me for the events of my past two weeks? And now this—the revelation that my insufferable, arrogant father might actually be the spawn of my grandmother’s illicit lover rather than the legitimate son of Hieronymus Behn.

As we headed through the maze of cobbled streets to the Café Central, Wolfgang seemed to understand I needed a little peace and quiet. I was fed up with all these surprises about my awful family. And it hardly helped that every new fact raised a new question. For instance, if Dacian Bassarides really was my grandfather and Hieronymus Behn knew it, why would Hieronymus have raised my father Augustus as the apple of his eye, preferring him not only to his stepson, Laf, but to his own legitimate children, Zoe and Earnest, too?

In the larger picture, Dacian Bassarides had played a pivotal role in each and every scene. For instance, if Pandora’s estate was parceled out—as Sam and I surmised—among members of the Behn family without anyone knowing who got what, then as executor of that estate, Dacian might well be the only person alive who could say how these manuscripts were connected, and to whom.

I recalled that when Uncle Laf gave me his version of the family saga, he’d described Dacian as his own early violin teacher, Pandora’s handsome young cousin who’d let them ride the carousel at the Prater and who’d later accompanied Pandora, with her friend “Lucky” and the children, to the Hofburg to view the spear of Charlemagne and the sword of Attila the Hun.

That was the basic story without filling in any blanks. One blank, however, might be a connection Laf had failed to make. Based on his eyewitness account, during that Prater merry-go-round ride Dacian seemed on as intimate terms with Lucky as Pandora herself was. Then later at the museum, it was his unobtrusive but well-timed question about “these other objects you seek” that elicited what Hitler thought the sacred items were—platters and tools and such—and revealed how and where he’d conducted his search for them.

But if Pandora’s cousin really was at the center of the plot, as Sam had hinted and as I myself was starting to believe, just how had this starring role fallen to Dacian Bassarides?

The Café Central had recently been redone. Some construction at the back was still under way, as a bit of dust and intermittent sawing attested. But since my last visit the old dark paneling, flocked wallpaper, and dingy wall sconces had been banished, and the place was now a bright open space.

As we crossed the room, the fog outside lifted; pale light poured through the big windows and glistened on the glass-and-brass display case filled with rich Viennese pastries. At small marble tables scattered across the floor, people sat on the stiff chairs reading papers attached to polished wooden sticks, as crisp as if they’d been freshly laundered and pressed. The painted plaster figure of a middle-aged Viennese sat alone at his usual table near the door, a plaster cup of coffee on the table before him.

Wolfgang and I crossed to the raised dining area in back, where tables in open booths were each graced with a crisp white cloth, sparkling silver, and a pitcher filled with freshly cut flowers. The maître d’ led us to ours, removed the Reserved sign, and took our orders for wine and bottled water. When the drinks had arrived, Wolfgang said, “I hoped he’d be here already.”

The wine made me feel more relaxed, but Wolfgang’s mind was elsewhere. He glanced around the open space of the room, then sat back, folding and refolding his napkin with some impatience.