The Magic Circle (42 page)

“If you and my grandmother grew up together and loved one another, if she was carrying your child, why did she marry Hieronymus Behn? I thought she despised him. And then, why would she run off with Lafcadio after the child was born, abandoning him too?”

“As I said earlier, it’s hard to answer questions unless they’re put properly,” he told me with a wry smile. “You mustn’t believe whatever you hear, and least of all from me—after all, I am Rom! But I’ll explain what I can, for I believe you’ve every right to know. Indeed, you
must
know everything, if you expect to protect those papers you have in your bag there under the table—”

Somehow a swallow of wine seemed to have been sucked down my windpipe. I was choking and reaching for the water as I wondered if he had X-ray vision or, perhaps, could read my mind.

“Wolfgang Hauser told me of them when we passed in the kitchen,” he said, reading my mind. “When he saw your bag examined by two customs authorities and by security at the IAEA, he found it strange that you should be carrying so much paper only for your work. He made a reasonable assumption. But we will come to that. To answer your question, Pandora was indeed my lover and the mother of my son and only child, but she was not my cousin at all. She was my wife. Those pictures in your hand were taken on our wedding day.”

“You were married to Pandora?” I said, dumbfounded. “But when?”

“As you see, in that photo she might have been eighteen or twenty years of age,” he said. “But in fact she was thirteen, and I sixteen, the day we were married. It was different then, you know: girls of tender years were already women, and early marriages are anyway quite customary among the Rom. At the age of thirteen Pandora was a woman, I assure you. Then when I was twenty and she seventeen, she left, and our son Augustus was born inside the house of Hieronymus Behn.”

My brain was swarming with a million questions, but just then the waiter arrived with the chocolate dessert named for the Gypsy violinist, a bowl of
Schlagobers
, and a bottle of
grappa
, that heady Italian liqueur made from the fermented seeds of grape, which is twice as strong as cognac. When the waiter left, I waved my hand to indicate I didn’t want anything further to drink—I was almost hyperventilating as it was. Dacian filled my glass anyway, then he picked up his own glass and touched it to mine.

“Take it. You may find that you need it before I’ve finished,” he said.

“You haven’t
finished?
” I hissed under my breath, though when I glanced around, I saw that we were the only diners still left in this part of the restaurant and the waiters, with towels folded over their arms, were at a discreet distance across the room chatting among themselves.

After all that business of beliefs clashing with reality, I suddenly knew what
I
believed: Of everything I’d thought I didn’t want to hear up until now, this was likely to be the worst. I prayed reality would prove me wrong, but I didn’t have much faith. I closed my eyes for a moment. When I opened them, Dacian Bassarides was seated beside me, blocking my exit from the booth. He rested one hand on my shoulder, and again I felt the energy of the man. He was so close I could inhale his perfumed warmth, like the scent of sage and bonfires, like the moist aroma of deep pine forests where the divine panther moved.

“Ariel, I know what I’ve said has shocked and perhaps even frightened you, but that was only part of what I came here from France to reveal,” he said gravely. He took the locket from my hand, closed it carefully, and replaced it in his vest pocket. “It’s imperative that you hear everything I have to say, however unpleasant. To close one’s eyes and ears at this moment is a dangerous decision for any of us to take—most especially for you.”

“I can’t ‘take’ any decisions at all,” I said bitterly. “I don’t think I can ‘take’ any more of anything.”

“Oh yes, you can,” he said. “You are Pandora’s only grandchild, and mine too. Whether you know it or not, you were born, as one might say, to have a rendezvous with destiny; your journey toward it has already begun. But my people make a distinction between destiny and fate. We don’t think we are born with a ‘fate’ that impels us to act out some script composed by a higher hand, but rather that each of us has a destiny, a preexisting pattern which, in our hearts, we wish one day to fulfill. However, in order to pour yourself into this new form—this higher vessel, as it were—you must
recognize
it is your destiny and seek it accordingly—just as a swan that’s been raised among chickens must realize his own destiny is in learning to swim and to fly, or he will remain nothing but an earthbound fowl, scratching in the dust all his days.”

Somehow, this comparison made me improbably angry. How could he even suggest that anything in our “swanlike” blood might call for a “higher vessel”? I helped myself to a healthy slug of the
grappa
and turned to him.

“Look,” I said in frustration, “maybe it was my ‘destiny’ to be Pandora’s only granddaughter, maybe it was my ‘destiny’ to look so much like her. And maybe it’s true that I was born just after she died. But that doesn’t make me some kind of reincarnation or clone of her—or mean that
her
destiny is in any way related to mine. There’s no ‘form’ or ‘pattern’ or anything inside of me that would cause me to do even
one
of the terrible, cruel things it seems she did to you, and to everybody else she came into contact with.”

Dacian looked at me with widened eyes for a moment. Then he burst into a kind of cold laughter.

“This is what I meant by not believing all you hear, and again the result of not putting questions properly,” he said. When I said nothing, he added, “You must understand that we were none of us pawns. Not Hieronymus Behn nor I. Not Pandora, Lafcadio, Earnest, or Zoe. Like you, we had choices. But a choice is a decision, and decisions lead to events. Once an event takes place it’s too late to turn back the clock and change it. But it is never too late to examine the lessons of history.”

“I’ve avoided examining my family’s history all my life,” I told him. “If I’ve been successful at it for so long, why start now?”

“Perhaps because ignorance is not success,” Dacian said.

Wasn’t that
my
song he was playing? I spread my hands, showing my willingness to proceed.

“Just before we married,” Dacian began, “Pandora and I learned to our horror that something of great value belonging to her family, something of vast importance, had by deceit come into the possession of a man named Hieronymus Behn. Pandora was obsessed with getting it back, a mission we both undertook knowing the possible penalties should we fail. It took time to find him, and when at last we did, we knew our task would require us to gain access to his household, to win the family’s trust. I befriended Lafcadio at his school in Salzburg—and Pandora met Hermione and the children, finally moving into the Behn house itself in Vienna. But no one could know that just as our efforts were about to bear fruit, Hermione would fall gravely ill. When the brain sickness took her so swiftly and she died, Hieronymus raped Pandora that very night and forced her into marriage without delay. The man was the darkest scoundrel. But when she married him, she was already married to me. For some time, I couldn’t accept that she’d subjected us all to such a fate—for what could be worse than having your pregnant wife despoiled by another man, who then casts her out ignominiously while kidnapping the child—”

“Kidnapping?” I said in shock. “What on earth do you mean?”

“I mean your father was not abandoned by anyone,” he told me clearly. “When Hieronymus Behn discovered Pandora had indeed succeeded in recovering what she was seeking, he threw her into the streets, then shut up the house and absconded with our child. Augustus was held hostage for a ransom we would never pay, Pandora and I, even if we had the means to do so.”

“Ransom!” I said. But then of course I got the picture. Neither of us glanced at the bag sitting between us under the table. My mind was so frayed that when he spoke, it took me a minute to process what he said.

“Perhaps you don’t know exactly what the contents of your satchel are, my dear,” he said, “but you must have a very clear idea of their value and their danger. Had you not, you’d have sold them, or burned them, or left them behind when you came. You would never have made so great a commitment as to bring them with you halfway around the world. So when Wolfgang Hauser said he believed they were in your possession and I made the decision to tell you everything about our family—including our Romani roots—I quickly sent him away. You see, the information about those papers in your possession meant something to me that was fortunately lost on him. I asked him to meet us a short distance from here, a quarter hour from now.”

He paused and looked me directly in the eye. I froze when I heard his next words:

“You could only just have learned the importance of these documents, and from someone who had far more than a superficial grasp of their true meaning. Since it wasn’t myself, and all the others have taken their secret to the grave, I presume you’ve learned it from the person who last held them in his possession. This strongly suggests that your cousin Samuel is alive—and that you’ve spoken with him quite recently.”

THE AXIS

The branches and fruit of the … World Tree appear in the art and myth of Greece, but its roots are in Asia.… The World Tree is a symbol which complements, or on occasion overlaps with, that of the Central Mountain, both forms being only more elaborate forms of the Cosmic Axis or Pillar of the World
.

—E.A.S. Butterworth,
The Tree at the Navel of the Earth

In a universe where planets revolve around suns, and moons turn about planets, where force alone forever masters weakness, compelling it to be an obedient slave or else crushing it, there can be no special laws for man. For him, too, the eternal principles of this ultimate wisdom hold sway. He can try to comprehend them, but escape them, never
.

—Adolf Hitler,
Mein Kampf

I was a mess. A real mess. I felt truly ill. How could I have been so naive as to imagine that an innocent girl nuke like me, with no training in espionage, could save these dangerous manuscripts and protect Sam too, when the first two people who saw me had figured out at once what I was toting in my bag?

I tried to mask my churning emotions as the waiter arrived to reckon our bill. God knows how I managed to crawl from the booth, yank my coat on, and navigate the length of the restaurant. Dacian Bassarides followed without a word. Out in the middle of the Herrengasse, I hung on to my lethal shoulder bag in a white-knuckled grip.

“My dear, your fears are almost palpable,” Dacian said. “But fear is a necessary and healthy thing. It sharpens our awareness, it isn’t something to be suppressed—”

“You don’t understand,” I interrupted with urgency. “If you and Wolfgang guessed that I have these papers, maybe others have figured it out, too. Sam’s in terrible danger—people have tried to kill him. But I don’t even know what these manuscripts
are
, much less how to protect them. I don’t know who to trust!”

“The answer is plain,” Dacian said. He calmly removed my hand from my bag and tucked it beneath his arm. “You must trust the one person who
does
know what they are and who can advise you, for the moment anyway, what to do with them—which in both cases happens to be me. Furthermore, since our friend Herr Hauser believes you have these papers, it would be a mistake to arouse his suspicions by pretending you
haven’t
. You must take him into your confidence at least so far as what he’s already guessed, a gesture which may prove expedient in other ways as well. But he’s waiting for us not far from here, so let’s join him. I have something I want to show you both.”

I tried to calm down as Dacian, still cradling my hand, led me through narrow streets to where the Graben dovetailed into the Kärntner Strasse, another avenue of fashionable shops, and the Stephansplatz fanned out to display the gaudy jewel at its center: Saint Stephan’s, the gold-tiled, multispired cathedral that forms the heart of the circle of Vienna.

Wolfgang was pacing at the corner where the two streets met. He glanced at his wristwatch, then scanned the crowds. I was reminded of the first time I’d seen him, in the same elegant camel overcoat and silk scarf and leather gloves, at the Technical Science annex of the nuclear site back in Idaho—good lord, was it only one week ago? It seemed a million years.

“Do you know the meaning of the word ‘aeon’?—or more properly
aion
in Greek,” Dacian asked me. “It has to do with why I’ve brought you both here to this corner.”

“It’s a long span of time,” I said. “Longer than a millennium.”

Wolfgang caught sight of us and cut through the swirling throngs with an expression of relief. But after one look at me his eyes clouded with concern.

“I’m sorry I agreed to leave you,” he told me. “You were already exhausted before.” Then he snapped at Dacian, “She looks awful—what have you said to her?”

“Gee, thanks a lot,” I commented with a wry smile. But I knew if my stress was so visible at first glance, I needed to pull myself together fast.

“Come now,” Dacian reassured Wolfgang. “Ariel has merely survived the ordeal of an hour or so spent with a member of her own family. Not a pleasant chore perhaps, but a task she’s managed splendidly.”

“We gorged on food and philosophy,” I told Wolfgang. “Now we’ve moved on to the millennium—Dacian was about to explain what the Greek word
aion
means.”

Wolfgang glanced at Dacian in surprise. “But it’s what Ariel and I were speaking of only yesterday in Utah,” he said. “The coming of this new century will also be the start of a new ‘age’ or aeon—a major two-thousand-year cycle.”

“That’s the common understanding,” said Dacian. “A vast span, a recurring cycle, from
aevum
, a full circle or axis. But for the ancient Greeks the word
aion
meant something more: moisture, the cycle of life itself that begins and ends in water. They imagined a river of living waters surrounding land like a serpent swallowing its tail. Earth’s
aion
consisted of rivers, springs, wells, underground waters that erupted from the depths and radiated outward to create and feed all forms of life. The Egyptians believed we were born from the tears of the gods, and that the zodiac itself was a circling river whose axis was the small bear’s tail. Another reason why the bears are called ladles or dippers—which leads to what I want to show you, just near here.”