The Magic Circle (64 page)

Okay, I was surprised by this revelation about Father Virgilio, who seemed a charming if somewhat bumbling medievalist scholar. Before pursuing that, though, I tried to harness my attention long enough to hear the rest of my question answered.

“Pastor Dart’s role is even more complex,” Wolfgang went on. “It requires a bit more background. On first arriving in Idaho, I was worried to learn that your colleague Olivier Maxfield was also your landlord, and so in a convenient position to tap your phone and spy on you virtually twenty-four hours a day. How could I be sure he wasn’t someone’s agent? For that reason, as soon as you’d returned from the funeral, I had Pastor Dart send Maxfield to intercept you at the post office, while I myself followed by car. It was apparent from your behavior there that Maxfield, arriving before you, had done something to arouse your suspicion. Once you had picked up your package, I saw you drive away from Maxfield and race off from town. So I followed you myself to Jackson Hole.

“Though I knew that a rune manuscript had been sent to you by your mother, your attitude of fear and suspicion from the moment we met up on the mountain made it clear you believed the document in your possession was your inheritance from your cousin instead. I had the opportunity to verify that these were your mother’s runes later that night when you slept. I also knew that this must be the only document you’d received so far, which meant you didn’t have your cousin’s inheritance yet, but were still expecting it. This was very dangerous if what I strongly believed was true—that Maxfield was trying to get hold of the documents, too.

“Though our Russian trip was planned, Pastor Dart and I decided to accelerate the schedule of our departure to take you from Maxfield’s position of constant surveillance. Dart himself would remain behind to intercept the second parcel when it arrived, to be certain it didn’t fall into the wrong hands. But after all these careful arrangements, you were late for our connecting flight to Salt Lake. I was in shock when you finally arrived. From the look of your bag—three times as heavy as it was the day before—and also from the fact you said you’d ‘run an errand’ between office and airport, I was certain you had again been to the post office, and this time you had collected the real thing!

“So what must I do,” he went on, “but arrange by phone from Salt Lake airport, while you were off at the women’s room, that Pastor Dart purchase a ticket for himself at once, on the very next airline headed to Vienna? I gave directions to where we could meet below my house at Krems, the one place I thought was safe from prying ears, the one time you and I might be completely alone. All the while, I prayed I could find a way to get you to leave the manuscripts in Austria, rather than run the risk of taking them into Russia, where they’d surely be confiscated. I contacted Dacian Bassarides, and asked him to come from France and meet us at the restaurant in Vienna. I hinted you’d received your inheritance and needed help understanding what to do with it. At the restaurant, I hadn’t expected him to send me away so he could be alone with you. But at least Virgilio watched so he didn’t take you off somewhere and fail to meet me on the corner he’d designated.…”

Wolfgang paused for the first time, and shook his head. “Ariel, if you could know how insane I’ve been these past two weeks, merely trying to protect you from yourself.”

From
myself?
I nearly screamed.

With thousands of gongs clanging in my brain, I wrestled myself back to reason. Let’s see if I’d got it right: this guy had just confessed that ever since meeting me he’d been embroidering on the truth until it looked like a Gobelin tapestry; that he’d had me watched all afternoon by a priest who was a possible arms dealer with mafia connections; and that he’d gotten my own grandfather to convince me to abandon my inheritance in a public library. Had I left anything out?

Well, actually, yes: there was one small thing.

“Wolfgang, why do you and Pastor Dart and everyone else in the world
want
these manuscripts?” I asked. “I know they’re valuable—but what’s so important about them that the Pod had to fly halfway around the world at the drop of a hat just to meet you for a few minutes at night in that vineyard? What did you two need to speak about that you felt you could only discuss right then and there?”

Wolfgang looked at me as if the answer were ridiculously obvious. Then for the second time, he motioned to the waiter for our check.

“With respect to the contents, I only know a portion—not all—and even that will take some explaining,” he said. “But as for Pastor Dart, I had to tell him where the manuscripts were just as soon as I myself knew where you had finally hidden them—and certainly before you and I had to leave for Russia. How else would Dart have been able to retrieve them from the Austrian National Library before someone else did?”

The word that instantly leapt to mind was Olivier’s
oy
. Virgilio, it seems, had followed us right from the Café Central, and as Wolfgang handed those slips out the door of our room in the Austrian National Library, he’d copied down every single book title. Actually, I couldn’t think of a word for that.

As we walked back along the narrow street, close enough to the river to smell the damp night air, I felt like weeping.

Wolfgang had taken my hand as if nothing were wrong, and now he squeezed it. “Let’s walk down by the river for a bit, shall we?” he suggested.

At the end of the street I saw the glittering lights of the Île de la Cité that seemed to be underwater. What the hey? I thought in silent desperation. I could always throw myself into the drink—or drag him in too, if he didn’t start coming up with some decent answers soon. This was hardly my idea of a weekend in Paris with Wolfgang. Right now I wanted to shoot him. I’d destroyed all Sam had risked his life for, by forgetting Laf’s injunction to “resist the
men
, until you learn exactly in what kind of situation you are involved.”

Well, I sure knew what kind of situation I was involved in now, though I hadn’t a clue what in God’s name to do about it. I felt like screaming my brains out. I still knew less than
nothing
about these bloody manuscripts! Just thinking of all they’d cost ripped me inside out. But the night was far from over, and I vowed to get some straight answers before it was up.

We went along the quai to where we could see, across the water, the illuminated facade of Notre Dame towering above its famous wall of ancient ivy that dripped down to the rippling river.

“Ariel,” said Wolfgang, turning my face up to his in the glittering night light. “If I lie to you, you say it makes you unhappy. But when I tell you the truth, you’re unhappy, too. I love you so much—what can I say or do that will make you happy?”

“Wolfgang, you’ve just said that you and some mafioso and my boss Pastor Dart have manipulated me and betrayed me, that you’ve betrayed everything Sam ever stood for—what indeed he may have lost his life for—and you expect that to make me
happy
?” I said. “It would make me happy if you’d just tell me the truth—up front for a change—rather than forcing me to pry it out of you, or keeping me in the dark ‘for my own good.’ I want you to tell me right now exactly what you know about Pandora’s manuscripts—what they have to do with Russia and Central Asia and nuclear matters, as clearly they do, and what role you and those others play in all of the above.”

“It seems you understand nothing I’ve just said,” Wolfgang said in frustration. “First of all, I never said Virgilio was a mafioso but that he was from a family of arms dealers—there is a difference. I said your uncle might have heard of mafia connections: those like Virgilio often must maintain contacts with such people for their own security. In my field too, if we treat every arms dealer as an enemy, then all activity goes beneath the table and we lose any measure of control over smuggling that we might have had to begin with—we close all doors.

“But when you speak of betrayal,” he added, “there’s something you clearly don’t know. There’s a group I’m given to understand had investigated Samuel Behn for many years, since his father Earnest’s death. They’d even hired your cousin at times to work for them in order to win his trust. But in the end I believe it was they who killed him.

“These people claimed to work for the United States government, but in fact were multinational, controlled by a man with a lengthy dossier—a man named Theron Vane. When I was absent, that week before I came to Sun Valley to find you, I learned several things about this man. The first: that he was in San Francisco the week your cousin Sam died. They were working on an assignment together. The second: that Vane went underground immediately after Sam’s death and has not resurfaced. The third—and you
must
believe me about this part, Ariel—is that Olivier Maxfield is, and has been ever since the day you met him, a henchman of Theron Vane. Maxfield came to Idaho, and secured his job, and also his acquaintance and friendship with you, for one reason and one reason only: because
you
were the only way they could think of to slip inside the defenses of your cousin Sam.”

I stood there absolutely stunned. I knew from Sam that he
had
worked with Theron Vane for over ten years. The man must have hired him out of college, just as the Pod had done with me. I also knew Theron Vane was there when Sam had “died” because, according to Sam, the man was killed in his place! And in that cryptic message Olivier had left with Laf, he too admitted he worked for Theron Vane.

In hindsight, it did seem odd for Olivier’s credentials to have matched mine so perfectly that from day one, five years ago, we’d been assigned codirection of the same project. Not to mention how he’d lured me to my tenancy in his basement apartment by providing cheap rent, designer meals, the willingness to cat-sit in a pinch—and by conjuring up that weird dream about me as the Virgin Mary beating the Mormon prophet Moroni at a game of pinball!

Indeed, all Wolfgang had said, if taken from a slightly different perspective, might present as accurate a picture. Theron Vane might have deceived Sam about who he was really working for. Somebody might have been out to get Theron Vane, not Sam. And Wolfgang and the Pod could simply have been trying to provide the documents more protection than Sam and I, in our bumbling attempts, had been able to do on our own.

I was so bloody confused: I had a million questions that were still unanswered. But Wolfgang took me into his arms there beside the river and he tenderly kissed my hair. Then he held me away and regarded me with a serious expression.

“I will tell you the answer to everything you’ve asked—that is, if I know the answers,” he said. “But it’s after two in the morning, and though we don’t meet Zoe until eleven tomorrow, I must confess I’d like to spend at least some of tonight making up for all the unhappiness it seems I’ve caused you.” He smiled wryly and added, “Not to say what it’s cost
me
, to spend all those nights alone in that Russian barracks!”

We headed along the quai where the fuzzy new leaves draped on the chestnuts, illuminated by little lights from below, were like gauzy shrouds of dangling caterpillars. The air was laden with the moisture of spring. I felt as if I were drowning and I knew I had to snap out of it.

“Why don’t you start with Russia?” I suggested.

“First of all,” Wolfgang began, taking my hand once more, “perhaps you found it odd, as I did, that during our entire stay in the Soviet Union—and despite our extensive discussion on the topic of security and cleanup of nuclear waste—not a single mention was made of the ‘accident’ at Kyshtym?”

In the 1957 disaster at Kyshtym, a nuclear waste dump had gone critical, like a live reactor minus control rods, and spewed waste over an estimated four hundred square miles—roughly the size of Manhattan, Jersey City, Brooklyn, Yonkers, the Bronx, and Queens—an area possessing a population of around 150,000.

The Soviets had successfully covered up this “mistake” for nearly twenty years, despite the fact that they’d had to clear population from the region, divert a river around it, and shut down all roads. It wasn’t until an expatriate Soviet scientist in the 1970s had blown the whistle that it all came out. But with today’s new atmosphere of cooperative atomic
glasnost
, one did have to wonder why, when they’d made a clean breast of everything else, Kyshtym was never broached throughout our week of intensive dialogue. It suddenly occurred to me that Wolfgang had an important point.

“You mean, you believe that the Kyshtym ‘accident’ was really no accident?” I asked.

Wolfgang stopped and smiled down at me in the almost surrealistic night light of the unfolding Parisian spring.

“Excellent,” he said, nodding his head. “But even those who finally did expose the mishap may never have guessed the awful truth. Kyshtym is located in the Urals, not far from Yekaterinburg and Chelyabinsk, two sites that are still today actively engaged in design and assembly of nuclear warheads—and where you and I, of course, for security reasons were not invited to visit. But what if Kyshtym had not actually been a waste dump for these two sites? What if it didn’t go critical by accident, as everyone believes? What if, instead, the incident was the result of a controlled experiment that turned out very differently than planned?”

“You can’t possibly imagine that even in the days of darkest repression, the Soviets would ever have performed a nuclear test in a populated area?” I said. “They’d have had to be completely insane!”

“I’m not referring to a nuclear weapons test,” said Wolfgang cryptically, gazing out across the river. He stretched one arm toward the flowing black waters of the Seine.

“More than a hundred years ago,” he said, “at this very spot in the river, young Nikola Tesla used to go swimming. He’d come to Paris from Croatia in 1882 to work for Continental Edison, then continued on to New York to work for Edison himself, with whom he soon quarrelled bitterly.

“As I’m sure you know,” Wolfgang added as we walked on, “Tesla held original patents on many inventions for which others later took all the credit and profit. He was first to conceive, design, and often even to construct inventions like the wireless radio, bladeless turbine, telephone amplifier, transatlantic cable, remote control, solar energy techniques, to name only a few. Some say, too, that he invented ‘anti-gravity’ devices that had the superconductive properties known today—as well as a most controversial ‘death ray’ that could shoot planes from the skies using only sound. And in his famous secret experiments at Colorado Springs in 1899, it’s said he was able to change even patterns of weather.”