The Magic Circle (72 page)

“I think you’d better tell
us,
” I said to Zoe. “From the beginning—including Pandora’s connection.”

And she did. When Hieronymus Behn arrived in South Africa in the summer of 1900, he was almost forty years old, a Calvinist minister with one prospect—to find his half sister, bring her to her long-lost mother Clio, and thereby gain the inheritance he felt his stepmother owed him.

He found his beautiful blond sister a recent widow, age thirty-two, with her hands full. She had mineral concerns and estates to manage, a six-month-old child (Uncle Lafcadio) and another expected (Uncle Earnest). Hieronymus saw enormous potential for himself in the situation. He quickly and ruthlessly determined how to kill two birds with one small stone.

Claiming he was her cousin who’d been searching for her for years, Hieronymus convinced Hermione he’d fallen passionately in love with her. Orphaned at two, she had no way of knowing that the man who called himself her cousin was really her half brother. He literally swept her off her feet: they were married within weeks, and he assumed management of all her late husband’s properties.

But Hieronymus knew he would have to reveal their true relationship before taking Hermione back to Europe, or he wouldn’t be able to claim their estates from Clio. There was an additional problem: If Hermione revealed their marital status to her new-found mother, the promised inheritance would surely blow up in his face. Further, once Hermione had learned how she’d been deceived, she might try to dissolve the marriage due to consanguinity. But Hieronymus realized it would be difficult to do so if they’d already had a child of their own.

However, given the possibility that they might be incapable of producing a child, the only insurance Hieronymus could think of was to convince Hermione, as a bond of their love, to name
him
as legitimate father on Earnest’s birth certificate. It wasn’t until Earnest himself discovered, years later, through his own research, that he was only
one
year younger than Lafcadio—not two, as they’d always been told—that his suspicions became aroused, and he dug further.

A great deal was beginning to fall into place for me, too, given this unpleasant revelation. It made sense, for instance, that little Lafcadio was sent off, just as he was nearing school age, to a place like Salzburg where he knew no one at all. Sooner or later, if he’d remained in South Africa, he might have heard details from others about the situation of his father’s death, his mother and stepfather’s hasty marriage, and the peculiar timing of Earnest’s birth. It also made sense that when Hermione got pregnant with Zoe, Hieronymus would pack up and move the entire family to Vienna where no one knew anything of their background—and where, according to Laf’s story, his mother became a prisoner in her own house.

This scenario made it clear why Laf was so upset about my meeting Zoe—not to mention his obvious distaste for the woman from the beginning. After all, she represented in her own person the single piece of evidence of his mother’s carnal relationship with her own brother. But for every one thing that got cleared up, others seemed to get murkier.

“Where does Pandora fit into all this?” I asked Zoe.

“There was one person,” she said, “who’d encountered Hieronymus and Hermione early on, as brother and sister, and then again years later, as husband and wife. It was the child Clio had adopted in Switzerland to replace her lost daughter, and had taken under her wing. When Hieronymus Behn finally brought Hermione to Switzerland for the promised reunion with her mother, Clio signed the papers that released a large part of her trust to her daughter and stepson, little realizing the legal and fleshly bonds these two had already entered into. When they left, it was discovered that—like his father before him—Hieronymus had appropriated some of those ancient scrolls he felt should have been his by God’s destiny. Scrolls that by now belonged to Clio’s adopted daughter. Though it took many years for her to run them to earth, she found them at last: that child, of course, was Pandora.”

The rest of the story was easy enough to flesh out based on what I already knew from Laf, Dacian, and others: how Pandora later infiltrated the Behn household in Vienna with the aid of Hilter’s high school chum Gustl and befriended the imprisoned Hermione as her adopted sister; how Hieronymus failed to recognize the child he’d met so briefly, now a beautiful woman; how Pandora blackmailed Hieronymus and managed to bring young Lafcadio home for Hermione’s deathbed scene. But there was something else still unexplained. By Dacian’s account, Hieronymus forced Pandora to marry him, then threw her into the streets when she stole something he valued. But hadn’t Zoe then run off, too, with Pandora and the Gypsies? And if Laf’s story held water, both girls had been cozy, from square one, with Adolf Hitler.

“Where does Hitler connect to all this?” I asked Zoe. “From everything you’ve told us, it’s plain these were Clio’s manuscripts Pandora wound up with. But even if your pal Lucky was after them, why would he go on outings with all of you—like that merry-go-round ride in the Prater Laf told me about—or take you to the Hofburg to look at the sword and spear? Why would he be so chummy with Pandora and Dacian, if he knew they were Rom?”

“When Lucky ran into Pandora and Dacian the first time in Salzburg,” Zoe said, “he learned they were hunting for Hieronymus Behn—the very man who, twelve years earlier, had made an enormous splash with his revelations about the possible history and provenance of the platter of John the Baptist. Lucky himself, as a boy of only eleven, had gone with his grammar-school class to view that celebrated object. Like the other hallows, it was something he dreamed of possessing himself, ever afterward. By the time he lived in Vienna, he’d learned a good deal about the background of the Behn family. Though it’s never been proven, I’m quite certain that my father became one of Lucky’s earliest and strongest supporters. And as you say, Lucky surely knew a good deal about Pandora’s background. Dacian had to flee to the south of France, where, thanks to my own unusual brand of connections, I was able to assist him throughout the war. And while Lucky always kept a low profile about it, he would let no one touch Pandora, all through the war in Vienna—though of course he knew that she and Dacian were Rom—for he believed she alone held the key to a power that he himself sought.”

“You say Rom—but what exactly does it mean?” Wolfgang interrupted in a strange tone. He’d been unusually quiet in this last part of her story.

“Gypsies,” Zoe told him. To me, she explained, “The child that Clio adopted, Pandora, was actually the young niece of Aszi Atzingansi, a man of distinguished Romani blood who’d helped her recover many ancient texts, including the oracles of Cumae. Though there is no hard evidence, Pandora always believed that Aszi was also Clio’s great love. As I told Wolfgang last year when he first sought me out at a
Heuriger
in Vienna, it’s the oldest souls who preserve and keep alive the ancient wisdom. Pandora was such an old soul, as are most of the Romani people. Dacian very much wanted me to meet you, for he believes you are another—”

“Just a moment,” Wolfgang cut in again, a bit more firmly. “You don’t mean to tell me that Pandora and Dacian Bassarides—Augustus Behn’s parents, Ariel’s grandparents—were actually Gypsies?”

Zoe regarded him with a strange little smile, and lifted one brow.

But wasn’t it Wolfgang who’d introduced me to Dacian in the first place? Then I recalled with a certain uneasiness that Dacian had
not
mentioned any Gypsy ancestry in Wolfgang’s presence, and indeed had cautioned me not to mention it either. In retrospect, considering how candid Dacian had been on other topics—the sword and spear, and even where we’d hidden Pandora’s manuscripts—the fact that he’d made a point of sending Wolfgang away during the part of our chat dealing with the family suddenly seemed chillingly significant. And more so when Zoe added enigmatically, “Your mother would be proud of such a question.”

Wolfgang was clearly as exhausted as I, what with the weeks we’d spent running all over Europe and Soviet Russia, not to mention our combined data overload. He slipped off to sleep just after dinner on the first leg of our nearly twenty-four-hour return trip to Idaho.

Though I had a multitude of topics to discuss, I also knew I needed time on my own to think things through and figure out where I stood. So I ordered strong black coffee with refills from the steward, and tried to focus my mind on reviewing everything I’d learned.

One month ago, Zoe’s theory would have sounded completely insane: that Lucky, his niece, his dog, his friends, and their children had all been used—just as he himself had previously “used” millions of Gypsies, Jews, and others—in some kind of mass pagan sacrifice, a shamanistic “working,” to usher in the New Age. But Hitler had so many around him who believed, as he himself did, in utter nonsense. The magical Atlantis-like home of the Aryans at the North Pole; the final destruction of the world by Fire and Ice; the power of sacred hallows and “purified” blood to work terrestrial miracles. Not to forget, as Wolfgang had pointed out, his belief in a weapon of mass destruction that was known and repeatedly rediscovered since ancient times.

For those who wanted to turn back the clock to an earlier golden age that they believed had once existed in pagan times—a danger Dacian Bassarides had warned against—human sacrifice could be very much a part of the system. So, revolting as such an idea might be, viewed within the context of what we knew of the Nazi belief system it didn’t actually seem all that far-fetched.

But despite this possibly useful process of sorting and culling, I ran into a brick wall every time I returned to the frustrating topic of my family’s true relations with Adolf Hitler and his ilk. I had no idea where to begin. I thought of that jingle of William Blake’s:

I give you the end of a golden string,

Only wind it into a ball:

It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate,

Built in Jerusalem’s wall.

If I could find the beginning of my own golden string—where and how the story had begun for
me
—that would certainly be a start.

I did know, in fact, where I had first fallen into this labyrinth: it was the night I’d returned from Sam’s funeral in a blizzard, when I’d nearly drowned in snow. Then I’d picked up the ringing phone to learn from my father, Augustus, that my “inheritance” might include something of great value I hadn’t expected: Pandora’s manuscripts.

But in hindsight, it suddenly occurred to me that maybe from that very first phone call, instead of pursuing the truth I constantly claimed I wanted, I might have been shutting my eyes whenever it was staring me right in the face. Hadn’t Dacian Bassarides said it was essential to ask the right questions? That the
process
could often be more important than the product? There was something connecting all these seemingly unrelated things, and though it might seem like trying to find a missing chunk in a scrambled pile of jigsaw pieces, I had to figure it out.

And that was when I saw it.

All this time I’d been sorting and culling and following bits of string when I
should
have been looking at what Sam called the “tantra” of it all—that is, the thing that held the whole tapestry together, as in Eastern cultures tantra tied Fate to life and death. Sam said it even existed in the animal kingdom: that a female spider wouldn’t eat the male if he left the web by the same path he’d entered by, showing that he recognized the pattern. Well, I’d finally recognized the pattern
I’d
been missing. I felt a cold little ball forming at the pit of my stomach.

Though everyone in my family had perhaps told me conflicting stories, there was one person whose stories
themselves
were riddled with twists and turns and internal contradictions. And though the history or genealogy of each person might’ve turned out differently from what I was first led to believe—maybe even from what each believed about himself—there was one person I now realized I knew almost nothing consistent about. It was certainly true, though, that everyone had warned me against him from the very start—including, as I now realized in an awful flash, his own sister!

It was the man sitting beside me here in the plane, his dark, shaggy head leaning against my shoulder so I could barely make out his chiseled profile. It was my colleague, cousin, and erstwhile lover, Wolfgang K. Hauser of Krems, Österreich. And although only weeks ago I’d believed Wolfgang to be my own destiny here on planet earth, in the hard, cold light of reality I was forced to recognize that his every lie had only led to another lie, from the moment he’d mysteriously arrived in Idaho while I was away in San Francisco at Sam’s funeral.

Speaking of that funeral, hadn’t Sam himself told me—in contradiction of Wolfgang’s claims about the employer of Olivier and Theron Vane—that it had all been arranged with blessings bestowed by the highest echelons of the U.S. government? And hadn’t Zoe also pointed out that Wolfgang had sought
her
out in Vienna to pump her for information, not the other way around?

But the bitterest pill was the thought that Wolfgang had appropriated Pandora’s manuscripts from beneath my very nose, deploying the same suave deftness he’d used to appropriate my body and my trust.

There were already enough hints of Aryan preoccupation in his Valhalla-like castle and his upbringing by a mother who herself had been raised by a Nazi. And what about Wolfgang’s direct question to Zoe: “You don’t mean to tell me that Ariel’s grandparents were actually Gypsies?” What else could that mean?

Having already swallowed enough lies to choke a warthog, I wondered when I was going to stop lying to
myself
.

Now that I feared, in the deep recesses of my mind, that Wolfgang Hauser himself was the missing link that tied together this mingled, mangled, muddled web of myth and intrigue, I only prayed I could retrace my own steps carefully enough to extricate both Sam and myself from it alive.