The Magic Circle (32 page)

When we all left the room to head off for dinner, the balcony outside was filled with eavesdropping hotel guests who applauded wildly, flooded Laf with a lengthy flurry of I-saw-you-when’s, and asked for his autograph on hastily proffered restaurant menus, hotel envelopes, and even lift tickets.

“Gavroche,” said Laf when at last the hurrahs died away and the guests had drifted off, “I am thinking I shall perhaps be dining with myself in my suite tonight, and leaving you young people to yourselves. I am not as young as I once was, and my body did not wholly agree with this trip from Vienna. Let us meet at the breakfast. I can then tell some more of the story.”

“Okay, Uncle Laf,” I said, wondering just how much more of “the story” I could take. “But not too early—let’s make it for brunch again. There’s something I need to work on in the morning.” Like a five
A.M
. whisk through a sheep pasture, I thought.

Bambi declined to join Olivier and me, and departed with Laf and Volga for their suites. As I was about to turn in to the dining room, Olivier surprised me by bowing out of dinner too.

“I admit it,” he told me. “
My
body didn’t ‘wholly agree’ with my trip up the mountain today. I ache everywhere. I thought I might hit the hot pool before it closes, then just order some soup in my room and crash for the night.”

Checking my watch, I saw it was already almost ten, so I decided to do likewise.

By eleven, Jason and I had shared some seafood pasta and garlic bread, listened to the weather report that said sunrise tomorrow would be at six-thirty, and were tucked into bed where I was drowsily reading, sipping the last of my room-service wine and about to turn out the light.

Suddenly Jason’s head popped up from where he’d been curled on the pillow. Ears erect, he stared at the door to the corridor as if waiting for someone to enter. He looked at me for a moment, but I’d heard nothing outside. Without a sound, he crept across the bed, dropped to the floor, padded to the door, and turned back to look over his shoulder at me again. There was definitely someone out there.

I took a deep breath. Then I threw back the covers and stood up, grabbed the robe that was lying on a nearby chair, pulled it on, and crossed to the door myself. Jason, standing there on the alert, was never mistaken about a visitor who was about to call. On the other hand, if someone was about to call—why didn’t he?

I put my eye to the peephole and saw a familiar if unexpected face. I grabbed the knob and yanked open the door.

There, in the soft yellow light of the corridor, stood beautiful blond Bambi, her pale eyes wide and guileless, her shimmering golden hair framing her face. She was dressed for
avant le boudoir
, in a long black velvet robe cut along the stark lines of a man’s smoking jacket, displaying cascades of antique lace and ribbons at throat and wrist. But I noticed she had one hand held behind her back.

Suddenly, in a panic, an insane but very real-seeming notion flashed into my head: She was hiding a gun! I was poised to leap back and slam the door in her face. At that instant she brought forth the other hand. In it she held a bottle of Rémy Martin and two small brandy snifters.

She smiled. “Will you join me in a cognac?” she said. “It’s a kind of peace offering, though not only for myself.”

“I have to get up quite early—” I began.

“So do I,” Bambi said quickly. “But what I have to tell you, I should prefer not to say while standing out here in the corridor. May I come in?”

I stepped back reluctantly and let her pass.

Despite this woman’s major beauty and her demonstrated artistry, there was still something bothering me—and not only her dippy demeanor. In fact, given those other qualities, it had occurred to me that her vagueness might well camouflage vulnerability, much as with Jersey and her drinking.

I went over to the table where Bambi was pouring, but stayed on my feet. I lifted my snifter, and she and I clinked glasses and sipped.

“What couldn’t you tell me, outside in the corridor?” I asked.

“Please sit down,” Bambi said in a low voice.

Her tone was so soothing, it wasn’t until I was halfway to the chair that I realized the effect had actually been that of a rein being expertly snapped in by an extremely practiced hand. I decided to listen up to Ms. Bambi a bit more attentively.

“I don’t want you to dislike me,” Bambi assured me. “I hope we’ll be friends.”

In the dim light of my room, those clear eyes swimming like Goldwasser with little gold flecks were half shadowed by her lashes. I couldn’t for the life of me make out what she was actually thinking, but I suddenly felt it was very, very important that I find out—and that honesty was the best policy to adopt.

“It isn’t that I dislike you, but I don’t really understand someone like you,” I admitted, “and that makes me uncomfortable around you. You appear one way, but speak in another, and behave in a third. I feel you’re not at all what you seem.”

“Perhaps you aren’t either,” said Bambi, reaching down to touch Jason on the head with those long, slender fingers. He didn’t purr, but he didn’t dart away either.

“We weren’t discussing me,” I said. “But as I’m sure you gathered from our conversation this morning, I grew up in a family that’s never been very close. If I seem mysterious when I’m around them, maybe I just want to distance myself from their controversies. That’s why I’ve chosen to go my own way—to take a different path from the others.”

“Do you believe so?” she asked cryptically. Then she added, “But you see, we actually
were
discussing you. And your opinion of me is important to me. When I said I didn’t want you to dislike me, I did not mean I hoped we would be like real sisters, as your uncle expressed. I only wish to explain that under the present circumstance, I feel it would be—how shall I say?—quite difficult if we could not, at the least, be friends.”

“Look here,” I told her, having another swallow of brandy: it was excellent. “There’s really no cause for the two of us to worry about whether we’re going to be pals or not. After all, this is the first time in many years I’ve been around Uncle Laf, so it’s unlikely that after this weekend you and I will even see each other again.”

“In that, you are mistaken,” she said with a smile. “But before I explain, I should like you to say what it is about me that has made you feel ‘uncomfortable.’ If you wouldn’t mind to do so.”

I looked into those clear, open eyes again, but they still seemed veiled to me. This chick was some item, but I decided that if that was what she wanted, she was going to get precisely what she asked for—even if it was a slap in the face.

“Okay, maybe this will seem too personal,” I told her, “but you’re the one who arrived in the middle of the night with the brandy, asking to chat. My uncle Laf’s life is hardly a sealed book, so you must be aware he’s been with plenty of women, each one more beautiful than the last, and many of them, like my grandmother Pandora, possessing great talent as well. But you’re different from the others: I believe you’re truly gifted. Really, your playing tonight was extraordinary, world class—as I think, given my upbringing, I am in a position to judge. It’s not clear to me why someone with such skill would be willing to be just an arm decoration, a trinket, even of someone as talented and famous and charming as my uncle Laf. My grandmother wouldn’t have done it, and I frankly can’t imagine why you have. I guess that’s what makes me uncomfortable about you: I feel there’s another scenario behind the story that hasn’t been revealed.”

“I see. Well, perhaps that’s true,” said Bambi, looking down at her hands. When she looked up at me, she wasn’t smiling. “Your uncle Lafcadio is very important to me, Fräulein Behn: he and I understand one another completely,” she told me. “But that is another situation altogether. That is not why I have come here alone tonight to ask for your friendship.”

I waited. Those gold-flecked eyes were trained on me. The news, when it came, dropped me like a thunderbolt.

“Fräulein Behn,” Bambi said, “I’m afraid for my brother’s interest in you. If you don’t do something soon, I fear this involvement of his will endanger us all.”

I sat there completely numb. This was the very last thing I could have imagined—but I suddenly grasped with a horrible certainty why everything about Bambi had seemed so familiar to me.

“Your brother?” I said weakly, though it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out who that might be.

“Permit me to introduce myself properly, Fräulein Behn,” she said. “My name is Bettina Braunhilde von Hauser—and Wolfgang is my only brother.”

Heilige Scheiss
, I couldn’t help but think when confronted with this turn of events. So Bambi was just Uncle Laf’s nickname for Bettina, as Gavroche was for me. In fact, I had heard of a Bettina von Hauser, a young cellist who was starting to make a stir on the world concert circuit, though it would never have occurred to me that Bambi was Bettina, or to link either of them with my own rather dangerous passion, Wolfgang Hauser.

This far-from-welcome surprise made me suspect everybody even more than before—especially my uncle Laf, whose behavior in hindsight seemed suspicious. If Laf was so cozy with Bambi he could say anything in front of her, as he told me, then why did he wait until she was absent to discuss Hitler and the runes in the hot pool? When I mentioned Wolfgang, why did Laf actually
warn
me against him, while never even hinting that those two were related? And if Laf thought Aunt Zoe the
Schutzstaffel
-supporter was so chummy with Bambi’s brother, why would he bring Bambi herself halfway around the globe to visit me?

Now here was Bambi tiptoeing around the lodge in the dead of night in her lavish lingerie, popping in with a bottle of brandy to reveal to me—behind Laf’s back—a few things he might not have known himself, and a lot he hadn’t bothered to mention. Since Bambi pointedly said she and Laf “understood one another completely,” I had to assume
I
was the only one in this cross-family matrix who didn’t have a clue what was going on. But I was damned well going to find out.

Luckily, I possessed a valuable secret weapon: my hollow leg. That is to say, despite my inferior age, weight, and experience, I could drink any number of cowpunchers under the bar, tossing down two-shot tequila bangers all night, and still stand up, walk out the swinging doors, and recall the next morning everything that was said the night before. So a half-bottle of Rémy Martin posed no challenge to me. I was hoping this talent would prove handy in my interrogation of Bambi. I poured us another round of drinks.

By three
A.M
. the brandy was gone, and so was Bambi. She’d passed out in midsentence, sitting bolt upright in her chair, but I got her on her feet again and walked her back to the maze of suites at the far side of the lodge. I couldn’t leave her in my room and risk having her wake up in a few hours to find me gone. But in three hours of sisterly if drunken cross-examination, I’d learned more than expected, including some real eye-openers.

Wolfgang Hauser wasn’t Austrian; he and his sister were Germans born in Nürnberg, raised there and in Switzerland, and later educated in Vienna, he in science and she in music. Their family, though not wealthy, was one of the oldest in Europe. They’d had the
von
in their name for hundreds of years, though Wolfgang had dropped his, Bambi explained, because he felt it was inappropriate to use in his business dealings. Their lives, as described by her, seemed idyllic compared with my own—until they got involved with the family Behn.

Bambi, it turned out, had been my uncle Laf’s protégé for more than ten years, from the age of fifteen. When everyone realized how gifted she was, and when he’d offered to hire the best coaches and structure her education and training himself, Bambi’s family had let her go live at Laf’s house in Vienna. Wolfgang had often visited his sister there, so Laf’s assertion that he hardly knew him couldn’t be true.

But something happened only seven years ago that changed even this limited familial relationship. Wolfgang had finished his degrees some years earlier, and his first job fresh out of school, as a nuclear industry consultant, took him away more and more often from Vienna. Then one day seven years ago, on returning from a trip, Wolfgang dropped by to visit his sister at Uncle Laf’s apartment overlooking the Hofburg. Wolfgang told Laf and Bambi he was leaving his old job for a new one he’d accepted with the International Atomic Energy Agency. He wanted to take the two of them to lunch at a nearby restaurant to celebrate.

“After lunch,” said Bambi, “Wolf asked that we will go with him to the Hofburg. He took us to the
Wunderkammer
to see the jewels, and then we visited the famous collections from ancient Ephesus that are now there, and to the
Schatzkammer
to look at the
Reichswaffen.
”

“To the treasury, to look at the royal armaments,” I said.

I hadn’t forgotten the story Laf told me in the hot pool only that morning about his visit, more than seventy-five years ago, to these same chambers of the Hofburg—in the company of Adolf Hitler.

“
Ja,
” said Bambi. “My brother took us to see a sword and a spear, and he asked your uncle, ‘Did you and Pandora know all about the sacred hallows?’ But Lafcadio said nothing, so Wolf said that he’d for a long time been interested in these objects himself. The story was well known in Nürnberg: Adolf Hitler had taken many of them out of the Imperial treasury in Vienna—for example, the First Reich insignia, the Imperial Crown, the Orb and Scepter, the Imperial Sword, and so on—and he carried them off to the Nürnberger Castle. It was the first thing Hitler did just after he made the—how one says?—the
Anschluss.
”

“Germany’s ‘annexation’ of Austria in 1938,” I said.

Was it only coincidence that exactly one year ago—in March of 1988, on the fiftieth anniversary of this same coup—my aunt Zoe arrived in Vienna with her fellow World War II “peacekeepers,” and there made the acquaintance of Herr Professor Dr. Wolfgang K. Hauser? I thought not, especially when Bambi told me Laf had violently turned off the tap on Wolfgang and refused to see him again or let him in the house after Wolfgang insisted that if, as a favorite of Hitler, Pandora had kept her costly Hofburg apartment throughout the war, and kept performing at the Vienna Opera, it might be because of something important that Pandora herself knew about the hallows. Something connecting them with Nürnberg, even with Hitler himself.