The Magic Circle (19 page)

“I said an acquaintance, not a friend,” said Wolfgang Hauser, turning away with no expression. He looked at his hands. Then he stood up and looked down at me where I still sat in the rumpled bedclothes. “Have you finished?”

“Not quite,” I said, warming to my theme. “How does it happen that everyone seems to have known I was getting that bloody inheritance in the first place—even before my cousin was dead?”

“I’ll tell you the answer to everything, if you really want to know,” Wolfgang said quietly. “But first I must say I fear such knowledge can be very, very dangerous.”

“Knowledge is never dangerous,” I told him, feeling my anger uncoiling. “
Ignorance
is dangerous. Especially ignorance of things that affect your own life. I’m sick of everyone hiding things from me, claiming it’s all for my own good! I’m sick of always being kept in the dark!”

As I said it, I suddenly realized how much I meant it. It was, at the root of things, what was wrong with my whole life. It wasn’t just fear of the unknown, of a mysterious parcel—even if the contents of that parcel might get people killed. It was ignorance
itself
: it was never being able to ferret out the truth. It was this compulsion for secrecy, rife through my industry, dominating even my own family—the idea that nothing could ever be done openly, that everything required conspiracy and collusion.

Thanks to Sam, I’d become a real master of this game. Thanks to Sam, I trusted no one on earth. Nor could anyone trust me.

Wolfgang was watching me with a strange expression. My sudden, passionate outburst had surprised me too. Until now, I hadn’t realized how deeply these feelings had lain buried in me—or how quickly they could rise to the surface.

“If that’s what’s required to win your trust, then I’ll always tell you whatever you want to know, regardless of the danger to either of us,” he said, with what seemed great sincerity. “For it’s vital that you trust me completely even if you don’t like the answers. The person who sent me here is also the one who asked me to give you that manuscript of runes.” He motioned to my backpack sitting on the chair. “Although you have never met her, I suppose you will recognize the name. It’s your aunt: Zoe Behn.”

I wondered about my compulsion to say “holy shit” all the time whenever anything startling or upsetting happened to me. I mean, what exactly
is
holy shit? Do gods or saints eliminate waste like the rest of us? And furthermore, was I so creatively bankrupt that I could think of no more imaginative exclamation to use, even within the privacy of my own mind?

But in my business, as I said, it was a way of life to make up witty sayings about waste—probably because the chore of constant cleanup after an ever expanding and ever more wasteful population living on this ever shrinking planet was in itself a pretty mind-bogglingly depressing task to confront each and every day.

So it was not unusual to be greeted, as I was by Olivier that morning when I came into the office, with a rousing round of the Tom Lehrer song “Pollution,” an industry favorite for phrases such as “The breakfast garbage that you throw into the Bay, they drink at lunch in San Jose.” Olivier was clicking his fingers like castanets as he spun around in his chair and caught sight of me.

“Oh, my blessed prophet Moroni!” he cried. “You
do
look like something the argonaut dragged in, if you don’t mind my saying so. What happened to you? Did you crash into a lamppost in your zeal to run down pedestrians yesterday?”

“I ran into an avalanche, in my zeal to get away from my life,” I told him, knowing that the pickup of Wolfgang’s government car would engender tongue-wagging around the site anyway, when it was learned that we’d been off together skiing all day. “And I’m sorry about what happened at the post office, Olivier. I’m just a bit crazy these days.”

“An avalanche? On your way from the post office to work? My, things must be picking up around here in the adventure department,” Olivier said, standing up to help me solicitously to my seat. He settled my arm on the arm of the chair. “But you never came in to work all day, and when I got home last night at seven, your car was in the drive, and the whole house was dark and silent. Jason and I dined alone, wondering where you could possibly be.”

So Jason had wangled himself two dinners—one downstairs and another from Olivier’s gourmet cat stockpile. What a little conniver. I wished he were human enough that I could put him to work on some of
my
problems. But I knew Olivier was waiting for an answer. I closed my eyelids and pressed my fingertips against the bandage above my throbbing eye. Then I opened them and looked at Olivier.

“I hope you haven’t speculated with the budget for free-range chickens and farm-reared venison, too,” I commented.

Olivier stared at me, his mouth open. “You didn’t?” he gasped. “You didn’t actually—”

“Spend the night with Dr. Hauser? Yes, I did,” I said. “But nothing happened.”

After all, with the kind of attention Wolfgang Hauser attracted, and in a town this size, everyone would know about it soon enough.

“Nothing
happened?!
” Olivier nearly screamed. He slammed the door shut and flung himself into his chair. “Just what is that supposed to mean?”

“The man saved my life, Olivier,” I told him. “I was injured, as you see, and he brought me home. I was unconscious, so he stayed with me.” I held my aching head.

“I think I need a new religion,” said Olivier, standing up. “The prophet Moroni doesn’t seem too connected to the impulsive behavior of women. I’ve always admired the Jewish faith, for the power of that Hebrew word of theirs:
Oy!
What is the etymological derivation, do you think? Why does it
feel
so good, just to run around, saying:
oy?
” Olivier started pacing around saying “
oy-oy-oy.
”

I thought it was time to intervene. “Are we going to Sun Valley this weekend?” I asked him.

“Why else am I working late every night?” he asked me back.

“If Wolfgang Hauser has returned from his trip by then, he’s coming with us,” I told him. “After all, I start work on his project on Monday—and he did save my life.”

“
Oy,
” said Olivier, looking at the ceiling. “My prophet, you’ve really screwed up.”

I hoped Olivier would come up with the meaning of that word
oy
, and soon. Because it was starting to sound like a pretty good description of my life just now.

Earlier that morning, since I still couldn’t move my arm without tearing stitches, Wolfgang had driven me to work. I’d asked him to stop en route at the post office and keep the engine running while I went inside for a minute. I signed a postal form so George, the clerk, could hold my mail for a few days until my arm healed. I asked him to phone me at work if any large parcels arrived—not to have the route driver leave claim slips in my mailbox. Then if there was something important, I told him, I could come by the post office on my way home from work and the postal folks could load it into my car.

“I hope you weren’t too shocked to learn about your aunt Zoe,” Wolfgang had said at home that morning as I’d wolfed down the sourcream-and-caviar omelette he’d thrown together from the bizarre fixings in my fridge. “Your aunt would very much like to know you, and have you know her. She’s a fascinating woman of great charm—though she understands why the rest of your family thinks of her as the black sheep.”

And well she might, I thought. Most details of Zoe’s life were widely known from the did-all-schmooze-all books on herself she’d already published. For instance, her legendary vocation as one of the most famous dancers in Europe, along with her pals Isadora Duncan, Josephine Baker, and the Nijinskys. Or her legendary
avocation
as one of the most famous
demimondaines
in Europe, along with her role models Lola Montez, Coco Chanel, and the fictional
Dame aux Caméllias
. And so on, and so on.

But until this morning’s breakfast with Wolfgang, I hadn’t heard some other details, such as the fact that during World War II my infamous aunt Zoe had been a member of the French Resistance, not to mention also acting as an informant for the OSS—the Office of Strategic Services, America’s first official international spy group.

I wondered precisely how much of this could be true. Though such endeavors were in keeping with
our
part of the family tree, I found it incongruous that a group like the OSS—which broke codes, encrypted messages, and operated in an environment of presumed secrecy—would have any traffic whatever with a gushy, gossipy, world-class blabbermouth like my aunt Zoe. But on closer consideration, a reputation like hers might prove the best cover—in the long run, clearly a superior one to that of her philosophical predecessor and fellow dancer Mata Hari.

Indeed, if current reports of Zoe were correct, now at eighty-three she was alive and kicking in Paris, swilling down champagne and living as bawdy and scandalous a life as ever. I was curious about how she’d gotten hooked up with someone like Wolfgang Hauser, a high official of the IAEA in Vienna.

Wolfgang explained that last March, a year ago, at a fiftieth-anniversary reunion of international World War II “peacekeepers” in Vienna, he was recruited by Zoe when the two became chummy during a welcoming gathering at a local
Heuriger:
one of those typically Austrian garden pubs where first-picked grapes just culled and pressed are drunk. According to Wolfgang, after a few gallons of new wine Zoe trusted him enough to speak of the rune manuscript. Then she solicited his aid.

Wolfgang said Zoe had acquired the manuscript, of which I now had a copy, decades ago—though she didn’t reveal where or how, just that it dated to the Wagnerian era before the turn of the century, when interest had sprung up in Germany and Austria in reviving the roots of their supposedly superior Teutonic culture. Societies were founded, he explained, that dashed all over Europe recording and deciphering runic inscriptions from ancient stone monuments.

Zoe thought her document was rare and valuable, and that it might form some connection with the manuscripts Sam had inherited from Zoe’s estranged brother Earnest. It was even possible, she’d suggested to Wolfgang, that Sam might possess other runic documents, and help her identify and translate her own. But after Earnest’s death, Zoe’s efforts to find Sam and discuss this with him had proven unsuccessful.

Because of Wolfgang’s position in the international nuclear field, Zoe hoped he might be able to get in touch with Sam through
me
and to discuss the thing without involving the rest of the family—though it wasn’t clear to Wolfgang why she’d chosen him, a total stranger, to confide in.

Knowing Auntie’s reputation, her reasons seemed clear enough to me. Zoe might be eighty-three but she wasn’t stone blind. The men she’d dallied with hadn’t always been rich but they
were
extravagantly handsome, some as smashing as Herr Wolfgang Hauser himself. If I hadn’t actually held this fabled manuscript in my hands, I might have guessed the batty old broad cooked it up just to add Wolfgang as the last bauble to her already heavily bejeweled crown.

Though he’d agreed to Zoe’s request to end-run our family, with whom she wasn’t on speaking terms, and to find Sam and me and sell us on this project, Wolfgang hadn’t acted at once—not until he found a legitimate reason that would bring him here to Idaho. He couldn’t know that Sam would be dead by the time he arrived—nor what my reaction would be to trafficking with one more relative among those I’d habitually avoided like the plague.

It was pointless to explain to Wolfgang that if my cousin Sam, even for a short time, had ever possessed such a document, it already would be decoded. The only unbroken encryption system in this century was designed during the Second World War by the Navajo. Native American culture engenders a penchant for such things, and I knew Sam lived and breathed encryption too.

But, as I had to keep vividly reminding myself, I was the only person on the planet who knew that Sam
himself
was still living and breathing. Now, in order to undo this knot I’d tied around myself, all I needed was to find him.

For the rest of the week things were frustratingly quiet. It wasn’t that I was hoping for a follow-up car chase or another avalanche to rescue me from boredom. The problem was, no package had arrived yet. Nor had I been able to contact Sam.

I cruised by the No-Name cowboy bar, inquiring as casually as possible about phone calls. The bartender told me he’d noticed the pay phone on the wall across the room ringing a few times earlier that week. But nobody picked it up, and nothing since.

I scanned my mail messages on the computer each day, coming up empty.

Olivier and I had to coordinate our driving schedules for a few days until I could operate my car again, and Wolfgang was still out of town. So in a way I felt lucky that the parcel didn’t arrive until I could be alone when I went to fetch it. Meanwhile I hid the rune manuscript in a place where no one could find it, right beneath ten thousand United States-government-employed noses: inside the DOD Standard.

The Department of Defense Standard was the bible of all research and development branches of the federal government: thirty-five massive bound volumes of rules and regulations that had to be consulted in order to do anything from developing a computer system to constructing a light-water reactor. It cost the taxpayers a fortune to produce and update this key document. We had many sets around the site: one was kept on the six-foot bookshelf just outside my office. But in the whole five years I’d worked here, I’d never once seen anyone stroll idly across the floor to peek at it, much less really consult the thing for the purpose intended. To be blunt, we could have papered the latrine walls with the DOD Standard and I doubt, even then, anyone would have noticed it.

I was the only one I knew who’d actually tried to read it—but once was enough. What I saw was less comprehensible than the revised Internal Revenue Service tax code: government service writing style, par exellence. I was sure no one would find the rune manuscript if I hid it there.