The Magic Circle Katherine Neville (top 100 novels of all time TXT) 📖

don’t mean to be rude,” Zoe told me. “You must understand, Pandora was unique. Now that she’s dead, it’s startling to encounter someone who is almost her incarnation down to the finest detail. You’ve done well, having avoided most of your family all these years. Seeing this amazing replica of Pandora on a more regular basis, we might all have had to resort to taking salts or drinking something stronger than champagne! She was something powerful to be reckoned with, I can tell you.”

For the first time, she smiled, and there was a glimpse of that languid sensuality she’d been renowned for—an attribute, as I recalled, that for nearly four decades had brought nobles and magnates to their knees, spilling riches at her feet.

“Were you very close to my grandmother?” I asked. Then, remembering that Zoe was also my grandmother, I said, “I mean—”

“I know what you mean. Don’t apologize,” she cut in curtly. “One day perhaps you’ll learn the most important lesson I could ever teach you: that you may do and say as you please in this life, so long as you apologize for nothing.” I had the feeling, in Zoe’s case, this little rule of thumb must have come in handy more than once.

She’d motioned for the waiter to come pour champagne into two more glasses that had been sitting at a side table awaiting our arrival. They were already partly filled with a mysterious purplish mixture which the waiter stirred into a cloud as he poured.

“This drink is called la Zoe,” she told us. “Like my name, it means ‘life.’ The concoction was created for me one night at Maxim’s—oh my, how many years ago! Everyone in Paris who wished to be chic drank it. I wanted to meet you here at the Deux Magots for a toast to Life. As no one comes out so early, we can also speak privately here. I wish to tell you of the missing magot, and how he relates to us. Then, as it’s also the case that no one goes to lunch until two or so, I’ve made us reservations at the Closerie des Lilas in a few hours from now. I expect, at the hotel where you’re stopping, you’ve been given a decent breakfast.”

I sat there frozen-faced, trying desperately not to let my telltale skin flush beet red at recalling our “breakfast” this morning. Wolfgang squeezed my hand meaningfully under the table.

“Perhaps just a dish of olives,” he told the waiter in French. When he’d departed, Wolfgang added to Zoe, “In America, one doesn’t take alcohol quite so early in the day without a bite of food.”

Except my bacchanalian family, I thought. We lifted our glasses to Life. With my first sip, the dark, heady flavor of this drink tasted somehow of danger.

“Ariel …” Zoe pronounced my name with an almost proprietary expression. Her next words made clear why. “Since your mother has always kept our relationship secret, perhaps you weren’t told that it was I who selected your name? Can you guess after whom you were called?”

“Wolfgang told me Ariel was an ancient name of Jerusalem, and that it means Lioness of God,” I said. “But I’d always imagined I was named for the little spirit Ariel who was held in bondage by Prospero the magician, in Shakespeare’s The Tempest.”

“No—but in fact you were named for another spirit who was later patterned after that one,” Zoe said. Then she quoted in German:

“

Ariel bewegt den Sang in himmlisch reinen Tönen

,

viele Fratzen lockt sein Klang, doch lockt er auch die Schönen.…

Gab die liebende Natur, gab der Geist euch Flügel

,

Folget meiner leichten Spur! Auf zum Rosenhügel!

”

“‘Ariel sings and plays the—urn, harp,’” I translated. “‘If Nature gave you wings … follow my steps to a hill of roses.’ What’s that from?”

“From Faust,” Wolfgang said. “It’s the scene atop the Brocken mountain, on the night called Walpurgisnacht, an ancient Germanic festival invoked by Goethe in his play. The word means ‘the night they cleanse the woods’—with fires.”

Zoe looked at Wolfgang as if there were some unspoken significance in what he’d just said. Then Granny ever so charmingly pulled the pin from her hand grenade.

“That part of Faust, the cleansing scene, is when the little spirit Ariel cleanses Faust of the bitterness and suffering he’s caused others,” she told us. “Often, mind you, Faust had harmed them unintentionally, in his quest for higher wisdom as a magus. You know, it was Lucky’s favorite passage. He wept tears every single time he heard it.” Then she added, “Most people don’t realize that the night he died—April 30, 1945—was also May Eve. Which is to say he killed himself, and Eva too, on Walpurgisnacht.”

“‘Lucky’?” Wolfgang asked, puzzled. I realized he’d missed Laf’s story revealing our family’s cute nickname for the world’s most evil tyrant. “But April 30, 1945, it’s a famous date: the day Hitler committed suicide. That was ‘Lucky’?”

“Why, yes,” I commented cynically. “A family friend, it would seem. I’m surprised you hadn’t heard.” But there was something I hadn’t heard yet, which I’d have been only too happy to have missed, myself.

“Not really a friend,” Zoe replied with remarkable sangfroid. “One might say, practically a member of the family.”

While I was collecting myself from that remark, she added,

“You must realize, I knew him since I was a child. The truth is, Lucky was an ordinary man with ordinary skills and background and education, but one who knew that his great strength lay in simplicity. That was what made it the more frightening to many, I think, for beneath it was something primal that resonates in one without conscious awareness. With Lucky, it was more than just mass hypnosis, as many wish to believe. Everything about him was archetypal: he touched a place of truth in everyone.” She paused, and added chillingly, “After all, he didn’t personally pull a trigger thirteen million times—nor did he give written orders for others to do so. Lucky knew all he needed was to make people feel