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

pick you up en route, and get us both back in time to pack. I thought, since you’d told me Maxfield would be here anyway, he could bring your car later and you’d come with me. There are many things you and I need to discuss in private before we leave the country. We’ll have time for breakfast here, of course, but we must—”

“Whoa!” I cried, holding up my ski mitt. “May I ask exactly why you and I are suddenly jet-setting off to Vienna together? Or has something escaped me?”

“Oh, didn’t I say?” he said, smiling somewhat abashedly. “Our Soviet visas have been approved by the embassy. Vienna is our first stop en route to Leningrad.”

Wolfgang had brought me a little phrase book of Russian for travelers, and I read it as he drove back from Sun Valley. I wished I could find some Russian words right now that would truly reflect my current state of mind. I did find words for constipation (zahpoer), for diarrhea (pahnoes), and for bowel (kyee-SHESCH-nyeek)—this last, in my view, about as close as I was likely to get to the feel of the thing. But though I’d learned Wolfgang himself was fairly fluent in Russian, I felt somehow awkward asking him to translate the expression “holy shit.”

To describe brunch as rather strained would be more than an understatement. Laf glared at me when I blew in with Wolfgang, and Bambi and her brother embraced. Then Olivier spent the entire meal glaring at me when he learned in swift succession that: a) Bambi was Wolfgang’s sister; b) Wolfgang was driving me back home today, while Olivier chauffeured my car and my cat; and c) Wolfgang and I were leaving at the crack of dawn to depart for an idyllic journey together to the USSR.

But Laf perked up a bit when I informed him our first stop was really Vienna—where he himself was scheduled to return from San Francisco Monday night—and that I’d come see him there in the event we’d left anything still unsaid. Before I left the dining room, though, I took Laf aside.

“Laf,” I said, “I know how you feel about Bambi’s brother. But since he and I will be together in Vienna on business, I’m asking you to make an exception in this one case, and invite us both to your house. Is there anything else about our family situation that you believe I need to know right now?”

“Gavroche,” said Laf with a sigh, “you have the eyes of your mother Jersey, those ice blue eyes she has always been so proud of. But yours are more like Pandora’s—wild leopard eyes—because yours are made of the pure green ice. I don’t blame Wolfgang: I don’t really know how any man could resist eyes like these. I surely could not. But, Gavroche, you must be certain that you will resist the men—until you learn exactly in what kind of situation you are involved.”

That was all Laf would tell me, but I knew he was being straight with me. He was worried about me, not about some feud with Bambi’s family or with ours.

I kissed Laf, hugged Bambi, handed over Jason to Olivier, and shook hands with the silent Volga Dragonoff who never smiled. As we headed back the hundred fifty miles to my basement apartment along the Snake River, I wondered what in hell I really was getting myself into. And I wondered how on earth I could contact Sam before I left and let him know.

Wolfgang gave me an earful on the way home about our impending trip. At the last moment he’d arranged this brief layover in Vienna for us en route to Russia, and for a reason—but not the one he had given to the Pod.

Though the IAEA was based in Vienna, Wolfgang’s office was in Krems, a medieval town just up the Danube at the beginning of the Wachau, the most famous wine-growing valley in all of Austria. Wolfgang had told the Pod we’d need to check in there and go over a lot of paperwork, involving IAEA philosophy as well as our specific mission in the USSR, before he could take me into Russia. And it seems the Pod bought this scenario.

I hadn’t remembered Krems earlier, but once Wolfgang mentioned the Wachau, I recalled it from my childhood. Just beyond it was another part of the Danube Valley, the Nibelungengau, where the early, magical inhabitants of Austria once lived. It was part of the setting of Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelungenlied, the cycle of four operas of which my grandmother Pandora’s recordings were today world renowned. I also remembered that in the Wachau, Jersey and I had once climbed the steep trail leading up through the woods overlooking the blue-grey Danube to the ruins of Dürnstein—the castle where Richard the Lionhearted had been captured while returning home from the Crusades, and where he was held prisoner for ransom for thirteen months.

But Wolfgang’s private reason for going to Krems was centered around another spot in the Wachau: the famous monastery of Melk. Once the castle-fortress of the House of Babenberg, the Habsburgs’ predecessors, and today a Benedictine abbey, Melk possessed a library of nearly one hundred thousand volumes, many of them very ancient. According to Wolfgang, whose story jibed with Laf’s in the hot pool, it was at Melk that Adolf Hitler first did his own research into the secret history of the runes, like those in Aunt Zoe’s manuscript. Apparently it was Zoe who’d asked him to bring me to Melk for our own research.

We got back about five, and Wolfgang dropped me at my cellar door. We agreed to meet at the airport at nine-thirty to catch the ten A.M. connecting flight to Salt Lake. That left this evening to get ready for the trip. I tried to concentrate on what I needed to take for a two-week trek, most of it in the Soviet Union where I’d never visited at this time of