The Magic Circle by Katherine Neville (top 10 books of all time txt) 📕

that Socrates and Pythagoras, despite all the secrets they knew, or maybe because of them, got wiped out by popular demand. Whatever ‘hidden knowledge’ they had certainly didn’t save them in the end.

“Anyway,” I added, “you said there were two things you knew about Pandora’s documents. What’s the second?”

“The second is what Nikola Tesla believed—which wasn’t such a very different picture from what I’ve just described,” said Wolfgang. “He thought the earth contained a form of alternating current that was continually expanding and contracting—at a rate that was difficult but not impossible to measure—rather like the rhythm of breathing, or of a heartbeat. He said that by placing a load of TNT in the right place at the right time—just when a contraction was beginning—he could split the earth itself in pieces ‘as a boy would split an apple.’ And by tapping into this current, this energy grid, he could harness unlimited power. ‘For the first time in man’s history,’ Tesla said, ‘he has the knowledge with which he may interfere with cosmic processes.’”

Holy shit.

Wolfgang looked up at the Eiffel Tower for a moment, its small red beacon at the top nearly lost in the silvery mists. Then he slipped one arm around me as we stood there in silence.

“If Tesla, like Prometheus, gave mankind a new kind of flame,” Wolfgang said, “maybe Pandora’s knowledge will prove to be both the world’s own gift and punishment.”

GOOD AND EVIL

SOCRATES: You speak of good and evil.

GLAUCON: I do.

SOCRATES: I wonder if you understand them as I do.

—Plato,

The Republic

Despite the best of intentions and well-laid plans, I found myself lying in the carved four-poster bed of a Renaissance suite at the Relais Christine making love with Wolfgang all night—or what was left of it—with a passion so intense, so draining, I felt I’d passed the time in the arms of a vampire rather than an Austrian civil servant.

There was a little garden just outside our room. Wolfgang was standing at the French windows looking out on it when I opened my eyes in the morning. His magnificent naked body was outlined by the web of wet black branches with their haze of tender pale green leaves unfurling just beyond the windows. I recalled that first morning in my cellar bedroom, when he’d crawled out of my sleeping bag and turned his back so he could dress—before he came over to kiss me for the very first time.

Well, I was no blushing quasi-virgin any longer: life had certainly seen to that. But I knew that this man who’d driven up my heartbeat—once again, all night long—was still the enigma he’d been when we’d first met, long before I’d learned that he was my cousin. And despite any philosophical observations about spirit and matter, I had to admit that what I’d coveted from Wolfgang was a pretty far cry from spiritual enlightenment. I wondered just what that said about me.

Wolfgang opened the windows that gave onto the garden, then came over and sat on the bed. He pulled down the sheet and ran his hands over my body until I began to tremble again. “You’re so beautiful,” he said.

I couldn’t believe I actually wanted more. “Don’t we have an imminent date for lunch that we really shouldn’t miss?” I forced myself to mention.

“Frenchwomen are always late.” Licking my fingers, he regarded me meditatively. “It’s something in the air—an exotic, erotic perfume you exude that makes me somehow wild. Yet I always feel it’s illusion, that we’re wrapped in a magical smoky veil that no one must penetrate, or the spell will be broken.”

It was a fair description of how I felt myself: there’d been an air of unreality about us from the beginning, an illusion so powerful it often seemed dangerous.

“It’s just past nine o’clock,” Wolfgang whispered, his lips hovering at my breast. “We can skip breakfast—can’t we?—if we’re having an early lunch.…”

Les Deux Magots is one of the most famous cafés in Paris. It was once the favorite rendezvous of the literati as well as the underground—two groups that, in France, had often boasted the same membership. Everybody from Hemingway to de Beauvoir and Sartre had hung out there. And apparently also Zoe Behn.

As we crossed the square of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, its sculpted chestnut trees already coming into bloom, Wolfgang pointed her out, seated alone at a corner table in the sunny, glass-walled outdoor solarium that gave onto the open plaza. We entered through the restaurant, past the famous wooden statues, the two magots. These Oriental figures in their robes of blue and green and gold, surrounded by gilded mirrors, hovering on thrones high above the bar, seemed like Elijahs swept from the streets of Paris up to heaven in chariots of fire.

We went out to the glassed-in terrace. As we crossed to Zoe, I studied this woman, my infamous grandmother, of whom so many scandalous things had been said and written over so many years. She might be eighty-three, but as she sat there sipping her glass of bubbly, it seemed the life she’d lived—lavish with wine, men, and dance—hadn’t served her at all badly. She sat “tall in the saddle,” as Olivier would say, with a proud bearing that complemented fine unweathered skin and the remarkable French braid of snowy hair that fell nearly to her waist. The strength revealed in her face recalled Laf’s comment that as a child she’d had all the self-containment of Attila the Hun.

When we reached her corner table, she studied me with intense aquamarine eyes—a shade somewhere between Wolfgang’s turquoise and my mother’s famous “ice blue” ones. Wolfgang presented me to her formally, pulled out a chair, and seated me when Zoe nodded. She addressed Wolfgang, her English lightly flavored with a mixture of accents, never taking her eyes from me.

“The resemblance is truly remarkable,” she told him. “What must Dacian’s reaction have been the first time he saw her!”

“At first he found it difficult to speak,” Wolfgang admitted.

“I