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

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