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

“To the treasury, to look at the royal armaments,” I said.

I hadn’t forgotten the story Laf told me in the hot pool only that morning about his visit, more than seventy-five years ago, to these same chambers of the Hofburg—in the company of Adolf Hitler.

“Ja,” said Bambi. “My brother took us to see a sword and a spear, and he asked your uncle, ‘Did you and Pandora know all about the sacred hallows?’ But Lafcadio said nothing, so Wolf said that he’d for a long time been interested in these objects himself. The story was well known in Nürnberg: Adolf Hitler had taken many of them out of the Imperial treasury in Vienna—for example, the First Reich insignia, the Imperial Crown, the Orb and Scepter, the Imperial Sword, and so on—and he carried them off to the Nürnberger Castle. It was the first thing Hitler did just after he made the—how one says?—the Anschluss.”

“Germany’s ‘annexation’ of Austria in 1938,” I said.

Was it only coincidence that exactly one year ago—in March of 1988, on the fiftieth anniversary of this same coup—my aunt Zoe arrived in Vienna with her fellow World War II “peacekeepers,” and there made the acquaintance of Herr Professor Dr. Wolfgang K. Hauser? I thought not, especially when Bambi told me Laf had violently turned off the tap on Wolfgang and refused to see him again or let him in the house after Wolfgang insisted that if, as a favorite of Hitler, Pandora had kept her costly Hofburg apartment throughout the war, and kept performing at the Vienna Opera, it might be because of something important that Pandora herself knew about the hallows. Something connecting them with Nürnberg, even with Hitler himself.

“You and Wolfgang grew up in Nürnberg, where all the Nazis were put on trial just after the war. Were these objects mentioned in the hearings, then?”

“I don’t know,” Bambi said, resting one elbow on the table to steady herself. “The judgments at Nürnberg—the war—this all happened before Wolfgang and I were born. But even after the war everyone in Nürnberg knew about the relics. They were kept in a chamber in the castle. Hitler believed they were somehow sacred and contained mysterious powers connected with the old German bloodlines. Hitler had an apartment there at Nürnberg, just for when he visited to attend the rallies. The apartment was near the center of town beside the opera house, and its windows faced the castle so he could always look across from his rooms, toward where the hallows lay. They were often put on public display at those big Nazi Party political rallies at the zeppelin field. They stayed at Nürnberg and they weren’t returned back to Austria until after the war—”

“Of course—Nürnberg!” Until that moment I’d completely forgotten, but now it suddenly flashed into my mind: All that film footage of nighttime rallies with flags and huge banners and strobe lights against the night sky, and thousands of people lined up in squared-off blocks to form a living chessboard—all those famous rallies had been held in Nürnberg. This raised another question.

I looked at the cognac and saw that the bottle was nearly empty, but I didn’t want Bambi to conk out before I learned what I needed to know, so I poured the rest into my own glass.

“Why Nürnberg?” I asked her. “It’s just a provincial city a bit off the beaten path, hundreds of miles from anywhere, isn’t it? Why would Hitler bring these objects to such an out-of-the-way spot—or hold his rallies there, for that matter?”

Bambi looked at me, her eyes still wide but now clouded a bit from the cognac.

“But Nürnberg is the axis,” she said. “Didn’t you know?”

“Axis? You mean it’s where the Axis powers met during the war? I thought they usually met at Rome or Vienna or—”

“I mean it is the axis,” she said. “The World Axis, the spot where all geomantic lines of power are thought to meet. Its ancient name was Nornenberg—the Mountain of Norns. In our history, the three Norns, goddesses of Fate—Wyrd, Verthandi, Skuld: Became, Becoming, Shall Be—are said to have lived since the dawn of time within this very mountain. They hold the spindle of fate; they weave the story of our destiny in a fabric made entirely of runes. These women are like judges, and their runic tapestry is the real Judgment of Nürnberg, for the tale they write will decide the world’s fate in the last days: die Gotterdammerung—the twilight of the gods—the tale of what will happen at the end of time.”

Maybe it was naive to imagine I could unkink knots in so tortuous a labyrinth, just by trying to untangle my own familial relationships. But I couldn’t help noticing that my nearest relatives did seem to be plunged up to their eyeballs in this National Socialist-mythological-cosmic Scheiss.

It wasn’t surprising that someone who was a stranger to me, like Bambi, would know so many repugnant things about my family of which I myself had been wholly unaware. After all, I’d spent a lifetime trying to distance myself from them. It now appeared I’d had plenty of legitimate, if hitherto unknown, reasons to have done so.

But I had to wonder—if what Bambi said was true—how Laf, Pandora, and Zoe had fared so well after Hitler’s demise. In postwar Paris, Frenchwomen who’d been too palsy with the Gestapo got their heads shaved and were marched through the streets and jeered at. Musicians in many countries, if they’d even performed before the Nazis during the occupation, were publicly disgraced after the war, their reputations ruined. And those who’d been really close to power, as Wolfgang believed that Pandora had, got long prison terms or were hanged. This raised an important question: If Pandora did stay in Vienna, and was even Hitler’s favorite opera star throughout the war, as Bambi said, why would Laf have mentioned her name in the same breath—much less stress the fact that