Angelopolis (14 page)

“You see this?” Nadia said. “OTMA was the collective name for the four Romanov grand duchesses: Olga, Tatiana, Marie, and Anastasia, all of whom were brutally murdered with the tsar and tsarina in 1917. Apparently the girls used to sign cards and letters with this collective name, and when their brother, Alexei, was young, he referred to his pack of older sisters as OTMA.” She paged through the album and pulled out a black-and-white photograph.

All four of the girls struck Bruno as remarkably beautiful, with their wide expressive eyes and white linen dresses, their pale complexions and curled hair. What a crime it was to have murdered such lovely creatures.

“Anyone who knows even the rudimentary facts about the Romanov family could tell you the meaning of OTMA,” Nadia continued, running her finger over the copper plate. “But understanding the nickname Our Friend is a bit more complicated.”

“Complicated by what?” Verlaine asked, his manner filled with impatience.

Bruno shot Verlaine a warning look—
Cool off and let the woman speak
—before turning back to Nadia. “Do you have any ideas about who Our Friend was?”

Nadia eyed them, cautious, and turned to Vera, who was studying the album with care. “It did not refer to just one person. The tsarina Alexandra used this moniker as a code name for her spiritual advisers. When writing to her husband, she never committed her guru’s name to paper but tried to mask him in order to avoid scandal. Alexandra used the name Our Friend for the first time with a man called Monsieur Philippe, who came into their life in 1897. He was a French mystic and charlatan who entranced the empress—Alexandra was a woman prone to mystical spells and esoteric beliefs—and he became a kind of court priest.”

“Like John Dee to Queen Elizabeth,” Vera said.

Bruno held Vera’s eye for a moment, impressed. John Dee was an obscure angelologist who had conducted some of the first angel summonings on record. He was starting to like Vera.

“John Dee was not a spiritual adviser so much as a court renaissance man,” Nadia said. “But that said, the analogy is appropriate. It was only one of the many similarities between the Russian and British royal families. They were intricately linked.”

“The tsarina was the granddaughter of Victoria and Albert of England,” Vera said. “The tsar Nikolai himself was the cousin of King George V of England on his mother’s side. And Nikolai’s father was Alexander III, a Romanov.”

“Exactly right,” Nadia said. “All of these branches of the imperial family had been heavily infiltrated by the Nephilim, and all of the children of these families—save a select few who by genetic fluke had human characteristics, the Grand Duke Michael II for example—were Nephilistic by birth. Their reproduction was watched with great interest by all of Europe’s angelologists, as the children of these families set the course of our work and, of course, history. The story of how Alexandra and Nikolai tried desperately to produce a son and heir to the throne is a common tale, one that can be found in any history book. They had daughter after daughter, each one beautiful and intelligent but considered a nonentity as far as the succession went: The Romanov daughters were unable to become regent.

“As royal governess to Alexandra’s daughters, my mother was given a window into a more hidden dimension to her household. The empress was a formidable creature who dominated Nikolai from the very beginning of their marriage. While Nikolai was weak—he had small white wings that resembled the unimpressive plumage of a goose—Alexandra was a particularly pure breed, like her grandmother. Her mauve wings were strong and full, with a span of over ten feet; her eyes were deep-set and steely blue; her will was indomitable. Alix, as she was called by her husband, was extremely proud of her inheritance and her gifts. She spent hours and hours grooming her great pink wings. She would use her leisure time teaching her daughters to fly in the private garden of their country estate in the Crimea. All of this is to say that she was an extremely determined woman. Alexandra would stop at nothing to create an heir.”

“And Our Friend was involved in all of this?” Bruno asked.

“In a word, yes,” Nadia said. “But not in the manner you are imagining. Monsieur Philippe’s primary attraction for the empress was the predictions about her future heir. He used prayer and a form of hypnosis to win her trust, and when she became pregnant, he told her that the child would be a boy. Alexandra announced her pregnancy and dismissed the court doctors. The whole of Russia waited. In the end, no child was delivered. It was kept quiet, but the servants and doctors gossiped that the tsarina had a phantom pregnancy: She had believed M. Philippe so strongly that her body produced all the symptoms of a normal gestation.

“But the biggest disappointment came years later. Another holy man, a seer and mystic like M. Philippe—with his knowledge of medicines and tinctures and potions—entered Alexandra’s life. That man came to be their closest adviser, her primary doctor, priest, and confidant. He, too, was referred to in many letters as Our Friend. This man eventually became notorious as the peasant who ruined the great Romanov dynasty and changed the course of the twentieth century.”

“Grigory Rasputin,” Vera said, her eyes bright with recognition.

Nadia turned to the first page of the album, where two Cyrillic words were scribbled in ink.

“Can you read it?” Verlaine asked.

“Of course,” Nadia said. “Your colleague is correct: It is the name Grigory Rasputin.”

Bruno took the album and looked at it more closely. “This album belonged to Rasputin?”

Nadia smiled, and Bruno knew their pathways had converged for a reason. “Rasputin was one of the most intriguing and, in my opinion, misunderstood men in the history of Russia. Father Grigory was the center of what we would now call a cult—he created a circle of largely upper-class female devotees, who gave him money, sex, social standing, and political power in exchange for his spiritual guidance. Rasputin came to St. Petersburg in 1903 and by 1905 had total access to the Empress Alexandra and, through her, to Nikolai and the children. Rumors have it that he seduced the tsarina, that he played sexual games with the grand duchesses, that he spent lavish amounts of state money for his own pleasure, and that he was actually ruling Russia during the crucial period of World War I, when the tsar left to command the military. All of these accusations were false, except for his influence on governmental policy. Alexandra believed Rasputin to have been sent by God. As such, she allowed him to choose state ministers from his friends. He duly filled the government with incompetents and sycophants, ensuring the Romanovs’ downfall. For the Russian people, Rasputin’s access to power was a mystery. They called him a magician, a hypnotist, a demon. He may have been all three, but the true reason for his power had little to do with magic or hypnotism. What the gossips of Moscow and Petersburg didn’t know about Father Grigory was that he was the only man who could keep the heir, Alexei, from dying of hemophilia.”

“The Romanovs found Rasputin to be an effective doctor?” Bruno asked.

“He wasn’t a doctor by training,” Nadia said. “There has been much speculation about what, exactly, he did specialize in. His power over Alexei certainly had much to do with a kind of medical treatment. Hemophilia was a deadly disorder at the beginning of the twentieth century. The disorder affected the blood vessels, which, when ruptured, could not heal, and thus the smallest bruise could lead to a hemophiliac’s death. Alexandra was a genetic carrier of the ‘bleeding disease,’ as it was called, inheriting it from her grandmother Queen Victoria. Women were carriers, but it only became manifest in men. Victoria’s sons and grandsons withered and died like cut flowers because of their inheritance. The tsarina felt horrible guilt over transmitting the disease to her son. She knew it to be a deadly disorder, requiring real medical care, and yet she trusted Rasputin, who was never trained as a doctor, to heal her son.”

“Why?” Bruno asked.

“That is at the heart of this album,” Nadia said. “He had methods that went beyond the perimeters of medicine. Of course, much of his power also stemmed from the force of his personality,” Nadia conceded. “He was a mystic, a holy man, a cunning and manipulative social climber, but there was—at the center of it all—an incredible mastery of human nature. Nothing he did was by chance. Later, once he had made the friendship of the tsarina, and had learned that his power over her would be absolute if he could heal her son, things changed. He needed an effective medicine for hemophilia, and he desperately tried to find one. I believe he saved Alexei with his formulas.”

Bruno glanced at the album. Nadia had opened it to a page filled with numbers.

“I have access to all of the records of the imperial treasures,” Vera said. “And I’ve never seen anything about this album.”

“It isn’t exactly common knowledge,” Naida said. “After the 1917 revolution, a committee was formed to make an official inquiry into Rasputin’s life, his influence on the tsar, and his murder. They interviewed people who knew him and collected firsthand accounts from his followers, patrons, friends, and enemies. A file was created about Rasputin. This file went missing during the Communist era—most people believed that it was burned with so many other tsarist-era documents.”

“I have colleagues who believe the burning of the imperial papers a crime against humanity, as egregious as Stalin’s purges,” Vera said.

Bruno shot Vera a look, wondering if she too believed the historical record more important than living, breathing human beings. It was this kind of thing that made Bruno feel allergic to academics.

“Perhaps your colleagues would be assuaged to learn, then, that the Rasputin file was spared,” Nadia said, her voice terse. She was clearly unhappy at the idea of papers being more valuable than human lives. “I was working in the Soviet archives in the eighties when I discovered it, buried in a room full of moldering surveillance records. It was not long after Angela Valko’s death. Vladimir had relocated to New York and I here to St. Petersburg—Leningrad at the time—where the tight restrictions on my existence felt like a salve to the wounds I had sustained during my work in Paris. So I took the file and, after copying everything, gave it to a friend, who smuggled it to France. It was put up for auction at Sotheby’s in Paris in 1996 and was purchased by a Russian historian. The original file is now in the hands of this man, who has made its contents public, even going so far as to create an investigative television series on Rasputin’s life.”

“You didn’t imagine that it could be important to our work?” Bruno asked, wondering how loyal Nadia was to the society.

“At that point I was finished with angelology,” Nadia replied. “I wanted nothing to do with this dead Russian mystic. I was not alone, of course. After Stalin came to power you would be hard-pressed to find anyone in Moscow or Leningrad willing to talk about Rasputin and the tsar. But my reasons were far more personal than the sour aftertaste of history. It was Rasputin and his album that put Angela Valko in danger. The power of this man, and his reach beyond death, was too strong—even now I fear what could happen as a result of this album.”

“You believe that Rasputin is to blame for Angela Valko’s death?” Verlaine asked, incredulous.

“When my mother died, bequeathing the eggs and the album to me, I showed the pages of flowers to Vladimir, drawing his attention to Rasputin’s name. He knew it was extraordinary, and so together we took it to Angela. She believed that the album was the most surprising link between ancient and modern methods of fighting the Nephilim to be discovered in the twentieth century. In my presence—indeed, using me to translate the contents of Rasputin’s writings—she identified this volume as a kind of medical recipe book. She believed it to contain the most precious, most dangerous of chemical compounds—a formula from the ancient world. It could be a poison or, depending upon your point of view, a medicine.”

“Was it Angela who added this?” Vera asked, squinting as she pulled out the passage about Noah tucked in the leaves of the book.

“Indeed,” Nadia said. Taking it from Vera’s fingers, she read:
“We instructed him concerning every kind of medicine. Thus the evil spirits were precluded from harming the sons of Noah.”

Bruno couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
Could Angela Valko really have interpreted a book full of pressed flowers in this way?
The famous passage from Jubilees was considered to be one of the great textual conundrums surrounding Noah and the Flood. It posited that a medicine was capable of killing off the Nephilim, and that Noah created and used the medicine, but every first-year student of angelology knew that the Nephilim had survived the Flood. In fact, they continued to thrive in the postdiluvian world.

“Did Angela believe that Rasputin was trying to kill the Nephilim?”

“We all speculated about his motives. Vladimir believed he was from a Nephil family, and that this was why Alexandra trusted him. The name Grigory is a common one, often shortened to Grisha, a name popular among Russians. But there has been evidence that Rasputin’s mother had a hint of Nephilistic blood, and that she gave her son the name Grigory in homage to the great Grigori family, known throughout Europe in the nineteenth century. Rasputin’s physical strength, the hypnotic power of his blue eyes, as well as his reputed sexual domination of female devotees—these were all traits that would lead one to believe so, although this theory is difficult to prove, as his lineage is pure peasant stock. Even his surname had a vulgar connotation in Russian. It displeased the tsar so much that he officially changed Father Grigory’s family name to Novy, or ‘the new one.’”

“But even if Rasputin attempted to create such a quote-unquote medicine, he failed,” Bruno said. “The Nephilim still live.”

“You are right,” Nadia said. “Whatever his intentions and capabilities, he did not succeed. Nor did Angela. But you, with this album, might.”

Vera stood and, taking the album in her hands, said, “In my first years with the society I tried working with my fellow Russian angelologists. It was simply impossible. They are a territorial bunch, wary of new ideas and dismissive of research that doesn’t dovetail with their own. And so I turned to the only person I knew who could help me, an old family friend named Dr. Hristo Azov, an angelologist working on the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria. Soviets were allowed to travel to the Black Sea when I was a girl, and my family spent holidays there. Azov supported my early work. He is a brilliant man, and his research quite startling.”