Angelopolis (25 page)

Valko smiled and said, “Bear with me. The quest of the alchemist, once upon a time, was to find the Philosopher’s Stone, which supposedly had the power to turn base metals into gold. This has been discredited many times over as an impossible dream of the avaricious and mad. But the Philosopher’s Stone also signified another human desire, a longing so universal, so persistent in culture and mythology as to be considered integral to the human psyche: The Philosopher’s Stone was believed to be a panacea with properties that could grant eternal life.”

“The Elixir of Life,” Azov said.

Valko continued. “It has gone by many names throughout history: Aab-Haiwan, Maha Ras, Chasma-i-Kausar, Amrita, Mansorovar, Soma Ras. The earliest written records of such a phenomenon emerge in China and denote a substance that is made of liquid gold. In Europe the substance often took on the properties of water, and many well-known drinks that soothed the body were called Water of Life, in French
eau de vie
, in Gaelic
whiskey
. There is a biblical precedent to this as well in John 4:14:
‘But whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life
.
’
”

“Is that what you’re growing up here in your garden, Raphael?” Azov asked. “While the rest of us work to fight the Nephilim, you’re concerned about self-preservation?”

“It is not surprising that I would exploit the resources at my disposal to stay alive,” Valko said, his voice soothing. “But I’m afraid that you’re missing the point, my friend, when you say that this is not engaging in our fight. From the moment Vera removed Rasputin’s book from her satchel, I knew what you had come here to do.”

Valko pressed open the book and Vera saw his long fingers frame the heart symbol that had inspired them to travel to Smolyan in the first place.”

“I can imagine the sequence perfectly,” Valko said. “You correctly deciphered Rasputin’s silphium symbol here. And then you turned a few pages and determined that Valkine was all you needed to re-create the medicine of Noah. Voilà, here you are in my home, waiting for it all to come together. But I would like you to take a step back and consider the language of this volume on the whole—including Tatiana’s illustration of the egg and ouroboros. OUR FRIEND, both Monsieur Philippe and Grigory Rasputin, were heavily immersed in the sexual and mystical properties of the alchemist tradition. Their Book of Flowers is much more than a recipe book for the medicine of Noah. In language, symbol, and aesthetic, it is a paean to the chemical wedding—the apotheosis of alchemy, the height of human spiritual aspiration. To understand Angela’s interest in the Russian artifact, you must consider its symbols and Enochian jargon on a metaphoric plane, a moral plane—even an anagogical plane.”

Something clicked in Vera’s mind. Just twenty-four hours earlier she herself had lectured Verlaine and Bruno on Angela’s Jungian approach to the society’s most revered texts. “This Book of Flowers was her Jacob’s Ladder,” Vera said, reaching for the journal.

“I could not have chosen a more apt analogy myself,” Valko said, releasing the book into her hands and walking to an oak armoire from which he removed a thick collection of folders. “This extraordinary collection of firsthand accounts of Rasputin’s life was smuggled out of the USSR. It was my daughter who first found the files more than twenty years before I bought it, during her search for documentation about Rasputin. She read through it and then buried it in a Soviet paper graveyard when she was done. Angela had hoped to find some mention of the flower book. There was nothing at all, but she did find allusions to Rasputin’s friendship with an herbalist. This man practiced medicine, Tibetan medicine in particular. Badmaieff, as he was called, had the honor of making tinctures for the tsar, mostly teas mixed with cannabis to restore his calm—the tsar was a mess psychologically during the First World War. Angela found this rather commonplace—herbal medicines were popular among Russian peasants, who believed that they were ‘God’s cures.’ Rasputin was, above all else, a peasant from Pokrovskoye, and there could be no importance whatsoever placed on giving the tsar tea. Badmaieff may have been just another quack.”

“Or,” Vera said, feeling a sense of satisfaction at the direction Valko was taking them, “he may have held information Angela needed.”

“Precisely,” Valko said. “It was at this point that my daughter came to me for help. Communicating through her friend and colleague Vladimir’s contacts, I learned that Badmaieff’s daughter, Katya, was alive and living in Leningrad. This was over thirty years ago, when there were still people alive who remembered Rasputin. Katya agreed to speak with me and invited me to her apartment near the Anichkov Palace.”

“Risky business, that would have been,” Vera said under her breath.

“As it turned out, Katya was relieved that I had found her. She had long wanted to tell her father’s story to someone, but she hadn’t known whom to trust. The burden of such a history had taken a great toll on her. She was haggard and twisted, her bones weak from osteoporosis. I listened to her story—which even I, who believed I’d heard everything under the sun, found utterly incredible—and then I made her write everything down and sign it, so that I could deliver her account directly to Angela in Paris.”

“I bet that was one amazing testament,” Sveti said, giving a low whistle.

“Quite,” Valko said, pulling a thin folio bound in red leather from the stack of papers. Vera recognized the society colophon on the spine and knew it must be an angelologist’s field notes.

Vera reached for the folio. “This was written by Angela?”

“Her mother,” Valko said, his voice grim. “Collected in this folio are things that my daughter was never meant to read. Officially, they are the reports of her mother, Gabriella Lévi-Franche, about her resistance work in Paris during the Nazi occupation. But between the lines lies the truth of Angela’s true paternity.”

“Forgive me for saying so, Raphael,” Azov said, a hint of apology in his manner. “But Angela’s connection to Percival Grigori is common knowledge.”

“Common knowledge now, perhaps,” Valko said, “but very closely guarded information during Angela’s lifetime. After her murder, Gabriella and I both were devastated to find this red book among Angela’s belongings. Not only did she die knowing I was not her biological father, she died knowing that her mother and I deliberately deceived her. It must have hurt her deeply to realize that she was descended from our enemy.”

Valko sighed deeply, and Vera felt a stab of guilt that they were forcing him to recall such painful memories.

“Finding Katya’s deposition inside the red book was like being slapped in the face,” Valko continued. “Clearly Angela wanted to send her mother and me a message. She wanted us to know that she had learned the truth.”

Vera looked from the red book to the file, knowing that the hundreds of hours she’d spent among Angela’s effects at the Hermitage had been merely the first step in a greater discovery. The obsession with eggs, the cryptic trail of clues the woman seemed to leave behind her wherever she went—Vera had once believed these to be meaningless. In a matter of hours Valko had changed all of that. Feeling an almost irrepressible urge to grab Katya’s testimony, Vera said, “I imagine there must be quite a few surprises in these pages.”

Valko removed a sheaf of loose pages from the red book and gave them to Vera. “Yes, indeed,” he said quietly. “I suggest that you see for yourself.”

Trans-Siberian Railway

V
erlaine stepped into a narrow bathroom, turned on a neon light, and looked at himself in the mirror. A black bruise had formed around the stitches across his forehead and was slowly eating its way under his left eye. After taking a piss, he turned on the tap and splashed cold water over his face, wincing as it hit the wound. He was in bad shape. The burn on his chest still ached, his head was still ringing, he was so tired he could hardly move. He only knew that he had to find the strength to get to Evangeline, wherever she was.

As he dragged himself back through the train to his compartment, he took in the sound of Russian. It was strangely sibilant, without the rough edges of English, and he found its rhythms soothing. He picked up a copy of the Moscow daily and tried to make out the Cyrillic, but the alphabet meant nothing to him. That he could puzzle over the angular symbols all morning and they would signify nothing at all was strangely pleasing to him.

A man brushed by him and he turned, feeling the hair stand up at the back of his neck. He recognized the static in the air, the sense of abeyance as everything froze and then broke apart. Looking more closely, he saw that the man’s skin oozed a slick of plasma, that the structure of the shoulders and back corresponded to Nephil wings, that the distinctive scent of the Nephilim followed him. He recognized the velvet suit and the elegance of his comportment: One of the twins from St. Petersburg was on the train.

Verlaine began following the creature, retracing his steps back toward the bathroom, through the second-class sleeping berths with their tatty lace curtains, a smoking car, the dining car smelling of black tea. They were nearing the back of the train. The creature stopped at a door with a gold plate that read
PRIVATE LOUNGE
. He pressed a button on an intercom system and a voice responded in Russian. The words were incomprehensible and, suddenly, the pleasurable dislocation Verlaine had felt only moments before became irritating. It was imperative that he understand everything happening around him.

Soon a muscular hulk of a man opened the door, mumbled a few words to the creature—Verlaine recognized the voice from the intercom—and motioned him inside. Verlaine followed the creature. He made sure the bouncer was human, and then slipped him a wad of euros, which the bouncer shoved into his jeans as he let Verlaine pass. The thump of music echoed through a narrow, dilapidated compartment. The scent of alcohol and cigarette smoke suffused the air. There were neon lights, cocktail waitresses in trashy lace corsets and stiletto heels, and leather couches where Nephilim lounged with drinks. The Nephil creature nodded at the bartender, who picked up a phone, and, after speaking with someone, waved him toward the back of the room.

Verlaine remembered what the doctor had said—that he should stay away from danger of any kind—and wondered if it was wise to have put himself in such a situation. Everyone had heard stories of agents brutally slaughtered during failed stints undercover. It was a fairly common occurrence, especially in the provincial outposts. The Nephilim could kill him and nobody in Paris would know what had happened. Yana might send the news back to France, although who could say if she could be considered trustworthy. Instinctively, he and Bruno had accepted her identity at face value, taking her skill as a hunter as proof of her authenticity. As he moved deeper into the lounge, Verlaine began to feel a prickling sensation of fear. If he needed to escape, there was no way out of there.

Although Verlaine had never seen Sneja Grigori before, he knew at once that this was the matriarch of the Grigori family. She lay on a leather couch, her body stretched from one end to the other. Two Anakim angels hovered over her, one feeding her pieces of baklava and the other holding a tray with a flute of champagne. Sneja was so enormous that Verlaine wondered how she had walked onto the train, and how she would, when the train reached its destination, descend. She wore what looked like a silk curtain wrapped around her body, and her hair had been tucked up into a turban. As he came closer to the bed, Sneja lifted her great, toadlike eyes. “Welcome to Siberia,” she said, assessing him with a sharp gaze. Her voice was gravelly, abrasive, smoky. “My nephews predicted that you would be coming, although they did not have the slightest notion that you would be making the trip as my personal guest.”

“Your nephews?” Verlaine said. Glancing behind Sneja, he saw that the first twin had been joined by his brother. They stood side by side, beautiful as cherubs, their blond hair curling around their shoulders, their large eyes fixed upon Verlaine.

“You met them in St. Petersburg,” Sneja said, taking a piece of baklava and placing it delicately on her tongue. “With our favorite mercenary angel, Eno, who I believe will be—with the assistance of my nephews—breaking free any moment.”

Sneja nodded to the twins, who turned and walked toward the exit.

“Now,” Sneja said, clasping her flute of champagne and taking a long sip. “Tell me what you know about my granddaughter.”

Verlaine narrowed his eyes, trying to read Sneja’s expression through the thick smoke. It seemed to him that she was a sea creature emerging from the murk of a dark ocean. “I don’t know who you mean,” he said at last.

“With the thousands of possible ways that I could kill you—the slow and painful death, the quick and bloody death, the playful death—you had better try to understand quickly. Evangeline is the single descendant of a noble and illustrious family, the sole child of my son, Percival.”