Angelopolis (26 page)

“You don’t have her already?”

Sneja growled something in German and threw Verlaine a look of contempt. “Don’t play games with me.”

Verlaine tried to understand what Sneja was talking about. Eno had taken Evangeline in Paris. If she hadn’t given her over to the Grigoris, what had she done with her?

“You can’t be right about her patrimony,” Verlaine said, deciding to feign ignorance. “Evangeline doesn’t even look like Percival.”

Suddenly, Sneja’s mood shifted. “You knew my son?”

“I worked for your son,” Verlaine said. “I saw him dead in New York. He was broken and pathetic, like a bird with clipped wings.”

She placed her champagne glass on the silver platter and, pointing her finger at Verlaine, said, “Remove him.”

Moving with the easy grace of a trained agent, Verlaine pulled his gun from his jacket and trained it on Sneja. Before he could bring his finger to the trigger, angelic creatures appeared from all sides, stepping before Sneja, surrounding him. A wing slithered around him, knocking his gun from his hand.

“Tie him up outside,” Sneja said. “I’d like to kill him here and now, but I cannot tolerate the mess.”

One of the creatures yanked Verlaine’s arms and bound them together, pushing him toward the end of the lounge. It kicked open a door and dragged Verlaine out onto a narrow viewing ledge and roped him to the metal banister. His head was pressed flat against the icy railing so that he saw the flash of the tracks flicking by, strips of brown against the white snow. Verlaine struggled against the rope, his warm breath rising into the frigid air. The freezing wind whipped against him, stinging his skin. Looking up, he saw an immense tableau of faint stars holding their light against the morning sky. Looking beyond, he saw the endless crystalline white of the Siberian plain. The train moved onward, slowly, relentlessly toward the east, where the sun was emerging on the horizon. Verlaine felt ice forming in the crevices of his eyelids and knew, within the hour, he would freeze to death.

Deposition of Katya Badmaiova, St. Petersburg, 1976

I
was a girl of ten years old when my father brought Rasputin to our home. I knew who he was—even I had heard the stories about him—but I was startled to find that he wasn’t as handsome as I had imagined. I couldn’t understand how the tsarina would fall under the spell of a man with such an ugly, gnarled, black beard, ruddy skin, and strange eyes. My first impression of him was as an ugly brute in peasants’ clothes. But my impression soon changed. Over the next months, when he visited us frequently, I came to have another opinion of Rasputin. He did not have elegant manners, or even a tendency to flatter, but there was something about his way of being that worked upon me until I was open to his allure. By the third or fourth visit his manner had changed my view of him. I was transformed from judging him the most vile of men to thinking him very subtle, almost charming. I believe this to be the secret of Rasputin’s seductive powers: He was an ugly man who had the ability to make people believe him to be beautiful. I, like so many others, was entranced.

Each time Rasputin visited our home—a small apartment near the Anichkov Palace in St. Petersburg—he and my father went to my father’s study, and I continued with my piano lesson, my French lesson, my lessons in embroidery, or whatever activity I had before me that day. We were not rich, but we had a number of tutors to keep me occupied while my father worked. Most of the time, I had no more direct exposure to Rasputin than seeing him walk from the entrance of the house to my father’s study. After a year or so, he gradually stopped visiting my father, and I began to think of him less and less often. After Rasputin’s murder, and the revolution, there was no reason to think of him ever again.

Or so I believed. My father became ill with cancer in the 1950s. During the final days of his life, when the illness had made him insensible to the world, he told a tale that astonished me. He was delirious when he said these things, and I could not know for certain if they were the incoherent words of a dying man or if there was some truth in his bizarre tale, but my mother was at my side, and she confirmed that I had heard the contents of the story correctly. I write it all down as faithfully as I remember it, reserving judgment for those who read it.

My father confessed that Grigory Rasputin came to him in November 1916, asking for his assistance. My father had won favor with the tsar by making him a tea—a simple mixture of cannabis and wolfsbane—which had the desired effect of relaxing Nikolai. And then one day Rasputin told my father that the tsars—as he sometimes called Nikolai and Alexandra—had another request. They wanted my father to mix a medicine. Rasputin claimed that the mixture would help the tsarevitch, Alexei Nikolaevich Romanov, recover from a terrible disorder. My father knew of the child’s illness—the boy had nearly died at Christmastime 1911, and he had heard at that time that the child was a hemophiliac. My father responded that a cure for hemophilia was unknown. Rasputin refused to accept this answer. The medicine, Rasputin claimed, required one thousand petals from one thousand different varieties of flowers. Many of the flowers, my father said, did not grow in Russia and would be impossible to find, especially during the war. It was 1916 and freezing cold; there was only snow and ice and suffering.

Rasputin countered this objection, showing him a book filled with flowers. The empress had been collecting the flowers herself over many years—she and the grand duchesses had gone on hunts together in numerous countries in Europe and had preserved the flowers in a diary they shared. My father would only have to confirm that the flowers were correctly labeled and mix them together in the elixir. Rasputin said that the empress herself promised a large sum of money and an elevated position in the tsar’s university in Moscow to anyone who could make the drug. Rasputin gave my father the album filled with flowers and left.

One month later Rasputin returned to see if my father had finished. My father had gone through the flowers in the album and confirmed that the one thousand flowers in the formula were the one thousand flowers in the book—everything matched up perfectly. My father had been having doubts about the authenticity of Rasputin’s promises, however. He didn’t know if he could trust the peasant to give him the sum promised. And so he gave Rasputin the elixir but kept the diary with the flowers as a guarantee.

When Rasputin returned with the money, he was drunk. I remember the evening well, because I was in the sitting room during the visit. I listened as Rasputin bragged to my father about the empress’s devotion to him, calling her “Mama,” a name he was encouraged to use by the empress herself. Rasputin claimed that he knew all of Mama’s secrets, that she kept nothing from him. As proof of her confidence in him, he told my father to visit Pokrovskoye, his native village. There he would find, in the care of Rasputin’s wife, a treasure unlike anything the world had seen before, one worth more than anyone in Moscow or St. Petersburg could imagine. Rasputin told my father that he would send a telegraph to his wife, who still lived in Pokrovskoye, telling her to allow my father to examine the treasure himself. The story was so ridiculous, and Rasputin so drunk, that my father took his payment, gave him the flower album, and kicked Rasputin out. Some days later Grigory Rasputin was murdered by Feliks Yusupov and Dmitri Pavlovich at the Moika Palace and his body thrown in the Neva.

My father never went to Pokrovskoye to see the treasure. I believe he forgot all about it—our lives were filled with real concerns during those years. After Rasputin’s death, however, a servant from Tsarskoye Selo arrived with a purse of money for my father, a gift of thanks from the tsarina herself, and a warning that he must never speak of what had transpired between them.

After my father’s death, in the summer of 1951, my mother and I began to wonder of these strange events. After much consideration, we took a train to Rasputin’s native village to see if Rasputin’s widow was still alive. It was a long journey from Petrograd to Tyumenskaya Oblast, and it was somewhat silly to make the trip, but we were exceptionally poor and extremely curious, and so decided that we must confirm Rasputin’s story, to put our minds at ease.

We found the widow without too much trouble. She lived in the same place she had shared with Rasputin decades before. She was a kind woman, and she invited us into their two-story house, sat us down, and served tea. My mother introduced herself and mentioned my father’s name. Mrs. Rasputin ruminated over the name a moment, and then went to a wooden box and removed a telegram: It was Rasputin’s communication from thirty-five years before, instructing her to show my father the tsarina’s treasure. Rasputin’s widow returned with a metal trunk, the Romanov eagle emblazoned on its surface. No doubt the poor woman had no idea what was inside or why she should keep it, only that a man—the doctor named in the telegram—would be coming for it. She seemed eager to be rid of it, telling us that it was just sitting around collecting dust.

We hoped for jewels or gold, something of value we might sell. And from the look of the trunk, with its elaborate buckles and fine leatherwork, it seemed that we would soon be rewarded for our efforts. Instead, we found, after we opened the trunk, another sort of thing altogether. Nestled in a bed of red velvet lay an enormous egg—a gold egg with flecks of scarlet on its shell. I picked it up and felt it in my hands. I must clarify that this was not an object like the famous enameled eggs that one could buy in Fabergé’s shop in the days before the Revolution. This was a living egg, large as an ostrich egg, heavy and warm when I took it in my hands. I had never seen anything like it and instantly wanted to give it back, but Mrs. Rasputin insisted that we take it with us. And so we packed the living egg back into the trunk marked with the Romanov insignia and took it home to Petrograd.

Dr. Raphael Valko’s compound, Smolyan, Bulgaria

V
era turned the paper over, looking for more. “That’s it?”

“The account ends there,” Valko said, taking the pages and sliding them back into the red book. “After Katya told me about this giant egg, I began to do some searching into the imperial family’s past, looking for something that could explain how this egg could have come into existence.” A look of frustration crossed his features, as if he were remembering the difficulties of the search. “But the last Russian monarch born of an egg was Peter the Great. His was also a gold egg dappled with scarlet, like the colors of the Romanov crest, but how such a birth had come to pass was never documented. The Romanovs longed for another golden era in their reign, a monarch with superior powers to unite the people behind the dynasty, and what better way to do it than this? But the golden era never came. And so they waited. Nearly three hundred years later, an egg finally arrived. And Katya had it in her possession.”

“But you must know what happened after Katya left Siberia,” Vera said.

“Katya refused to write down the events that occurred after her encounter with Mrs. Rasputin. It was too dangerous, and she couldn’t risk someone reading what she’d written. But she did tell me that she took the Romanov trunk with her to Leningrad, where she kept it hidden in her apartment. If the Soviets had gotten wind of the trunk, they would surely have sent someone around to investigate.”

Vera tried to imagine the existence of such a strange and wonderful object, something that Katya had risked everything to hide. “And it was never discovered?”

“No,” Valko said. “Katya was careful. But in the spring of 1959, fifty-seven years after it was laid, the egg cracked apart. A child lay in the catastrophe of shells, a golden-skinned boy with eyes that burned red and wings that wrapped around his shoulders. Katya was entranced by the creature, and she kept it, raising it as her own son. She named the angel Lucien.”

Vera felt her jaw drop. She stared at Valko, waiting for him to tell her more. Finally she managed to say, “It lived?”

“Oh yes, it lived. Not only did it survive, the creature thrived. He grew over time, moving through the normal stages of development, like any child. Katya tried to treat him as if he were human. Of course, he was never enrolled in a school and had no human contacts other than Katya, but he was taught to read, to write, to speak, to eat, and to dress like a human being. By the time I arrived in Leningrad he had grown to adulthood. I had never seen such a magnificent creature.”

“It was a Nephil with antediluvian qualities?” Azov asked.

“Even a quick look at Lucien told me that he was no Nephil. He seemed to me to embody the ancient descriptions of the heavenly host, the passages that one finds in biblical literature, with skin like pounded gold, hair of silk, eyes of fire. I telegraphed Angela, and, after much difficulty, she came to join us in Russia. This was in the 1970s, when Westerners were not exactly welcome behind the Iron Curtain.”

“Nor archangels, I imagine,” Sveti said.

“True enough,” Valko responded. “Which is perhaps the reason Lucien had been permitted to leave the apartment only a few times in his life. I was there with Angela the day she met Lucien. He looked from Angela to me, his eyes wide with curiosity. There was such purity in his gaze, such peace, that I felt that I was in the presence of divinity. I understood in a single moment the metaphor of the chemical wedding: that synergy, that renewal of existence that grows out of a perfect meeting.”

“Angela felt this as well?” Vera asked, finding it hard to imagine the savvy Angela Valko falling prey to any mystical mumbo jumbo.

“I believe so,” Valko said. “In any case, she convinced Katya to let her take Lucien outside. The creature was delighted by the air, the coldness of the snow, the blue sky, the open spaces. He had never seen the Neva, never touched ice, never heard music played at the theater. Angela showed him the human world, and, in turn, he began to teach her what it meant to be ethereal. I cannot say if Angela had planned to seduce him from the beginning, but from the moment she saw him, there seemed to be no other course for my daughter. They fell in love before my eyes. Soon they were having an affair. And in 1978, after Angela returned to Paris, she gave birth to Lucien’s child.”