Angelopolis: A Novel (ANGELOLOGY SERIES)

by Danielle Trussoni

  Valko emptied his teacup, placed it on the table, and said, “You see, Alexei Romanov’s hemophilia was passed down from Alexandra’s family. The tsarevitch inherited the blood disorder from Queen Victoria. Queen Victoria was one of the most vital, effective Nephilim rulers in English history, while her husband, Albert, was actually partially Golobian, although this was a family secret that has been very well hidden. The hemophilia was passed through the Nephil line. Thus, it would follow that this disorder was one of the traits the medicine of Noah would cure.”

  “Surely it would have killed him,” Azov said, echoing Vera’s thoughts.

  “Perhaps it would have,” Valko acknowledged. “But Rasputin had little to lose in the gamble. He had promised not only to ease Alexei’s bleeding episodes but to cure him completely. If Noah’s medicine turned the tsarevitch human, the vow would be fulfilled; if it killed the boy, the hemophilia could always be blamed.”

  “Rasputin would have been sentenced to exile—even execution—if Alexei had died on his watch,” Vera said.

  “You should remember Rasputin’s power over Alexei’s mother,” Valko said. “He was thought to have cast a spell over Alexandra. He was charged with every kind of evil practice imaginable—of holding black masses at the palace, of invoking demons to harm Alexandra’s enemies, of the sexual practices associated with the Khlysty sect. Maybe there was a kernel of truth to the rumors. But if he hadn’t come up with a cure, he would have lost all power over the imperial family.” Valko looked out the doorway, as if the morning star were pulling him toward some distant memory. “I was a boy of nine years when the tsarevitch was executed with his family. Despite his Nephil lineage, despite all that I knew to be wrong with imperial Russia, I remember feeling a profound horror at the thought of his murder, horror at the pain he must have suffered as he and his family were led into the cold and shot. Horror, in the end, at the cruelty of humankind. I cannot say why, but I felt a strange kinship—something like brotherhood—for this murdered child. When his body disappeared and rumors abounded that he lived, I wondered if he was perhaps hiding somewhere, waiting to return.”

  Azov exchanged a look with Vera and said, “Just last month, genetic tests identified the remains of Alexei Romanov. They were found in a communal grave in Ekaterinburg.”

  “And so Rasputin’s success or failure meant nothing,” Valko said. “Revolution would have snuffed out any progress Rasputin had made with Alexei.”

  “What I don’t understand,” Azov said, “is why Angela became involved in all of this. What did she hope to gain from the formula?”

  “Remember, it was Rasputin, not Angela, who actually attempted to produce the medicine of Noah,” Valko said. “My daughter’s efforts may have had the appearance of such an endeavor, but the true nature of her work was something else entirely.”

  “Such as?” Vera asked.

  “Performing a wedding,” Valko said and, seeing Vera’s surprise, he added, “A chemical wedding. The concept is invoked as a symbol for chemical union: a female element and a male element being brought together in an unbreakable, eternal bond. This marriage of disparate elements brings forth a new element, often called the Alchemical Child.” Valko turned to Vera and placed a hand on Rasputin’s journal, brushing her arm. “May I?” he asked.

  Vera felt an instant reaction to Raphael Valko’s touch. Something about him made her profoundly aware of herself—she glanced down at her sweaty, wrinkled clothes, the same clothes she’d worn to work when Verlaine and Bruno showed up at the Hermitage, and wondered how she appeared to a man like Valko.

  Valko turned through Rasputin’s journal, finally stopping at a page of hastily written sentences. “I read this page thirty-two years ago with Angela. She understood the value of Noah’s medicine, and she was intent upon re-creating it.” Valko gave Azov a nod. “That is how you came into our acquaintance, Hristo. But it wasn’t only Rasputin’s recipe that caught her attention.” He ran a finger along the page until it rested upon a drawing of an egg painted in a wash of gold and scarlet.

  Vera recognized another egg, this one different from the others, the fourth of the missing eggs she had seen in two days.

  “This aquarelle, made by one of the grand duchesses, probably the talented Tatiana, was of great interest to Angela. She believed it to have been copied under the guidance of Rasputin’s predecessor, Monsieur Philippe—the spiritual adviser who undertook to give the tsar and tsarina an heir. You see, it is the Nécessaire Egg, one of the most practical of the eggs, holding all the important toiletry utensils an empress might need. Contrary to what historians believe about the egg, it was wildly expensive to make, with rubies and colored diamonds studding the egg itself and the toilet articles fashioned of gold.”

  “It looks,” Vera said, leaning close, “as if there is a snake biting its tail drawn below the egg.”

  “Well spotted,” Valko said. “It is something that Angela found intriguing about the egg.”

  “This symbol is very well-known,” Sveti offered. “The ouroboros, the alpha and omega, is a sign of death and rebirth, regeneration and new life. The passage below it contains the words of Jesus, ‘I am the Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.’ Revelation 22:13.”

  “Yes, of course,” Valko said. “In this respect, the Nécessaire Egg is an echo of the Blue Serpent Clock Egg given to Grace Kelly on her wedding day, and one of the most elaborate and lovely of Fabergé’s eggs, a masterpiece made with the quatre couleur technique of gold, diamonds, and royal blue and opalescent white enamel. Most interesting is the diamond-encrusted serpent coiled around the base, its head and tail pointing to the hour on the face of the clock—the ouroboros, the symbol of eternal renewal and immortality.”

  “But what does that have to do with a chemical wedding?” Vera asked. “Especially considering the fact that Monsieur Philippe’s sole legacy was Alexandra’s phantom pregnancy.”

  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 m
y 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

  Verlaine 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 ba
ck 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.