Vera, however, hadn’t forgotten a thing: She suddenly turned to Verlaine, giving him a hard look, one that conveyed curiosity and complicity at once, and then glanced from Verlaine to Bruno. Registering that she and Verlaine weren’t alone, she assumed the expression of a disinterested colleague.
“Thanks for agreeing to meet us on such short notice,” Bruno said.
“It was quite a surprise to get your call.” Vera shook Bruno’s hand and gestured for them to sit at one of the tables. “Please, tell me what I can do to help you.”
“I’m not entirely sure if you can help,” Bruno said.
“Actually,” Verlaine said, cutting in, “we’re hoping you can give us some information.”
“With pleasure.” Vera moved her eyes over Verlaine until he felt his stomach turn. Details of their night together were beginning to come back to him.
Without trying to explain, he removed the jeweled egg from his pocket and turned it in his fingers as if it were a Rubik’s cube. With each twist of his wrist, he struggled to forget that this egg had been in Evangeline’s hands only hours before, and that the Nephilim had likely abducted her in hopes of obtaining it.
Vera took the egg from Verlaine, lifting it as if it might explode in her hand. “My God. Where did you get this?”
“You recognize it?” Bruno asked, clearly surprised by the intensity of her reaction.
“Yes.” Her expression softened as she grew thoughtful. “It’s Fabergé’s Cherub with Chariot Egg, made in 1888 for Empress Maria Feodorovna.” Vera ran her fingers over the enamel and, with expert movements, opened the egg, moving the hinges apart so that the golden mechanism creaked. As she removed the chariot and cherub figurine, Verlaine stepped behind her and examined it over her shoulder. The workmanship was exceptional: The sapphire eyes, the golden hair—every detail of the cherub had been perfectly rendered.
“What does it say on the sash?” Bruno asked.
“Grigoriev,” Vera said, reading the letters painted in Cyrillic. She paused, considering the word. “The patronymic of Grigori, meaning son of Grigori.”
Verlaine couldn’t help but think of Evangeline’s connection to the Grigoris: As the granddaughter of Percival Grigori, she was a descendant of one of the most vicious Nephilim families on record. “Is it possible that the egg could belong to the Grigori family?”
Vera gave him a weary look. “Grigori is an extremely common name in Russia.”
Bruno rolled his eyes. “It’s just a piece of tsarist bling, a nicely made bauble. Nothing deeper than that.”
“I don’t agree with your aesthetic sensibility,” Vera said. “Fabergé’s eggs are exquisite objects, almost perfect in their lack of practicality, whose sole purpose was to delight and surprise the recipient. Their seemingly impermeable exterior cracks to reveal another egg and then, at the center of this egg, a precious object, the surprise. The eggs are the most pure expression of art for art’s sake: beauty that reveals only itself.”
Verlaine liked the way Vera stood when she spoke, her posture that of a ballet dancer midstep, one arm moving with her voice, as if her ideas had been choreographed to match the rhythm of her body. Perhaps sensing the intensity of Verlaine’s gaze, she changed her stance.
“Go on,” Bruno said.
“The first Imperial Easter egg was constructed by Peter Carl Fabergé for the Russian tsar in 1885, and delighted Empress Maria Feodorovna, who had seen similar creations in her childhood at the Danish court. Fabergé was commissioned to create a new and original egg each year. The jeweler was given the artistic license to design the eggs according to his imagination, and, as you can probably guess, they grew more elaborate—and more expensive—with time. The only requirement of Fabergé was that there must be a new egg each Easter and that each must contain a surprise.”
Vera took the chariot and the cherub and placed it on one of the oak reading tables. It seemed to Verlaine like a precious windup toy that might, with the twist of a key, twitch into motion.
“Some of the surprises were miniatures, like this one,” Vera continued. “Others were jeweled brooches or portraits of the tsar and his family painted onto ivory. After Tsar Alexander III died in 1894, his son Nikolai II took up the tradition, commissioning two eggs each year, one for his mother and the other for his wife, Empress Alexandra. There were fifty-four eggs designed for the Romanovs in total. After the 1917 revolution, many were confiscated. Those that were not were dispersed—smuggled out of Russia and sold to collectors or passed on to the living relations of the Romanovs. Since then, they have become museum pieces and treasures for the rich. There are a number of them here at the Hermitage, and Buckingham Palace houses dozens as well. The Forbes family collected them for years, and Grace Kelly was given one—the Blue Serpent Clock Egg—for her wedding to Prince Rainier. The eggs are extremely valuable, rare, and, as a result, have become coveted displays of wealth and taste, especially after the Forbes auction. Of the fifty-four original imperial eggs, the location of eight is unknown. Collectors believe they were lost, destroyed by revolutionaries, stolen, or kept hidden in private vaults. This egg—and its cherub and chariot surprise—is one of the missing eight.”
Bruno gave the egg a dismissive look. “It’s not really missing if we have it,” he noted.
“To the world at large—and to collectors especially—it has disappeared,” Vera said. She plucked the golden chariot from the table and turned it over. Squinting, she examined the chassis, pushing it with her fingernail. Suddenly, a gold plate slid out. “Ah,” Vera said, smiling triumphantly, as she showed Verlaine a series of Cyrillic letters stamped across the plate.
Verlaine couldn’t begin to decipher it. “What does it say?”
“Hermitage,” Vera said. She held up the plate for Verlaine to get a better look. He saw a string of numbers etched over the length of the plate, the numbers so faint that he had to squint to see them. “After the revolution there was a committee formed to catalog the Romanov treasures. They added numbers to many of the items—sometimes even painting them onto the canvases of Rembrandts—to identify their place in the archival storage area. Often the numbers rubbed off, or the identification tags were lost, leaving a holy mess of miscataloged and forgotten objects in the archive.”
Verlaine tucked the egg into his pocket and said, “You seem to know a lot about this.”
“Unfortunately, my first years here were spent doing such drudge work. I would find the strangest things shoved into the archival vaults.” Vera sighed and returned her gaze to the egg. “The interesting thing about this, however, is that while most of the Romanov treasures were cataloged, the Fabergé eggs were not.”
“But the plate you found?” Bruno said.
“Clearly the number was inserted into the egg by someone else,” Vera said.
“But why?” Verlaine asked.
Vera smiled softly, and Verlaine realized that there was truly more to what Vera was saying than he had imagined. “Come with me. There’s only one way to know for sure.”
• • •
They left the reading room and turned into a corridor off the main entrance of the research center, passing door after door, each one identical to the one before, until Vera stopped abruptly at an electronic keypad. Vera pressed her thumb against it and an adjacent entryway clicked open.
Her high heels clicked on the polished marble as she led them into an immense gilded Rococo space. The ceilings glittered with chandeliers, and glass cases lined the walls, holding objects donated by past angelologists: a treatise on the seraphim by Duns Scotus; a scrying stone that had belonged to John Dee; a gold model of the lyre of Orpheus; a clipping of hair taken from the dead angel in the Devil’s Throat. The upper walls were lined with thousands of Russian, Byzantine, and Eastern Orthodox manuscripts collected over the course of generations, most of them relocated to the Hermitage during the cold war. Were it not for Evangeline and the urgency he felt to find her, he could imagine spending a lifetime exploring this
room.
A short man in a brown wool suit greeted them. “Vera Petrovna Varvara,” the man said, his reedy voice filled with weariness. After the night shift in the archives, he was clearly glad to have human contact.
Handing him the tiny golden plate, Vera said, “From the permanent collection, please.”
“You have clearance for this?” the man said, examining first the gold plate and then Vera.
Vera lifted the sleeve of her dress and presented the man with her forearm. He took a pen from his pocket, switched it on, and, in one quick gesture, scanned the chip implanted in her arm. A beep confirmed Vera’s identity.
“Very well, then,” the man said and, turning on his heel, he disappeared behind the desk and into a darkened room. It took nearly ten minutes for him to return, leading Verlaine to imagine that he had become lost in the folds of shelving, each one connected into the other like the bellows of an accordion. He was growing impatient. Maybe the whole idea of coming to the Hermitage had been a mistake to begin with. Evangeline could be food for vultures before the archivist got back to them. Finally the man arrived with a large manila envelope in his hands.
“This was deposited here in 1984,” the man said tersely as he handed Vera the envelope.
Vera slid her finger under the seal and opened it. A reel of 8mm film slid onto the table.
“I haven’t seen one of these since I was a kid,” Verlaine said, “And even then, 8mm was retro.”
“Eighty-four,” Bruno said, picking up the envelope and looking for something that might explain it. His voice was hollow, and Verlaine knew that something about the year loomed in his memory, immense and solid as a stone monument to a massacre. “That was the year Evangeline’s mother was murdered.”
Biowaste storage facility, Grigori Laboratoies, Ekaterinburg, Russia
Evangeline arched her back until the thick straps of leather tightened over her chest. She tried to move her legs, but they, too, were strapped down. She couldn’t even turn her head more than an inch. A dull pounding behind her temples caused her vision to blur. She closed her eyes and opened them again, trying to regain focus, willing herself to understand where she was and how she had gotten there, pinned like a butterfly to a board. Her memory held shapes she couldn’t decipher—forms of sensation that she felt but could not identify well enough to name: the whine of a jet engine; the prick of a needle; the cinching of buckles against her skin. Making out the sterile wash of white paint on concrete, she guessed that she was in a hospital or, perhaps, in a prison. The strange pulsing sound took on the pitch and tempo of a voice before dissolving into a rain of static. Whoever was speaking could have been nearby, but she heard the voice as if it were at the far end of a tunnel, distant and echoing.
The noise suddenly ceased and, as if a door had opened in her mind, memories rushed into her consciousness. She remembered the rooftop, the black-winged angel, the duel. She remembered the fleeting freedom, that brief but exhilarating buoyancy she’d felt before her surrender. She remembered Verlaine, standing nearby, helpless. She remembered what it had felt like to be touched by him. She remembered the heat of his skin against hers as he ran his finger along her cheek, and the shiver that went through her as he touched the delicate skin that joined her wings to her back.
And then her thoughts were driven even further back to the only time in her life that she had felt as frightened as she did now. It was 1999, New Year’s Eve in New York City. While the rest of the world celebrated the coming of the new millennium, Evangeline was caught in her own private apocalypse. She found a park bench and sat in Central Park, too stunned to move, watching the crowds passing by. The angelic creatures had blended into the population with such skill that—despite the eerie colored light that surrounded them—they appeared to be entirely human. Some of the Nephilim paused, noticing her, recognizing her as one of their own, and Evangeline felt her whole being recoil. It was impossible that she was one of them. Yet she was no longer human. She noted the changes in her body as if they belonged to someone else. Her heartbeat was slow and shallow, the beat barely registering against her finger. Her breathing had sunk to such a depressed level that she took one or two breaths a minute. When she inhaled, the sensation was intense and pleasurable, as if the air itself gave her nourishment. She knew that Nephilim survived for five hundred years, a little more than six times the average life span of a human being, and she tried to imagine the years before her, the days and nights of unrelenting imprisonment in a body that needed little sleep. She was a monster, the very creature her parents had worked to destroy.
Evangeline strained against the leather straps once more, but they held fast. Her wings were open and pressed flat against the table. She could feel them against her skin, soft as sheets of silk. She knew that if she could move her wings, the straps would loosen, giving just enough for her to slip free. But as she twisted, a biting pain stopped her cold: She had been pinned to the table. The nails ripped into the skin of her wings.
A figure stepped into her peripheral vision. Evangeline could turn her head just enough to see a woman in a white lab coat.
“She’s a very unusual creature,” the woman said.
“I thought that was what Dr. Godwin was looking for,” a second voice responded.
Evangeline’s skin grew hot; her hands trembled against the metal cuffs. She recognized the name Godwin. She knew it from her childhood. If Godwin was behind this, she knew she was in terrible danger. It would be better to tear off her own wings than to be subject to his will.
She pressed her forehead against the leather strap, seeking the coolness of it, but the throb of the electrodes sent a current of heat into every part of her body. The pain caused her eyes to fill with tears. She blinked them away and they slid down her temples. A bright light burst on overhead, blinding her. When her eyes adjusted, she saw a syringe poised in a hand. As the nurse inserted the needle into her vein, she took a deep breath and struggled to stay conscious. She wanted nothing more than to drift to sleep. But she couldn’t let herself go. If she did, she might never wake up.
Angelology Research Center, State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg
As they walked down the narrow iron staircase and into the underworld of the Hermitage, Verlaine was subsumed by the smell of thick deoxygenated air shot through with the slightest hint of gunpowder.
“Stay close and be careful not to trip,” Vera said. She moved ahead, flipped a switch, and a naked bulb illuminated the space. They had descended into a long hallway made of old limestone. Vera grabbed a flashlight from a shelf, turned it on, and walked through a narrow, dark passageway. “This passage leads to chambers where the tsars once hoarded ordnance to stave off political agitators.” They turned a corner. Verlaine found the passage so tight that the walls brushed the sleeves of his jacket, leaving a film of powder behind. “You smell the gunpowder, yes?” Vera continued. “Whenever I smell it I remember the thousands of people gathered outside the palace and the crimes committed against Russians by their own army.”
Vera opened a door and led them into a room.
“Now these rooms belong to the society, and for decades they’ve been employed as a staging area for more than three million pieces of undocumented art. The first months of my time here were spent cataloging objects for my supervisor.” Stopping before a wooden door sunk into the stone, she took a set of keys from her pocket and unlocked it. “This is his private space. If he knew I was bringing you here, I would be out on the street.”
In a single motion, Vera opened the door and led them into the space. Verlaine walked inside, feeling awed by the chaos of objects.
“After Angela Valko’s death, her father, Dr. Raphael Valko, donated her research papers to the research academy.”
“I haven’t heard news of Raphael for years,” Bruno said. “He left the academy abruptly in the eighties to pursue his own research. He was ancient when I met him. I imagine he must have passed away by now.”
“Raphael Valko
is very much alive,” Vera said. Reaching beneath a shelf, she hauled out a suitcase trimmed in leather. As she opened it, clouds of dust rose into the air, spinning in the weak gleam of the flashlight. Shining the beam across its contents, she picked up a picture frame, the glass coated in a thick film of dust, and gave it to Verlaine. Wiping away the grime, he found an image of Evangeline. She stood between her parents, one hand in her mother’s hand, the other in her father’s. She could not have been much older than five or six years old. Her hair was long and braided; a missing front tooth created a gap in her smile. Evangeline had been a normal kid once. He wished, suddenly, that he had tried harder to protect her. He couldn’t help but feel that he’d gone about everything in the wrong way—they should have captured Evangeline and Eno when they had had the chance. Looking up, he found Bruno holding a folder.
Bruno opened the folder. There was a collection of loose pages inside. A passage had been scribbled on the top page. Bruno read: “To you this tale refers who seek to lead your mind into the upper day, for he who overcomes should turn back his gaze toward the Tartarean cave. Whatever excellence he takes with him he loses when he looks below.”
“Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy,” Verlaine said. The passage was from what had become a veritable mantra of the angelologists, a text that referred to to a geological formation called the Devil’s Throat Cavern, the mountainous cave where the Watchers were imprisoned, and where, angelologists believed, they waited still for their release. He stepped closer, to get a better look at the inscription, and saw that someone had written the words Dad’s translation next to the passage.
“Any ideas?” Verlaine asked Vera.
“This is an early draft of Dr. Raphael Valko’s translation of the Venerable Clematis’s notebook, which was written during the First Angelic Expedition. The most obvious reference of the passage is to the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice—Orpheus rescued his beloved, but at the point of leaving Hades, or Tartarus, he turned back and lost her forever. But Angela Valko thought that this passage referred not just to the myth of Orpheus—and his lyre, which was recovered in the Devil’s Throat Cavern, as you very well know—but to a spiritual journey, the emergence of the individual mind from the darkness of self to find a higher purpose.”