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