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