and bloody death, the playful death—you had better try to understand quickly. Evangeline is the single
descendant of a noble and illustrious family, the sole child of my son, Percival.”
“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