Angelopolis(79)

that a man—the doctor named in the telegram—would be coming for it. She seemed eager to be rid of

it, telling us that it was just sitting around collecting dust.

We hoped for jewels or gold, something of value we might sell. And from the look of the trunk,

with its elaborate buckles and fine leatherwork, it seemed that we would soon be rewarded for our

efforts. Instead, we found, after we opened the trunk, another sort of thing altogether. Nestled in a bed

of red velvet lay an enormous egg—a gold egg with flecks of scarlet on its shell. I picked it up and

felt it in my hands. I must clarify that this was not an object like the famous enameled eggs that one

could buy in Fabergé’s shop in the days before the Revolution. This was a living egg, large as an

ostrich egg, heavy and warm when I took it in my hands. I had never seen anything like it and instantly

wanted to give it back, but Mrs. Rasputin insisted that we take it with us. And so we packed the living

egg back into the trunk marked with the Romanov insignia and took it home to Petrograd.

Dr. Raphael Valko’s compound, Smolyan, Bulgaria

Vera turned the paper over, looking for more. “That’s it?”

“The account ends there,” Valko said, taking the pages and sliding them back into the red book.

“After Katya told me about this giant egg, I began to do some searching into the imperial family’s

past, looking for something that could explain how this egg could have come into existence.” A look

of frustration crossed his features, as if he were remembering the difficulties of the search. “But the

last Russian monarch born of an egg was Peter the Great. His was also a gold egg dappled with

scarlet, like the colors of the Romanov crest, but how such a birth had come to pass was never

documented. The Romanovs longed for another golden era in their reign, a monarch with superior

powers to unite the people behind the dynasty, and what better way to do it than this? But the golden

era never came. And so they waited. Nearly three hundred years later, an egg finally arrived. And

Katya had it in her possession.”

“But you must know what happened after Katya left Siberia,” Vera said.

“Katya refused to write down the events that occurred after her encounter with Mrs. Rasputin. It

was too dangerous, and she couldn’t risk someone reading what she’d written. But she did tell me that

she took the Romanov trunk with her to Leningrad, where she kept it hidden in her apartment. If the

Soviets had gotten wind of the trunk, they would surely have sent someone around to investigate.”

Vera tried to imagine the existence of such a strange and wonderful object, something that Katya

had risked everything to hide. “And it was never discovered?”

“No,” Valko said. “Katya was careful. But in the spring of 1959, fifty-seven years after it was laid,

the egg cracked apart. A child lay in the catastrophe of shells, a golden-skinned boy with eyes that

burned red and wings that wrapped around his shoulders. Katya was entranced by the creature, and

she kept it, raising it as her own son. She named the angel Lucien.”

Vera felt her jaw drop. She stared at Valko, waiting for him to tell her more. Finally she managed

to say, “It lived?”

“Oh yes, it lived. Not only did it survive, the creature thrived. He grew over time, moving through

the normal stages of development, like any child. Katya tried to treat him as if he were human. Of

course, he was never enrolled in a school and had no human contacts other than Katya, but he was

taught to read, to write, to speak, to eat, and to dress like a human being. By the time I arrived in

Leningrad he had grown to adulthood. I had never seen such a magnificent creature.”

“It was a Nephil with antediluvian qualities?” Azov asked.

“Even a quick look at Lucien told me that he was no Nephil. He seemed to me to embody the

ancient descriptions of the heavenly host, the passages that one finds in biblical literature, with skin

like pounded gold, hair of silk, eyes of fire. I telegraphed Angela, and, after much difficulty, she came

to join us in Russia. This was in the 1970s, when Westerners were not exactly welcome behind the

Iron Curtain.”

“Nor archangels, I imagine,” Sveti said.

“True enough,” Valko responded. “Which is perhaps the reason Lucien had been permitted to leave

the apartment only a few times in his life. I was there with Angela the day she met Lucien. He looked

from Angela to me, his eyes wide with curiosity. There was such purity in his gaze, such peace, that I

felt that I was in the presence of divinity. I understood in a single moment the metaphor of the

chemical wedding: that synergy, that renewal of existence that grows out of a perfect meeting.”