Authors: Danielle Trussoni
Bruno lifted an iron knocker and let it fall against a metal plate. Verlaine heard the sound of footsteps from somewhere in the house. Suddenly a peephole opened at the center of the door and a large eye peered outside. The door swung back, and the woman from the film, Vladimir’s wife, who had assisted Angela Valko, appeared before them. Nadia—smaller, grayer, and slightly bent—was dressed in a black velvet dress, a ruby brooch pinned at her cleavage. Verlaine looked at his watch—it was nearly seven in the morning.
“Isn’t it a bit early to be going to the opera?” Bruno said, bowing slightly.
“Bruno,” she said, pushing a swirling mass of gray hair over her shoulder.
Bruno bent to kiss her, his lips brushing each cheek. “You knew we were coming.”
“Parisian angelologists aren’t as conspicuous as they used to be,” she said, waving them into a darkened corridor. “Nevertheless, I have friends in the Russian branch of the society who identified your presence at the research center and telephoned me. Come in, come in. You should be careful. I may not be the only one who knows you’ve arrived in St. Petersburg.”
The interior of the house was distinctly French. They walked through a corridor and into a drawing room paneled in dark wood and red velvet, with Second Empire wallpaper, its panels clotted with flowers climbing the walls. A great chandelier hung from the ceiling, the crystals muted in the half light. Nadia led them through into a smaller chamber, the walls dripping with Russian Orthodox icons. The paintings were of every size and shape and hung so close together—the edge of one frame cutting into the next—that it appeared the walls were covered in a brilliant, gilded armor.
When Nadia noticed Verlaine examining the paintings she said, “My father loved Orthodox icons and opened up the back room of his antique shop in Paris to Russian painters when they needed support. In exchange for paint and brushes, he accepted their work. At the time, this was a more or less even exchange. Now, as you can imagine, they hold a certain historical, as well as a sentimental, value. These images are a record of an era that has disappeared. When I see them I recall what it was like to be in exile, the long lunches in the garden with my parents and their friends, the low murmur of Russian, with its elegant, yet biting, resonance. These icons form a museum of my youth.”
As if remembering that she was not alone, Nadia turned and led them onward, taking them through a succession of narrow rooms filled with birdcages and marble busts. A cabinet of butterflies stood against a wall with hundreds of colorful specimens pinned to boards inside, a copper plaque naming the collection as belonging to Grand Duke Dmitri Romanov. When Verlaine drew closer to examine them, the rows of powdery wings cast a sinister sensation over him, a kind of illusion of perspective. Suddenly he realized that the specimens were actually feathers from the wings of angels. He saw the bright yellow wings of Avestan angels, those beautiful but toxic creatures whose wings dripped with poison; the iridescent green wings of Pharzuph, the dandies of the angel world, whose feathers blanched blue and purple in a certain light, like the scales of a fish in an aquarium; the lavender and orange wings of the Andras scavenger angels; the pearlescent white wings of the Phaskein enchantress angels, whose voices invoked daydreaming and listlessness; the flat green wings of the Mapa parasite angels, who occupied the souls of human beings, feeding off the warmth of the living. Verlaine himself had a Linnaean catalog of many of these varieties stored in his mind—only he’d never had the nerve to preserve them. The thought of killing and cataloging the creatures both fascinated and sickened him.
“The Grand Duke Dmitri Romanov was a very special man,” Nadia said, noting Verlaine’s interest. “With the help of a Russian chemist, he made a preservative that could envelop an angel’s feather and fix it, a marvelous feat, something along the lines of being able to encapsulate the contours of a scent or of an illusion. Dmitri gave these feather samples to my parents, who knew him during his time in exile. Indeed, that was the same period that Dmitri assisted his lover, Coco Chanel, in the creation of her perfumes, most notably her famous No. 5. Some people say he gave her the idea to use a secret ingredient: the wing fibers of a Phaskein angel. Ms. Chanel had connections with many Nephilim, and so this is not startling information. More interesting is that she managed to keep her perfumes in production for so long, and that the secret ingredient is used still in limited-edition batches of the perfume. It is the favorite scent of Nephilim everywhere. It was no coincidence that Chanel was embroiled in intrigues during the Nazi occupation. She had connections with Nephilim that went back to the Russian Revolution.”
Verlaine was at a loss for how to interpret this information. The imperial family’s Nephilistic lineage was well-known—their downfall was celebrated by the society as a great victory—but he had never imagined how this might manifest among their descendants.
If Dmitri Romanov was a Nephil, what in the hell was he doing collecting feather specimens from fellow angelic creatures? What sorts of people were Nadia’s parents that they had associated with him? How did his connection with Chanel, and the Nazis, play into his family history?
He wanted to press Nadia to tell him more, but a look from Bruno signaled that he should let it drop, and so he followed Nadia in silence to the far end of the room.
After unlocking a wooden door, she ushered them into a larger space. It took a moment for Verlaine to get his bearings, but soon he realized that they had just walked through the back door of the antique shop. An enormous brass cash register sat on a polished oak table, its gleaming keys reflected in a large plate-glass window that opened onto the street. The scent of tobacco hung heavily in the air, as if the residue of decades of cigarette smoke coated the walls.
Verlaine maneuvered through the room. It had been filled to capacity with curiosities: a barometer, a mannequin displaying a large muscovite headdress, and Baroque chairs upholstered in silk. One wall had been hung with mirrors in gilded frames. There were porcelain figurines, oil paintings of Russian soldiers, an engraving of Peter the Great, and a pair of golden epaulets. Verlaine noted the irony of a French-born Russian woman selling prerevolutionary Russian antiques to post-Soviet Russians in twenty-first-century St. Petersburg. Painted across the glass window in inverted letters were the words:
LA VIEILLE RUSSIE, ANTIQUAIRE.
“Forgive the clutter,” Nadia said. “After my parents died, I took over La Vieille Russie. Now the entire stock of the antique shop is stored here.”
Another woman entered and stirred the dying embers in the fireplace, adding wood until a glow of warmth and light filled the room. Verlaine realized that the antique shop doubled as a guest apartment: There was a daybed and a cupboard with boxes of tea and jars of honey. Mismatched chairs, piano benches, stools, and trunks were scattered through the shop. Nadia gestured that they should sit.
Vera nudged his arm and nodded to a wall and whispered, “Look, it’s another missing egg.”
Verlaine turned his gaze to a framed oil painting behind Nadia. It was a portrait of a child, painted in creams and browns and golds. The thick application of paint gave the flesh a glossy texture. The child was five or six years old, dressed in a white smock trimmed with lace. Verlaine’s gaze lingered a moment on the large blue eyes, the abundance of curly brown hair, the rosy hue of the little hands that—to his amazement—held a pale Fabergé egg.
“The girl in the portrait is me,” Nadia said. “Painted in Paris by a friend of my father’s. The egg was Alexandra’s beloved Mauve Egg, given to her in 1897, in the happiest period of her marriage.”
Verlaine looked from the old woman to the painting. Although there was a resemblance in the eyes, little else connected her to the image. The painted Nadia displayed a childish innocence that was reflected in the trinket cupped in her hands. Rendered with quick impressionistic brushstrokes, the details of the egg were difficult to make out. Verlaine could see the Mauve Egg with what appeared to be hazy portraits on the surface. Looking from the painting to Nadia, he found that he was helpless to gauge the significance of finding this, the third in a set of eight treasures that had been lost for nearly a century. He felt as desperate, and as childish, as Hansel following a path of shiny pebbles.
“You will eat something,” Nadia said. “And then we will talk.”
“I don’t know if we have time for that,” Verlaine said.
“I remember how hard Vladimir worked,” she said quietly. “He would be out on a mission for days at a time without eating properly. He would return to me exhausted. Eat, and then you can tell me why you’ve come.”
As if her words brought him back to his body, Verlaine felt a sharp shock of hunger, and he realized he hadn’t so much as thought of food since before his encounter with Evangeline.
How strange it would feel,
he thought,
to be like Evangeline, a creature suspended above the physical needs of human beings.
Even hours after seeing her he felt a sharp need to be near her. He had to find her, and, once he did, to understand her.
Where was she now? Where had Eno brought her?
He saw Evangeline in his mind, her pale skin and dark hair, the way she had looked at him on the rooftop in Paris. The brittle exterior he had developed in his work cracked a little more with every thought of her. He needed to steel his resolve if he was to have any hope of finding her.
Nadia cleared a set of encyclopedias from a slate tabletop and, opening a trunk, removed a stack of porcelain bowls and a handful of silver spoons, which she wiped with a cloth as she laid the table. The woman who had lit the fire returned some minutes later with a tureen of kasha and then a platter of cured salmon. She poured water into a samovar by the tea cupboard, turned it on, and left the room.
The very smell of food made Verlaine ravenous. As they ate, refilling their soup bowls until the tureen was empty, he could feel his body become warm, his strength and energy returning. Nadia took a dusty bottle of Bordeaux from an armoire, opened it, and filled their glasses with wine the color of crushed blackberries. Verlaine took a sip, tasting the fruit and tannin prick his tongue.
He could sense Nadia was watching them, studying their gestures, assessing their body language. She was someone who understood the work of angelologists, who had seen the best of their kind in action. She was deciding if she could trust them.
Finally, she said, “I understand that you were with Vladimir during his last mission.”
“Bruno and I were with him in New York,” Verlaine answered.
“Can you tell me if he was buried?” Her voice was so quiet he had to strain to hear her. “I’ve been trying to get information from the academy, but they won’t confirm anything.”
“He was cremated,” Bruno said. “His ashes are being held in New York.”
Nadia bit her lip, thinking this over, and said, “I would like to ask a favor of you. Could you help me get them transported to Russia? I would like to have them with me.”
Bruno nodded, and in the austerity of the gesture, Verlaine could almost taste the regret over what had happened to Nadia’s husband.
She stood and left the room, returning with a pear tart, which she cut into slices and served on gilded dessert plates, releasing the scent of caramelized sugar and cloves. She dispensed the tea from the samovar, pouring it into teacups shaped like tulips.
“Nadia, there is a specific reason that we came to you,” Bruno said.
“I gathered that there was something on your mind.” She straightened in her chair as Bruno gave her the Cherub with Chariot Egg wrapped in cloth.
Nadia slid a pair of reading glasses onto her nose and, pulling the cloth away, examined the egg, her hands shaking. Her face became flushed; her eyes brightened. Verlaine could see that she was struggling to contain her reactions.
“Where did you get this?” she asked at last, her voice filled with excitement.
“It was found among Vladimir’s effects by your daughter and, by various twists and turns over the past twenty-four hours, came into our possession,” Verlaine explained, glancing at Bruno, to see how much information he could divulge.
“We believe that Angela Valko gave it to Vladimir,” Bruno said.
“Perhaps with the intention that he would hold it for Evangeline,” Verlaine added.
“They brought it to me, at the Hermitage, and I was able to help them identify it as one of the missing Fabergé eggs,” Vera said.
“Now I understand why you are here,” Nadia said, weighing the egg in the palm of her hand.
“You recognize it?”
“Of course. It was in my parents’ possession for many years. It was the companion of the egg you see in the portrait.”
“Then you understand its significance?” Verlaine asked.
“Perhaps,” Nadia said quietly. Standing, she walked to a shelf filled with dusty books and removed a leather-bound album. “You should know, however, the egg alone is not significant. It is a mere vessel, a kind of time capsule, something that carries significance inside it, preserving it for the future.”
She pressed the pages flat on a table, gently, so that they were clearly visible. The pages were filled with dried flowers, each blossom fixed by a square of clear wax paper. Some pages contained three or four of the same variety of flower, while others featured only a single petal. Nadia moved the pages under a lamp and the colors sharpened. The rows were neat and meticulous, as if the position of each item had been carefully considered before being assigned its place. There were examples of iris, lily of the valley, whole rosebuds closed tight as a fist, and a number of speckled orchid petals that curled like tongues. There were also flowers that Verlaine didn’t recognize, despite the tags pasted below identifying them in Latin. Some petals were as delicate and transparent as the wings of a moth, their fanning tissues pale and dusted with powder. He was tempted to touch them, but they were so lovely and ephemeral, so delicate, that it seemed they would turn to dust at the slightest contact with his finger.