Angelopolis A Novel Page 0,21
was constructed by Peter Carl Fabergé for the Russian tsar in 1885, and delighted Empress Maria Feodorovna, who had seen similar creations in her childhood at the Danish court. Fabergé was commissioned to create a new and original egg each year. The jeweler was given the artistic license to design the eggs according to his imagination, and, as you can probably guess, they grew more elaborate—and more expensive—with time. The only requirement of Fabergé was that there must be a new egg each Easter and that each must contain a surprise.”
Vera took the chariot and the cherub and placed it on one of the oak reading tables. It seemed to Verlaine like a precious windup toy that might, with the twist of a key, twitch into motion.
“Some of the surprises were miniatures, like this one,” Vera continued. “Others were jeweled brooches or portraits of the tsar and his family painted onto ivory. After Tsar Alexander III died in 1894, his son Nikolai II took up the tradition, commissioning two eggs each year, one for his mother and the other for his wife, Empress Alexandra. There were fifty-four eggs designed for the Romanovs in total. After the 1917 revolution, many were confiscated. Those that were not were dispersed—smuggled out of Russia and sold to collectors or passed on to the living relations of the Romanovs. Since then, they have become museum pieces and treasures for the rich. There are a number of them here at the Hermitage, and Buckingham Palace houses dozens as well. The Forbes family collected them for years, and Grace Kelly was given one—the Blue Serpent Clock Egg—for her wedding to Prince Rainier. The eggs are extremely valuable, rare, and, as a result, have become coveted displays of wealth and taste, especially after the Forbes auction. Of the fifty-four original imperial eggs, the location of eight is unknown. Collectors believe they were lost, destroyed by revolutionaries, stolen, or kept hidden in private vaults. This egg—and its cherub and chariot surprise—is one of the missing eight.”
Bruno gave the egg a dismissive look. “It’s not really missing if we have it,” he noted.
“To the world at large—and to collectors especially—it has disappeared,” Vera said. She plucked the golden chariot from the table and turned it over. Squinting, she examined the chassis, pushing it with her fingernail. Suddenly, a gold plate slid out. “Ah,” Vera said, smiling triumphantly, as she showed Verlaine a series of Cyrillic letters stamped across the plate.
Verlaine couldn’t begin to decipher it. “What does it say?”
“Hermitage,” Vera said. She held up the plate for Verlaine to get a better look. He saw a string of numbers etched over the length of the plate, the numbers so faint that he had to squint to see them. “After the revolution there was a committee formed to catalog the Romanov treasures. They added numbers to many of the items—sometimes even painting them onto the canvases of Rembrandts—to identify their place in the archival storage area. Often the numbers rubbed off, or the identification tags were lost, leaving a holy mess of miscataloged and forgotten objects in the archive.”
Verlaine tucked the egg into his pocket and said, “You seem to know a lot about this.”
“Unfortunately, my first years here were spent doing such drudge work. I would find the strangest things shoved into the archival vaults.” Vera sighed and returned her gaze to the egg. “The interesting thing about this, however, is that while most of the Romanov treasures were cataloged, the Fabergé eggs were not.”
“But the plate you found?” Bruno said.
“Clearly the number was inserted into the egg by someone else,” Vera said.
“But why?” Verlaine asked.
Vera smiled softly, and Verlaine realized that there was truly more to what Vera was saying than he had imagined. “Come with me. There’s only one way to know for sure.”
• • •
They left the reading room and turned into a corridor off the main entrance of the research center, passing door after door, each one identical to the one before, until Vera stopped abruptly at an electronic keypad. Vera pressed her thumb against it and an adjacent entryway clicked open.
Her high heels clicked on the polished marble as she led them into an immense gilded Rococo space. The ceilings glittered with chandeliers, and glass cases lined the walls, holding objects donated by past angelologists: a treatise on the seraphim by Duns Scotus; a scrying stone that had belonged to John Dee; a gold model of the lyre of Orpheus; a clipping of hair taken