He was ancient when I met him. I imagine he must have passed away by now.”
“Raphael Valko is very much alive,” Vera said. Reaching beneath a shelf, she hauled out a suitcase trimmed in leather. As she opened it, clouds of dust rose into the air, spinning in the weak gleam of the flashlight. Shining the beam across its contents, she picked up a picture frame, the glass coated in a thick film of dust, and gave it to Verlaine. Wiping away the grime, he found an image of Evangeline. She stood between her parents, one hand in her mother’s hand, the other in her father’s. She could not have been much older than five or six years old. Her hair was long and braided; a missing front tooth created a gap in her smile. Evangeline had been a normal kid once. He wished, suddenly, that he had tried harder to protect her. He couldn’t help but feel that he’d gone about everything in the wrong way—they should have captured Evangeline and Eno when they had had the chance. Looking up, he found Bruno holding a folder.
Bruno opened the folder. There was a collection of loose pages inside. A passage had been scribbled on the top page. Bruno read: “To you this tale refers who seek to lead your mind into the upper day, for he who overcomes should turn back his gaze toward the Tartarean cave. Whatever excellence he takes with him he loses when he looks below.”
“Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy,” Verlaine said. The passage was from what had become a veritable mantra of the angelologists, a text that referred to to a geological formation called the Devil’s Throat Cavern, the mountainous cave where the Watchers were imprisoned, and where, angelologists believed, they waited still for their release. He stepped closer, to get a better look at the inscription, and saw that someone had written the words Dad’s translation next to the passage.
“Any ideas?” Verlaine asked Vera.
“This is an early draft of Dr. Raphael Valko’s translation of the Venerable Clematis’s notebook, which was written during the First Angelic Expedition. The most obvious reference of the passage is to the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice—Orpheus rescued his beloved, but at the point of leaving Hades, or Tartarus, he turned back and lost her forever. But Angela Valko thought that this passage referred not just to the myth of Orpheus—and his lyre, which was recovered in the Devil’s Throat Cavern, as you very well know—but to a spiritual journey, the emergence of the individual mind from the darkness of self to find a higher purpose.”
“You make Angela sound like some kind of Sufi mystic,” Bruno said.
“True, she was a bit unusual,” Vera said. “Although a die-hard scientist, she interpreted much of her work as part of a spiritual journey, believing that the material world was the expression of the unconscious, and that this collective unconsciousness was God. The word of God brought forth the universe, and each human being has access to this original language through the unconscious. You might call her a Jungian, I suppose, but there was a history of such mysticism long before Carl Jung. In any case, Angela was interested in this passage for its verticality—the upward trajectory from the pit to the sky, from darkness to light, from hell to heaven. Each step up brought the seeker out of chaos and into a place of beauty and order.”
“Like Jacob’s Ladder,” Verlaine said.
“Or,” Vera said, turning the flashlight into a room, “a passionate collector.”
Verlaine could hardly believe his eyes. There, displayed in glass cases, was an incredible collection of eggs—thousands of varieties of bird eggs: plain bird eggs glazed with paint; dodo eggs cut apart and labeled; robin’s eggs preserved in formaldehyde, with the chick still curled against the shell, delicate as a bean in a pod. There were crystal eggs, jeweled eggs, eggs from the courts of Denmark and France. The assortment was singular and obsessive, qualities that piqued Verlaine’s curiosity.
“The egg you showed me in the research center would fit very nicely here, don’t you think?” Vera asked.
“Perfectly,” Bruno said under his breath. “Where did they come from?”
“I haven’t uttered a word about this to anyone,” Vera said, “but I don’t come down here to simply admire the eggs. I believe the fact that Angela Valko had one of Fabergé’s eggs in her possession—and found a way to catalog the egg in our archives—is more than just a coincidence.”
“You can’t seriously think there is a