Angelopolis A Novel Page 0,74
Sveti following close behind. Inside, she found a large room illuminated by gas lamps and filled with ropes, boots, and belts with rock hammers. Windbreakers and backpacks had been piled on a couch, and a large map of the Rhodopes hung on the wall, its surface filled with colored pins. From the state of disorder it was clear that visitors were a rare phenomenon. As she looked over the mess, she realized that she was exhausted. The few hours of sleep she’d had on the plane weren’t enough to sustain her. The mission was beginning to wear on her.
“My explorations have taken me to nearly every part of these mountains,” Valko said, seeing Vera’s interest in the map. “I left the Paris academy after Angela’s death because, quite frankly, I couldn’t bear to be reminded of her. But I’ve come to realize that there was another reason I left: I needed to go back to the source of my work, the inspiration for all of my efforts.”
Running his finger over the map, he stopped at the Devil’s Throat Cavern.
“My major discoveries have always occurred when I returned to the original dwelling places of the Nephilim—the Alps, or the Pyrenees, or the Himalayas.”
“Or the Rhodopes,” Azov said.
“Correct. The places most important to the creatures are always located in the remotest regions of the earth, away from human eyes.”
A door opened and a girl walked into the room. She appeared to be between ten and twelve years old and wore jeans, tennis shoes, and a pale yellow sweater that matched her bobbed blond hair. She had blue eyes and the distinct patrician features of Dr. Raphael Valko. Vera guessed her to be the daughter Azov had mentioned. Looking her over more carefully, she detected a scar running along the side of the girl’s face, a wide pale track of healed stitches crawling along the line of her jaw, past her ear and into her hairline. The girl set a cup of tea on her father’s desk and looked at the others, as if curious to see so many visitors.
“Thank you, Pandora,” Valko said.
Vera wondered if this was a tea made from the plants Valko had grown from Azov’s Black Sea seeds. Not that Valko seemed the sort to acknowledge others’ contributions. He had invited them inside to hear their reasons for coming to Smolyan, but not even Azov had managed to get a word in edgewise.
Sensing a gap in Valko’s monologue, Vera cleared her throat and said, “There is something I am hoping you can help me with, Dr. Valko.”
“I gathered as much,” he said, taking the cup and drinking. “You’ve come a long way to speak with me. I hope that I can help.”
“Vera has found documents pertaining to the medicines of Noah,” Azov said.
Valko seemed unnaturally calm, as if he were in a trance. “My daughter would have been very interested to speak with you about this matter, if she were alive.”
“So Angela did have an interest in this concoction?” Vera asked, standing and walking to the door, where she gazed out over the garden. The first light of dawn suffused the sky above the courtyard. She reached into her satchel for the Book of Flowers—which overnight had come to seem more her own than Rasputin’s or the Romanovs’—and stepped back into the room.
“Interest?” Valko said, smiling slightly, his gaze resting on the book. “I should say it was more than that. My daughter’s connection wasn’t theoretical. Her involvement brought her deep into the secrets of the nature of angelic life on this planet. In the end she succeeded in learning things that put her in danger.”
“You think that this information led to her death?” Azov asked.
“Most probably,” Valko said, an air of sadness in his manner. “But in the beginning it was an exhilarating, if highly doubtful, quest. Rasputin’s journal came to Angela almost out of the sky.”
“Nadia mentioned that Vladimir simply presented it to her one day,” Vera said.
“Of course, the ease with which it arrived in her life made her suspicious—it could have been a fake; it could have been created to trick her—but in the end she believed that Rasputin’s work was authentic, that he was one more magus seeking the formula cited so cryptically in the Book of Jubilees—Noah, Nicolas Flamel, Newton, John Dee. The chain of seekers is long.”
“And so she came to believe in the quest,” Sveti said.
“Perhaps more pertinent is the question of why Rasputin would attempt to create a potion so