Angelopolis A Novel Page 0,79
no way out of there.
Although Verlaine had never seen Sneja Grigori before, he knew at once that this was the matriarch of the Grigori family. She lay on a leather couch, her body stretched from one end to the other. Two Anakim angels hovered over her, one feeding her pieces of baklava and the other holding a tray with a flute of champagne. Sneja was so enormous that Verlaine wondered how she had walked onto the train, and how she would, when the train reached its destination, descend. She wore what looked like a silk curtain wrapped around her body, and her hair had been tucked up into a turban. As he came closer to the bed, Sneja lifted her great, toadlike eyes. “Welcome to Siberia,” she said, assessing him with a sharp gaze. Her voice was gravelly, abrasive, smoky. “My nephews predicted that you would be coming, although they did not have the slightest notion that you would be making the trip as my personal guest.”
“Your nephews?” Verlaine said. Glancing behind Sneja, he saw that the first twin had been joined by his brother. They stood side by side, beautiful as cherubs, their blond hair curling around their shoulders, their large eyes fixed upon Verlaine.
“You met them in St. Petersburg,” Sneja said, taking a piece of baklava and placing it delicately on her tongue. “With our favorite mercenary angel, Eno, who I believe will be—with the assistance of my nephews—breaking free any moment.”
Sneja nodded to the twins, who turned and walked toward the exit.
“Now,” Sneja said, clasping her flute of champagne and taking a long sip. “Tell me what you know about my granddaughter.”
Verlaine narrowed his eyes, trying to read Sneja’s expression through the thick smoke. It seemed to him that she was a sea creature emerging from the murk of a dark ocean. “I don’t know who you mean,” he said at last.
“With the thousands of possible ways that I could kill you—the slow and painful death, the quick and bloody death, the playful death—you had better try to understand quickly. Evangeline is the single descendant of a noble and illustrious family, the sole child of my son, Percival.”
“You don’t have her already?”
Sneja growled something in German and threw Verlaine a look of contempt. “Don’t play games with me.”
Verlaine tried to understand what Sneja was talking about. Eno had taken Evangeline in Paris. If she hadn’t given her over to the Grigoris, what had she done with her?
“You can’t be right about her patrimony,” Verlaine said, deciding to feign ignorance. “Evangeline doesn’t even look like Percival.”
Suddenly, Sneja’s mood shifted. “You knew my son?”
“I worked for your son,” Verlaine said. “I saw him dead in New York. He was broken and pathetic, like a bird with clipped wings.”
She placed her champagne glass on the silver platter and, pointing her finger at Verlaine, said, “Remove him.”
Moving with the easy grace of a trained agent, Verlaine pulled his gun from his jacket and trained it on Sneja. Before he could bring his finger to the trigger, angelic creatures appeared from all sides, stepping before Sneja, surrounding him. A wing slithered around him, knocking his gun from his hand.
“Tie him up outside,” Sneja said. “I’d like to kill him here and now, but I cannot tolerate the mess.”
One of the creatures yanked Verlaine’s arms and bound them together, pushing him toward the end of the lounge. It kicked open a door and dragged Verlaine out onto a narrow viewing ledge and roped him to the metal banister. His head was pressed flat against the icy railing so that he saw the flash of the tracks flicking by, strips of brown against the white snow. Verlaine struggled against the rope, his warm breath rising into the frigid air. The freezing wind whipped against him, stinging his skin. Looking up, he saw an immense tableau of faint stars holding their light against the morning sky. Looking beyond, he saw the endless crystalline white of the Siberian plain. The train moved onward, slowly, relentlessly toward the east, where the sun was emerging on the horizon. Verlaine felt ice forming in the crevices of his eyelids and knew, within the hour, he would freeze to death.
Deposition of Katya Badmaiova, St. Petersburg, 1976
I was a girl of ten years old when my father brought Rasputin to our home. I knew who he was—even I had heard the stories about him—but I was startled to find that he wasn’t as handsome as I had imagined. I couldn’t understand