Angelopolis (11 page)

A hint of cruelty shone in Angela’s eyes, and Verlaine understood that she had succeeded in turning the interview around. Percival Grigori was once again in her power.

Angela hesitated for a moment, and then, taking the syringe in hand, moved toward him. Verlaine sensed with growing alarm that he should not be there, should not be witnessing Angela Valko’s final interaction with her father. In the decades since the film had been made, the virus in her syringe had infected 60 percent of the Nephilim, killing and disabling the creatures with a vicious efficiency. The disease had been such a powerful force that many in the society had joked that it was a pestilence sent from heaven to help along their work.

But Verlaine knew a terrible truth that Angela did not: The personal wager she was making would fail. The angel would tell her his secrets, but there would be consequences. Soon, within days after the film was shot, Angela Valko would lose her life.

The Third Circle

GLUTTONY

Angelopolis, Chelyabinsk, Russia

D
r. Merlin Godwin noted the heaviness of Evangeline’s breath, the labored flickering of her eyes, the expression of despair that crossed her face whenever she came back into consciousness. The last time he saw her she had been a little girl. She had stared at him with intransigent curiosity. He had spent twenty-five years looking for her, all the while hoping to have her just as he did now, weak as a dragonfly dessicated in the sun.

“Come, come, have some water,” he said, when she opened her eyes once more. Smiling, he poured water over her lips, letting it drip over her chin. The drugs were effective. Even if the straps were loosened she wouldn’t have the strength to lift her head.

“Do you remember me?” he whispered, caressing her arm with his finger. When it was clear that Evangeline had no clue who he was, he added, his voice little more than a whisper. “It was so long ago, but surely you recall how you came to see me with your mother.”

At Angela Valko’s request, Godwin had handled the scheduling of the visits, asking only that he organize the sessions with Evangeline when the lab was empty. As a result, they had met early in the morning or later in the evening, when the others had left the building. He had examined Evangeline himself, taking her pulse, listening to her breathe. He couldn’t help being moved at how the stolid Angela Valko, renowned for her sangfroid in the most unnerving situations, held her daughter close, steadying the girl’s trembling body as the needle slid into the vein, the bright vermilion blood drawn swiftly into the barrel of the syringe. The clinical nature of the procedure seemed to reassure Angela but not Evangeline—she had an instinctual fear that seemed to Godwin to belong less to a little girl than to a wild animal caught in a cage.

During each session, Angela watched the procedure with rapt attention, and Godwin could never tell if she felt anxiety or curiosity, if she secretly hoped to discover something unusual in the blood. But there was never anything at all unusual about the results when they came back from the lab. Still, Godwin had kept a sample from each session, labeling the vials and locking them in his medical case.

“Your mother insisted on the exams herself,” Godwin whispered, dabbing a drop of water from Evangeline’s chin. “And although she demonstrated a reasonable concern for your well-being, it’s difficult to understand the motives of a mother subjecting her own child to such invasive scrutiny. Unless, of course, she was not entirely human.”

Evangeline tried to speak. She had been heavily drugged. Although her voice was weak, and she could not focus her eyes, Godwin understood her when she said, “But my mother was human.”

“Yes, well, Nephilistic traits can appear in a human being, manifesting like a cancer,” Godwin said, walking to a table of medical instruments. A series of scalpels, the edges of varying acuity, lay in a line as if waiting for him. He chose one—not the sharpest but not the dullest either—and returned to Evangeline. “Both you and your mother appeared to be human, but angelic qualities could have—how shall I say it?—blossomed in you like a black and noxious flower. No one can say for sure why it happens, and it is quite rare for a human-born creature to transform, but it has occurred in the past.”

“And if there had been a change?” Evangeline asked.

“I would have been very pleased to have seen this happen,” Godwin said, his fingers rolling the scalpel. Once upon a time he had been Angela’s most prized student, the first in years to be granted his own laboratory, and the only one to be taken into her confidence. What she had not considered, and what he had not allowed her to see, was the extent of his ambition. “Unfortunately, neither of you showed signs of being anything but human. Your blood was red, for example, and you were born with a navel. But if you had changed, or shown signs of changing, and the angelologists had discovered this, you would have been handled in the usual fashion.”

“Which is?”

“You would have been studied.”

“You mean to say that we would have been killed.”

“You did not know your mother well,” Godwin said, lightly. “She was above all else a scientist. Angela would have applauded the rigorous empirical study of any one of the creatures. She allowed you to be tested. Indeed, she pushed to have you studied.”

“And if I were one of them?” Evangeline asked. “Would she have sacrificed me?”

Godwin wanted to smile. He bit his lip instead, and concentrated upon the cold metal of the scalpel. “It makes no difference what she would have wanted. If there had been any sign of a genetic likeness to the Nephilim, and the society was alerted to this fact, you would have been removed from your mother’s care.”

Evangeline strained against the leather straps. “My mother would have resisted.”

“That her father was a Grigori was completely unknown at the time. Her heritage was hidden—from herself, from other agents—out of necessity. Your grandmother Gabriella understood that if it were known that Angela was an angel, such a taint would have ruined them both. The threat was not in what she was, but what she could become. Or, rather,” Godwin said, meeting Evangeline’s eye, “the danger was in her genetic potential—in what her body could create.”

“The threat was me.”

“I wouldn’t say that you pose much of a threat, Evangeline,” Godwin said, placing the scalpel on Evangeline’s neck and pressing it against her skin.

Godwin slid the sharp edge under Evangeline’s white skin until a bulb of blue blood rose, collecting into a globe. He watched it rise and fall over her collarbone, pooling and expanding in the arc of her neck. He took a glass vial from the table. Holding it to the light, he felt a surge of triumph.

Hermitage Bridge, Winter Canal, St. Petersburg

V
erlaine’s thoughts were in a state of chaos as he walked with Vera and Bruno alongside the palace embankment, the dark water of the canal sluicing by below, glistening as if coated with a layer of oil. Two grand buildings rose on each side of the stone pathway, ornate and Italianate, and, for a moment, Verlaine had the feeling he was walking through a historical film about the Renaissance, that noblemen in velvet cloaks would step from behind the shadows. The contrast between his physical surroundings and the images playing in his mind—of Angela and Percival and the syringe filled with the virus—left him disoriented.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw Vera gesture from one building to the other. “Old Hermitage and the Hermitage Theater.”

Verlaine stepped ahead, replaying the film in his mind. Of all he had seen in the Hermitage, the image of Percival Grigori haunted him most. His golden wings, his long body glistening with the amber excretion, the ropes cinching his wrists and ankles—Percival had been a sublime creature, one that Verlaine didn’t fear so much as admire. Of course Verlaine had seen such angels before. He’d interrogated many in much the same fashion as Angela had. But now something had shifted inside him. Now that he had seen Evangeline up close, touched her wings and taken in the chill of her body, it was impossible for Verlaine to think that the Nephilim were simply the enemy, nothing more than horrible parasites that had attached themselves to humanity, devils marked for extermination. He felt both strangely repulsed by the aims and methods of the society and desperate for them to help him find Evangeline.

He turned to Vera. She had caught up with him and was walking by his side, her hands shoved into the pockets of her jacket.

“There is absolutely no record of this structure, this Angelolopolis, anywhere,” she said, as if they’d been discussing the subject all along. “Not a single angelologist has seen such a place, nor has an expeditionary team attempted to locate one.”

“That is because nobody in his right mind would consider the possibility that the Nephilim would actually construct one,” Bruno said, walking behind them.

Verlaine turned back to look at Bruno. “And yet,” he said, annoyed by Bruno’s dismissive manner, “Percival Grigori spoke of it as if it were already under way.”

“The video was taken nearly three decades ago,” Bruno replied. “If they’d constructed such a thing, we would know about it.”

“Grigori could have been lying,” Vera offered. “An Angelopolis is a utopia of angelic creatures, something everyone hears about at school but never wholly believes to be real. The Nephilim may have wanted to build it, but that doesn’t mean that it was physically possible to do so. It’s a concept more than anything, an idea that has existed for the angels since the great massacre of the Flood.”

“Stories of a mythical angel paradise called an Angelopolis are like Peter Pan’s Never Never Land,” Bruno said.

“But the film points to the fact that the Nephilim—at least Percival Grigori—were working to build it,” Verlaine said. “He mentioned Valkine. They had a sample of Evangeline’s blood. It seems clear to me that whatever they wanted from Evangeline in 1984 is the same motive for why they want her now.”

Vera stopped abruptly and turned to Verlaine. “Evangeline Cacciatore hasn’t been seen since 1999.”

Verlaine looked across the water of the Winter Canal, his gaze settling upon the wide stretch of embankment.

Bruno said, “Evangeline was abducted by an Emim angel last evening in Paris. Verlaine had the honor of speaking with her beforehand. The Cherub with Chariot Egg was in her possession—that is how it came to us.”

“And that is why you came to me,” Vera said.

“You’re our best chance at understanding this,” Verlaine said, struggling to control the sense of urgency he felt. “This can’t all be a coincidence. The Nephilim went after Evangeline for a reason. Angela, the egg, the film, this fairy tale of an Angelopolis—this has to be more than a wild-goose chase.”

“Sure,” Bruno said. “But the function of the Angelopolis, the purpose for building it, its exact location—Percival Grigori didn’t give anything away.”

“True,” Vera said. “We need to find out what was said after the recording stopped.”

“They’re all dead,” Verlaine mumbled. “Vladimir, Angela, Luca—even Percival Grigori.”

“Actually, not all of the participants of that interview are gone,” Bruno said, walking off ahead, scanning the streets for a taxi.

A frigid wind blew off the canal, and Verlaine pulled his jacket close to his body. A cluster of Mara angels stood under the stone archway, the granite façade reflecting the illumination of their sallow skin. They rarely came out in daylight; their sunken eyes spoke of hundreds of years of living in the shadows. Their wings were mottled green and orange with streaks of blue, as iridescent as peacock feathers in the blue light of dawn. There was something disconcerting about seeing the creatures standing before the lovely archway of the bridge, a kind of dislocation that took a moment to adjust to. If it had been a normal morning, and they had been in Paris, Bruno would have insisted that they take the whole lot of them in.

After what seemed like an eternity, a beat-up station wagon rattled to the curb and stopped abruptly. Bruno gave the driver an address and they climbed in. As they pulled away, Verlaine noticed a sleek black car emerge behind them. It followed them, keeping an even pace with the taxi.

“You see that?” Vera asked.

Bruno nodded. “I’m keeping my eye on it.”

Verlaine leaned against the door and watched the car, waiting for Vera to meet his eye. She smiled slightly and brushed her hand over his. Her gesture was ambiguous, and he was certain she meant it to be that way.

•   •   •

The taxi sped past the Theatre Arts Academy on Mokhovaya Street and, after crossing Pestel, let them off on a narrow avenue lined with trees. The windows of bars and cafés were lit up, while stores were still shuttered and locked, the glass protected by metal cages.

“Drop us here,” Bruno said, directing the driver to leave them near a crowded bar. They got out and walked some blocks, Bruno looking over his shoulder the whole time before stopping at a shop with weathered stucco chipping from the façade. A sign above the door read
LA VIEILLE RUSSIE
.