Angelopolis (23 page)

“This very well may have been the fruit that caused the exile of Adam and Eve. But then again,” Valko said, stepping past the apple tree and stopping before a beautiful citrus tree, its leaves lush and glossy. Between the leaves grew clusters of tiny, bright yellow fruit that looked like miniature lemons. “If I were to trade paradise to taste a fruit, it would have to be this one.” He plucked one of the clusters and offered it to his guests. Vera pinched a lemon free and held it under a neon light. It was no bigger than the nail of her thumb, the peel supple and pliable to the touch. “No need to peel it,” Valko said. Vera put one in her mouth.

Azov followed her example. As he bit into the fruit, sweetness filled his tongue, a rich taste that seemed to be distantly related to citrus but had been overlaid with strawberry and cherry, and with darker, more subtle tastes, such as fig and plum. He looked at the tree, wanting to pick a cluster of the lemons.

“How were you able to get so many of the seeds to grow?” Sveti asked.

“I developed a solution of fertilizer and plant hormones in which I soaked the seeds until they began to sprout. In the protection of the greenhouse, most of them thrived. I have kept a record of every blossom on every tree and every fruit that has ripened.” Valko’s delight was apparent as he gestured to his work. “When I close the door to this greenhouse, shutting myself inside with these ancient forms of life, I can almost imagine what the world looked like before the Flood.”

Azov looked carefully at Raphael. His skin was pale and carved with wrinkles, his white hair had been pulled back into a ponytail, and a fine white beard curled to his stomach. What Azov had believed to be a greatcoat revealed itself, under the lights, to be a midnight blue gown that swept to the ankles and made the old scientist look like a magician.

Azov wanted to simply move through the garden, examining the plants. “These new varieties are even more strange and wonderful than I had imagined,” he said at last. “Have you lost any of the seeds?”

“A few,” Valko said. “But not as many as I had initially anticipated. Now that I have the solar energy panels, I have been very successful in growing nearly all of them, and have made enormous progress with my various medicines.”

“Medicines for whom?” Vera asked, her voice trembling. Azov found her excitement charming—he’d delighted in her intelligence and curiosity since she was a child.

“For my own consumption, mainly,” Valko replied.

“Is that wise?” Azov asked. Although he hadn’t mentioned it to Vera and Sveti, he had been tempted to dabble in the medicinal arts but had ultimately resisted. The potential dangers of mixing such medicines outweighed the possible benefits.

“Most are tinctures of ingredients that are perfectly safe when ingested in small quantities,” Valko explained. “I have had only one case of serious toxicity, and that was because I ground the seeds of a cluster of prehistoric grapes into a tea. I should have simply eaten the fruit, I suppose, but I wanted to know if the seeds contained properties associated with longevity, concentrated amounts of undiluted polyphenols that are found in diluted quantities in the seeds of modern fruits. It turned out that the seeds were more powerful than I could have imagined. And, in fact, despite the fact that I got sick a time or two, there were extreme benefits as well. I am an old man, and yet this garden has given me a second youth. I feel and look younger and younger each year.”

Azov studied Raphael closely. At one hundred years old, his vitality was nothing short of astonishing.

“Once I felt the effects of the seeds, I mixed them with the extract from the hemlock plant. It is an extremely powerful concoction.”

“It’s a lethal concoction, Raphael,” Azov said.

“Not quiet lethal,” Valko replied. “With the right dosage, it is a classic example of the
pharmakon
.”

“That’s Greek,” Sveti said, glancing at Vera to make sure she followed. “It refers to a substance that is both a remedy and a poison at once.”

“Well put, my dear,” Valko said. “The seeds have the power to kill me, but the seeds also have the power to prolong my life. This is the basis of homeopathy: At one dosage a substance may do great good. At a different dosage, it kills you. Certainly most medicines and vaccines work on this principle. It has been the North Star of my work. But enough about me and my fountains of youth. Come inside now and tell me what brings you here.”

The Sixth Circle

HERESY

Surveillance Report, June 9, 1984, submitted by Angela Valko

T
his is the first such report I have filed in the history of my time as an angelologist, and I do so with some degree of discomfort. But the horrific nature of my suspicions, and the extent of Dr. Merlin Godwin’s involvement in activities detrimental to our security, require that I report what I have witnessed. I submit this document with the hope that my observations can be of use to the preservation of our work.

My concerns about Godwin began on the night of April 13, 1984, when I came across Dr. Godwin in the street. My husband, Luca, and I were on our way to dinner in a restaurant on the rue de Rivoli when we recognized Godwin. He was ahead, strolling along alone. He wore a three-piece suit and carried a briefcase. We decided to catch up with him, to say hello and invite him for a glass of wine, but before we reached him he was joined by a tall, female creature with the standard angelic traits.

My husband, who was as intrigued as I by this pairing, and whose instinct as an angel hunter pushed him to discover their destination, decided it best to follow. We did, keeping our distance behind Godwin until he stopped on the rue de Temple, where he and the creature entered a restaurant. They took a table near the back, away from human beings. We didn’t dare follow them inside. Dr. Godwin knows me well—he began his career as my intern—and would recognize me instantly.

Luca called a colleague—Vladimir Ivanov, a man who would not have been recognized by Dr. Godwin—and sent him into the restaurant to observe them up close. Vladimir entered the restaurant and sat at the bar, observing, and, within an hour, Godwin and his companion left the restaurant. Vladimir returned to us a short time later, relaying the following surprising information: Godwin had spent the hour in conversation with the woman, whom Vladimir confirmed to be an Emim angel. In his opinion, Godwin was working with the creature. He had spoken of his work at length and, most surprising of all, at the end of their rendezvous, Godwin gave her the briefcase.

Luca and I discussed this at length, speculating about the contents of the briefcase, and in the end decided that we should continue to watch Godwin before making an official report. Consorting with the enemy is a serious offense, but we reasoned that there might be some explanation for his association with the creature. We decided to simply watch and wait.

This was not difficult to do. Godwin has recently been given a laboratory next to mine, and so I had the opportunity to observe him with ease over the course of many weeks. I found nothing out of the ordinary. He works seven days a week; he is solitary; he keeps a strict routine. When I checked in on his work during our weekly appointments, I could find no fault in Dr. Godwin’s experiments.

In the meantime, Luca began to look through profiles of previously hunted and captured creatures. He identified Godwin’s companion as an Emim named Eno. I will not go into further detail about the significance of this name here, but suffice it to say that her identity impressed Luca and me and made us all the more wary of Godwin’s behavior.

On the night of May 30, at eleven o’clock, I saw him leave his laboratory and hurry down the hallway. Again he was dressed in a suit and again he carried his briefcase. I followed him into the elevator and he held the door. He was deferential, bowing in a gentlemanly fashion. I believe now that Godwin must have known more about me than I suspected. For many years I had assumed his slightly awkward manner toward me grew from an inability to speak to women, and that he was too inexperienced and naïve to assert himself in the presence of an attractive colleague. I believed this trait to be a sign of innocence. I would soon see how very wrong I was in this assessment.

As we stood together in the elevator, I noticed him slipping a copper key card into the pocket of his jacket, so that a corner of the metal was visible. Perhaps it was Luca’s influence, but I found myself calculating how I could take the key, what diversionary maneuver I could make to steal it, and what I would do with it once I had it. If Godwin had any secrets—if he were giving our secrets to the Nephilim, as I suspected—then there might be proof in his laboratory.

We walked together through security and left the building. He hailed a taxi and, his gaze never meeting mine, asked if I’d like to share it. Seizing the opportunity, I climbed into the taxi with Godwin. We spoke of office politics, of new policies being implemented for scientists, and of other innocuous subjects, but all the while I was watching the corner of metal poking out of his pocket.

I told the taxi driver to stop and, as I was getting out of the car, I pretended to trip, falling heavily into Godwin’s arms as he held the door open for me. This feint took him off guard and, in the confusion, I plucked the key from his pocket and slid it up my sleeve. Even as I made my apologies for my clumsiness, Godwin climbed into the taxi and disappeared into the night.

I returned to the labs at once and entered Godwin’s office with ease, using his key. The layout was identical to mine, only instead of equipment for the experimental work he’d been presenting to me during our meetings, I found masses of files stacked up on every flat surface of the lab. I began to look through them, trying to find something that would help me to understand Godwin’s association with Eno.

What I discovered shocked me to the core. The folders were stuffed with photographs of angelic creatures in erotic positions, pornographic shots of female and male Nephilim, sadomasochistic couplings between humans and angels, every kind of sexual perversity imaginable. As I moved through the stacks, the photographs became increasingly violent, and soon there were stills of people being tortured and raped and killed by Nephilim. The pleasure the creatures took in human suffering was evident in these photographs, and even now, with some of these images before me, I cannot believe that they exist. Even more unbelievable, however, was a thick book featuring images of the victims after they had been used for pleasure and discarded—the bodies were bruised, bloodied, dismembered, and photographed like trophies. The graphic nature of these images was like nothing I had seen before, and I understood how sheltered I had been from the everyday behavior of the Nephilim, from what horrors they are capable of performing.

As a fellow scientist, I would like to give Godwin the benefit of believing, if possible, that these images are part of his work. If Godwin were exploring the nature of angelic sexuality, he might bring an academic reserve to his participation in the underworld of angelic sex and violence, a coldness in relation to the events that he has photographed. However, I truly do not believe this to be the case, for reasons that will soon be evident.

I spent many hours in Dr. Godwin’s lab that night. Aside from this trove of horrors, I found a number of items that were of intense interest to me, both personally and professionally. The first was a document written by my mother, Gabriella Lévi-Franche, that appears to be a collection of her field notes from 1939–43, the years she worked as an undercover agent while attending the academy. The volume is bound in red leather, in the official manner, signifying that the account was produced and published with the sanction of the council. Until that evening, this period of Gabriella’s life was a mystery to me—she had never told me the details of her wartime work, had never spoken of it to anyone, so far as I had been aware—and so it was with curiosity and trepidation that I opened the red book and looked inside. How Godwin came to possess this book, and what his interest was in my mother’s experiences, is a question I cannot bring myself to answer in this report. I can only record here that the revelations of Gabriella’s report were deeply shocking to me and have repercussions that will seep into every aspect of my life.

As for the second discovery, I am relieved to say, it had a professional importance that almost obscured the pain of the first discovery. On the shelf, prized in the fingers of a silver holder, was an egg.

I recognized it immediately as one of the eggs created by Fabergé for the Romanovs. I spent many childhood afternoons paging through books about the Romanovs—the family was of intense interest to angelologists—and my mother had a large collection of books about the tsar. The egg in Godwin’s laboratory was one of the eight missing eggs. Instantly, picture-book images of these eggs appeared in my mind, crisp and glistening with bright lithographic colors: the Cherub with Chariot Egg; the Empire Nephrite Egg; the Hen Egg; the Emperial Egg; the Nécessaire Egg; the Mauve Egg; the Danish Jubilee Egg; and the Alexander III Egg. Sitting on the shelf was the Hen Egg, its blue enamel surface alive with sapphires. I took it down and, turning it in my hand, found the mechanism and pressed it.