Angelopolis Read online

  “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 connection between one of our best scientists and this collection,” Bruno said.

  “Quite,” Vera responded crisply. “I won’t bore you with my research any more than necessary, but one of my pet projects at the moment has to do with Nephilim reproduction. It just so happens that once upon a time egg births were common among the purest breeds, their offspring superior in strength, beauty, agility, and intelligence.”

  Verlaine’s eyes fell upon an illustration from Albrecht Dürer’s famous Manual of Measurement propped up among the eggs. He had heard of Dürer’s theory of the egg line, and his obsession with the egg, with its perfect euclidean shape, as the vessel through which pure angels were born. Verlaine had dismissed the idea. It seemed to him that when angelologists couldn’t prove their work with hard facts, they fell to creating airy theories. He wasn’t sure whether Vera’s support of such an idea granted it credence or if it proved that she was out of her mind.

  Vera continued. “Many of the royal families in Europe longed for an egg-born heir, and they mated with this in mind, arranging marriages with other royal families based on their reproductive prospects. Nevertheless, as time went on, Nephilim eggs became more and more rare.”

  “Enter Carl Fabergé,” Verlaine said.

  “Indeed,” Vera replied. “Clearly, the Romanovs were not immune to the ostentatious fuss over the eggs. Fabergé played on this obsession. His eggs were precious and intricate objects that, when cracked open, revealed a surprise that spoke of the secret desires of kings—the most precious surprise of all would be an heir hatched from an egg. The tradition of giving enameled eggs at Easter stemmed from the imperial family’s longing for another such birth. Indeed, all the Nephilim of Russia wanted an egg-hatched heir. Such an event would be prestigious, and would guarantee instant advancement.”

  “If this were the case, why aren’t we seeing eggs now?” Bruno asked.

  “There’s no concrete answer to this question, but it seems that the Nephilim lost their ability to create the eggs. There were no egg births after the seventeenth century, as far as I know, but that did not kill hope. At the court of Louis XIV, there was such a fuss about the production of an egg that the court confectioner created elaborate chocolate eggs and presented them to the king and queen at Easter. The surprise at the center of the egg was something of an inside joke, one that the royal families understood all too well. Suddenly eggs were everywhere. The fashion for eggs spread to the masses. Ordinary human families began to color chicken eggs, and factories molded chocolate eggs by the millions, some of which contained small toys inside, a direct reference to the surprise of the jeweled eggs, which, of course, referred to the coveted angelic child. Human beings have copied Nephilim habits without realizing that they were celebrating the hatching of their oppressors. It is a great irony that chocolate eggs are now so common at Easter. When you eat a Cadbury egg you don’t realize that you are following this tradition without understanding its origin, or the joke.”

  “For Christians, the eggs symbolize the resurrection of Christ,” Bruno said. “There is nothing Nephilistic about that.”

  “On the surface this appears to be compatible with the Christian celebration of Easter,” Vera said. “But if you look deeper you will see that the egg symbol has little to do with the church. The decoration of eggs, the Orthodox practice of breaking eggs on Easter morning, the egg hunt—these are all popular practices whose real origin is obscure. Of course, there is the pagan Germanic goddess Eostre, whose feast day was celebrated in the spring, but ask the man on the street why he’s coloring eggs at Easter, and he has no idea.”

  “Wouldn’t there be Christmas eggs rather than Easter eggs?” Verlaine asked.

  “Christmas is a celebration of Jesus’s human birth,” Vera said. “Easter, his second, spiritual, immortal birth. One birth within the next. An egg within an egg.” Vera placed the flashlight on a table. “Which brings us back to our purpose in this room. Someone—Angela Valko most likely—added the metal card to the surprise at the heart of Fabergé’s Cherub with Chariot Egg. She intended for whoever would discover the egg to watch the film stored in the archives.”

  Vera walked to a gray plastic box at the far side of the room and carried it to the table. She flipped a series of metal clasps and revealed an old film projector. Unwinding a cord, she plugged it into a makeshift socket hanging from the wall, its wires dangerously exposed. An electric buzz hummed through the projector, and, with a flip of a switch, a searing white light blazed onto the wall, cutting a perfect square of light.

  “Voilà,” she said. “Give me the reel of film.”

  As Verlaine placed the film in Vera’s hand, he felt another tremor of anxiety. Perhaps it was filled with nothing more than images of lab equipment, or, worse, it had been damaged and would spit out a series of distorted and indecipherable images.

  Vera locked the reel into place and fiddled with the levers until they were in the correct positions. After feeding the film into the catch and turning the wheel so that it spooled, she pressed a button, and the reels began to move. A flickering of sepia frames flashed over the limestone wall, and then, as if by some feat of magic much stronger than any charm taught at the Academy of Angelology, Angela Valko appeared before them.

  Verlaine’s muscles stiffened at the sight of Evangeline’s mother, as if the electricity that powered the projector had funneled itself through his spine. Angela’s face was serious, her blond hair tied back in a ponytail, her large blue eyes staring into the camera, and into the eyes of the people who had gathered together to try to understand the message she left behind.

  Verlaine felt the irrational urge to speak to the woman on the wall, to reach out and touch the insubstantial light that flickered in the dusty air, to draw close to the illusion. She was beautiful and—Verlaine could only make the comparison now, after having seen Percival Grigori in person—a near replica of her Nephilistic father. She wore a white lab jacket unbuttoned to reveal a black turtleneck. The laboratory was sterile, orderly, with large glass windows and a polished concrete floor. Droppers, tongs,
tubes, and other equipment he couldn’t readily identify were arrayed on a shelf behind her. A series of beakers had been placed at hand, some filled with liquid, others with powders. Something flashed at her throat. Verlaine looked more closely until he made out a necklace—the lyre pendant he’d touched only hours before—at her throat.

  Suddenly Evangeline’s father stepped into the frame. Striking in his T-shirt and jeans, Luca looked nothing like the man Verlaine had imagined him to be. In the film he was young and vibrant, filled with energy and determination. He had long black hair that fell over his brow, tanned skin, dark eyes. There was an aura of care in his movements—he stepped deeper into the frame and paused to be certain everything was in place—but he had a buoyancy about him that seemed at odds with the accounts Verlaine had heard. The founder of the angel hunter unit was, as legend had it, a darkly laconic man, a warrior whose strategic mind allowed him to trap and kill angels with an ease most angelologists found unnerving.

  The couple exchanged a look of complicity—as if they had planned every last detail of the film—and Luca leaned over and kissed Angela’s cheek, a quick gesture, one that he might have performed without thought many times each day, but in the kiss it was clear how profoundly he had loved her.

  A strange, guttural noise—half moan, half growl—caused Angela to turn. The camera, following her gaze, panned over the lab and settled on a creature. The Nephil was suspended from a metal hook, its feet dangling above the floor. Although the creature was male, the long, white-blond hair, narrow shoulders, and elegant, tapering waist gave it a delicate beauty. Bright copper wings fell around its body like the feathers of a dead bird. The creature had been stripped, perhaps beaten, most likely sedated, as it seemed to be in a state of confusion.

  As a captive of the flickering image, Verlaine was horrified and fascinated at once. It was beautiful and grotesque, like a fairy caught in a spider’s web, its luminous skin creating the softest glow through the glass. He recognized the honeylike liquid that oozed over its skin, sliding slowly over the creature’s chest and legs, dripping from its suspended feet and pooling on the glass floor—it was the same excretion that coated Evangeline’s skin when he’d touched her earlier. For an unsettling moment he imagined how Evangeline would react to such bondage. Would she struggle if the ropes burned her wrists? Would she fold her wings against her body like a shield as they interrogated her? Luca must have beaten the creature—there was no other explanation for its condition—and it remained to be seen whether he would resort to even more violent methods. A wave of nausea came over Verlaine, and he wanted, suddenly, to walk out of the room and breathe the fresh cold air aboveground.

  Angela Valko began to speak. “To those who object to our methods of obtaining information, I say this: We can no longer submit to the moral code created two thousand years ago by our founding fathers that requires us to fight with approved methods. We have acted with dignity, showing restraint and judgment in our fight. As a result, our enemies have become more vicious than ever. They evolve in their methods to harm us. We must, in turn, evolve in our methods of defense. Angelologists who have worked with me, either in the academy or here at my laboratory, know that I am no reactionary. My work has been a steady accumulation of facts gleaned through observation and experimentation. I am a scientist, and I would prefer to be left in peace, to continue my work. My belief that the Nephilim can be routed only by hard work over multiple human lifetimes hasn’t changed. But it is clear that the reach of the creatures has grown and that we must respond. The angelic life-forms around the globe multiply exponentially each year. The victory of the creatures over humanity is at hand, and it seems that we must stand by and watch their ascendancy. We have fought too long and too hard to lose our war against the Nephilim. I will not allow that to happen. It is to that end that I record this communication. It is not an apology for what Luca and I intend to do but an attempt to demonstrate our motives and, in the case of our deaths, which both Luca and I realize to be a very strong possibility, to help other angelologists to understand the secret structures the Nephilim are building.”

  Another man stepped into the frame, and Verlaine was startled to see a young Vladimir Ivanov. Verlaine calculated that he had encountered Vladimir in New York nearly twenty years after this film was made. In 1999 Vladimir’s whole manner had been that of a man exhausted by life; in the 1984 film he was a man fully energized by his work. Next to Vladimir was a woman Verlaine did not recognize. She wore a white lab coat over a brown dress. She was so still, so statuesque in her manner, that Verlaine hardly registered her presence.

  “That is Nadia,” Bruno whispered. “Vladimir’s wife, a lab tech who assisted Angela in her work. After Angela’s murder, she quit her work at the academy. When Vladimir left for New York, she didn’t go with him.”

  Verlaine turned back to the film just as Vladimir was putting his arms around the angel’s chest and lifting it from the hook. The creature was unwieldy—at least two feet taller than the men in the room with it. Struggling, it hissed, its body contracting and writhing as Vladimir bound it to the chair, the ropes cinching tighter as it moved. The creature’s wings hung outside of the stays, falling limp as bat wings until suddenly, in desperation, the angel thrust them open, striking Angela in the face and slamming her against the wall. Verlaine’s urge to protect Angela, to pull her away from the creature, felt even stronger than before, a feeling mirrored by Luca: The camera jolted and wavered, then stabilized as Luca set it onto the table and rushed into the frame. He grabbed the creature, wrenched the wings closed, and, holding the angel steady, assisted Vladimir in binding the wings.

  “Let’s get on with this,” Angela said, her voice hardened. The left side of her face had been scratched. She pulled a chair close to the bound angel, balanced a notebook on her lap, and tapped a pen against the paper. The metallic click of the spring pounded an even rhythm as Angela spoke.

  “Interrogation of Nephil male, 1984, Montparnasse, Paris.”

  Angela glanced at Luca, as if to check that he was filming the exchange, and then turned her attention back to the angel. “The creature was captured on the rue de Rivoli at approximately 1:30 A.M., and injected with ketamine en route to our facilites in Montparnasse. Preliminary observations suggest the creature to be between two hundred and three hundred years old, with the characteristics of all Nephilim. Initial attempts to interview the subject were fruitless. He remains unresponsive.”

  Angela looked at the angel, and Luca followed with the camera. The creature stared at his interrogator through narrowed eyes. His face was flushed with anger, and his breathing—whether from the cinch of the ropes or the strain of fury—came in labored bursts. Veins snaked over his skin, as if they might explode with the pressure of his blood.

  Angela looked at him with a cold, clinical eye and said, “Are you ready to begin?”

  The creature’s nostrils flared. He displayed a level of belligerence consistent with Nephilim of his rank and heritage. Verlaine recognized the insouciant, indignant anger of the fallen angel. Although he had not read Milton for years, he couldn’t help but think of Lucifer—the brightest star of heaven—falling to the depths of the earth, undone by beauty and pride.

  “Speak, beast,” Vladimir said, stepping behind the angel and tightening the ropes.

  The creature closed his eyes and said, “If words were shields, my voice would rally to my defense.” His words seemed to float upon his light, buoyant voice, its tone taken from the pure registers of the angels.

  “Riddles will get you nowhere,” Vladimir said.

  “Then I will remain stationary for the time being,” the creature said.

  Vladimir assessed the angel and, with a swift movement, slapped him across the face. A stream of blue blood slid over his lips and chin and dripped onto his chest. He smiled a vicious, devilish smile, one filled with arrogance. “Do you really believe pain is an effective method? I have lived through things you cannot begin to imagine.”

/>   Angela stood, placed the notebook and pen on the chair, crossed her arms over her chest, and said to Luca, “Perhaps he’ll be more cooperative if I speak to him by myself.”

  The camera moved abruptly, and Luca—setting the device onto a table, leaving Angela and the angel in view—stepped into the frame. “There is no way I’m leaving you alone with this thing,” he said.

  Angela placed her hand on his arm, as if to assuage his worries. “He can’t do much under the circumstances. I know he has information we can use, if we can get him to talk. If you hear anything alarming, come back in.” Angela glanced at the creature, who had closed his eyes, as if waiting for the ordeal to end. A look of determination passed over her features, and Verlaine knew that she was testing herself against the creature, marking her strength and intelligence against it, placing her bets on her ability to defeat it. He recognized the feeling. It was exactly this that kept him hunting.

  “Go on, Luca,” Angela said, opening the door. “I’ll alert you if there’s a problem.”

  The film went black and then, in a sputter of light and movement, resumed. The bright, industrial overhead bulb had been dimmed, and a single desk light glowed in a corner, casting a blue shadow over the creature. Angela Valko sat in a metal chair across from the angel. They were alone.

  “Identify yourself, please,” Angela said.

  “Percival Grigori III,” the creature said. “Son of Sneja and Percival Grigori II.”

  Verlaine looked more closely at the creature, trying to understand how this could be the person he had met in New York. The Percival Grigori he had known was twisted and ill, his skin transparent, his eyes a watery, weak blue. The angel in the film was beautiful, his skin glowing with health, his golden hair glossy, his expression one of superiority and defiance. In fact, there was a staggering resemblance between the angelologist and the angel. It was obvious to anyone who saw them together that they were related by blood. And yet, Angela never knew the true identity of her father. Neither one of them could guess what time would bring. Frozen in 1984, they were forever suspended in their innocence.