“A wonderful dream,” Vladimir said, wistful. “But a fantasy. We cannot control our destiny.”
“Perhaps it’s God’s plan to weaken them slowly,” her father said, ignoring his friend. “Perhaps he chose to exterminate them over time rather than wipe them out suddenly, in one clean sweep.”
“I tired of God’s plans years ago,” Vladimir said, weary. “And so, Luca, did you.”
“You will not come back to us, then?”
Vladimir looked at her father for a moment, as if measuring his words. “Tell me the truth—are my musicological theories what Angela was working with when they took her?”
Evangeline started, unsure if she’d heard Vladimir correctly. Angela had been gone for years, and still Evangeline did not know the precise details of her mother’s death. She shifted in her chair to get a better look at her father’s face. To her surprise, his eyes had filled with tears.
“She was working on a genetic theory of Nephilistic diminishment. Angela’s mother, whom I blame for all of this as much as I blame anyone, sponsored the bulk of the work, found funding, and encouraged Angela to take over the project. I suppose Gabriella thought it the safest niche in the organization—why else would she hide her away in classrooms and libraries if she didn’t think it prudent? Angela assisted in developing models in laboratories—under her mother’s observation, of course.”
“You blame Gabriella for the abduction?” Vladimir said.
“Who can say who is to blame? She was at risk everywhere. Her mother certainly did not protect her from them. But each day I live with the uncertainty. Is Gabriella to blame? Am I? Could I have protected her? Was it a mistake to allow her to pursue her work? That, my old friend, is why I must see the creatures now. If anyone can understand this sickness, this horrid addiction to learning the truth, it is you.”
Suddenly a waiter came to Evangeline’s table, blocking her view of her father. She had been so involved in listening to him that she’d completely forgotten her cake. It lay half eaten, the cream seeping from the center. The waiter cleared the table, wiping up the remainder of the spilled water and, with a cruel efficiency, taking away the cake. By the time Evangeline turned her gaze back to her father’s table, Vladimir had lit a cigarette. Her father’s seat was empty.
Noticing her distress, Vladimir waved her to come to his side. Evangeline jumped from her chair, searching for her father.
“Luca has asked me to watch you while he is gone,” Vladimir said, smiling kindly. “You may not remember, but I met you once when you were a very little girl, when your mother brought you to our quarters in Montparnasse. I used to know your mother quite well in Paris. We worked together, briefly, and were dear friends. Before I spent my days making cakes, I was a scholar, if you can believe it. Wait a moment, and I will show you a picture I have of Angela.”
As Vladimir disappeared into the back room of the café, Evangeline hurried to the door and ran outside. Two blocks away, through crowds of people, she caught sight of her father’s jacket. Without a thought of Vladimir, or of what her father would say if she caught him, she rushed into the crowd, running past shops, convenience stores, parked cars, vegetable stands. At the corner she stepped into the street, nearly tripping over a curb. Her father was ahead; she could see him plainly in the crowd.
He turned a corner and walked south. For many blocks Evangeline followed, passing through Chinatown and into ever more industrial buildings, pushing onward, her toes pinching in her tight leather shoes.
Her father stopped at the end of a dingy, trash-strewn street. Evangeline watched him pound upon the doorway of a great corrugated-steel warehouse. Preoccupied with whatever business was at hand, he didn’t notice her walking toward him. She was almost close enough to call out to him when a door swung open. He stepped inside the warehouse. It happened so quickly, with such finality, that for an instant Evangeline stopped in her tracks.
Pushing the heavy door open, she stepped into a dusty corridor. She climbed a set of aluminum stairs, balancing her weight carefully, lightly, so that the soles of her shoes would not alert her father—or whoever else was in the depths of the warehouse—to her presence. At the top of the stairs, she crouched down, resting her chin upon her knees, hoping that no one would discover her. In the past years, all his efforts had been to keep Evangeline at a distance from his work. Her father would be furious if he knew she had followed him there.
It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the sunless, airless space, but when they did, she saw that the warehouse was vast and empty, except for a group of men standing below three suspended cages, each one as big as a car. The cages were hung with steel chains from steel girders. Inside, trapped like birds in cubes of iron mesh, were three creatures, each in a cage. One of them appeared to be nearly insane with rage—it clutched the bars and screamed obscenities at its captors standing below. The other two were listless, lying limp and sullen, as if drugged or beaten into submission.
Studying them more closely, Evangeline saw that the creatures were completely naked, although the texture of their skin, a luminescent membrane of clarified gold, made them seem encased in pure light. One of the creatures was female—she had long hair, small breasts, and a tapering waist. The other two were male. Gaunt and hairless, with flat chests, they were taller than the female and at least two feet taller than the size of a grown man. The bars of the cage were smeared in a glittering, honeylike fluid that dripped slowly down the metal and onto the floor.
Evangeline’s father stood with the men, his arms crossed. The group appeared to be doing some kind of scientific experiment. One man held a clipboard, another had a camera. There was a large lit board with three sets of chest X-rays clipped to it—the lungs and rib cage stood out in ghostly white against a faded gray background. A nearby table held medical equipment—syringes and bandages and numerous tools Evangeline could not name.
The female creature began to pace in her cage, still screaming at her captors, tearing at her flowing blond hair. Her gestures were executed with such strength that the bearing chain creaked and groaned above the cage, as if it might break. Then, with a violent movement, the female creature turned her body. Evangeline blinked, unable to believe her eyes. At the center of her long, lithe back grew a pair of sweeping, articulated wings. Evangeline covered her mouth with her hands, afraid that she might call out in surprise. The creature flexed her muscles, and the wings opened, spreading the entire length of the cage. White and sweeping, the wings shone with mellowed luminosity. As the cage swayed under the angel’s weight, tracing a slow parabola through the stagnant air, Evangeline felt her sense sharpen. Her heartbeat pounded in her ears; her breath quickened. The creatures were lovely and horrifying at once. They were beautiful, iridescent monsters.
Evangeline watched the female pace the length of her cage with wings unfurled, as if the men below her were little more than mice she might swoop down upon and devour.
“Release me,” the creature growled, her voice grinding, guttural, anguished. The tips of her wings slid through the interstices of the cage, sharp and pointed.
Evangeline’s father turned to the man with the clipboard. “What will you do with them?” he asked, as if referring to a net filled with rare butterflies.
“We won’t know where to send the remains until we’ve had the final test results.”
“Most likely we’ll send them back to our labs in Arizona for dissection, documentation, and preservation. They certainly are beauties.”
“Have you made any determinations about their strength? Do you see any signs of diminishment?” Evangeline’s father asked. Evangeline could detect a strain of hope in his questions, and although she could not be certain, she felt that this had something to do with her mother. “Something in their fluid tests?”
“If you’re asking whether they have the strength of their ancestors,” the man said, “the answer is no. They’re the strongest of their kind that I’ve seen in years, and yet their vulnerability t
o our stimuli is pronounced.”
“Wonderful news,” Evangeline’s father said, stepping closer to the cages. Addressing the creatures, his voice became commanding, as if speaking to animals. “Devils,” he said.
This drove one of the male creatures from his lethargy. He wrapped his white fingers around the bars of the cage and pulled himself to full height. “Angel and devil,” he said. “One is but a shade of the other.”
“There will come a day,” Evangeline’s father said, “when you will disappear from the earth. One day we will be rid of your presence.”
Before Evangeline could hide, her father turned and walked quickly toward the stairs. Although she had been careful to obscure herself at the top of the stairwell, she had not planned her exit. She had no choice but to scamper down the stairs, through the door, and out into the brilliantly sunny afternoon. Blinded by the light, she ran and ran.
Milton Bar and Grill, Milton, New York
As Verlaine pushed his way through a crowded barroom, the pounding in his head dissolved in a wash of country music. He was frozen stiff, the cut on his hand seared, and he hadn’t eaten a thing since breakfast. If he were in New York, he would be getting takeout from his favorite Thai restaurant or meeting friends for a drink in the Village. He would have nothing to worry about other than what he should watch on television. Instead he was stuck in a dive bar in the middle of nowhere, trying to figure out how he was going to get himself out of there. Still, the bar was warm and gave him a place to think. Verlaine rubbed his hands together, trying to bring life back to his fingers. If he could unthaw, perhaps he would be able to sort out what in the hell he was going to do next.
Taking a table at a window overlooking the street—it was the only isolated spot in the place—he ordered a hamburger and a bottle of Corona. He drank the beer quickly, to warm himself, and ordered another. The second beer he drank slowly, allowing the alcohol to bring him back to reality little by little. His fingers tingled; his feet thawed. The pain of his wound lessened. But by the time his food arrived, Verlaine felt warm and alert, better equipped to sort out the problems before him.
He took the piece of paper from his pocket, placed it upon the laminate table, and reread the sentences he had copied. Pale, smoky light flickered over his weather-beaten hands, the half-full bottle of Corona, the pale pink paper. The communication was short, only four direct, unadorned sentences, but it opened a world of possibilities for Verlaine. Of course, the relationship between Mother Innocenta and Abigail Rockefeller remained mysterious—clearly they had collaborated upon some project or another and had found success in their work in the Rhodope Mountains—but he could foresee a large paper, perhaps even an entire book, about the object the women had brought back from the mountains. What intrigued Verlaine nearly as much as the artifact, however, was the presence of a third person in the adventure, someone named Celestine Clochette. Verlaine tried to recall if he had come across a person by that name in any of his other research. Could Celestine have been one of Abigail Rockefeller’s partners? Was she a European art dealer? The prospect of understanding the triangle was the very reason he loved the history of art: In every piece there lay the mystery of creation, the adventure of its distribution, and the particularities of its preservation.
Grigori’s interest in St. Rose Convent made the information all the more perplexing. A man like Grigori could not possibly find beauty and meaning in art. People like that lived their entire lives without understanding that there was more to a van Gogh than record-breaking sales at an auction. Indeed, there must be a monetary value to the object in question, or Grigori wouldn’t spend a moment of his time trying to hunt it down. How Verlaine had gotten mixed up with such a person was truly beyond his understanding.
Gazing outside, he searched the darkness beyond the pane. The temperature must have fallen again; the heat from the interior of the room reacted with the cold window, creating a layer of condensation on the glass. Outside, the occasional car drove by, its taillights leaving a trail of orange in the frost. Verlaine watched and waited, wondering how he would get back home.
For a moment he considered calling the convent. Perhaps the beautiful young nun he’d met in the library would have a suggestion. Then the thought struck him that she, too, might be in some kind of danger. There was always the chance that the thugs he’d seen at the convent might go inside looking for him. Yet there was no way they could possibly know where he had gone in the convent, and surely they wouldn’t know he’d spoken to Evangeline. She had not been happy to see him and would probably never speak to him again. In any event, it was important to be practical. He needed to get to a train station or find a bus that would get him back to the city, and he doubted that he would find either of those in Milton.
St. Rose Convent, Milton, New York
Evangeline did not know Sister Celestine well. At seventy-five, she was wheelchair-bound and did not spend much time among the younger nuns. Although she made an appearance each day at morning Mass, when one of the sisters would push her wheelchair to the front of the church, Celestine resided in a position of isolation and protection as sacrosanct as a queen’s. Celestine always had her meals delivered to her room, and from time to time Evangeline had been dispatched to Celestine’s cell from the library, a stack of poetry books and historical fiction in her arms. There were even the occasional works in French that Sister Philomena had secured by interlibrary loan. These, Evangeline had noted, made Celestine particularly happy.
As Evangeline walked through the first floor, she saw that it had filled with sisters at work, a great mass of black-and-white habits shuffling along under the weak light of bulbs encased in metal sconces as they performed their daily chores. Sisters swarmed the hallways, opening broom closets, brandishing mops and rags and bottles of cleaning agents as they set about the evening chores. The sisters tied aprons at their waists and rolled up their dolman sleeves and snapped on latex gloves. They shook the dust from drapery and opened windows to dissuade the perennial mildew and moss of their damp, cool climate from taking hold. The women prided themselves on their ability to carry out a great deal of the convent’s labor themselves. The cheerfulness of their evening chore groups somehow disguised the fact that they were scrubbing and waxing and dusting, and instead it created the illusion that they were contributing to some marvelous project, one of much larger significance than their small individual tasks. Indeed, it was true: Each floor washed, each banister finial polished became an offering and a tribute to the greater good.
Evangeline followed the narrow steps from the Adoration Chapel up to the fourth floor. Celestine’s chamber was one of the largest cells in the convent. It was a corner bedroom with a private bathroom containing a large shower equipped with a folding plastic platform chair. Evangeline often wondered whether Celestine’s confinement freed her from the burden of daily participation in community activities, offering her a pleasant reprieve from duties, or if isolation made Celestine’s life in the convent a prison. Such immobility struck Evangeline as horribly restrictive.
She knocked on the door, giving three hesitant raps.
“Yes?” Celestine said, her voice weak. Celestine was born in France—despite half a century in the United States, her accent was pronounced.
Evangeline stepped into Celestine’s room, closing the door behind herself.
“Who is there?”
“It’s me.” She spoke quietly, afraid to disturb Celestine. “Evangeline. From the library.”
Celestine was nestled into her wheelchair near the window, a crocheted blanket in her lap. She no longer wore a veil, and her hair had been cut short, framing her face with a shock of white. On the far side of the room, a humidifier spewed steam into the air. In another corner the hot coils of a space heater warmed the room like a sauna. Celestine appeared to be cold, despite the blanket. The bed was made up with a similar crocheted throw, typical of the blankets made for the Elder Sisters by the younger ones. Celestine narrowed her eyes, tryi
ng to account for Evangeline’s presence. “You have more books for me, do you?”
“No,” Evangeline said, taking a seat next to Celestine’s wheelchair, where a stack of books sat on a mahogany end table, a magnifying glass atop the pile. “It looks like you’ve got plenty to read.”
“Yes, yes,” Celestine said, looking out the window, “there is always more to read.”
“I’m sorry to disturb you, Sister, but I was hoping to ask you a question.” Evangeline pulled the letter from Mrs. Rockefeller to Mother Innocenta out of her pocket and flattened it upon her knee.
Celestine folded her long white fingers together upon her lap, a gold FSPA signet ring glinting on her ring finger, and stared blankly at Evangeline with a cool, assessing gaze. It was possible that Sister Celestine could not remember what she had eaten for lunch, let alone events that had occurred many decades before.
Evangeline cleared her throat. “I was working in the archives this morning and found a letter that mentions your name. I don’t really know where to file it—I was wondering if you would help me to understand what it is about, so that I can put it in its proper place.”
“Proper place?” Celestine asked, doubtful. “I don’t know if I can be much help at putting anything in its proper place these days. What does the letter say?”
Evangeline gave the page to Sister Celestine, who turned the thin paper over in her hands.
“The glass,” she said, fluttering her fingers toward the table.
Evangeline placed the magnifying glass in her hands, watching Celestine’s face intently as the lens moved over the lines, transforming the solid paper into a sheet of watery light. It was clear by her expression that she was struggling with her thoughts, although Evangeline could not say if the words on the page had caused the confusion. After a moment Celestine laid the magnifying glass in her lap, and Evangeline understood at once: Celestine recognized the letter.
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