Angelology

Times Square, New York City
The driver rolled through rush-hour traffic, stopping at the corner of Forty-second and Broadway. Traffic had all but halted at the NYPD headquarters, where police were making preparations for the Millennial New Year’s Eve ball drop. Through the crowds of office workers on their way to work, Verlaine could see the police welding manhole covers closed and setting up checkpoints. If the Christmas season filled the city with tourists, Verlaine realized, New Year’s Eve would be a veritable nightmare, especially this one.
Gabriella ordered Verlaine out of the van. Stepping into the masses of people clustered on the streets, they fell into a chaos of movement, blinking billboards, and relentless foot traffic. Verlaine hoisted the duffel bag over his shoulder, afraid that he might somehow lose its precious contents. After what had happened at his apartment, he couldn’t shake the feeling that they were being watched, that every person nearby was suspect, that Percival Grigori’s men were waiting for them at every turn. He looked over his shoulder and saw an endless sea of people.
Gabriella walked quickly ahead, weaving through the crowd at a pace Verlaine struggled to match. As people surged around them, he noted that Gabriella cut quite a figure. She was a tiny woman, barely five feet tall, extraordinarily thin, with sharp features. She wore a fitted black overcoat that appeared to be Edwardian in cut—a tight, tailored, and stylish silk jacket fastened with a line of tiny obsidian buttons. The jacket was so tight that it appeared to have been designed to be worn over a corset. In contrast to her dark clothing, Gabriella’s face was powdery white, with fine wrinkles—the skin of an old woman. Although she must have been in her seventies, there was something unnaturally youthful about her. She carried herself with the poise of a much younger woman. Her sculpted, glossy black hair was perfectly coiffed, her spine erect, her gait even. She walked fast, as if challenging Verlaine to keep up.
“You must be wondering why I’ve brought you here, into all of this madness,” Gabriella said, gesturing to the crowd. Her voice resonated with the same calm equanimity she’d had on the telephone, a tone he found both eerie and deeply comforting. “Times Square at Christmas is not the most peaceful place for a stroll.”
“I usually avoid this place,” Verlaine said, looking around at the neoninfused storefront windows and incessantly flashing news ticker, a zipper of electricity dripping information faster than he could read it. “I haven’t been around here in nearly a year.”
“In the midst of danger, it is best to take cover in the crowd,” Gabriella observed. “One does not want to call attention, and one can never be too careful.”
After a few blocks, Gabriella slowed her pace, leading Verlaine past Bryant Park, where the space swarmed with Christmas decorations. With the fresh-fallen snow and the brightness of the morning light, the scene struck Verlaine as the image of a perfect New York Christmas, the very kind of Norman Rockwell scene that irritated him. As they approached the massive structure of the New York Public Library, Gabriella paused once again, looked over her shoulder, and crossed the street. “Come,” she whispered, walking to a black town car parked illegally before one of the stone lion statues at the library’s entrance. The New York license plate read ANGEL27. Upon seeing them approach, a driver turned on the engine. “This is our ride,” Gabriella said.
They turned right on Thirty-ninth and drove up Sixth Avenue. As they paused at a stoplight, Verlaine looked over his shoulder, wondering if he would find the black SUV behind them. They weren’t being followed. In fact, it unnerved him to realize that he felt almost at ease with Gabriella. He had known her all of forty-five minutes. She sat next to him, peering out the window as if being chased through Manhattan at nine o’clock in the morning were a perfectly normal part of her life.
At Columbus Circle the driver pulled over, and Gabriella and Verlaine stepped into the freezing gusts of wind blowing through Central Park. She walked swiftly ahead, searching traffic and looking beyond the rotary, nearly losing her impenetrable calm. “Where are they?” she muttered, turning along the edge of the park, walking past a magazine kiosk stacked high with daily papers, and into the shadows of Central Park West. She kept pace for a number of blocks, turned onto a side street, and paused, looking about her. “They are late,” she said under her breath. Just then an antique Porsche rounded a corner, stopping with a sharp squeal of tires, its eggshell white paint shining in the morning light. The license plate, to Verlaine’s amusement, read ANGELI.
A young woman bounded out of the driver’s seat of the Porsche. “My apologies, Dr. Gabriella,” she said, placing a set of keys in Gabriella’s hand before walking quickly away.
“Get in,” Gabriella said, dropping into the driver’s seat.
Verlaine followed orders, squeezing into the tiny car and slamming the door. The dash was glossy burled maple, the steering wheel leather. He arranged himself in the cramped passenger seat and shifted the duffel bag so he could reach the seat belt, but found that there wasn’t one to fasten. “Nice car,” he said.
Gabriella gave him a cutting look and started the engine. “It is the 356, the first Porsche made. Mrs. Rockefeller bought a number of them for the society. It’s amazing—all these years later we’re still surviving off her crumbs.”
“Pretty luxurious crumbs,” Verlaine said, running his hand over the caramel-brown leather seat. “I wouldn’t have suspected Abigail to like sports cars.”
“There are many things about her one wouldn’t have suspected,” Gabriella said, and pulled into traffic, spun around in a U-turn, then headed north alongside Central Park.
Gabriella parked on a quiet, tree-lined street in the mid-Eighties. Sandwiched between two similar buildings, the brownstone to which she led him appeared to have been squeezed vertical by sheer force. Gabriella unlocked the front door and waved Verlaine through the entrance, her movements so sure that he hadn’t a moment to get his bearings before Gabriella slammed the door and turned the lock. It took him a moment to register that they’d made it out of the cold.
Gabriella leaned against the door, closed her eyes, and sighed deeply. In the granular darkness of the foyer, he could see her exhaustion. Her hands shook as she brushed a strand of hair from her eyes and placed a hand upon her heart. “Really,” she said softly, “I am getting too old for this.”
“Forgive me for asking,” Verlaine said, his curiosity getting the better of him, “but how old would that be?”
“Old enough to raise suspicion,” she said.
“Suspicion?”
“About my humanity,” Gabriella said, narrowing her eyes—startling sea-green eyes lined heavily in gray shadow. “Some people in the organization believe that I am one of ‘them.’ Really, I should retire. I’ve dealt with such suspicions all my life.”
Verlaine looked her up and down, from black boots to red lips. He wanted to ask her to explain herself, to explain what had happened the previous evening, to tell him why she’d been sent to his apartment to watch him.
“Come, we haven’t time for my complaints,” Gabriella said, turning on her heel and walking up a set of narrow wooden steps. “We’ll go upstairs.”
Verlaine followed as Gabriella climbed a creaky stairway. At the top of the steps, she opened a door and led Verlaine into a darkened room. As his eyes adjusted, he saw a long, narrow room filled with overstuffed armchairs, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, Tiffany lamps perched upon end tables like precarious, brightly plumed birds. A series of oil paintings in heavy gilded frames—it was too dark to make out their subjects—hung upon one wall. An unevenly canted roof peaked at the center of the room, its plaster stained yellow with water damage.
Gabriella gestured for Verlaine to sit as she drew back the curtains of a series of tall narrow windows, filling the room with light. He walked to a set of straight-backed Neo-Gothic chairs near the window, set the duffel bag lightly at his side, and sank into the rock-hard seat. The chair’s legs creaked under his weight.
“Let me be clear, Mr. Verlaine,” Gabriella said, taking a seat in the matching chair at his side. “You are lucky to be alive.”
“Who were they?” Verlaine said. “What did they want?”
“Equally fortuitous,” Gabriella continued, nonplussed by Verlaine’s questions and growing agitation, “is the fact that you eluded them completely unharmed.” Glancing at his raw wound, the scab of which had begun to congeal, she said, “Or nearly unharmed. You are lucky. You have escaped with something that they want.”
“You must have been there for hours. How else would you have known they were watching me? How did you know they would break in?”
“I am no psychic,” Gabriella said. “Wait long enough and soon the devils come.”
“Evangeline called you?” Verlaine asked, but Gabriella said nothing. Clearly she was not about to divulge any of her secrets to the likes of him. “I suppose you know what they were planning to do once they found me,” Verlaine said.
“They would have taken the letters, of course,” Gabriella answered calmly. “Once they had them in their possession, they would have killed you.”
Verlaine turned this over in his mind for a moment. He couldn’t understand how the letters could possibly be so important. Finally, Verlaine said, “Do you have a theory as to why they would do this?”
“I have a theory about everything, Mr. Verlaine.” Gabriella smiled for the first time in their brief acquaintance. “First, they believe, as I do, that the letters in your possession contain valuable information. Second, they want the information very badly.”
“Enough to kill for it?”
“Certainly,” Gabriella replied. “They have killed many times for information of much less importance.”
“I don’t understand,” Verlaine said, pulling the duffel bag onto his lap—a protective movement that, he could see from the flicker in her gaze, did not escape Gabriella’s notice. “They have not read Innocenta’s letters.”
This information gave Gabriella pause. “Are you certain?”
“I didn’t give them to Grigori,” Verlaine said. “I wasn’t sure what they were when I found them, and I wanted to be certain of their authenticity before alerting him. In my line of work, it is essential to verify everything beforehand.”
Gabriella opened the drawer of a small escritoire, took a cigarette from a case, fitted it into a lacquered holder, and lit it with a small gold lighter. The scent of spiced tobacco filled the room. When she held the case to Verlaine, offering him a cigarette, he accepted. He considered asking for a strong drink to accompany it.
“Truthfully,” he said at last, “I don’t have a clue how I got involved in this. I don’t know why those men, or whatever they are, were at my place. I admit I’ve picked up some odd information about Grigori while working for him, but everyone knows that man is an eccentric. Frankly, I’m beginning to wonder if I might simply be going insane. Can you tell me why I’m here?”
Gabriella assessed him, as if contemplating the appropriate response. At last she said, “I have brought you here, Mr. Verlaine, because we need you.”
“‘We’?” Verlaine replied.
“We ask that you help us recover something very precious.”
“The discovery made in the Rhodope Mountains?”
Gabriella’s face turned pale at Verlaine’s words. He felt a brief flicker of triumph—for once he had surprised her.
“You know about the journey to the Rhodopes?” she said, recovering her composure.
“It is mentioned in a letter from Abigail Rockefeller that Evangeline showed me yesterday. I gathered that they were discussing the recovery of some sort of antiquity, perhaps Greek pottery or Thracian art. Although now I see that the discovery was more valuable than a few clay jars.”
“Quite a bit more valuable,” Gabriella said, finishing the cigarette and putting it out in an ashtray. “But its worth is assessed differently than you might think. It isn’t a value that can be quantified with money, although over the past two thousand years there has been much, much gold spent trying to obtain it. Let me put it this way: It has an ancient value.”
“It is a historical artifact?” Verlaine asked.
“You might say so,” Gabriella said, crossing her arms against her chest. “It is very old, but this is no museum piece. It is as relevant today as it was in the past. It could affect the lives of millions of people, and, even more important, it could change the course of the future.”
“Sounds like a riddle,” Verlaine said, extinguishing the cigarette.
“I’m not going to play games with you. We haven’t the time. The situation is much more complicated than you realize. What happened to you this morning began many ages ago. I don’t know how you became enmeshed in this affair, but the letters in your possession place you firmly at the center.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You will have to trust me,” Gabriella said. “I’ll tell you everything, but it must be a trade. For this knowledge you will give up your freedom. After tonight either you will become one of us or you will go into hiding. In any case you will spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulder. Once you know the history of our mission and how Mrs. Rockefeller became involved—which is only a very minor component to a large and complex tale—you will be part of a terrible drama, one that there is no way of exiting completely. It may sound extreme, but once you know the truth, your life will change irrevocably. There is no going back.”
Verlaine looked at his hands, contemplating what Gabriella had said. Although it felt as if he had been asked to step over the edge of a cliff—commanded to jump over, in fact—he could not stop himself from continuing onward willingly. At last he said, “You believe that the letters reveal what they discovered during the expedition.”
“Not what was discovered but what was hidden,” Gabriella said. “They went to the Rhodope Mountains to bring back a lyre. A kithara, to be exact. Once, briefly, we had it in our possession. Now it has been hidden again. Our enemies—an extremely wealthy and influential group—want to find it as badly as we do.”
“That’s who was at my place?”
“The men at your apartment were hired by this group, yes.”
“Is Percival Grigori part of this group?”
“Yes,” Gabriella said. “He is very much a part of it.”
“So in working for him,” Verlaine said, “I have been working against you.”
“As I told you before, you really mean nothing to them. It is detrimental and extremely risky for him to be in public, and so he has always hired disposables—that is his word, not mine—to do his research for him. He uses them to dig up information and then kills them. It is an extremely efficient security measure.” Gabriella lit another cigarette, the smoke forming a haze in the air.
“Did Abigail Rockefeller work for them?”
“No,” Gabriella said. “Quite the opposite. Mrs. Rockefeller was working with Mother Innocenta to find an appropriate hiding place for a case containing the lyre. For reasons we don’t understand, Abigail Rockefeller ceased all communication with us after the war. It caused quite a lot of trauma in our network. We had no idea where she put the contents of the case. Some believe it was hidden in New York City. Others believe she sent it back to Europe. We have been trying desperately to locate where she hid it, if she hid it at all.”
“I’ve read Innocenta’s letters,” Verlaine said, doubtful. “I don’t think they will tell you what you’re hoping to find. It makes more sense to go to Grigori.”
Gabriella took a deep, weary breath. “There is something I would like to show you,” she said. “It may help you understand the kind of creatures we are dealing with.”
Standing, she slid out of her jacket. Then she began to remove her black silk shirt, her veined hands working over the buttons until each one had been unfastened. “This,” she said quietly, pulling first her left arm, then her right free of the black sleeves, “is what happens when you are caught by the other side.”
Verlaine watched Gabriella turn under the light of a nearby window. Her torso was covered with thick, ribboning scars that crossed her back, her chest, her stomach, and her shoulders. It was as though she had been carved with an exceedingly sharp butcher’s knife. From the width of the damaged tissue and the haphazard ridges of the scars, Verlaine guessed that the wounds had not been properly sutured. In the weak light, the skin was pink and raw. The pattern suggested that Gabriella had been whipped or, worse, sliced with a razor blade.
“My God,” Verlaine said, overwhelmed by the mangled flesh, the horrible yet strangely delicate oyster-shell pink of the scars. “How did it happen?”
“Once I believed I could outsmart them,” Gabriella said. “I believed that I was wiser, stronger, more adept than they were. I was the best angelologist in all of Paris during the war. Despite my age I rose through the hierarchy faster than anyone. This was a fact. Believe me—I am and always have been very, very good at my work.”
“This happened in the war?” Verlaine asked, trying to make sense of such brutality.
“In my youth I worked as a double agent. I became the lover of the heir of the most powerful enemy family. My work was monitored, and I was quite successful in the beginning, but ultimately I was found out. If anyone could have pulled off such an infiltration, I could have. Take a long look at what happened to me, Mr. Verlaine, and imagine what they will do to you. Your na?ve American belief that good always overcomes evil would not save you. I guarantee: You will be doomed.”
Verlaine could not bear to look at Gabriella, yet he could not turn away. His gaze traced the scars’ sinuous pink path from her clavicle to her hip, the pallor of her skin registering through his body. He felt that he might be sick. “How can you hope to defeat them?”
“That,” Gabriella said, sliding back into her blouse and fastening the buttons, “is something I will explain after you have given me the letters.”

Verlaine set the laptop computer on the surface of Gabriella’s desk and turned it on. The hard drive clicked, and the monitor flickered to life. Soon all his files—including the research documents and scanned letters—appeared as icons on the glowing surface of the screen, bright-colored electronic balloons floating in an electronic blue sky. Verlaine clicked the Rockefeller/ Innocenta folder and stepped away from the computer, giving Gabriella ample room to read. At the dust-streaked window, he observed the quiet, cold park. He knew that beyond there were frozen ponds, an empty skating rink, snow-covered sidewalks, the winterized carousel. A phalanx of taxis sped north on Central Park West, carrying people uptown. The city carried on in its usual manic fashion.
Verlaine glanced over his shoulder at Gabriella. She read the letters breathlessly, utterly absorbed in the computer screen, as if the incandescent words might disappear at any moment. The monitor cast a green-white pallor over her skin, accentuating the wrinkles about her mouth and eyes and turning her black hair a shade closer to purple. She removed a sheet of paper from the desk drawer and jotted notes on it, scribbling as she read, not once glancing up at Verlaine or down at the stream of sentences emerging from her pen. Gabriella’s attention was so intently focused on the screen—the looping, pinched curves of Mother Innocenta’s handwriting, the creases of the paper reproduced to an exact digital likeness—that it was not until Verlaine stood at her side, looking over her shoulder at the computer, that she noticed him.
“There is a chair in the corner,” she said without taking her eyes from the screen. “You will find it more comfortable than bending over my shoulder.”
Verlaine carried an antique piano bench from the corner, placed it lightly next to Gabriella, and sat.
She lifted a hand, as if expecting it to be kissed, and said, “A cigarette, s’il vous pla?t.”
Verlaine removed one from the porcelain box, fitted it into the lacquer holder, and placed it between Gabriella’s fingers. Still without looking up, she brought the cigarette to her lips. “Merci,” she said, inhaling as Verlaine ignited the lighter.
Finally he opened his duffel bag, took a folder from inside, and, venturing to disturb her from her reading, said, “I should have given these to you before.”
Gabriella turned from the computer and took the letters from Verlaine. Sifting through them, she said, “The originals?”
“One hundred percent original stolen material from the Rockefeller Family Archive,” Verlaine said.
“Thank you,” Gabriella said, opening the folder and paging through the letters. “Of course, I wondered what happened to them, and I suspected that they might be with you. Tell me—what other copies of these letters are there?”
“That’s it,” Verlaine said. “Those are the originals in your hands.” He gestured to the scans open on the computer screen. “And the scans.”
“Very good,” Gabriella said quietly.
Verlaine suspected that she wished to say more. Instead she stood, removed a canister of coffee grounds from a drawer, and brewed a pot of coffee on a hot plate. When the coffee bubbled into the pot, Gabriella carried it to the computer and, without a hint of warning, poured the contents of the pot over the laptop, the scalding liquid soaking the keyboard. The screen went white and then black. A horrid clicking noise wrenched through the computer. Then it fell quiet.
Verlaine hovered over the coffee-saturated keyboard, trying not to lose his temper—and failing. “What have you done?”
“We cannot allow more copies than absolutely necessary,” Gabriella said, calmly wiping her hands free of coffee grounds.
“Yes, but you’ve destroyed my computer.” Verlaine pressed the “start” button, hoping that it would somehow come to life again.
“Technological gadgetry is easily replaced,” Gabriella said, not a hint of apology in her voice. Walking to the window, she leaned against the glass, her arms crossed over her chest, her expression serene. “We cannot allow anyone to read these letters. They are too important.”
Sorting through them, she placed the letters alongside one another on a low table until it was filled with yellowed sheets. There were five letters, each composed of numerous pages. Verlaine came to Gabriella’s side. The pages were written in florid cursive. Lifting a soft, wrinkled sheet, he attempted to read the script—elegant, looping, exceptionally illegible penmanship that washed across the unlined paper in faded blue waves. It was nearly impossible to decipher in the dim light.
“You can read it?” Gabriella asked, leaning over the table and rotating a page, as if approaching it from a new angle might clarify the tangle of letters. “I find it difficult to make out her writing at all.”
“It takes a bit of getting used to,” Verlaine said. “But yes, I can manage it.”
“Then you can help me,” Gabriella said. “We need to determine if this correspondence is going to be of any real assistance.”
“I’ll give it a try,” Verlaine said. “But first I would like you to tell me what I’m looking for.”
“Particular locations mentioned in the correspondence,” Gabriella said. “Locations where Abigail Rockefeller had full access. Perhaps an institution where she had the authority to come and go as she wished. Seemingly innocuous references to addresses, streets, hotels. Secure locations, of course, but not too secure.”
“That could be half of New York,” Verlaine said. “If I’m going to find anything at all in these letters, I need to know exactly what you’re seeking.”
Gabriella stared out the window. Finally she said, “Long ago a band of rogue angels called the Watchers were condemned to be held in a cave in the remotest regions of Europe. Entrusted to deliver the prisoners, the archangels bound the Watchers and thrust them into a deep cavern. As the Watchers fell, the archangels heard their cries of anguish. It was an agony so great that in a moment of pity the Archangel Gabriel threw the wretched creatures a golden lyre—a lyre of angelic perfection, a lyre whose music was so miraculous that the prisoners would spend hundreds of years in contentment, pacified by its melodies. Gabriel’s mistake had grave repercussions. The lyre proved to be a solace and strength to the Watchers. They not only entertained themselves in the depths of the earth, they became stronger and more ambitious in their desires. They learned that the lyre’s music gave them extraordinary power.”
“What kind of power?” Verlaine inquired.
“The power to play at being God,” Gabriella said. She lit another cigarette and resumed. “It is a phenomenon taught exclusively in our ethereal musicology seminars to the advanced students at angelological academies. As the universe was created by the vibration of God’s voice—by the music of His Word—so the universe can be altered, enhanced, or entirely undone by the music of His messengers, the angels. The lyre—and other celestial instruments fashioned by the angels, many of which we have had in our possession throughout the centuries—has the power to effect such changes, or so we speculate. The degree of power these instruments contains varies. Our ethereal musicologists believe that at the correct frequency any number of cosmic changes could occur. Perhaps the sky will be red, the sea purple, and the grass orange. Perhaps the sun will chill the air rather than heat it. Perhaps devils will populate the continents. It is believed that one of the powers of the lyre is to restore the sick to health.”
Verlaine stared at her, flabbergasted at what this otherwise rational woman had just said.
“It makes little sense to you now,” she said, taking the original letters and giving them to Verlaine. “But read the letters to me. I would like to hear them. It will help me think.”
Verlaine scanned the sheets, found the beginning date of the correspondence—June 5, 1943—and began to read. Although Mother Innocenta’s style posed a challenge—every sentence was grandiose in tone, each thought pounded into writing as if with an iron hammer—he soon fell into the cadences of her prose.
The first contained little more than a polite exchange of formalities and was composed with a tentative, halting tone, as if Innocenta were feeling her way toward Mrs. Rockefeller through a darkened hallway. Nonetheless, the odd reference to Mrs. Rockefeller’s artistry was contained even in this letter—“Please know that the perfection of your artistic vision, and the execution of your fancy, is well noted and accepted”—a reference that brought all of Verlaine’s ambition back the instant he read it. The second letter was a longer and slightly more intimate missive in which Innocenta explained her gratitude to Mrs. Rockefeller for the important role she held in the future of their mission, and—Verlaine noted with particular triumph—discussed the drawing that Mrs. Rockefeller must have included in the letter: “Our most admired friend, one cannot fail to marvel at your delicate renderings or receive them with humble thanks and grateful understanding.” The tone of the letter hinted that an arrangement had developed between the two women, although there was nothing concrete to be found, and certainly nothing to suggest that a plan had been arrived at. The fourth letter contained another of the references to something artistic: “As always, your hand never fails to express what the eye most wishes to behold.”
Verlaine began to explain his theory of Mrs. Rockefeller’s artwork, but Gabriella urged him to read on, clearly annoyed that he would stop. “Read the final letter,” she said. “The one dated December fifteenth, I943.”
Verlaine sifted through the pages until he found the letter.
December 15, 1943
Dearest Mrs. Rockefeller,

Your latest letter arrived at an opportune moment, as we have been laboring at our annual Christmas celebrations and are now fully prepared to commemorate our Lord’s birth. The sisters’ annual fund-raiser has been a greater success than expected, and I daresay that we will continue to draw many donations. Your assistance is also a source of great joy to us. We give thanks to the Lord for your generosity and remember you in our hourly prayers. Your name will long remain upon the lips of the sisters at St. Rose.
The charity benefit described in your letter of November has been met with great approval by all at St. Rose Convent, and I hope it will make quite a difference to our efforts to bring in new membership. After the travails and hardships of our recent battles, the great privations and declines of the past years, we nonetheless see a greater brightness emerging.
While a discerning eye is like the music of the angels—precise and measured and mysterious beyond reason—its power rests in the cast of light. Dearest benefactress, we know you chose your renderings wisely. We eagerly await further illumination and ask that you write in due haste, so that news of your work will lift our spirits.
Your fellow seeker,
Innocenta Maria Magdalena Fiori, ASA
As he read the fifth letter, a particular phrase caught Gabriella’s attention. She asked Verlaine to stop and repeat it. He backtracked and read, “‘. . . a discerning eye is like the music of the angels—precise and measured and mysterious beyond reason—its power rests in the cast of light.’”
He placed the stack of yellowed papers upon his lap. “Did you hear anything of interest?” he asked, anxious to test his theory about the passages.
Gabriella appeared lost in thought, gazing past him, staring out the window, her chin resting on her hand. “It is half there,” she said at last.
“Half?” Verlaine said. “Half of what?”
“Half of our mystery,” Gabriella said. “Mother Innocenta’s letters confirm something I have long suspected—namely, that the women were working together. I will need to read the other half of this correspondence to be certain,” she went on. “But I believe that Innocenta and Mrs. Rockefeller were choosing locations. Even months before Celestine brought the instrument from Pans—even months before it was retrieved from the Rhodopes—they were planning the best way to keep it safe. It is a blessing that Innocenta and Abigail Rockefeller had the intelligence and foresight to find a secure location. Now we need only to understand their methods. We need to find the location of the lyre.”
Verlaine raised an eyebrow. “Is that possible?”
“I will not be certain until I read Abigail Rockefeller’s letters to Innocenta. Clearly Innocenta was a brilliant angelologist, much smarter than she’s given credit for. All along she was urging Abigail Rockefeller to secure the future of angelology. The instruments were placed into Mrs. Rockefeller’s care only after great forethought.” Gabriella walked the length of the room, as if movement ordered her thoughts. Then she stopped short. “It must be here in New York City.”
“You are certain?” Verlaine asked.
“There is no way to know for sure, but I believe it is here. Abigail Rockefeller would have wanted to keep an eye on it.”
“You must see something in the letters that I can’t,” Verlaine said. “To me they’re just a collection of friendly exchanges between two old women. The only potentially interesting element about the letters is referred to time and time again but isn’t actually there.”
“What do you mean?” Gabriella asked.
“Did you notice how Innocenta returns over and over to the discussion of visual images? It seems that there were drawings or sketches or other artwork Abigail Rockefeller included in her letters,” Verlaine said. “These visual images must be in the other half of the correspondence. Or they have been lost.”
“You are quite right,” Gabriella said. “There is a pattern of some kind in the letters, and I am certain that this will be confirmed once we read the other half of the correspondence. Surely the ideas proposed by Innocenta were refined. Perhaps new suggestions were sent. Only when we can lay out the correspondence side by side will we have the whole picture.”
She took the letters from Verlaine and paged through them once more, reading them over as if to memorize the lines. Then she tucked them into her pocket. “We must be extremely careful,” she said. “It is paramount that we keep these letters—and the secrets they point to—away from the Nephilim. You are certain that Percival has not seen them?”
“You and Evangeline are the only people who have read them, but I did show him something else that I wish he’d never seen.” Verlaine said, removing the architectural drawings from his bag.
Gabriella took the drawings and examined them with care, her expression turning grave. “This is very unfortunate,” she said at last. “These give everything away. When he looked at these papers, did he understand their significance?”
“He didn’t seem to think they were important.”
“Ah, good,” Gabriella said, smiling slightly. “Percival was wrong. We must go at once, before he begins to understand what you have found.”
“And exactly what is it that I’ve found?” Verlaine asked, feeling that he might at last learn the significance of the drawings and the golden seal at their center.
Gabriella placed the drawings on the table and pressed them flat with her hands. “These are a set of instructions,” she said. “The seal at the center marks a location. If you notice, it is at the center of the Adoration Chapel.”
“But why?” Verlaine asked, studying the seal for the hundredth time and wondering at its meaning.
Gabriella slipped into her black silk jacket and headed to the door. “Come with me to St. Rose Convent, and I will explain everything.”