Angelology

Tappan Zee Bridge, 1-87 North, New York
With its antiquated engine and low chassis, the Porsche proved to be a bumpy, loud ride. Yet despite the noise, Verlaine found the journey to be deeply calming. He looked at Gabriella sitting in the driver’s seat, her arm resting against the door. She had the air of someone planning a bank heist—her manner was concentrated, serious, and careful. He had come to think of her as an extraordinarily private person, a woman who said nothing more than she needed to. Although Verlaine had pressed her for information, it took some time before she would open her thoughts to him.
At his insistence they had spent the drive in a discussion about her work—its history and purpose, how Abigail Rockefeller had become involved, and how Gabriella had spent her life entrenched in angelology, until Verlaine understood the depth of the danger he’d fallen into. Their familiarity with each other grew as the minutes passed, and by the time they drove over the bridge, an uncommon understanding had developed between them.
From their vantage above the wide expanse of the Hudson, Verlaine could see ice chunks clinging to the snowy riverbanks. Looking down upon the landscape, he felt as if the earth had split open in a great geomorphic gash. The sun burnished the Hudson so that it scintillated with heat and color, fluid and brilliant as a sheet of fire.
The lanes of the highway were empty compared to the clogged streets of Manhattan. Once across the bridge, Gabriella drove faster and faster over the open road. The Porsche sounded as tired as he felt: Its motor rattled as if it might explode. Verlaine’s stomach ached with hunger; his eyes burned from exhaustion. Glancing into the rearview mirror, he saw, to his surprise, that he looked as if he’d been in a brawl. His eyes were bloodshot and his hair tangled. Gabriella had helped him to dress the wound properly, winding gauze around his hand so that it resembled a boxing glove. It seemed appropriate: In the past twenty-four hours he had become a battered, beaten, and bruised man.
And yet in the presence of such immense beauty—the river, the azure sky, the eggshell glint of the Porsche—Verlaine reveled in the sudden expansion of his perception. He could see how confined his life had become in the past years. He’d spent whole days moving along a tiny track between his apartment, his office, and a few cafés and restaurants. Rarely if ever did he step outside this pattern. He could not remember the last time he had really noted his surroundings or truly looked at the people around him. He had been lost in a maze. That he would never return to that life again was both terrifying and exhilarating.
Gabriella turned off the highway and drove onto a small country road. She stretched, arching her back like a cat. “We need to get gas,” she said, scanning the road for a place to stop. Rounding a bend, Verlaine spotted a twenty-four-hour gas station. Gabriella pulled off the road and parked alongside a pump. She didn’t object when he offered to fill the car, telling him to be sure to use premium.
As Verlaine had paid for the gas, he stood gazing over the neat rows of merchandise inside the station—the bottles of soda, the packaged food, the orderly array of magazines—remarking how simple life could be. Only yesterday he would not have thought much of the creature comforts of a gasstation convenience store. He would have been too annoyed by the long line and neon lights to actually look around. Now he felt a perverse admiration for anything that offered such safe familiarity. He added a pack of cigarettes to the tally and returned to the car.
Outside, Gabriella waited in the driver’s seat. Verlaine took the passenger side and gave Gabriella the pack of cigarettes. She accepted them with a terse smile, but he could see that the gesture pleased her. Then, without waiting another moment, she threw the car into gear and drove onto the small country highway.
Verlaine unwrapped the pack of cigarettes, extracted one, and lit it for Gabriella. She rolled the window down a crack, the cigarette smoke dispersing in a stream of fresh air. “You don’t seem to be afraid, but I know that what I told you must have some effect upon you.”
“I’m still working on getting my mind around it all,” Verlaine replied, thinking, even as he spoke, that this was a huge understatement. In truth, he was baffled by what he’d learned. He couldn’t understand how she managed to stay so calm. Finally, he said, “How do you do it?”
“Do what?” she asked, keeping her eye on the road.
“Live like this,” he replied. “As if nothing abnormal is happening. As if you’ve accepted it.”
Keeping her eyes on the road, Gabriella said, “I became part of this battle so long ago that I am hardened to it. It is impossible for me to remember what it is like to live without knowing. Discovering their existence is like being told the earth is round—it goes against everything one senses to be true. Yet it is reality. I cannot imagine what it is like to live without them haunting my thoughts, to wake in the morning and believe that we live in a just, free, equal world. I suppose I have adjusted my vision of the world to suit this reality. I see everything in white and black, good and evil. We are good, they are evil. If we are to live, they must die. There are those of us who believe in appeasement—that we can work out a way to live side by side—but many also believe we cannot rest until they have been exterminated.”
“I would think,” Verlaine said, surprised by the adamancy of Gabriella’s voice, “it would be more complicated than that”
“Of course, it is more complicated. There are reasons for my strong feelings. While I have been an angelologist all of my adult life, I have not always hated the Nephilim as I do today,” Gabriella said, her voice quiet, almost vulnerable. “I will tell you a story, one that very few have heard before. Perhaps it will help you to understand my extremism. Perhaps you will see why it is so important to me that every last one of them is killed.”
Gabriella tossed the cigarette out the window, lit another, her eyes trained upon the winding highway.
“In the second year of my schooling at the Angelological Society in Paris, I met the love of my life. This is not something I would have admitted at the time, nor would I have made this claim in middle age. But I am an old woman now—older than I look, as a matter of fact—and I can say with great certainty that I will never love again as I did in the summer of 1939. I was fifteen then, too young to fall in love, perhaps. Or maybe it is only then, with the dew of childhood still in my eyes, that I was capable of such love. I will never know, of course.”
Gabriella paused, as if weighing her words, and continued.
“I was a peculiar girl, to put it mildly. I was obsessed with my studies in the way that some become obsessed with riches or love or fame. I came from a family of wealthy angelologists—many of my relatives had trained in the academy. I was also inordinately competitive. Socializing with my peers was out of the question, and I thought nothing of working night and day in order to succeed. I wanted to be at the top of my class in every respect, and routinely I was at the top. By the second term of my first year, it was clear that there were only two students to have distinguished themselves—myself and a young woman named Celestine, a brilliant girl who later became a dear friend.”
Verlaine nearly choked. “Celestine?” he said. “Celestine Clochette who came to St. Rose Convent in 1943?”
“It was 1944,” Gabriella corrected. “But that is another story. This story begins one afternoon in April 1939, a chill, rainy afternoon, as April afternoons tend to be in Paris. The cobblestones veritably flooded over each spring with rain, filling the sewers and the gardens and the Seine. I remember the afternoon exactly. It was one o’clock, April seventh, a Friday. I had finished my morning classes and, as usual, ventured out to find something for lunch. What was unusual about this day was that I had forgotten my umbrella. As I was fastidious to a fault, it was a rare spring day when I found myself unprotected in a downpour. Yet this was the case. Upon walking out of the Athenaeum, I realized that I would be soaked to the bone, and the papers and books I carried under my arm would certainly have been ruined. And so I stood under the great portico of our school’s main entrance, watching the water fall.
“From out of the swirling deluge of rain, a man emerged with an enormous violet-colored umbrella, an unusual choice for a gentleman, I thought. I watched him saunter across the courtyard of the school, elegant, erect, and exceedingly good-looking. Perhaps it was the longing I felt for the hollow, dry sanctuary of the umbrella, but I stared at the stranger, hoping that he would come to me, as if I had the power to cast a spell upon him.
“Those were very different times. If it was unseemly for a woman to stare at a handsome gentleman, it was equally unseemly for him to ignore her. Only the most ill-mannered rake would leave a lady in the rain. He paused halfway through the courtyard, discovered that I was staring at him, turned sharply upon the heel of his leather boot, and came to my aid.
“He tipped his hat so that his great blue eyes met mine. He said, ‘May I take you safely through this torrent?’ His voice was filled with a buoyant, seductive, almost cruel confidence. This one look, this single phrase, was all that it took to win me.
“‘You may take me wherever you wish,’ I replied. Instantly aware of my indiscretion, I added, ‘Anything to get out of this terrible rain.’
“He asked me my name, and when I told him, I saw at once that the name pleased him. ‘Named after an angel?’
“‘The messenger of good news,’ I answered.
“He met my eyes and smiled, pleased with my quick response. His eyes were the coolest, most pellucid blue I had ever seen. The smile was a sweet, delicious smile, as if he knew the power he had over me. A few years later, when it was revealed that my uncle, Victor Lévi-Franche, had disgraced our family by working as a spy for this man, I wondered if his delight at my name was tied to my uncle’s position and not, as he suggested, its angelic provenance.
“He offered his hand and said, ‘Come, my messenger of good news, let us go.’ I gave him my hand. In that moment, with the first touch of his skin, the life I had been leading fell away and a new one began.
“He later introduced himself as Percival Grigori III.” Gabriella glanced at Verlaine, to catch his reaction.
“Not the same—” Verlaine said in disbelief.
“Yes,” Gabriella said. “One and the same. At the time I had no notion of who he was or what his family name meant. If only I had been older and had been exposed to more at the academy, I would have turned from him and run away. In my ignorance I was charmed.
“Under the great violet umbrella, we walked. He took my arm and led me through the narrow, flooding streets to a motorcar, a shiny Mercedes 500K Roadster, an amazing silver car that shone even in the rain. I don’t know if you admire automobiles, but this was a gorgeous machine, with all the luxuries available at the time—electric wipers and locks, opulent coach-work. My family owned a car—which was quite a luxury in itself—but I had never seen anything like Percival’s Mercedes. They were exceedingly rare. As a matter of fact, a prewar 500K was auctioned off a few years ago in London. I went to the event so that I could see the car again. It sold for seven hundred thousand pounds sterling.
“Percival opened the door with a grand gesture, as if placing me into a royal carriage. I sank into the soft seat, my wet skin sticking to the leather, and took a deep breath: The car smelled of cologne mixed with the slightest hint of cigarette smoke. A tortoiseshell dashboard gleamed with buttons and knobs, each one waiting to be pressed and turned, while a pair of leather driving gloves lay folded upon the dash, waiting for his hands to fill them. It was the most beautiful car I had seen in my life. Nestling deep into the seat, I was consumed by happiness.
“I remember quite vividly the feeling I had as he drove the Mercedes along the boulevard Saint-Michel and across the ?le de la Cite, the rain falling with increased violence, as if it had been waiting for us to take shelter before releasing itself upon the spring flowers and green, receptive earth. The feeling, I believe, was fear, although at the time I told myself it was love. The danger Percival posed was not known to me. For all I could tell, he was just a young man who drove recklessly. I believe now that I feared him instinctively. Still, he had captured my heart without effort. I watched him, glancing at his lovely pale skin and his long, delicate fingers upon the gearshift. I couldn’t speak. Over the bridge he sped, and then onto the rue de Rivoli, the wipers swishing across the windshield, cutting a porthole through the water.
“‘Naturally I am taking you to lunch,’ he said, glancing at me as he slowed before a grand hotel off the place de la Concorde. ‘I see that you’re hungry.’
“‘And how can you see such a thing as hunger?’ I replied, challenging him, although he was correct: I had not eaten breakfast and was ravenous.
“‘I have a special talent,’ he said, taking the car out of gear, pulling the brake shaft, and peeling his leather driving gloves from his hands one by one. ‘I know exactly what you desire before you know yourself.’
“‘Then tell me,’ I demanded, hoping that he would find me bold and sophisticated, the very things I knew I was not. ‘What do I want most of all?’
“He studied me for a moment. I saw, as I had in the first seconds of our meeting, the fleeting, sensual cruelty behind his blue eyes. ‘A beautiful death,’ he said, so quietly I was not sure that I’d heard him correctly. With that he opened the door and slid out of the car.
“Before I had time to question this bizarre statement, he opened the passenger door, helped me from my seat, and we were walking arm in arm into the restaurant. Pausing at a gilded mirror, he shed his hat and coat, glancing about as if the fleet of waiters rushing to assist him were too slow for his taste. I watched the glass as his reflection moved, examining his profile, the beautifully cut suit of light gray gabardine that in the harsh clarity of the mirror appeared almost blue, an off rhyme of his eyes. His skin was deathly pale, nearly transparent, and yet this quality had the strange effect of making him more attractive, as if he were a precious object that had been kept from the sun.”
As he listened to Gabriella’s tale, Verlaine tried to reconcile her description with the Percival Grigori he had seen yesterday afternoon, but he could not. Clearly Gabriella did not speak of the sickly, decrepit man Verlaine knew, but rather of the man Percival Grigori had once been. Instead of questioning her, as he wished, Verlaine sat back and listened.
“Within seconds a waiter had taken our coats and was leading us into the dining room, a converted ballroom that opened upon a courtyard garden. All the while I could feel him glancing at me with intense interest, as if searching for my reaction.
“There was no question of menus or of ordering our dishes. Wineglasses were filled and plates arrived, as if everything had been arranged ahead of time. Of course Percival achieved his desired effect. My astonishment at it all was immense, although I tried to disguise it. While I had been sent to fine schools and had been raised in the bourgeois fashion of the city, I was quite aware that this man was beyond anything I had experienced. Looking over my clothes, I realized to my horror that I was wearing my school attire, a detail I had overlooked in the excitement of the drive. In addition to my drab clothing, my shoes were scuffed and I had forgotten my favorite perfume at my apartment.
“‘You’re blushing,’ he said. ‘Why?’
“I merely looked down at my pleated wool skirt and crisp white blouse, and he understood my dilemma.
“‘You are the loveliest creature here,’ he said, without a hint of irony. ‘You look like an angel.’
“‘I look exactly like what I am,’ I said, pride overruling all other emotions. ‘A schoolgirl dining with a wealthy older man.’
“‘I am not so much older than you,’ he said playfully.
“‘How much is not so much?’ I demanded. Although he appeared to be in his early twenties—an age that was not, as he rightly said, much older than mine—his manners and the confidence with which he carried himself seemed to belong to a man of great experience.
“‘I am more interested in you,’ he said, brushing away the question. ‘Tell me, do you enjoy your studies? I believe you must. I own apartments near your school, and I have seen you before. You always have the appearance of someone who has been in the library too long.’
“While it should have sent a warning that he had been aware of my existence before that day, it instead sent a ripple of pleasure through me. ‘You noticed me?’ I said, too eager for his attention.
“‘Of course,’ he said, sipping his wine. ‘I could not make it through the courtyard without wishing to see you. It has become rather annoying lately, especially when you are not there. Surely you are aware of your beauty.’
“I paused to eat a sliver of roasted duck, afraid to speak. Finally I said, ‘You are right—I enjoy my studies immensely.’
“‘If they are entertaining,’ he said, ‘you must tell me everything about them.’
“And so the afternoon continued, the hours filled with course after course of delicious food, glasses of wine, and ceaseless conversation. Over the years I have had few confidants—you are perhaps the third—with whom I have spoken openly about myself. I am not the kind of woman who enjoys idle chatter. Yet not a moment of silence intruded between Percival and me. It was as though both of us had been hoarding stories to tell each other. As we talked and ate, I felt myself being drawn closer and closer to him, the brilliance of his conversation holding me in a trance. Eventually I fell in love with his body with equal abandon, but it was his intelligence that I adored first.
“Over the weeks I was drawn closer and closer to him, so close that I could not endure even one day passing without seeing him. Despite the passion I felt for my studies and the dedication I pledged to the profession of angelology, there was nothing at all I could do to keep myself from him. We met in the apartments he owned near the Angelological Society, where we lingered through the hot summer afternoons of 1939. My classes became secondary to our leisurely hours in his bedroom, the windows open to the stifling summer air. I began to resent my roommate for asking questions; I began to hate teachers for keeping me from him.
“After our first meeting, I began to suspect that there was something unusual about Percival, but I ignored my instincts, choosing to see him against my better judgment. Again, after our first night together, I knew that I had fallen into a kind of trap, although I could not articulate the nature of the danger I felt, nor did I know the damage it would cause me. It was only some weeks later that I fully understood he was Nephilistic. He had, until then, kept his wings retracted—a deception that I should have seen through but did not. One afternoon as we made love he simply opened them, encompassing me in an embrace of golden brilliance. I should have left then, but it was too late—I was completely, irrevocably under his spell. It was thus, they say, between the disobedient angels and the women of ancient time—theirs was a great passion that turned heaven and earth upside down. But I was just a girl. I would have traded my soul for his love.
“And in many ways, I did just that. As our affair grew more intense, I began to help him acquire secrets from the Angelological Society. In return he gave me the tools to advance quickly, to gain prestige and power. He asked for small bits of information at first—the location of our offices in Paris and the dates of society meetings. I gave them willingly. When his demands grew, I accommodated them. By the time I understood how dangerous he was and that I must escape his influence, it was too late: He threatened to tell my teachers of our relationship. I was terrified of being found out. It would have meant a life of exile from the only community I had ever known.
“My affair was not easy to keep secret, however. When it became clear that I would be discovered, I confessed everything to my teacher, Dr. Raphael Valko, who decided that I was in a position to be useful to angelology. I became a spy. While Percival believed that I was working with him, I was actually doing my best to undermine his family. The affair continued, growing more and more treacherous as the war continued. Despite my misery, I did my part. I fed the Nephilim misinformation about angelological missions; I brought the secrets I learned about the closed world of Nephilistic power to Dr. Raphael, who in turn educated our scholars; and I organized what was meant to be the biggest victory of our lives, a plan to give the Nephilim a replica of the lyre while we kept the authentic lyre in our care.
“The plan was simple. Dr. Seraphina and Dr. Raphael Valko knew that the Nephilim were aware of our expedition to the gorge and that they would fight us until they had the lyre in their possession. The Valkos suggested that we orchestrate a plan that would throw the Nephilim off our trail. They arranged the manufacture of a lyre with all the properties of those of ancient Thrace—the curved arms, the heavy base, the crossbars. The instrument was created by our most brilliant musicologist, Dr. Josephat Michael, who labored over each detail, finding silk strings woven with the hair of a white horse’s tail. After we had unearthed the true lyre, we saw that it was much more sophisticated than the false version—its body was made of a metallic material that is closest to platinum, an element that has never been classified and cannot be considered an earthly element. Dr. Michael named the substance Valkine, after the Valkos, who had done so much to discover the lyre. The strings were made of glossy golden strands twisted into a tight cord, which Dr. Michael concluded had been made from strands of the Archangel Gabriel’s hair.
“Despite the obvious differences, the Valkos believed we had no choice but to act. We put the false lyre in a structured leather case identical to the case of the true lyre. I gave Percival a tip that our caravan would be driving through Paris at midnight, and he arranged the ambush. If all had gone according to plan, Percival would have captured Dr. Seraphina Valko and demanded that the angelological council give the lyre in exchange for her life. We would have traded the false lyre, Dr. Seraphina would have gone free, and the Nephilim would have believed that they had won the ultimate prize. But something went terribly wrong.
“Dr. Raphael and I had agreed to vote for making the trade. We assumed that the council members would follow Dr. Raphael’s lead and vote to trade the lyre for Dr. Seraphina. But for reasons we could not understand, the council members voted against making the trade, throwing our plan into chaos. There was a tie, which we asked one of the expedition members—Celestine Clochette—to break. She had no way of knowing about our plans and so she voted according to protocol, which fit with her careful, meticulous character. In the end we did not make the trade. I tried to remedy the mistake by taking the false lyre to Percival myself, telling him that I had stolen the lyre for him. But it was too late. Percival had killed Dr. Seraphina Valko.
“I have lived with regret over what happened to Seraphina. But my sorrows were not to end on that terrible night. You see, despite everything, I loved Percival Grigori, or at least was terribly addicted to how I felt in his presence. It seems amazing to me now, but even after he had ordered my capture and had allowed me to be brutally tortured, I could not give him up. I went to him one last time in 1944, as the Americans were liberating France. I knew that he would flee before he could be captured and I needed to see him again, to say good-bye. We spent the night together, and some months later I learned, to my horror, that I had become pregnant with his child. In my desperation to hide my condition, I turned to the only person who knew the extent of my involvement with Percival. My former teacher, Dr. Raphael Valko, understood how much I had suffered from my involvement with the Grigori family and that my child must be kept away from them at all costs. Raphael married me, letting the world believe that he was the father of my child. Our marriage caused a scandal among angelologists loyal to Seraphina’s memory, but it allowed me to keep my secret safe. My daughter, Angela, was born in 1945. Many years later Angela had a daughter, Evangeline.”
Hearing Evangeline’s name startled Verlaine. “Percival Grigori is her grandfather?” he said, unable to mask his incredulity.
“Yes,” Gabriella said. “It was Percival Grigori’s granddaughter who, just this morning, saved your life.”