Angelology

Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, New York City
Percival Grigori tapped the tip of his cane as he waited for the elevator, a rhythm of sharp metallic clicks pounding out the seconds. The oak-paneled lobby of his building—an exclusive prewar with views of Central Park—was so familiar that he hardly noticed it any longer. The Grigori family had occupied the penthouse for over half a century. Once he might have registered the deference of the doorman, the opulent arrangement of orchids in the foyer, the polished ebony and mother-of-pearl elevator casement, the fire sending a spray of light and warmth across the marble floor. But Percival Grigori noticed nothing at all except the pain crackling through his joints, the popping of his knees with each step. As the doors of the elevator slid open and he hobbled inside, he regarded his stooped image in the polished brass of the elevator car and looked quickly away.
At the thirteenth floor, he stepped into a marble vestibule and unlocked the door to the Grigori apartment. Instantly the soothing elements of his private life—part antique, part modern, part gleaming wood, part sparkling glass—filled his senses, relaxing the tension in his shoulders. He threw his keys onto a silk pillow at the bottom of a Chinese porcelain bowl, shrugged his heavy cashmere overcoat into the lap of an upholstered banister-back chair, and walked through the travertine gallery. Vast rooms opened before him—a sitting room, a library, a dining hall with a four-tiered Venetian chandelier suspended overhead. An expanse of picture windows staged the chaotic ballet of a snowstorm.
At the far end of the apartment, the curve of a grand staircase led to his mother’s suite of rooms. Peering up, Percival discerned a party of her friends gathered in the formal sitting room. Guests came to the apartment for lunch or dinner nearly every day, impromptu gatherings that allowed his mother to hold court for her favorite friends from the neighborhood. It was a ritual she had grown more and more accustomed to, primarily because of the power it gave her: She selected those people she wished to see, enclosed them in the dark-paneled lair of her private quarters, and let the rest of the world go on with its tedium and misery. For years she had left her suite only on rare occasions, when accompanied by Percival or his sister, and only at night. His mother had grown so comfortable with the arrangement, and her circle had become so regular, that she rarely complained of her confinement.
Quietly, so as not to draw attention to himself, Percival ducked into a bathroom at the end of the hallway, shut the door softly behind him, and locked it. In a succession of quick movements, he discarded a tailored wool jacket and a silk tie, dropping each piece of clothing onto the ceramic tiles. Fingers trembling, he unbuttoned six pearlescent buttons, working upward to his throat. He peeled away his shirt and stood to full height before a large mirror hung upon the wall.
Running his fingers over his chest, he felt a mélange of leather strips weaving one over the other. The device wrapped about him like an elaborate harness, creating a system of stays that, when fully fastened, had the overall appearance of a black corset. The straps were so taut they cut into his skin. Somehow, no matter how he fastened it, the leather cinched too tightly. Struggling for air, Percival loosened one strap, then the next, working the leather through small silver buckles with deliberation until, with a final tug, the device fell to the floor, the leather slapping the tiles.
His bare chest was smooth, without navel or nipples, the skin so white as to appear cut from wax. Swiveling his shoulder blades, he could see the reflection of his body in the mirror—his shoulders, his long thin arms, and the sculpted curve of his torso. Mounted at the center of his spine, matted by sweat, deformed by the severe pressure of the harness, were two tender nubs of bone. With a mixture of wonder and pain, he noted that his wings—once full and strong and bowed like golden scimitars—had all but disintegrated. The remnants of his wings were black with disease, the feathers withered, the bones atrophied. In the middle of his back, two open wounds, blue and raw from chafing, fixed the blackened bones in a gelatinous pool of congealed blood. Bandages, repeated cleanings—no amount of care helped to heal the wounds or relieve his pain. Yet he understood that the true agony would come when there was nothing left of his wings. All that had distinguished him, all that the others had envied, would be gone.
The first symptoms of the disorder had appeared ten years before, when fine tracks of mildew materialized along the inner shafts and vanes of the feathers, a phosphorescent green fungus that grew like patina on copper. He had thought it a mere infection. He’d had his wings cleaned and groomed, specifying that each feather be brushed with oils, and yet the pestilence remained. Within months his wingspan had decreased by half. The dusty golden shimmer of healthy wings faded. Once, he had been able to compress his wings with ease, folding his majestic plumage smoothly against his back. The airy mass of golden feathers had tucked into the arched grooves along his spine, a maneuver that rendered the wings completely undetectable. Although physical in substance, the structure of healthy wings gave them the visual properties of a hologram. Like the bodies of the angels themselves, his wings had been substantial objects utterly unimpaired by the laws of matter. Percival had been able to lift his wings through thick layers of clothing as easily as if he had moved them through air.
Now he found that he could no longer retract them at all, and so they were a perpetual presence, a reminder of his diminishment. Pain overwhelmed him; he lost all capability for flight. Alarmed, his family had brought in specialists, who confirmed what the Grigori family most feared: Percival had contracted a degenerative disorder that had been spreading through their community. Doctors predicted that his wings would die, then his muscles. He would be confined to a wheelchair, and then, when his wings had withered completely and their roots had melted away, Percival would die. Years of treatments had slowed the progression of the disease but had not stopped it.
Percival turned on the faucet and splashed cool water over his face, trying to dissipate the fever that had overtaken him. The harness helped him to keep his spine erect, an increasingly difficult task as his muscles grew weak. In the months since it had become necessary to wear the harness, the pain had only grown more acute. He never quite got used to the bite of leather on his skin, the buckles as sharp as pins against his body, the burning sensation of ripped flesh. Many of their kind chose to live away from the world when they became ill. This was a fate Percival could not begin to accept.
Percival took Verlaine’s envelope in his hands. Feeling its heft with pleasure, he disemboweled the dossier with the delicacy of a cat feasting upon a trapped bird, tearing open the paper with slow deliberation and placing the pages upon the marble surface of the bathroom sink. He read the report, hoping to find something that might be of use to him. Verlaine’s summary was a detailed and thorough document—forty pages of single-spaced lines forming a black, muscular column of type from beginning to end—but from what he could see there was nothing new.
Putting Verlaine’s documents back in the envelope, Percival took a deep breath and slipped the harness over his body. The tight leather caused much less trouble now that his color had returned and his fingers had grown steady. Once dressed, he saw that he’d ruined all hope of being presentable. His clothes were wrinkled and sweat-stained, his hair fell into his face in a messy blond sweep, his eyes were bloodshot. His mother would be mortified to see him so careworn.
Smoothing his hair, Percival left the bathroom and set out to find her. The sounds of crystal glasses clinking, the hum of a string quartet, and the shrill laughter of her friends became louder as he ascended the grand staircase. Percival paused at the edge of the room to catch his breath—the slightest effort drained his strength.
His mother’s rooms were always filled with flowers and servants and gossip, as if she were a countess holding a nightly salon, but Percival found the gathering under way to be even more elaborate than he had expected, with fifty or more guests. A cantilevered ceiling rose above the party, the skylights’ usual brightness dimmed by a cap of snow. The walls of the upper floor were lined with paintings his family had acquired over the course of five hundred years, most of which the Grigoris had chosen from museums and collectors for their private enjoyment. The majority of the paintings were masterworks, and all were original—they had provided expert copies of the paintings to be circulated through the world at large, taking the originals for themselves. Their art required meticulous care, everything from climate control to a team of professional cleaners, but the collection was well worth the trouble. There were a number of Dutch masters, a few from the Renaissance, and a smattering of nineteenth-century engravings. An entire wall at the center of the sitting room held the famous Hieronymus Bosch triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, a wonderfully gruesome depiction of paradise and hell. Percival had grown up studying its grotesqueries, the large central panel depicting life on earth providing him with early instruction on the ways of humanity. He found it particularly fascinating that Bosch’s depiction of hell contained gruesome musical instruments, lutes and drums in various stages of dissection. A perfect copy of the painting hung at the Museo del Prado in Madrid, a reproduction Percival’s father had personally commissioned.
Gripping the ivory head of his cane, Percival made his way through the crowd. He usually put up with such debauchery but felt now—in his current condition—that it would be difficult to make it across the room. He nodded to the father of a former schoolmate—a member of his family’s circle for many centuries—standing at a remove from the crowd, his immaculate white wings on display. Percival smiled slightly at a model he had once taken to dinner, a lovely creature with pellucid blue eyes who came from an established Swiss family. She was far too young for her wings to have emerged, and so there was no way to glean the full extent of her breeding, but Percival knew her family to be old and influential. Before his illness had struck, his mother had tried to convince him to marry the girl. One day she would be a powerful member of their community.
Percival could tolerate their friends from old families—it was to his benefit to do so—but he found their new acquaintances, a collection of nouveau riche money managers, media moguls, and other hangers-on who had insinuated themselves into his mother’s good graces, to be loathsome. They were not like the Grigoris, of course, but most were close enough to be sympathetic to the delicate balance of deference and discretion the Grigori family required. They tended to gather at his mother’s side, inundating her with compliments and flattering her sense of noblesse oblige, ensuring that they would be invited to the Grigori apartment the next afternoon.
If it were up to Percival, their lives would be kept private, but his mother could not endure being alone. He suspected that she surrounded herself with amusement to stave off the terrible truth that their kind had lost their place in the order of things. Their family had formed alliances generations before and depended upon a network of friendships and relations to maintain their position and prosperity. In the Old World, they were deeply, inextricably connected to their family’s history. In New York, they had to re-create it everywhere they went.
Otterley, his younger sister, stood by the window, a dim light falling over her. Otterley was of average height—six feet three inches—thin, and zipped into a low-cut dress, a bit much but in keeping with her taste. She’d pulled her blond hair back into a severe chignon and had painted her lips a bright pink that seemed a little too young for her. Otterley had been stunning once—even more lovely than the Swiss model standing nearby—but had burned through her youth in a hundred-year spree of parties and ill-suited relationships that had left her—and their fortune—significantly diminished. Now she was middle-aged, well into her two-hundredth year, and despite her efforts to conceal it, her skin had the appearance of a plastic mannequin’s. Try as she might, she couldn’t recapture the way she had looked in the nineteenth century.
Seeing Percival, Otterley sauntered to his side, slid a long bare arm through his arm, and led him into the crowd as if he were an invalid. Every man and woman in the room watched Otterley. If they had not done business with his sister, they knew her from her work on various family boards or by the incessant social calendar she maintained. Their friends and acquaintances were wary of his sister. No one could afford to displease Otterley Grigori.
“And where have you been hiding?” Otterley asked Percival, narrowing her eyes in a reptilian stare. She had been raised in London, where their father still resided, and her crisp British accent had a particularly sharp sting when she became irritated.
“I doubt very much that you’re feeling lonely,” Percival said, glancing at the crowd.
“One is never alone with Mother,” Otterley replied, tart. “She makes these things more elaborate each week.”
“She’s here somewhere, I assume?”
Otterley’s expression hardened in irritation. “Last I checked, she was receiving admirers at her throne.”
They walked to the far end of the room, past a wall of French windows that seemed to invite one to step through their thick, transparent depths and float out above the foggy, snow-laden city. Anakim, the class of servants the Grigoris and all well-bred families kept, stepped in their path and cut away. More champagne, sir? Madam? Dressed entirely in black, the Anakim were shorter and smaller-boned than the class of beings they served. In addition to their black uniforms, his mother insisted that they wear their wings exposed, to distinguish them from her guests. The difference in shape and span was marked. Whereas the pure class of guests had muscular, feathered wings, the servants’ wings were light as film, webs of gossamer tissue that appeared washed in sheets of gray opalescence. Because of the wings’ structure—they resembled nothing so much as the wings of an insect—the servants flew with precise, quick movements that allowed great accuracy. They had huge yellow eyes, high cheekbones, and pale skin. Percival had witnessed a flight of Anakim during the Second World War, when a swarm of servants had descended upon a caravan of humans fleeing the bombing of London. The servants ripped the wretched people apart with ease. After this episode Percival understood why the Anakim were believed to be capricious and unpredictable beings fit only to serve their superiors.
Every few steps Percival recognized family friends and acquaintances, their crystal champagne flutes catching the light. Conversations melted into the air, leaving the impression of one continual velvety drone of gossip. He overheard talk of holidays and yachts and business ventures, conversation that characterized his mother’s friends as much as the flash of diamonds and the sparkling cruelty of their laughter. The guests looked upon him from every corner, taking in his shoes, his watch, pausing to examine the cane and finally—seeing Otterley—realizing that the sick, disheveled gentleman was Percival Grigori III, heir to the Grigori name and fortune.
Finally they reached their mother, Sneja Grigori, stretched out upon her favorite divan, a beautiful and imposing piece of Gothic furniture with serpents carved into the wood frame. Sneja had gained weight in the decades since her move to New York and wore only loose, flowing tunics that draped against her body in silken sheets. She’d splayed her lush, brilliant-colored wings behind her, folded and arranged to great effect, as if displaying the family’s jewels. As Percival approached, he was nearly blinded by their luminosity, each delicate feather shimmering like a sheet of tinted foil. Sneja’s wings were the pride of the family, the height of their beauty proof of the purity of their heritage. It was a mark of distinction that Percival’s maternal grandmother had been endowed with multicolored wings that stretched over thirty-six feet, a span that had not been seen in a thousand years. It was rumored that such wings had served as models for the angels of Fra Angelico, Lorenzo Monaco, and Botticini. Wings, Sneja had once told Percival, were a symbol of their blood, their breeding, the predominance of their position in the community. Displaying them properly brought power and prestige, and it was no small disappointment that neither Otterley nor Percival had given Sneja an heir to carry on the family endowment.
Which was precisely the reason it annoyed Percival that Otterley hid her wings. Instead of displaying them, as one would expect, she insisted upon keeping them folded tight against her body, as if she were some common hybrid and not a member of one of the most prestigious angelic families in the United States. Percival understood that the ability to retract one’s wings was a great tool, especially when in mixed society. Indeed, it gave one the ability to move in human society without being detected. But in private company it was an offense to keep one’s wings hidden.
Sneja Grigori greeted Otterley and Percival, lifting a hand so that it might be kissed by her children. “My cherubs,” she said, her voice deep, her accent vaguely Germanic, a remnant of her Austrian childhood in the House of Hapsburg. Pausing, she narrowed her eyes and examined Otterley’s necklace—a globular pink diamond solitaire sunk in an antique setting. “What a superior piece of jewelry,” she said, as if surprised to find such a treasure about her daughter’s neck.
“Don’t you recognize it?” Otterley said, lightly. “It is one of Grandmother’s pieces.”
“Is it?” Sneja lifted the diamond between her thumb and forefinger so that light played off the faceted surface. “I would think I should recognize it, but it seems quite foreign to me. It is from my room?”
“No,” Otterley replied, her manner guarded.
“Isn’t it from the vault, Otterley?” Percival asked.
Otterley pursed her lips, giving him a look that told him at once that he had given his sister away.
“Ah, well, that would explain its mystery,” Sneja said. “I haven’t been to the vault in so long I’ve completely forgotten its contents. Are all of my mother’s pieces as brilliant as this?”
“They are lovely, Mother,” Otterley said, her composure shaken. Otterley had been taking pieces from the vault for years without their mother noticing.
“I simply adore this piece in particular,” Sneja said. “Perhaps I will have to make a midnight trip to the vault? It may be time to do an inventory.”
Without hesitation Otterley unfastened the necklace and placed it in her mother’s hand. “It will look stunning on you, Mother,” she said. Then, without waiting for her mother’s reaction, or perhaps to mask the anguish of giving up such a jewel, Otterley turned on her stiletto heels and slinked back into the crowd, her dress clinging to her as if wet.
Sneja held the necklace to the light—it burst into a ball of liquid fire—before dropping it into her beaded evening clutch. Then she turned to Percival, as if suddenly recalling that her only son had witnessed her victory. “It is rather funny,” Sneja said. “Otterley thinks I am unaware that she’s been stealing my jewelry these twenty-five years.”
Percival laughed. “You haven’t let on that you’ve known. If you had, Otterley would have stopped ages ago.”
His mother waved the observation away as if it were a fly. “I know everything that goes on in this family,” she said, adjusting herself on the divan so that the arch of a wing caught the light. “Including the fact that you have not been taking proper care of yourself. You must rest more, eat more, sleep more. Things cannot simply go on as usual. It is time to make preparations for the future.”
“That is precisely what I have been doing,” Percival said, annoyed that his mother insisted upon directing him about as if he were in his first century of life.
“I see,” Sneja said, evaluating her son’s irritation. “You have had your meeting.”
“As planned,” Percival said.
“And that is why you have come upstairs with such a sour look—you wish to tell me about the progress you’ve made. The meeting did not go as planned?”
“Do they ever?” Percival said, though his disappointment was plain. “I admit: I had higher hopes for this one.”
“Yes,” Sneja said, looking past Percival. “We all did.”
“Come.” Percival took his mother’s hand and helped her from the divan. “Let me speak to you alone for a moment.”
“You cannot talk to me here?”
“Please,” Percival said, glancing at the party with repulsion. “It is completely impossible.”
With her audience of admirers captivated, Sneja made a great show of leaving the divan. Unfurling her wings, she stretched them away from her shoulders so that they draped about her like a cloak. Percival watched her, a tremor of jealousy stopping him cold. His mother’s wings were gorgeous, shimmering, healthy, full-plumed. A gradation of soft color radiated from the tips, where the feathers were tiny and roseate, and moved to the center of her back, where the feathers grew large and glittering. Percival’s wings, when he’d had them, had been even larger than his mother’s, sharp and dramatic, the feathers precisely shaped daggers of brilliant, powdery gold. He could not look at his mother without longing to be healthy again.
Sneja Grigori paused, allowing her guests to admire the beauty of her celestial attribute, and then, with a grace Percival found marvelous, his mother drew the wings to her body, folding them to her back with the ease of a geisha snapping closed a rice-paper fan.

Percival led his mother down the grand staircase by the arm. The dining-room table had been stacked with flowers and china, awaiting his mother’s guests. A small roasted pig, a pear in its mouth, lay amid the bouquets, its side carved into moist shelves of pink. Through the windows Percival could see people hurrying below, small and black as rodents pushing through the freezing wind. Inside, it was warm and comfortable. A fire burned in the fireplace, and the faint sound of muted conversation and soft music descended upon them from upstairs.
Sneja arranged herself in a chair. “Now, tell me: What is it you want?” she asked, looking more than a little annoyed at being escorted away from the party. She took a cigarette from a platinum cigarette case and lit it. “If it is money again, Percival, you know you’ll have to speak with your father. I haven’t the slightest idea how you go through so much so quickly.” His mother smiled, suddenly indulgent. “Well, actually, my dearest, I do have some idea. But your father is the one you must speak to about it.”
Percival took a cigarette from his mother’s case and allowed her to light it for him. He knew the moment he inhaled that he had made a mistake: His lungs burned. He coughed, trying to breathe. Sneja pushed a jade ashtray to Percival so that he could extinguish the cigarette.
After recovering his breath, he said, “My source has proved useless.”
“As expected,” Sneja said, inhaling the smoke from her cigarette.
“The discovery he claims to have made is of no value to us,” Percival said.
“Discovery?” Sneja said, her eyes widening. “Exactly what kind of new discovery?”
As Percival elaborated upon the meeting, outlining Verlaine’s ridiculous obsession with architectural drawings of a convent in Milton, New York, and an equally infuriating preoccupation with the vagaries of ancient coins, his mother ran her long, chalk-white fingers over the polished lacquer table, then stopped abruptly, astonished.
“It is amazing,” she said at last. “Do you really believe he found nothing of use?”
“What do you mean?”
“Somehow, in your zeal to trace Abigail Rockefeller’s contacts, you’ve missed the larger point entirely.” Sneja crushed out her cigarette and lit another. “These architectural drawings may be exactly what we’re looking for. Give them to me. I would like to see them myself.”
“I told Verlaine to keep them,” Percival said, realizing even as he spoke them that those words would enrage her. “Besides, we ruled St. Rose Convent out after the 1944 attack. There was nothing left after the fire. Surely you don’t imagine we missed something.”
“I would like to be able to see for myself,” Sneja said, without bothering to mask her frustration. “I suggest we go to this convent at once.”
Percival jumped at an opportunity to redeem himself. “I have taken care of it,” he said. “My source is en route to St. Rose this very instant to verify what he’s found.”
“Your source—he is one of us?”
Percival stared at his mother a moment, unsure how to proceed. Sneja would be furious to learn he had placed so much faith in Verlaine, who was outside their network of spies. “I know how you feel about using outsiders, but there is no cause to worry. I’ve had him thoroughly checked.”
“Of course you have,” Sneja said, exhaling cigarette smoke. “Just as you’ve had the others checked in the past.”
“This is a new era,” Percival said. He measured his words carefully, determined to remain calm in the face of his mother’s criticism. “We are not so easily betrayed.”
“Yes, you are correct, we live in a new era,” Sneja retorted. “We live in an era of freedom and comfort, an era free of detection, an era of unprecedented wealth. We are free to do as we wish, to travel where we wish, to live as we wish. But this is also an era in which the best of our kind have become complacent and weak. It is an era of sickness and degeneration. Not you, nor I, nor any one of the ridiculous creatures hanging about in my sitting room are above detection.”
“You think I have been complacent?” Percival said, his voice rising despite his efforts. He took his cane in hand and prepared to leave.
“I don’t believe you can possibly be anything else in your condition,” Sneja said. “It is essential that Otterley will assist you.”
“It is only natural,” Percival said. “Otterley has been working on this as long as I have.”
“And your father and I have been working on it long before that,” Sneja said. “And my parents were working on it before I was born, and their parents before them. You are just one of many.”
Percival tapped the tip of his cane on the wooden floor. “I should think my condition brings a new urgency.”
Sneja glanced at the cane. “It is true—your illness brings new meaning to the hunt. But your obsession to cure yourself has blinded you. Otterley would never have given up those drawings, Percival. Indeed, Otterley would be at this convent now, verifying them. Look at all the time you have wasted! What if your foolishness has cost us the treasure?”
“Then I will die,” he said.
Sneja Grigori placed her smooth white hand upon Percival’s cheek. The frivolous woman he had escorted from the divan hardened into a statuesque creature filled with ambition and pride—the very things he both admired and envied in her. “It will not come to that. I will not allow it to come to that. Now go and rest. I will take care of Mr. Verlaine.”
Percival stood and, leaning heavily upon his cane, hobbled from the room.