Angelology

by Danielle Trussoni

  “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 naïve 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 plaît.”

  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 was
hed 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.”