Angelology (43 page)

Evangeline nearly cried out with frustration at the missive’s abrupt ending. The amputated letter left no further explanation of what she must do. She searched through the cards and reread her grandmother’s words once again, desperate to discover something she had overlooked.

The account of her mother’s murder caused Evangeline such pain that she had to force herself to continue reading Gabriella’s words. The details were gruesome, and there seemed something cruel, almost heartless, in Gabriella’s retelling of the horror of Angela’s death. Evangeline tried to imagine her mother’s body, bruised and broken, her beautiful face marred. Wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, Evangeline understood at last why her father had taken her so far away from the country of her birth.

Upon the third reading of the cards, Evangeline stopped to examine a line relating to her mother’s killers.
There are many who would see our work eliminatedand who will kill indiscriminately to reach that end. Your mother died at the hands of the Grigori family, whoseeffortshave kept the battle between Nephilim and angelologists alive.
She had heard the name, but she could not say where until she remembered that Verlaine was working for a man called Percival Grigori. At once she understood that Verlaine—whose intentions were obviously pure—was working for her greatest enemy.

The horror of this realization left Evangeline at a loss. How could she assist Verlaine when he didn’t even realize the danger he was in? Indeed, he might report his findings to Percival Grigori. What she had believed to be the best plan—to send Verlaine back to New York and to carry on at St. Rose as if nothing significant had happened—had put them both in grave danger.

She began to pack the cards when, skimming the lines, she noticed one that struck her as odd:
By thetime you read this, you will be a woman of twenty-five.
Evangeline recalled that Celestine had been asked to give her the cards when she turned twenty-five years old. Therefore the missive must have been conceived and written out entirely more than ten years before, when Evangeline was twelve, as each letter had been sent in an orderly progression each year. Evangeline was twenty-three years old. That meant that there must be two more cards, and two more pieces of the puzzle her grandmother had fashioned, waiting to be found.

Taking the envelopes once again, Evangeline put them in chronological order and checked the cancellation dates inked across the stamps. The last card had been postmarked before the previous Christmas, on December 21, 1998. In fact, all of the cards had a similar cancellation date—they had been mailed just days before Christmas. If the card for the present year had been posted in the same fashion, it could have already arrived, perhaps in the previous afternoon’s mailbag. Evangeline wrapped the cards together, put them in the pocket of her skirt, and hurried from her cell.

I
t had been a long and chilly walk from the I25th Street—Harlem station to his office, but Verlaine had buttoned his coat and was determined to face the freezing winds. Once he arrived on the Columbia University campus, he found everything utterly quiet, more still and dark than he’d seen it before. The holiday had sent everyone—even the most dedicated students—home until after the New Year. In the distance, cars drove along Broadway, their lights opening over the buildings. Riverside Church, its imposing tower stretching above even the highest of the campus buildings, sat in the distance, its stained-glass windows illuminated from within.

The cut on Verlaine’s hand had somehow reopened on the walk, and a fine trickle of blood blossomed through the silk of his fleur-de-lis tie. After some searching he found his office keys and let himself into Schermerhorn Hall, the location of the art history and archaeology department, an imposing brick building in proximity to St. Paul’s Chapel that had once housed the natural sciences departments. Indeed, Verlaine had heard that it had been the site of early work on the Manhattan Project, a bit of trivia he found fascinating. Although he knew he was alone, he felt too ill at ease to take the elevator and risk being trapped inside. Instead, Verlaine ran up the stairs to the graduate-student offices.

Once in his office, he locked the door behind him and removed the folder containing Innocenta’s letters from his desk, taking care not to let his bloodied hand come into contact with the desiccated, fragile paper. Sitting in his chair, he flicked on his desk lamp, and in the pale ring of light he examined the letters. He had read them numerous times before, noting every possible distinguishing innuendo and every potentially allusive turn of phrase, and yet even now, after hours of rereading them in the spooky solitude of his locked office, he felt that the letters seemed strangely, even bizarrely banal. Though the events of the past day prodded him to read the slightest detail with a new eye, he could find very little that pointed to a hidden agenda between these two women. Indeed, beneath the puddle of light from his desk lamp, Innocenta’s letters appeared to be not much more than sedate tea-table discursions on the quotidian rituals of the convent and on Mrs. Rockefeller’s unerring good taste.

Verlaine stood, began packing his papers into a messenger bag he kept in the corner of his office, and was about to call it a night when he stopped short. There was something uncanny about the letters. He could detect no obvious pattern—in fact, they were almost purposely jumbled. But there was an unaccountable recurrence of some very odd compliments Innocenta paid Mrs. Rockefeller. At the end of several missives, Innocenta praised the other woman’s good taste. In the past, Verlaine had skimmed these passages, believing them to be a trite way to bring the letters to a close. Taking the letters from his bag, he reread them again, this time noting each of the many passages of artistic praise.

The compliments revolved around the choice of Mrs. Rockefeller’s taste in a picture or design. In one letter Innocenta had written,
“Please know that the perfection of your artistic vision, and the execution of your fancy, is well noted and accepted.”
At the close of the second letter, Verlaine read, “
Our most admired friend, one cannot fail to marvel at your delicate renderings or receive them with humble thanks and grateful understanding.”
And yet another read,
“As always, your hand never fails to express what the eye most wishes to behold.”

Verlaine puzzled over these references for a moment. What was all this talk about artistic renderings? Had there been pictures or a design included in Abigail Rockefeller’s letters to Innocenta? Evangeline hadn’t mentioned finding anything accompanying the letter in the archives, but Innocenta’s replies seemed to suggest that there was in fact something of that nature attached to her patron’s half of the correspondence. If Abigail Rockefeller had included her own original drawings and he discovered these drawings, his professional life would skyrocket. Verlaine’s excitement was so great he could hardly think.

To fully understand Innocenta’s references, he would need to find the original letters. Evangeline had one in her possession. Surely the others must be somewhere at St. Rose Convent, most likely archived in their vault in the library. Verlaine wondered if it was possible that Evangeline had discovered Abigail Rockefeller’s letter and had overlooked an enclosure, or perhaps had even discovered an envelope with the letter. While Evangeline had promised to look for the other missives, she had no reason to search for anything more. If only he had his car, he would drive back to the convent and assist her in the search. Verlaine fumbled through his desk, looking for the telephone number of St. Rose Convent. If Evangeline couldn’t find the letters in the convent, it was more than likely that they would never be found. It would be a terrible loss for the history of art, not to mention Verlaine’s career. He suddenly felt ashamed that he had been so afraid, and of his reluctance to return to his apartment. He needed to pull himself together immediately and get back upstate to St. Rose by whatever means possible.

B
efore the previous day, Evangeline had believed what she’d been told about her past. She trusted the accounts she’d heard from her father and the sequence of events the sisters had told her. But Gabriella’s letter had shattered her faith in the story line of her life. Now she distrusted everything.

Gathering her strength, she stepped into the immaculate, empty hallway, the envelopes tucked under her arm. She felt weak and dizzy after reading her grandmother’s letters, as if she had just escaped from the confines of a horrible dream. How had it been that she’d never fully understood the importance of her mother’s work and, even more astonishing, her mother’s death? What more had her grandmother meant to tell her? How could she possibly wait for the next two letters to understand it all? Fighting the urge to run, Evangeline walked down the stone steps, making her way to the one place she knew she might find the answer.

The Mission and Recruitment offices were in the southwestern corner of the convent in a modernized series of suites with pale pink carpeting, multiple-line telephones, solid oak desks, and metal filing cabinets containing all of the sisters’ personal files: birth certificates, medical records, educational degrees, legal documents, and—for those who had departed this earth—certificates of death. The Recruitment Center—combined with the Mistress of Novices’ Office due to the decline in membership—occupied the left arm of the suite, while the Mission Office occupied the right. Together they formed two open arms embracing the outside world to the bureaucratic heart of St. Rose Convent.

In recent years traffic to the Mission Office had risen, while recruitment had fallen into a deep decline. Once upon a time, the young had flocked to St. Rose for the equity and education and independence convent life offered to young women loath to enter into marriage. In modern times, St. Rose Convent became more stringent, demanding that women make the choice to profess vows on their own, without family coercion, and only after much soul-searching.

Thus, while recruitment flagged, the Mission Office became the busiest department at St. Rose. On the wall of the office hung a large laminated map of the world with red flags affixed to affiliate countries: Brazil, Zimbabwe, China, India, Mexico, Guatemala. There were photographs of sisters in ponchos and saris holding babies, administering medicine, and singing in choirs with the native populations. In the past decade, they had developed an international community-exchange program with foreign churches, bringing sisters from all over the world to St. Rose to participate in perpetual adoration, study English, and pursue personal spiritual growth. The program was a great success. Over the years they had hosted sisters from twelve countries. These sisters’ photographs hung above the map: twelve smiling women with twelve identical black veils framing their faces.

Arriving at such an early hour, Evangeline had expected to find the Mission Office empty. Instead there was Sister Ludovica, the oldest member of their community, installed in her wheelchair as the early edition of a National Public Radio broadcast played from a plastic radio on her lap. She was frail and pink-skinned, her white hair springing about the bandeau edges of her veil. Ludovica glanced at Evangeline, her dark eyes glistening in a way that confirmed the growing speculation among the sisters that Ludovica was losing her mind, slipping further and further from reality with each passing year. The previous summer a Milton police officer had discovered Ludovica pushing her wheelchair along Highway 9W at midnight.

Lately her attentions had turned to botany. Her conversations with the plants were harmless but signaled further disintegration. As she wheeled through the convent with a red watering can dangling from the side of her chair, one could hear Ludovica’s stentorian voice quoting
Paradise
Lost as she watered and trimmed: “‘Nine times the Space that measures Day and Night / To mortal men, he with his horrid crew / Lay vanquisht, rowling in the fiery Gulfe / Confounded though immortal!’”

It was plain to Evangeline that the Mission Office’s spider plants had taken to Ludovica’s affection: They had grown to enormous proportions, sending shoots dripping over the filing cabinets. The plant had become so profound in its fecundity that the sisters had started snipping the baby plants and placing them in water until they sprung roots. Once transplanted, the new spider plants grew equally enormous and were stationed throughout the convent, filling each of the four floors with tangles of green spawn.

“Good morning, Sister,” Evangeline said, hoping that Ludovica would recognize her.

“Oh, my!” Ludovica replied, startled. “You surprised me!”

“I’m sorry to disturb you, but I was unable to pick up the mail yesterday afternoon. Is the mailbag in the Mission Office?”

“Mailbag?” Ludovica asked, furrowing her brow. “I believe that all mail goes to Sister Evangeline.”

“Yes, Ludovica,” Evangeline said. “I’m Evangeline. But I wasn’t able to pick up our mail yesterday. It would have been delivered here. Have you seen it?”

“Most certainly!” Ludovica said, wheeling the chair to the closet behind her desk, where the mailbag hung from a hook. It was, as always, filled to the top. “Please deliver it directly to Sister Evangeline!”

Evangeline carried the bag to the far end of the Mission Office, to a darkened cove where she might find more privacy. Spilling the contents over the desk, she saw that it was filled with its usual mixture of personal requests, advertisements, catalogs, and invoices. Evangeline had sorted through such muddles of post so often and knew the sizes of each variety of letters so well that it took her only seconds to locate the card from Gabriella. It was a perfectly square green envelope addressed to Celestine Clochette. The return address was the same as the others, a New York City location that Evangeline did not recognize.