Angelopolis (6 page)

Winter Palace, State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg

I
f Vera Varvara were permitted to do as she wished, she would leave her office, with its chipping white plaster and disorderly papers, and walk through the vast Baroque hallways of the Winter Palace. She would make her way through the ancient corridors, with their gilded mirrors and cut crystal chandeliers, free as a child in a palace built of rock candy. She would cross the immense Palace Square, walk under the arches of the southern façade, and wander to the museum, where a flash of her ID card would open every door. Among paintings and tapestries and porcelains and statues—all the beautiful things amassed by the Romanovs during their three-hundred-year rule of Russia—she would feel as unfettered as a princess.

Instead she twisted her long blond hair into a chignon, went to the window, and pushed the pane open. There were angelic creatures below; she could feel them lingering, their presence like a high frequency vibrating her ear. She ignored them and let the chill night wind sweep over her. A lifetime in the swampy climate of St. Petersburg had given her a strong constitution, one that resisted every kind of illness and allowed her to get through harsh winters without much discomfort. Vera was neither tall nor short, thin nor fat, beautiful nor plain. In fact, she considered herself to be a perfect example of physical mediocrity, and this knowledge empowered her to live entirely in her mind, to push herself intellectually, to forget the frivolous lives led by so many women she knew—lives filled with shopping and husbands and children—and to excel in her work. In this regard, she had a difficult time coming down to the level of the people she met on the street; she simply didn’t want to hear about their everyday successes and failures. An old boyfriend had once complained that her mind was like a metal trap—it hung open, inviting one to engage, and then clamped down hard on whoever dared come inside. She had never had a relationship with a man for more than a month or two, and even that duration of time she found to be cloying.

Leaning forward, Vera craned her neck outside, taking in the green-and-white marble of the Winter Palace, the onion dome rising in the distance. The river Neva, floes of ice floating and sinking, rushed by. All that she found ugly about St. Petersburg—the Communist apartment blocs, the gaudy trappings of the nouveaux riches abutting the glaring poverty, the lack of political freedom of Putin’s government—seemed far away when she was ensconced in her tiny corner of the Winter Palace. Vera’s position as a junior researcher revolved around the study of Russian Nephilim, their infiltration into the royal family and the aristocracy, their artifacts, their genealogies, and their fates during the revolution of 1917. She’d grown up in post-Soviet Petersburg, surrounded by the lush Italianate buildings of the Romanovs, and this—along with her training in angelology—had influenced her taste profoundly. She did not yearn, like so many young Russians, to experience the opulence of the past, to feel the luxuries and excesses of another era, and yet she didn’t perceive such decadence as a kind of sickness either, as the Communists had. She was able to accept the layers of historical accretion as one accepts the layers of an archaeological dig: The effects of the Nephilim on the earth could be found underneath the social, economic, and political structures humans experienced each day. She knew that the creatures had infected the essence of her country once and, with the angelic population rising, would do so again.

With only two years of work outside of her training period, Vera was at the lowest position on the totem pole and, as such, was charged with sorting and cataloging artifacts. Just a fraction of the Hermitage collections were on permanent display. The rest of the three million treasures were kept in massive storage rooms below the palace, hidden from public view. Among these she’d found uncountable remnants of Romanov treasures: ancient books that had been ripped apart; Rembrandts with red numbers painted on the canvases to mark their place in the Soviet inventory; furniture destroyed by water and fire. Many of the objects had been part of Catherine the Great’s private collection but had been significantly augmented by Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna before her fall from power in 1917. Picking up the pieces strewn about by history, and putting them back together—rebinding books, matching chipped enamels, removing the mar of red paint—was work she loved. Such opportunities were rare, and ones that allowed access to a collection like that of the Hermitage were almost nonexistent. Past curators had left the artifacts locked away for nearly a hundred years, uncertain of what to do with such strange treasures. Whenever she entered the storage rooms she felt as though she had walked into a time capsule, one as eerie as an Egyptian tomb, filled with secrets too strange to be shared with the world. She found segments of the collection to be a highly unnerving, almost frightening, accumulation of bizarre curiosities. For example, there was an entire storage room filled with canvases depicting angels and swans and young women, presumably virgins. It made her wonder at the motives for collecting such objects. Had the Romanovs actively singled them out or had the pieces been procured for them at random? For some reason, the taste of the collector mattered to her.

One day earlier that year, while Vera was searching through this bizarre collection of swans and virgins, she come across a sheaf of etchings. She’d found many odd things, but these were magnetic, perhaps because they were so unusual. Each print contained a portrait of an angel unlike any she had seen before. The creatures seemed utterly unique, with details that set them apart, and it was clear that they were very pure beings, perhaps archangels. Checking the signature, she realized that the prints were the work of Albrecht Dürer, a fifteenth-century artist, mathematician, and angelologist whom Vera deeply admired. His Apocalypse series was taught extensively in angelological courses as a vision of what would happen if the Watchers were ever released from their subterranean prison.

But these etchings seemed like a departure for Dürer. Oddly, they reminded her of the photographs taken by Seraphina Valko during the Second Angelic Expedition, in 1943. The renowned Dr. Valko and her team had located a dead angel’s body, measured it, photographed it, and positively identified it as belonging to one of the Watchers who had been banished from Heaven for falling in love with human women.

Vera had seen the photos firsthand, during a conference in Paris the year before. Although they were black-and-white, taken in conditions that were far from ideal, the body of the dead angel was clearly visible. The long limbs, the hairless chest, the ringlets of hair falling over its shoulders, the full lips—the creature seemed vital and healthy, as if it had only closed its eyes for a moment. Only a broken wing fanning from the torso, its feathers folded at an unnatural angle, revealed the truth: The angel had been dead for thousands of years. The creature was male, with all the recognizable organs of human anatomy, a truth the pictures demonstrated with graphic accuracy. Seraphina Valko’s photographs proved that the Watchers were physical beings, more like humanity than traditionally believed. Angels were not sexless beings but physical creatures whose bodies were but a more perfect expression of the human body. And most important of all, the photos had proven that angels were capable of fathering children. All of Vera’s ideas about the Watchers, and all the work she had done to support her theories, depended upon this conclusion.

Vera drew away from the window and leaned against her desk, a Brezhnev-era affair with rusting metal legs. She slid open a drawer and removed the envelope she’d hidden under a stack of magazines. The portfolio was too bulky to keep on her desk, where anyone stopping by to chat could see it. With such limited access hours to the Hermitage, and the strict ban on bringing objects up from the storage rooms, she had had little choice but to smuggle the prints out of their tomb. It was her only hope for making progress on her own research. If there was one thing she knew about her field, it was this: Nobody was going to help her to advance but herself.

Gently unwinding the string of the clasp, she spread the sketches over the desk, marveling at the intricacy of the figures, the leaden hue of the line, the sheer genius of Dürer’s composition. Originally, it was her fascination with Dürer’s artistry that drew her to covet the etchings. But now, in the privacy of her office, the drawings seemed to become animated with movement and energy. Only an artist as masterful as Dürer could make a viewer viscerally understand how a Watcher could, like Zeus, seduce a virgin. Gazing at the prints, Vera imagined the encounter: In a swirl of wind, an angel appears before a young woman. He opens his wings, blinding her with his brilliance. She blinks, tries to understand who or what has come to her, but is too afraid to speak. The angel tries to comfort her, wrapping the terrified woman in his wings. There is a moment of terror and empathy and attraction. Vera wanted to feel it: the tangle of feathers and flesh, the heat of the embrace, the conflating of pain and pleasure and fear and desire.

Aeroflot Ilyushin IL-96 300, economy class, 35,000 feet above Europe

T
he lights in the cabin had been switched off. Most of the passengers were twisted in their seats, trying to sleep. Bruno pulled down the plastic table and set out his dinner, bought at Roissy before boarding: a baguette sandwich with ham and a bottle of red wine from Burgundy. If there was one thing he understood about the present situation, it was that he couldn’t think on an empty stomach.

Bruno found two plastic cups and poured the wine. Verlaine accepted one, took a pillbox from his pocket, and swallowed two pills, washing them down with the wine. He was obviously too jittery to eat anything. Verlaine tried to hide his state of mind, but Bruno could see it clearly: Finding Evangeline had opened a door to another lifetime, one Verlaine had nearly forgotten. Bruno knew, at that moment, that his suspicions about Verlaine were correct: His Achilles’ heel, that secret weakness he’d detected, was now clear.

No one knew it, he hoped, but Bruno was also wrestling with his own demons: He couldn’t forget Eno—the way she moved, her strength, her beauty. Calling up the profile he’d downloaded onto his phone, he scrolled through the supplementary documents, glancing at the DNA report before stopping to examine—admire, if he were honest with himself—the photographs of her exquisitely cold features. It was no use pretending to himself that her penetrating black eyes hadn’t burned into his heart.

“What are you looking at?” Verlaine asked, squinting through his glasses.

Bruno passed the phone to Verlaine. “Eno,” he said, opting to tell him the truth. “This creature inspires pure obsession among our agents,” he said. “There is something about her, something that makes the challenge of capturing her almost irresistible. Our official stance has been to discourage our agents from becoming too tied up in hunting a particular creature. Often they don’t heed this advice.”

As Verlaine looked at Eno’s profile on the phone, a look of horror spread over his face:
“The victim suffered burns to the neck, wrists, and ankles; lacerations to the face, torso, buttocks, and back. The body was marred by what appears to be—from autopsies documenting previous victims—ritualistic castration. Organs are never left at the scene and assumed to be kept as a trophy
.
”

“She’s not someone you want to take home for a quiet romantic evening,” Bruno continued. “No matter how much one likes to think himself the hunter, Eno is the one doing the hunting. She’s young, by the standards of the Emim angels, and hungry.”

“But what does she want with Evangeline?” Verlaine asked.

It was an interesting question for Bruno. The last time he had seen Evangeline, she’d been at the center of an operation that ended in unqualified disaster: They had lost their outpost in Milton, New York, not to mention a number of agents, and an artifact of untold value to their cause. Evangeline’s own grandmother Gabriella, a close friend of Bruno’s, had been found dead on a subway platform. Evangeline had disappeared completely. For the past ten years Bruno had considered her AWOL at best; at worst she was a traitor, guilty of crimes against their society.

Not that he was perfectly in line with society regulations himself. Bruno took a long sip of his wine, trying to think through the consequences of his decision to go after Eno and Evangeline. Flying to Russia on the spur of the moment was totally unsanctioned. Of course, Bruno had leeway to go after dangerous creatures, and he didn’t ask for permission for every hunt, but this was not the usual situation. He’d bought the tickets himself, to keep the flight off the record, and he knew that he would have to work without the usual backup. It was an act of insubordination worthy of Evangeline, but even more so of Evangeline’s mother, Angela Valko, one of the most daring angelologists in recent memory.

When Bruno arrived at the academy in Paris, Angela Valko was already legendary. Even then she was considered to be their most brilliant scientist. Her reputation was varnished by her husband, an infamous angel hunter named Luca Cacciatore. Angela’s pedigree was the envy of every student in the school. As the daughter of Gabriella and Dr. Raphael Valko, she was personally tutored by her parents and was thus their heir in spirit as well as in name. As it turned out, she was the rare case of a well-connected child exceeding the glories of the past: Angela’s work was so advanced that it didn’t matter who her parents were or what they had done to help her. Her work changed the direction of the battle against angels—angelologists began to focus on the possibility of destroying the Nephilim en masse.

As with the chatter about any celebrity couple, much of what Bruno heard was gossip, but there must have been at least a little truth in the stories. Whenever an antiquated tradition or the red tape of the society held her back, Angela had simply changed the rules. If she couldn’t change the system, she created a new one, beginning with her marriage to Luca, whom she met when he was a guest from the academy in Rome. When the council members—old and conservative angelologists who liked to keep the school staffed with their own kind—rejected Luca’s application for a position in Paris, Angela helped him to create the angel hunter unit. Together they recruited the first fleet of angel hunters and the rest was history.