Angelology(125)

Evangeline turned the paper over in her hand, hoping the red ink would continue. Surely the

message was a fragment of a larger communication. But she found nothing.

She glanced about her bedroom—the solid edges of which had gone soft as her exhaustion grew—

then turned back to the cards. She opened another card and then another. There were identical creamy

pages fastened inside each card, all of which had been filled with lines of writing that began and

ended without any discernible logic whatsoever. Of the eleven cards, only the one addressed to her

contained a definite starting or ending point. There were no numbers on the pages, and the order could

not be discerned from the chronology in which they’d been mailed. In fact, it appeared to Evangeline

that the pages had been simply filled up with an endless stream of words. To make matters worse, the

words were so small it strained her eyes to read them.

After examining the pages for some time, Evangeline returned each card to its envelope, being sure

to keep the envelopes in the order of cancellation date. The effort of trying to understand the tangled

pages of her grandmother’s writing made her head throb. She could not think clearly, and the pain in

her temples was acute. She should have gone to sleep hours before. Bundling the cards together, she

placed them under her pillow, careful not to bend or crease the edges. She could do nothing more

until she had some sleep.

Without pausing to put on her pajamas, she stepped out of her shoes and fell into bed. The sheets

were wonderfully cool and soft against her skin. Pulling her comforter to her chin and wiggling her

nylon-encased toes, she dropped into the bottomless free fall of sleep.

Metro-North Hudson Line train, somewhere between Poughkeepsie

and Harlem—125thStreet station, New York

Verlaine had caught the last southbound train of the night. To his right, the Hudson River ran

alongside the tracks; to his left, the snow-covered hills rose to meet the night sky. The train was

warm, well lit, and empty. The Coronas he had drunk at the bar in Milton and the slow, rocking

rhythm of the train had combined to calm him to the point of resignation, if not contentment. Although

he hated the thought of leaving his Renault behind, the reality was that he would probably never get

his car back in working order. It was a model with a boxy body whose simple design gestured to the

early Renaults of the postwar era, cars that—because they had never been imported to the United

States and he had never been to France—Verlaine had seen only in photographs. Now it was smashed

up and gutted.

Even worse than losing his car, however, was the loss of his entire body of research. In addition to

the meticulously organized material he’d used to support his doctoral thesis—a binder of colored

plates, notes, and general information regarding Abigail Rockefeller’s work with the Museum of

Modern Art-there were hundreds of pages of photocopies and further notes he’d made in the past year

of his work for Percival Grigori. While his formulations were not exactly original, they were all he

had. Everything had been in the backseat, in the bag Grigori’s men had stolen. He had made copies of

much of his work but with Grigori riding him he’d been more disorganized than usual. He could not

recall how much of the St. Rose/ Rockefeller material he’d actually duplicated, nor was he

completely certain of what he’d thrown in his bag and what he’d left behind. He would need to stop

by his office and check his files. For now he had to hold out hope that he’d been assiduous enough to

keep a reserve of the most important documents. In spite of all that had happened in the past hours,

there was some reassurance: First, the original letters from Innocenta to Abigail Rockefeller were

locked in his office, and second, he had kept the architectural drawings of St. Rose Convent with him.

Sliding his injured hand deep into the inside pocket of his overcoat, he removed the bundle of

plans. After Grigori’s dismissive attitude toward them in Central Park, he had almost thought them

worthless. Why, then, would Grigori send thugs to break into his car if they weren’t valuable?

Verlaine spread the plans out on his lap, his eye falling upon the seal of the lyre. The coincidence

of the icon seal matching Evangeline’s pendant was an oddity Verlaine was keen to explain. In fact,

everything about the lyre—from its presence on the Thracian coin he’d found to its prominence on St.

Rose’s insignia—felt larger than life, almost mythological. It was as though his personal experiences

had taken on the properties of symbolism and layered historical meaning that he was used to applying

to his art-history research. Perhaps he was imposing his own scholarly training upon a situation,