Angelopolis(70)

Godwin. We spoke of office politics, of new policies being implemented for scientists, and of other

innocuous subjects, but all the while I was watching the corner of metal poking out of his pocket.

I told the taxi driver to stop and, as I was getting out of the car, I pretended to trip, falling heavily

into Godwin’s arms as he held the door open for me. This feint took him off guard and, in the

confusion, I plucked the key from his pocket and slid it up my sleeve. Even as I made my apologies

for my clumsiness, Godwin climbed into the taxi and disappeared into the night.

I returned to the labs at once and entered Godwin’s office with ease, using his key. The layout was

identical to mine, only instead of equipment for the experimental work he’d been presenting to me

during our meetings, I found masses of files stacked up on every flat surface of the lab. I began to look

through them, trying to find something that would help me to understand Godwin’s association with

Eno.

What I discovered shocked me to the core. The folders were stuffed with photographs of angelic

creatures in erotic positions, pornographic shots of female and male Nephilim, sadomasochistic

couplings between humans and angels, every kind of sexual perversity imaginable. As I moved

through the stacks, the photographs became increasingly violent, and soon there were stills of people

being tortured and raped and killed by Nephilim. The pleasure the creatures took in human suffering

was evident in these photographs, and even now, with some of these images before me, I cannot

believe that they exist. Even more unbelievable, however, was a thick book featuring images of the

victims after they had been used for pleasure and discarded—the bodies were bruised, bloodied,

dismembered, and photographed like trophies. The graphic nature of these images was like nothing I

had seen before, and I understood how sheltered I had been from the everyday behavior of the

Nephilim, from what horrors they are capable of performing.

As a fellow scientist, I would like to give Godwin the benefit of believing, if possible, that these

images are part of his work. If Godwin were exploring the nature of angelic sexuality, he might bring

an academic reserve to his participation in the underworld of angelic sex and violence, a coldness in

relation to the events that he has photographed. However, I truly do not believe this to be the case, for

reasons that will soon be evident.

I spent many hours in Dr. Godwin’s lab that night. Aside from this trove of horrors, I found a

number of items that were of intense interest to me, both personally and professionally. The first was

a document written by my mother, Gabriella Lévi-Franche, that appears to be a collection of her field

notes from 1939–43, the years she worked as an undercover agent while attending the academy. The

volume is bound in red leather, in the official manner, signifying that the account was produced and

published with the sanction of the council. Until that evening, this period of Gabriella’s life was a

mystery to me—she had never told me the details of her wartime work, had never spoken of it to

anyone, so far as I had been aware—and so it was with curiosity and trepidation that I opened the red

book and looked inside. How Godwin came to possess this book, and what his interest was in my

mother’s experiences, is a question I cannot bring myself to answer in this report. I can only record

here that the revelations of Gabriella’s report were deeply shocking to me and have repercussions

that will seep into every aspect of my life.

As for the second discovery, I am relieved to say, it had a professional importance that almost

obscured the pain of the first discovery. On the shelf, prized in the fingers of a silver holder, was an

egg.

I recognized it immediately as one of the eggs created by Fabergé for the Romanovs. I spent many

childhood afternoons paging through books about the Romanovs—the family was of intense interest to

angelologists—and my mother had a large collection of books about the tsar. The egg in Godwin’s

laboratory was one of the eight missing eggs. Instantly, picture-book images of these eggs appeared in

my mind, crisp and glistening with bright lithographic colors: the Cherub with Chariot Egg; the

Empire Nephrite Egg; the Hen Egg; the Emperial Egg; the Nécessaire Egg; the Mauve Egg; the Danish

Jubilee Egg; and the Alexander III Egg. Sitting on the shelf was the Hen Egg, its blue enamel surface

alive with sapphires. I took it down and, turning it in my hand, found the mechanism and pressed it.

The egg sprang apart. Inside was a hen surprise, and inside this precious miniature, wrapped in a

muslin cloth, were three glass vials full of liquid, each labeled in Godwin’s thin scrawl. Holding a