Angelopolis A Novel Page 0,27
as they interrogated her? Luca must have beaten the creature—there was no other explanation for its condition—and it remained to be seen whether he would resort to even more violent methods. A wave of nausea came over Verlaine, and he wanted, suddenly, to walk out of the room and breathe the fresh cold air aboveground.
Angela Valko began to speak. “To those who object to our methods of obtaining information, I say this: We can no longer submit to the moral code created two thousand years ago by our founding fathers that requires us to fight with approved methods. We have acted with dignity, showing restraint and judgment in our fight. As a result, our enemies have become more vicious than ever. They evolve in their methods to harm us. We must, in turn, evolve in our methods of defense. Angelologists who have worked with me, either in the academy or here at my laboratory, know that I am no reactionary. My work has been a steady accumulation of facts gleaned through observation and experimentation. I am a scientist, and I would prefer to be left in peace, to continue my work. My belief that the Nephilim can be routed only by hard work over multiple human lifetimes hasn’t changed. But it is clear that the reach of the creatures has grown and that we must respond. The angelic life-forms around the globe multiply exponentially each year. The victory of the creatures over humanity is at hand, and it seems that we must stand by and watch their ascendancy. We have fought too long and too hard to lose our war against the Nephilim. I will not allow that to happen. It is to that end that I record this communication. It is not an apology for what Luca and I intend to do but an attempt to demonstrate our motives and, in the case of our deaths, which both Luca and I realize to be a very strong possibility, to help other angelologists to understand the secret structures the Nephilim are building.”
Another man stepped into the frame, and Verlaine was startled to see a young Vladimir Ivanov. Verlaine calculated that he had encountered Vladimir in New York nearly twenty years after this film was made. In 1999 Vladimir’s whole manner had been that of a man exhausted by life; in the 1984 film he was a man fully energized by his work. Next to Vladimir was a woman Verlaine did not recognize. She wore a white lab coat over a brown dress. She was so still, so statuesque in her manner, that Verlaine hardly registered her presence.
“That is Nadia,” Bruno whispered. “Vladimir’s wife, a lab tech who assisted Angela in her work. After Angela’s murder, she quit her work at the academy. When Vladimir left for New York, she didn’t go with him.”
Verlaine turned back to the film just as Vladimir was putting his arms around the angel’s chest and lifting it from the hook. The creature was unwieldy—at least two feet taller than the men in the room with it. Struggling, it hissed, its body contracting and writhing as Vladimir bound it to the chair, the ropes cinching tighter as it moved. The creature’s wings hung outside of the stays, falling limp as bat wings until suddenly, in desperation, the angel thrust them open, striking Angela in the face and slamming her against the wall. Verlaine’s urge to protect Angela, to pull her away from the creature, felt even stronger than before, a feeling mirrored by Luca: The camera jolted and wavered, then stabilized as Luca set it onto the table and rushed into the frame. He grabbed the creature, wrenched the wings closed, and, holding the angel steady, assisted Vladimir in binding the wings.
“Let’s get on with this,” Angela said, her voice hardened. The left side of her face had been scratched. She pulled a chair close to the bound angel, balanced a notebook on her lap, and tapped a pen against the paper. The metallic click of the spring pounded an even rhythm as Angela spoke.
“Interrogation of Nephil male, 1984, Montparnasse, Paris.”
Angela glanced at Luca, as if to check that he was filming the exchange, and then turned her attention back to the angel. “The creature was captured on the rue de Rivoli at approximately 1:30 A.M., and injected with ketamine en route to our facilites in Montparnasse. Preliminary observations suggest the creature to be between two hundred and three hundred years old, with the characteristics of