Angelopolis A Novel Page 0,72

to women, and that he was too inexperienced and naïve to assert himself in the presence of an attractive colleague. I believed this trait to be a sign of innocence. I would soon see how very wrong I was in this assessment.

As we stood together in the elevator, I noticed him slipping a copper key card into the pocket of his jacket, so that a corner of the metal was visible. Perhaps it was Luca’s influence, but I found myself calculating how I could take the key, what diversionary maneuver I could make to steal it, and what I would do with it once I had it. If Godwin had any secrets—if he were giving our secrets to the Nephilim, as I suspected—then there might be proof in his laboratory.

We walked together through security and left the building. He hailed a taxi and, his gaze never meeting mine, asked if I’d like to share it. Seizing the opportunity, I climbed into the taxi with 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