Finally they reached their mother, Sneja Grigori, stretched out upon her favorite divan, a beautiful and imposing piece of Gothic furniture with serpents carved into the wood frame. Sneja had gained weight in the decades since her move to New York and wore only loose, flowing tunics that draped against her body in silken sheets. She’d splayed her lush, brilliant-colored wings behind her, folded and arranged to great effect, as if displaying the family’s jewels. As Percival approached, he was nearly blinded by their luminosity, each delicate feather shimmering like a sheet of tinted foil. Sneja’s wings were the pride of the family, the height of their beauty proof of the purity of their heritage. It was a mark of distinction that Percival’s maternal grandmother had been endowed with multicolored wings that stretched over thirty-six feet, a span that had not been seen in a thousand years. It was rumored that such wings had served as models for the angels of Fra Angelico, Lorenzo Monaco, and Botticini. Wings, Sneja had once told Percival, were a symbol of their blood, their breeding, the predominance of their position in the community. Displaying them properly brought power and prestige, and it was no small disappointment that neither Otterley nor Percival had given Sneja an heir to carry on the family endowment.
Which was precisely the reason it annoyed Percival that Otterley hid her wings. Instead of displaying them, as one would expect, she insisted upon keeping them folded tight against her body, as if she were some common hybrid and not a member of one of the most prestigious angelic families in the United States. Percival understood that the ability to retract one’s wings was a great tool, especially when in mixed society. Indeed, it gave one the ability to move in human society without being detected. But in private company it was an offense to keep one’s wings hidden.
Sneja Grigori greeted Otterley and Percival, lifting a hand so that it might be kissed by her children. “My cherubs,” she said, her voice deep, her accent vaguely Germanic, a remnant of her Austrian childhood in the House of Hapsburg. Pausing, she narrowed her eyes and examined Otterley’s necklace—a globular pink diamond solitaire sunk in an antique setting. “What a superior piece of jewelry,” she said, as if surprised to find such a treasure about her daughter’s neck.
“Don’t you recognize it?” Otterley said, lightly. “It is one of Grandmother’s pieces.”
“Is it?” Sneja lifted the diamond between her thumb and forefinger so that light played off the faceted surface. “I would think I should recognize it, but it seems quite foreign to me. It is from my room?”
“No,” Otterley replied, her manner guarded.
“Isn’t it from the vault, Otterley?” Percival asked.
Otterley pursed her lips, giving him a look that told him at once that he had given his sister away.
“Ah, well, that would explain its mystery,” Sneja said. “I haven’t been to the vault in so long I’ve completely forgotten its contents. Are all of my mother’s pieces as brilliant as this?”
“They are lovely, Mother,” Otterley said, her composure shaken. Otterley had been taking pieces from the vault for years without their mother noticing.
“I simply adore this piece in particular,” Sneja said. “Perhaps I will have to make a midnight trip to the vault? It may be time to do an inventory.”
Without hesitation Otterley unfastened the necklace and placed it in her mother’s hand. “It will look stunning on you, Mother,” she said. Then, without waiting for her mother’s reaction, or perhaps to mask the anguish of giving up such a jewel, Otterley turned on her stiletto heels and slinked back into the crowd, her dress clinging to her as if wet.
Sneja held the necklace to the light—it burst into a ball of liquid fire—before dropping it into her beaded evening clutch. Then she turned to Percival, as if suddenly recalling that her only son had witnessed her victory. “It is rather funny,” Sneja said. “Otterley thinks I am unaware that she’s been stealing my jewelry these twenty-five years.”
Percival laughed. “You haven’t let on that you’ve known. If you had, Otterley would have stopped ages ago.”
His mother waved the observation away as if it were a fly. “I know everything that goes on in this family,” she said, adjusting herself on the divan so that the arch of a wing caught the light. “Including the fact that you have not been taking proper care of yourself. You must rest more, eat more, sleep more. Things cannot simply go on as usual. It is time to make preparations for the future.”
“That is precisely what I have been doing,” Percival said, annoyed that his mother insisted upon directing him about as if he were in his first century of life.
“I see,” Sneja said, evaluating her son’s irritation. “You have had your meeting.”
“As planned,” Percival said.
“And that is why you have come upstairs with such a sour look—you wish to tell me about the progress you’ve made. The meeting did not go as planned?”
“Do they ever?” Percival said, though his disappointment was plain. “I admit: I had higher hopes for this one.”
“Yes,” Sneja said, looking past Percival. “We all did.”
“Come.” Percival took his mother’s hand and helped her from the divan. “Let me speak to you alone for a moment.”
“You cannot talk to me here?”
“Please,” Percival said, glancing at the party with repulsion. “It is completely impossible.”
With her audience of admirers captivated, Sneja made a great show of leaving the divan. Unfurling her wings, she stretched them away from her shoulders so that they draped about her like a cloak. Percival watched her, a tremor of jealousy stopping him cold. His mother’s wings were gorgeous, shimmering, healthy, full-plumed. A gradation of soft color radiated from the tips, where the feathers were tiny and roseate, and moved to the center of her back, where the feathers grew large and glittering. Percival’s wings, when he’d had them, had been even larger than his mother’s, sharp and dramatic, the feathers precisely shaped daggers of brilliant, powdery gold. He could not look at his mother without longing to be healthy again.
Sneja Grigori paused, allowing her guests to admire the beauty of her celestial attribute, and then, with a grace Percival found marvelous, his mother drew the wings to her body, folding them to her back with the ease of a geisha snapping closed a rice-paper fan.
Percival led his mother down the grand staircase by the arm. The dining-room table had been stacked with flowers and china, awaiting his mother’s guests. A small roasted pig, a pear in its mouth, lay amid the bouquets, its side carved into moist shelves of pink. Through the windows Percival could see people hurrying below, small and black as rodents pushing through the freezing wind. Inside, it was warm and comfortable. A fire burned in the fireplace, and the faint sound of muted conversation and soft music descended upon them from upstairs.
Sneja arranged herself in a chair. “Now, tell me: What is it you want?” she asked, looking more than a little annoyed at being escorted away from the party. She took a cigarette from a platinum cigarette case and lit it. “If it is money again, Percival, you know you’ll have to speak with your father. I haven’t the slightest idea how you go through so much so quickly.” His mother smiled, suddenly indulgent. “Well, actually, my dearest, I do have some idea. But your father is the one you must speak to about it.”
Percival took a cigarette from his mother’s case and allowed her to light it for him. He knew the moment he inhaled that he had made a mistake: His lungs burned. He coughed, trying to breathe. Sneja pushed a jade ashtray to Percival so that he could extinguish the cigarette.
After recovering his breath, he said, “My source has proved useless.”
“As expected,” Sneja said, inhaling the smoke from her cigarette.
“The discovery he claims to have made is of no value to us,” Percival said.
“Discovery?” Sneja said, her eyes widening. “Exactly what kind of new discovery?”
As Percival elaborated upon the meeting, outlining Verlaine’s ridiculous obsession with architectural drawings of a convent in Milton, New York, and an equally infuriating preoccupation with the vagaries of ancient coins, his mother ran her long, chalk-white fingers over the polished lacquer table, then stopped abruptly, astonished.
“It is amazing,” she said at last. “Do you really believe he found nothing of use?”
“What do you mean?”
“Somehow, in your zeal to trace Abigail Rockefeller’s contacts, you’ve missed the larger point entirely.” Sneja crushed out her cigarette and lit another. “These architectural drawings may be exactly what we’re looking for. Give them to me. I would like to see them myself.”
“I told Verlaine to keep them,” Percival said, realizing even as he spoke them that those words would enrage her. “Besides, we ruled St. Rose Convent out after the 1944 attack. There was nothing left after the fire. Surely you don’t imagine we missed something.”
“I would like to be able to see for myself,” Sneja said, without bothering to mask her frustration. “I suggest we go to this convent at once.”
Percival jumped at an opportunity to redeem himself. “I have taken care of it,” he said. “My source is en route to St. Rose this very instant to verify what he’s found.”
“Your source—he is one of us?”
Percival stared at his mother a moment, unsure how to proceed. Sneja would be furious to learn he had placed so much faith in Verlaine, who was outside their network of spies. “I know how you feel about using outsiders, but there is no cause to worry. I’ve had him thoroughly checked.”
“Of course you have,” Sneja said, exhaling cigarette smoke. “Just as you’ve had the others checked in the past.”
“This is a new era,” Percival said. He measured his words carefully, determined to remain calm in the face of his mother’s criticism. “We are not so easily betrayed.”
“Yes, you are correct, we live in a new era,” Sneja retorted. “We live in an era of freedom and comfort, an era free of detection, an era of unprecedented wealth. We are free to do as we wish, to travel where we wish, to live as we wish. But this is also an era in which the best of our kind have become complacent and weak. It is an era of sickness and degeneration. Not you, nor I, nor any one of the ridiculous creatures hanging about in my sitting room are above detection.”
“You think I have been complacent?” Percival said, his voice rising despite his efforts. He took his cane in hand and prepared to leave.
“I don’t believe you can possibly be anything else in your condition,” Sneja said. “It is essential that Otterley will assist you.”
“It is only natural,” Percival said. “Otterley has been working on this as long as I have.”
“And your father and I have been working on it long before that,” Sneja said. “And my parents were working on it before I was born, and their parents before them. You are just one of many.”
Percival tapped the tip of his cane on the wooden floor. “I should think my condition brings a new urgency.”
Sneja glanced at the cane. “It is true—your illness brings new meaning to the hunt. But your obsession to cure yourself has blinded you. Otterley would never have given up those drawings, Percival. Indeed, Otterley would be at this convent now, verifying them. Look at all the time you have wasted! What if your foolishness has cost us the treasure?”
“Then I will die,” he said.
Sneja Grigori placed her smooth white hand upon Percival’s cheek. The frivolous woman he had escorted from the divan hardened into a statuesque creature filled with ambition and pride—the very things he both admired and envied in her. “It will not come to that. I will not allow it to come to that. Now go and rest. I will take care of Mr. Verlaine.”
Percival stood and, leaning heavily upon his cane, hobbled from the room.
St. Rose Convent, Milton, New York
V
erlaine parked his car—a 1989 Renault he’d bought secondhand during college—before St. Rose. A wrought-iron gate cut across the passageway to the convent, leaving him no choice but to climb over a thick limestone wall that surrounded the grounds. Up close, St. Rose proved to be much as he had imagined it: isolated and serene, like a castle enchanted in a spell of sleep. Neo-Gothic arches and turrets lifted into the gray sky; birch and evergreen trees rose on all sides in tight protective clusters. Moss and ivy clung upon the brickwork, as if nature had embarked upon a slow, insatiable campaign to claim the structure as its own. At the far end of the grounds, the Hudson edged alongside a riverbank crusted with snow and ice.
As he walked up a snow-dusted cobblestone path, Verlaine shivered. He felt unnaturally cold. The sensation had come over him the moment he left Central Park, and it had remained heavy and stifling throughout the drive to Milton. He had blasted the heat in his car in an attempt to shake off the chill, and still his hands and feet remained numb. He could not account for the effect the meeting had had upon him or why it unsettled him to discover how truly ill Percival Grigori really was. There was something eerie and disturbing about Grigori, something that Verlaine couldn’t put his finger upon. Verlaine had a strong sense of intuition about people—he could discern much about a person within minutes of an introduction, and he rarely wavered from his initial impressions. From their first meeting, Grigori had provoked a strong physical reaction in Verlaine, so strong that he felt instantly weakened in Grigori’s presence, empty and lifeless, without a trace of warmth.
The meeting earlier that afternoon had been their second, and it might, Verlaine surmised with relief, be their last. If he himself didn’t terminate their arrangement-which would happen very soon if this research trip went as planned—there was a real chance that Grigori wouldn’t be around much longer anyway. Grigori’s skin had appeared so colorless that Verlaine could see networks of blue veins through the thin, pale surface. Grigori’s eyes had burned with fever, and he could only just hold himself up on his cane. It was absurd that the man would leave his bed, let alone conduct business meetings outside in a blizzard.