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, drawing connections where none existed, romanticizing his work and blowing the whole thing out of proportion. Now that he’d settled into his seat on the train and had the peace of mind to think it all through, Verlaine began to wonder if he hadn’t overreacted a bit to the lyre necklace. Indeed, there was the chance that the men who had broken into his Renault had nothing to do with Grigori. Perhaps there was another, completely logical explanation for the bizarre events that had happened that day.
Verlaine took the sheets of blank St. Rose Convent stationery and pressed them over the top of the architectural drawings. The paper was thick cotton bond, pink, with an elaborately woven heading of roses and angels executed in a lush Victorian-era style that, to his surprise, Verlaine quite liked, despite his preference for modernism. He had not said so at the time, but Evangeline had been wrong that their founding mother had designed the stationery two hundred years before: The invention of a chemical method for making paper from wood pulp, a technological revolution that bolstered the postal service and allowed individuals and groups to create individualized stationery, did not occur until the mid-1850s. The St. Rose stationery was most likely created in the late nineteenth century, using their founding mother’s artwork for the heading. The practice had in fact become extraordinarily popular during the Gilded Era. Luminaries like his very own Abigail Rockefeller had put great effort into making dinner-party menus, calling cards, invitations, and personalized envelopes and stationery, each with family symbols and crests pressed into the highest-quality paper available. He’d sold a number of pristine sets of such custom-printed bond at auction over the years.
He had not corrected Evangeline’s error, he realized now, because she’d thrown him off guard. If she had been an old bulldog of a woman, ill-tempered and overprotective of the archives, he would have been perfectly prepared to handle her. In his years of begging access to libraries, he’d learned how to win over librarians, or at least gain their sympathy. But he’d been helpless upon seeing Evangeline. Evangeline was beautiful, she was intelligent, she was strangely comforting, and-as a nun-completely off-limits. Perhaps she liked him, just a little. Even as she was about to kick him out of the convent, he’d felt a strange connection between them. Closing his eyes, he tried to remember exactly how she’d looked sitting in the bar in Milton. She’d looked-aside from that funky black nun outfit-like a normal person having a normal night out. He didn’t think he would be able to forget the way she’d smiled, just slightly, when he touched her hand.
Verlaine let the rocking of the train car lull him into a state of reverie, thoughts of Evangeline playing through his mind, when a crack against the windowpane jarred him awake. An immense white hand, its fingers spread apart like the points of a starfish, had pressed against the window. Startled, Verlaine sat back, trying to examine it from a different angle. Another hand appeared on the glass, slapping against it as if it might push the thick square of plastic inward, popping it from its frame. A swift, fibrous, red feather brushed against the window. Verlaine blinked, trying to decide if he had somehow fallen asleep, if this bizarre show was a dream. But upon looking more closely, he saw something that chilled his blood: Two immense creatures hovered outside the train, their great red eyes staring at him with menace, their large wings carrying them along in tandem with the car. He stared at them in fright, unable to pull his gaze away. Was he going crazy or did these bizarre beings resemble the thugs he had watched trash his car? To his amazement and consternation, he concluded that they did.
Verlaine jumped up, grabbed his jacket, and ran to the train’s restroom, a small, windowless compartment that smelled of chemicals. Breathing deeply, he tried to calm himself down. His clothes were soaked in sweat, and there was a lightness in his chest that made him feel as though he might faint. He had felt this way only once, in high school, when he’d drunk too much at his prom.
As the train hit upon the edges of the city, Verlaine tucked the maps and stationery deep into his pocket. He left the bathroom and walked quickly to the front of the train. There were only a few passengers to get off the midnight train in Harlem. The stark depopulated midnight station gave him the eerie sensation, as he stepped onto the platform, that he’d made some kind of mistake, perhaps missed his stop or, worse, had taken the wrong train entirely. He walked the length of the platform and down a set of iron stairs to the dark, cold, city street below. He felt as if some cataclysm had hit New York in his absence, and, through some trick of destiny, he had returned to a ravaged and empty city.