Angel Time (The Songs of the Seraphim 1)

But I did trust him. And I did love him. I didn't love anyone in the world but him. I just didn't want anyone to know where I lived.

No place I lived was home, and I changed where I lived often. Nothing traveled with me from home to home, except my lute, and all my books. And of course my few clothes.

In this age of cell phones and the Internet, it was so easy to be untraceable. And so easy to be reached by an intimate voice in a perfect teletronic silence.

"Look, you can reach me anytime, day or night," I'd reminded him. "Doesn't matter where I live. Doesn't matter to me, so why should it matter to you? And someday, maybe I'll send you a recording of me playing the lute. You'll be surprised. I'm still good at it."

He'd chuckled. Okay with him, as long as I always answered the phone.

"Have I ever let you down?" I'd asked.

"No, and I'll never let you down either," he'd replied. "Just wish I could see you more often. Hell, you could be in Paris right now, or Amsterdam."

"I'm not," I'd answered. "You know that. The checkpoints are too hot. I'm in the States as I've been since Nine-Eleven. I'm closer than you think, and I'll come see you one of these days, just not right now, and maybe I'll take you to dinner. We'll sit in a restaurant like human beings. But these days, I'm not up to the meeting. I like being alone."

There had been no assignment on that anniversary, so I was able to stay in the Mission Inn, and I'd driven over to San Juan Capistrano the following morning.

No need at all to tell him I had an apartment in Beverly Hills right now, in a quiet and leafy place, and maybe next year it would be Palm Springs out in the desert. No need to tell him that I didn't bother with disguises in this apartment, either, or in the surrounding neighborhood from which the Mission Inn was only an hour away.

In the past, I'd never gone out without some sort of disguise, and I noted this change in myself with a cold equanimity. I wondered sometimes if they would let me have my books if I ever went to jail.

The Mission Inn in Riverside, California, was my only constant. I'd fly across the country to make the drive to Riverside. The Inn was where I most wanted to be.

The Right Man had gone on talking that evening. "Years ago, I bought you every recording in the world of lute music and the best instrument money can buy. I bought you all those books you wanted. Hell, I pulled some down off these shelves. Are you still reading all the time, Lucky? You know you should have a chance to get more education, Lucky. Maybe I should have looked out for you a little more than I did."

"Boss, you're worrying yourself about nothing. I have more books now than I know what to do with. Twice a month, I drop a box at some library. I'm perfectly fine."

"What about a penthouse somewhere, Lucky? What about some rare books? There must be something I can get for you more than just money. A penthouse would be nice, safe. You're always safe when you're higher up."

"Safe up in the sky?" I'd asked. The fact was my Beverly Hills apartment was a penthouse, but the building was only five stories high. "Penthouses are usually reached by two methods, Boss," I said, "and I don't like being bottled up. No thanks."

I felt secure in my Beverly Hills penthouse and it was walled with books on just about every epoch that had preceded the twentieth century.

I'd known for a long time why I loved history. It was because the historians made it sound so coherent, so purposeful, so complete. They'd take an entire century and impose a meaning on it, a personality, a destiny--and this was, of course, a lie.

But it soothed me in my solitude to read that sort of writing, to think that the fourteenth century was a "distant mirror," to paraphrase a famous title, to believe that we could learn from whole eras as if they had existed with marvelous continuity simply for us.

It was good reading in my apartment. It was good reading at the Mission Inn.

I liked my apartment for more reasons than one. As my undisguised self, I liked to walk in the soft, quiet neighborhood around it, and to stop in the Four Seasons Hotel for breakfast or lunch.

There were times when I checked into the Four Seasons just to be someplace completely different, and I had a favorite suite there with a long granite dining table and a black grand piano. I would play the piano in that suite, and sometimes even sing, with the ghost of the voice I'd once had.

Years ago, I'd thought I'd be singing all my life. It was music that had taken me away from wanting to be a Dominican priest--that and growing up, I suppose, and wanting to be with "girls" and wanting to be a man of the world. But mostly it was the music that had ravaged my twelve-year-old soul, and the total charm of the lute. I think I felt superior to the garage band kids when I played that beautiful lute.

All that was over, and had been over for ten years--the lute was a relic now--and the anniversary had come around and I wasn't telling The Right Man my address.

"What can I get you?" he still pleaded. "You know I was in a rare-book shop the other day, just by chance actually. I was roaming in Manhattan. You know me and roaming. And I saw this beautiful old medieval book."

"Boss, the answer is nothing," I said. And I hung up.

The next day, after that phone call, I'd talked about that to the Non-existent God in the Serra Chapel, in the flicker of the red sanctuary light, and told Him what a monster I was being, a soldier without a war, and a needle sniper without a cause, a singer who never really sang. As if He cared.

And then I'd lit a candle "To the Nothingness" that had become my life. "Here's a candle ... for me." I think I'd said that. I'm not sure. I know I was talking way too loud by that time because people noticed me. And that surprised me because people seldom notice me at all.

Even my disguises were for the nondescript and the pale. There was a consistency, though I doubt anyone ever caught on. Grease-slicked black hair, heavy dark glasses, a bill cap, leather pilot's jacket, the usual dragging foot, but never the same foot.

That was plenty enough to make me a man nobody saw. Before I'd ever gone as myself, I'd run three or four disguises by the desk of the Mission Inn, and three or four different names to go with them. It went perfectly fine. When the real Lucky the Fox walked in with the alias Tommy Crane, no one showed a flicker of recognition. I was too good at the disguises. For the agents that hunted me, I was a modus operandi, not a man with a face.

That last time, I'd walked out of the Serra Chapel, angry, and confused, and miserable, and was only comforted by spending the day in the picturesque little town of San Juan Capistrano, and buying a statue of the Virgin in the Mission gift shop before it closed.