Angel Time (The Songs of the Seraphim 1)

It wasn't just an ordinary little Virgin. It was a figure with the Christ Child and the whole made not only with plaster but plastered cloth. It looked dressed and soft, though it wasn't. It was dressed and stiff. And it was sweet. The little Baby Jesus had a lot of character, with His tiny head tilted to one side, and the Virgin herself was just a teardrop face and two hands emerging from the fancy robes of gold and white. I threw the box in my car at the time and didn't give it much of a thought.

Whenever I went to Capistrano, however--and last time had been no exception--I heard Mass in the new Basilica, the grand re-creation of the big church broken to pieces in1812 .

I was very impressed and quieted by the Grand Basilica. It was vast, expensive, Romanesque, and, like so many Romanesque churches, filled with light. Round arches again everywhere. Exquisitely painted walls.

Behind the altar there was another golden retablo, one that made the one in the Serra Chapel look small. This too was ancient and shipped from the Old Country, just as the other had been, and covering the entire back wall of the sanctuary to a momentous height. It was overwhelming in its dazzling gold.

Nobody knew it, but I sent money now and then to the Basilica, though rarely under the same name. I'd buy postal money orders and make up joke names to put on them. The money got there, that was the point.

Four saints had their appropriate niches in the retablo--St. Joseph with his inevitable lily, the great St. Francis of Assisi, Blessed Jun�pero Serra holding a small model of the mission in his right hand, and then a newcomer as far as I was concerned, Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha, an Indian saint.

But it was the center of the retablo that most completely absorbed me as I sat through Mass. There was the Crucified Christ in high gloss with bloodied hands and feet, and above Him a bearded figure of God the Father who was under the golden rays descending from a white dove. This was the Holy Trinity actually though maybe a Protestant wouldn't have known it--with the three figures rendered in literal form.

When you think that only Jesus became Man to save us, well, the figure of God the Father and the Holy Spirit as a dove can be puzzling, and touching. The Son of God, after all, has the body.

Whatever the case, I marveled at it, and enjoyed it. I didn't care whether it was literal or sophisticated, mystical or pedestrian. It was gorgeous, it was gleaming, and it comforted me to see it, even when I was steaming with hate. It comforted me that other people around me were worshipping, that I was somewhere sacred or where people came to be with the sacred. I don't know. I pushed any self- accusations out of my mind and just looked at what was right before me, just the way I do when I'm on the job, and set to take a life.

Maybe when I looked up from the pew at this Crucifix, it was like running into a friend with whom you are angry and saying, "Well, there you are again and I am still in a rage against you."

Underneath the dying Lord was his Blessed Mother, in the form of Our Lady of Guadalupe, whom I'd always admired.

That last visit, I'd spent hours staring at that golden wall.

This wasn't faith. This was art. The art of faith forgotten, the art of faith denied. This was excess, this was egregious and somehow soothing, even if I did keep saying, "I don't believe in you, I'll never forgive you for not being real."

After Mass that last time, I took out the rosary I'd carried since boyhood, and I said it, but I didn't meditate on the old mysteries that meant nothing to me. I merely lost myself in the mantric chant.Hail Mary, Full of Grace, as if I believe you exist. Now and at the Hour of our Death Amen Like Hell For Them are you ever there?

Mind you, I was certainly not the only hit man on this planet who went to Mass. But I was one of a very small minority who paid attention, murmuring the responses and sometimes even singing the hymns. Sometimes I even went to Communion, soaked in mortal sin, and defiant. I knelt afterwards with head bowed and I thought:This is Hell. This is Hell. And Hell will be worse than this.

There've always been criminals great and small who went to Mass with their families and presided over sacramental occasions. I don't have to tell you about the Italian Mafioso of cinematic legend who goes to his daughter's First Communion. Don't they all?

I had no family. I had no one. I was no one. I went to Mass for myself who was no one. In my files at Interpol and the FBI, they said so: he is no one. No one knows what he looks like, or where he came from, or where he will appear next. They didn't even know if I worked for one man.

As I said, I was a modus operandi to them, and they'd taken years to refine it, listing vaguely disguises poorly glimpsed by video surveillance, never yielding to precise words. Often they detailed the hits with considerable misunderstanding of what had actually taken place. But they did have it almost right: I was nobody. I was a dead man walking around in a live body.

And I did work for only one man, my boss, the one I called, in my heart of hearts, The Right Man. It simply never occurred to me to work for someone else. And nobody else could have sought me out for an assignment, and no one else ever would.

The Right Man might have been the bearded God the Father, of the retablo, and I his bleeding son. The Holy Ghost was the spirit that bound us, because we were bound, that was certain, and I never thought past the commands of The Right Man.

That's blasphemy. So what?

How did I know these things about police files and agency files? My beloved boss always had his connections, and he'd chuckle with me on the phone about the information that came his way.

He knew what I looked like. On the night we met, some ten years back, I'd been myself with him. That he hadn't laid eyes on me in years disturbed him.

But I was always there when he rang, and whenever I dumped the cell phones, I called him with the new numbers. In the beginning, he'd helped me get the phony papers, passports, driver's licenses, and such. But I'd long known how to acquire that sort of material on my own, and how to confuse the people who provided it to me.

The Right Man knew I was loyal. Not a week went by that I didn't call in, whether he called me or not. Sometimes I felt a sudden breathlessness when I heard his voice, just because he was still there, because fate hadn't taken him away from me. After all, if one man is your entire life, your vocation, your quest, well, then, you're going to be afraid of losing him.

"Lucky, I want to sit down with you," he sometimes said. "You know, the way we did that first couple of years. I want to know where you come from." I'd laugh as gently as I could.

"I love the sound of your voice, Boss," I'd say.

"Lucky," he asked me one time, "do you yourself know where you come from?"