Angel Time (The Songs of the Seraphim 1)

His was a busy life, what with after-school study, and then the demands of the Jesuit High School curriculum. So it wasn't so hard to keep at arm's length the rich boys and girls he knew, for though he liked many of them very much, he was determined they were never to enter the slovenly apartment in which he lived, with two drunken parents, either of whom could hopelessly humiliate him.

He was fastidious as a child and, later on, fastidious as a killer. But in truth, he grew up afraid, a keeper of secrets, a child in permanent dread of shabby violence.

Later, as a full-blown hit man, he thrived on danger, remembering at times with amusement the television dramas he'd once loved, with the thought that he was now living something far more darkly glorious than had ever been revealed to him. While never admitting it to himself, he took some pride in his particular brand of evil. Despair might be the tune he sang to himself about what he did, but a deep polished vanity lay beneath it.

He had, in addition to this passion for the hunt, one truly precious trait which separated him completely from lesser killers. It was this: he didn't care whether he lived or died. He didn't believe in Hell because he didn't believe in Heaven. He didn't believe in the Devil because he didn't believe in God. And though he remembered the ardent and sometimes hypnotic faith of his youth, though he respected it far more than anyone would ever have guessed, it didn't warm his soul in the slightest. To repeat, he had early on wanted to be a priest, and no fall from grace had taken him from that. Even when he played the lute, he prayed constantly to bring beautiful music from it, and he often devised new melodies for prayers that he loved.

It's worth noting here that he had once wanted to be a saint as well. And he had wanted, young as he was, to understand the whole history of his church, and he had delighted in reading about Thomas Aquinas in particular. It seemed his teachers were always mentioning that name, and when a Jesuit priest came from the nearby university to talk to the grade school class, he told a tale of Thomas that lodged itself permanently in Toby's memory.

It was that the great theologian Thomas had been granted a vision in his last years that caused him to turn against his earlier work, the greatSumma Theologica. "It is so much straw," said the saint to those who asked him, in vain, to continue it.

The tale was something he thought on even to the very day that he came into my relentless gaze. But he didn't know whether it was fact or beautiful fiction. Lots of things said about the saints weren't true. And yet that never seemed to be the point.

Sometimes, in his later ruthless and professional years, when he was tired of playing the lute, he would jot down his thoughts on these remembered things that had once meant so much to him. He conceived of a book that would shock the world:Diary of a Hit Man. Oh, he knew that others had written such memoirs but they weren't Toby O'Dare, who still read theology when not taking down bankers in Geneva and Zurich; who, carrying a rosary, had penetrated Moscow and London long enough to commit four strategic murders within sixty-two hours. They weren't Toby O'Dare, who had once wanted to say Mass for the multitudes.

I said he didn't care whether he lived or died. Let me explain: he didn't take suicide missions. He liked being alive too much to do this, though he never admitted it. Also those who worked for him did not want his body to be found at the scene of any attempted hit.

But he didn't care, truly, whether he died today or tomorrow. And he was convinced that the world, though nothing more than the materialistic realm we can see with our own eyes, would be a lot better off without him. Sometimes he positively wanted to be dead. But these periods didn't last long and music, above all, would bring him out of it.

He'd lie in his expensive apartment listening to the old slow songs of Roy Orbison, or to the many recordings of opera singers he had, or listening to the recordings of music written for the lute especially in the time of the Renaissance when the lute had been such a popular instrument.

How had he come to be this thing, this darkling human, banking money for which he had no use, killing people whose names he didn't know, penetrating the finest fortresses his victims might construct, bringing death as a waiter, a doctor in a white coat, the driver of a hired car, or even a bum on the street, drunkenly careening into the man he would puncture with his fatal needle?

The evil in him made me shudder insofar as an angel can shudder, but the good shining forth attracts me utterly. Let's return to those early years, when he'd been Toby O'Dare, with a younger brother and sister, Jacob and Emily--to the time when he'd been struggling to get through the strictest prep school in New Orleans, on a full scholarship, of course, as he'd worked as many as sixty hours a week playing music on the street to keep the children and his mother fed, and clothed, and manage an apartment which no one but the family ever entered.

Toby paid the bills. He stocked the refrigerator. He talked to the landlord when his mother's howling woke the man next door. He was the one who cleaned up the vomit, and put out the fire when the grease spilled out of the frying pan into the gas flame, and she fell back with her hair ablaze, shrieking.

With another spouse, his mother might have been a tender and loving thing, but her husband had gone to prison when she was pregnant with the last child, and she'd never gotten over it. A cop who preyed on prostitutes in the French Quarter streets, the man was stabbed to death at Angola.

Toby was only ten when that happened.

For years, she drank herself drunk, and lay on the bare boards murmuring her husband's name, "Dan, Dan, Dan." And nothing Toby ever did could comfort her. He'd buy her pretty dresses, and bring home baskets of fruit or candy, and for a few years there before the toddlers went off to kindergarten, she'd been an evening drunk more than anything else, and had even scrubbed herself and her children well enough to take them all to Mass on Sundays.

In those days Toby watched TV with her, the two on her bed, and she shared his love of the police kicking in doors and catching the most depraved killers.

But once the little ones weren't underfoot, his mother drank by day and slept by night, and Toby had to become the man of the house, dressing Jacob and Emily every morning with care, and taking them to school early so he had time to make it to his own classes at Jesuit on time, a bus ride away, with perhaps a few moments to go over his homework.

By the age of fifteen, he'd been studying the lute and composition for it every afternoon for two years, and now Jacob and Emily did their homework in a practice room nearby and his teachers still taught him for nothing.

"You have a great gift," his teacher told him, and urged him to move on to other instruments which might have given him a living later on.