Angel Time (The Songs of the Seraphim 1)

I went up to the topmost veranda and, resting against the green iron railing, I looked down upon the restaurant piazza and across it at the immense Nuremberg clock. I often waited for the clock to chime as it does at every quarter of an hour. I wanted to see the large figures in the alcove beneath it slowly progress.

There's something powerful to me about all clocks. When I killed someone, I stopped their clock. And what do clocks do but measure the time we have to make something of ourselves, to discover something inside us that we didn't know was there?

I thought ofHamlet's Ghost often when I killed people. I thought of his tragic complaint to his son. Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin ... No reckoning made, but sent to my account With all my imperfections on my head.

I thought of things like that whenever I meditated on life and death, or on clocks. There wasn't anything about the Mission Inn--not the music room or the Chinese room, or the smallest nook or cranny--that I didn't perfectly love.

Maybe I cherished it because it was for all its clocks and bells timeless, or so skillfully made up of things from different times that it could drive an orderly person mad.

As for the Amistad Suite, the bridal suite, I chose it for the domed ceiling, painted with an ashen landscape and doves ascending through a bland mist to a blue sky, at the very top of which was an octagonal cupola with stained-glass windows. The rounded arch was even represented in this room-- between the dining room and the bedroom, and in the shape of the heavy double doors to the veranda beyond. The three high windows half embracing the bed were arched as well.

The bedroom had a massive gray stone fireplace, cold and empty and black inside, but nevertheless a beautiful frame for imagined flames. I have a fine imagination. That's why I'm such a good killer. I think of so many ways to get it done, and to get away with it.

Heavy draperies covered the three floor-length windows, surrounding the huge half tester antique bed. It had a high heavily carved dark wood headboard, and low thick knobbed posts at the foot. The bed always made me think of New Orleans, of course.

New Orleans was home once, home for the boy in me who died there. And that boy never had the luxury of sleeping in a half tester bed.

That was in another country, And besides, the wench is dead.

I hadn't been back to New Orleans since I became Lucky the Fox, and I figured I never would go back, and so I'd never sleep in one of its antique tester beds. New Orleans was where the important bodies were buried, not those of the men I'd dispatched for The Right Man.

When I thought of the important bodies, I thought of my parents and my little brother Jacob and my little sister Emily, all dead back there, and I hadn't the slightest idea where any of those bodies actually might have been placed.

I remembered some talk about a plot in old St. Joseph's Cemetery out Washington Avenue, in the dangerous neighborhood. My grandmother was buried back there. But I never went to the place that I could recall. My father they must have buried near the prison where he was knifed.

My father was a filthy cop, a filthy husband, a filthy father. He got killed two months into his lifetime sentence. No. I didn't know where to find a grave on which I might lay flowers for any of them, and if I did, it wouldn't have been on his grave.

Okay. So you can imagine what it was like, when The Right Man told me the hit had to be in the Mission Inn.

Murder Most Foul was to pollute my consolation, my diversion, my gently guided delirium, my safe place. Maybe it was New Orleans holding me in its arms, just because it was old and creaky and nonsensical and deliberately and accidentally picturesque.

Give me its long vine-shaded arbors, its countless Tuscan pots overflowing with lavender geraniums and orange trees, its long red-tiled porches. Give me its endless iron railings with their pattern of cross and bell. Give me its many fountains, its small gray stone statues of angels above the doorways of the suites, even its empty niches and its whimsical bell towers. Give me the flying buttresses surrounding the three windows of that topmost corner room.

And give me the bells that did ring all the time there. Give me the view from the windows of the distant mountains sometimes visibly covered in gleaming snow.

And give me the dark comfortable steak house with the best meals outside of New York.

Well, it could have been a hit in the Mission of San Juan Capistrano--that might have been worse-- but even that wasn't the place where I often lay down to sleep in peace.

The Right Man always spoke to me lovingly and I suppose that's the way I spoke to him.

He said, "The man's Swiss, a banker, money launderer, in thick with the Russians, you wouldn't believe the rackets these guys are into, and it has to be done in his hotel room."

And that was ... my room.

I gave away nothing. But without making a sound I said an oath, I said a prayer.God, help me. Not that place.

To put it in the simplest terms, a bad feeling came over me, a feeling of falling.

The dumbest prayer of my old repertoire came back to me, the one that made me the angriest:

Angel of God, my guardian dear, to whom God's love commits me here, ever this day be at my side, to light and guard, to rule and guide.

I felt weak listening to The Right Man. I felt fatal. No matter. Turn that into hurt. Turn that into pressure, and you'll be just fine.

After all, I reminded myself, one of your chief assets is you think the world would be better if you died. A good thing for any and every single person I was yet to destroy.

What makes people like me continue day after day? What does Dostoyevsky say about it when the Grand Inquisitor is speaking?Without a stable conception of the object of life, man would not consent to go on living.

Like Hell. But then we all know that the Grand Inquisitor is evil and wrong.

People go on under unbearable circumstances, as I well knew.

"This one has to look like a heart attack," said The Boss. "No message--just a little subtraction. So leave the cell phones and the laptops behind. Leave everything as you find it, except be sure the man's dead. Of course the woman can't see you. Blow her away and you blow the cover. The woman's an expensive tramp."

"What's he doing with her in the bridal suite?" I asked. Because that is what the Amistad Suite was, the bridal suite.

"She wants to get married. She tried it in Vegas, failed, now she's pushing for it in the chapel in this crazy place where people go to get married. It's some kind of a landmark, this place. You won't have any trouble finding it or finding the bridal suite. The bridal suite's built under a tiled dome. You can spot it from the street before you take your look around. You know what to do."