Angel Time_The Songs of the Seraphim

Chapter FOUR
Malchiah Reveals My Life to Me

WHEN ANGELS CHOOSE A HELPER, THEY DON’T ALWAYS start at the beginning. In scanning a human being’s life, they might begin with the warm present, then move a good third of the way in, and work towards the earliest beginning and back towards the moment at hand, as they collect the data of their emotional attachment and strengthen it. And don’t ever believe anyone who tells you that we have no such emotional attachment.
Our emotions are different but we have them. We never cast a cold eye on life or death. Don’t misunderstand our seeming serenity. After all, we live in a world of perfect trust in The Maker, and we are keenly aware that humans often do not, and we feel an active sorrow for them.
But I couldn’t help but notice, as soon as I began to investigate Toby O’Dare as a boy, anxious and burdened with countless cares, that he liked nothing better than to watch on late-night television the most brutal of detective shows, and they took his mind off the hideous realities of his own crumbling world, and the firing of bullets always produced a catharsis in him just as the producers of those shows wanted to do. He learned to read early, to finish his homework in study hall, and for pleasure he read the books they call “true crime,” also, sinking easily into the well-written prose of Thomas Thompson’s Blood and Money or Serpentine.
Books on organized crime, on pathological murderers, on hideous deviants, all these he picked up from the bins of a bookstore on Magazine Street in New Orleans where he lived, though in those days he never dreamed, never for a moment, that he would one day be the subject of just that sort of story.
Loathing the glamour of evil in Silence of the Lambs, he’d thrown it in the trash. The nonfiction books weren’t written till the killer was caught, and Toby needed that resolution.
When he couldn’t sleep in the very small hours, he watched the cops and killers on the small screen, oblivious to the fact that what drove these shows was the committing of the crime, and not the sanctimonious anger and actions of the artificially heroic police lieutenant or genius detective.
But this early taste for crime fiction and fact is just about the least important thing about Toby O’Dare, so let me get back to the story to which I helped myself as soon as I fixed my inalterable gaze on him.
Toby didn’t grow up dreaming of being a killer or a cop. Toby dreamed of being a musician and saving everyone in his little family.
And what drew me to him was not the anger churning inside him and devouring him alive in this present time, or in time past. No, on that darkness I find it as hard to look, as a human might find it hard to walk into an icy winter wind that cut at his eyes and his face and froze his fingers.
What drew me to Toby was a bright and shining goodness that nothing could completely efface, a great glowing sense of right and wrong that had never been forfeit to the lie, no matter where his life had taken him.
But let me make it clear: because I choose a mortal for my purposes, that does not mean that the mortal is going to agree to come with me. Finding such a one as Toby is hard enough; persuading him to come with me is even harder. You’d think it was irresistible but it’s not. People swindle themselves out of Salvation with great regularity.
However there were too many aspects of Toby O’Dare for me to back away from him and leave him to the guardianship of lesser angels.
Toby was born in the city of New Orleans. He was of Irish and German descent. He had some Italian blood but he didn’t know it, and his great-grandmother on his father’s side was Jewish, but he didn’t know that either because he came from hardworking people who never kept track. There was some Spanish blood in him also, on his father’s side, dating from the time the Spanish Armada crashed along the coast of Ireland. And though there was talk of that as some in the family had jet-black hair and blue eyes, he never thought much about it. No one in his family ever spoke about lineage. They talked about survival.
Genealogy belongs to the rich in human history. The poor rise and fall without leaving a footprint.
Only now in the age of DNA investigation are the common people enamored of knowing their genetic makeup, and they’re not sure what to do with the information, but a revolution of sorts is happening as people seek to understand the blood that runs through their veins.
The more Toby O’Dare became the contract killer of underground fame, the less he cared about who he’d been before, or who had come before him. So as he gained the means that might have made possible an investigation into his own past, he drew further and further from the chain of humanity to which he belonged. He had after all destroyed “the past” as far as he saw it. So why should he care about what had happened long before his birth to others struggling with the same pressures and miseries?
Toby grew up in an uptown apartment, just a block away from prestigious streets, and in that dwelling there were no pictures on the walls of ancestors.
He had cherished his grandmothers, stalwart women, parents of eight children each, loving, tender, and with calloused hands. But they died when he was very young, as his parents were their youngest children.
These grandmothers were worn out from the lives they’d led and their deaths came swift, with the smallest amount of drama, in a hospital room.
Yet gigantic funerals followed, filled with cousins and flowers, and people crying because that generation, the generation of the great families, was passing from America.
Toby never forgot all those cousins, most of whom went on to great success without ever committing a crime or a sin. But by the age of nineteen, he was completely disengaged from them.
Yet the hit man now and then secretly investigated thriving marriages, and used his great computer skills to track this or that impressive career of the lawyers, judges, and priests who came from his related families. He’d played a lot with those cousins when he was a very little child, and he could not entirely forget the grandmothers who brought them together.
He’d been rocked by his grandmothers, now and then, in a big wooden chair that was sold long after their deaths to a junk dealer. He’d heard their old songs before they left the world. And now and then he sang to himself bits and pieces of them. See Saw, Marjory Daw, Catch Behind the Steam Car! or the soft tormenting melody of Go tell Aunt Rhodie, Go tell Aunt Rho oh di, the old gray goose is dead, the one she was saving for Fatty’s feather bed.
And then there were the black songs that the whites had always inherited.
Now, honey won’t you play in your own backyard, don’t mind what the white child say. For you’ve got a soul as white as snow, that’s what the Lord done say.
These were songs of a spiritual garden extant before the grandmothers departed the earth, and by eighteen Toby had turned his back on everything about his past, except the songs, of course, and the music.
Ten years ago, or at age eighteen, he left that world forever.
He simply vanished from the midst of anybody who knew him, and though none of those boys and girls or aunts or uncles blamed him for going away, they were surprised and confused by it.
They imagined him, with reason, to be a lost soul somewhere. They even imagined him mad, a street bum, a gibbering imbecile begging for his supper. That he’d taken with him a suitcase of clothes and his precious lute gave them hope, but they never saw or heard of him again.
Once or twice over the years, a search was made but, as they were searching for Toby O’Dare, a boy with a diploma from Jesuit High School and professional skill with the lute, they didn’t have the slightest chance of finding him.
One of his cousins listened quite a lot to a tape he’d made once of Toby playing on a street corner. But Toby didn’t know of this; he couldn’t possibly have known. So this potential warmth never reached him.
One of his old teachers at Jesuit High School had even searched every musical conservatory in the United States for a Toby O’Dare, but Toby O’Dare had never enrolled in any such institution.
You might say some of this family suffered grief for the loss of the soft peculiar music of Toby O’Dare, and grief for the loss of the boy who so loved his Renaissance instrument that he would stop to explain, to anyone who asked, all about it, and why he preferred to play it on the street corner, rather than the guitar of rock star affection.
I think you see my point: his family was good stock, the O’Dares, the O’Briens, the McNamaras, the McGowens, and all those who had intermarried with them.
But in every family there are bad people, and weak people, and some people who can’t or won’t withstand the trials of life, and who fail spectacularly. Their guardian angels weep; demons beholding them dance for joy.
But only The Maker decides what ultimately happens to them.
So it was with the mother and father of Toby.
But both lines gave Toby tremendous advantages: talent for music as well as love for it was certainly the most impressive gift. But Toby inherited keen intelligence, as well, and an unusual and irrepressible sense of humor. He had a powerful imagination that enabled him to make plans, to have dreams. And a mystical bent sometimes caught hold of him. His strong desire to be a Dominican priest at the age of twelve did not pass so easily with the coming of worldly ambition, as it might have done with another teenager.
Toby never stopped going to church during the roughest high school years, and even if he’d been tempted to skip the Sunday Mass, he had his brother and sister to consider, and wouldn’t fail to set a good example.
If ever he could have only drifted back some five generations and seen his forefathers studying Torah night and day in their synagogues in Central Europe, maybe he would not have become the killer that he was. If he could have gone further back, and seen his ancestors painting pictures in Siena, Italy, perhaps he would have had more courage to pursue his most cherished designs.
But he had no idea such persons ever existed, or that on his mother’s side, generations ago, there had been English priests martyred for their faith in the time of Henry VIII, or that his great-grandfather on his father’s side, too, had wanted to be a priest but could not make the grades in school for such to be possible.
Almost no mortal on earth knows his lineage before the so-called Dark Ages, and only the great families can penetrate the deep layers of time to extract from them a series of examples that might inspire.
And the word, “inspired,” is not one to be wasted in Toby’s case, because as a contract killer, he has always been inspired. And he was inspired as a musician before that.
His success as a killer derived in no small part from the fact that tall and graceful as he was, blessed with beauty as he was, he didn’t look like anyone in particular.
By the age of twelve, he had the permanent stamp of intelligence on his features, and when he was anxious, there was something cold in his face, a look of well-established distrust. But this passed almost instantly, as it was not something he wanted to reflect, and did not want to abide in himself. He tended towards calm and people almost always found him remarkable and attractive.
He was six foot four before he graduated high school, and his blond hair had faded to an ashen color, and his level gray eyes were full of ready concentration and gentle curiosity, and gave no offense to anyone.
He frowned seldom, and when he went out for a walk, just a walk on his own, to the casual observer he appeared a bit watchful, like one eager for a plane to land on time, or someone waiting a bit anxiously for an important appointment.
If startled, he would flash with resentment and distrust, but snap away from this almost instantly. He did not want to be an unhappy or bitter person, and he had cause over the years to become both, and he resisted it mightily.
He did not drink, ever in all his life. He hated it.
From childhood on, he dressed beautifully, principally because the children in the uptown grade school to which he went dressed this way, and he wanted to be like them, and he was not above taking expensive hand-me-downs from his cousins, which included navy blue blazers and khaki trousers, and pastel polo shirts. There was a look to the boys of uptown New Orleans that was located in these very clothes and he took to discovering and cultivating it. He also tried to talk like these boys, and slowly he eliminated from his speech the strong indicators of poverty and hardness that had always marked his father’s taunts and bawling complaints and ugly threats. As for his mother’s voice, it was accentless and pleasant, and he spoke much more like her than like anyone else in his family.
He read The Official Preppy Handbook, not as a satire, but as something to be obeyed. And he knew how to roam the secondhand stores for the right kind of leather book bag.
In the parish of Holy Name of Jesus School, he walked through gloriously green streets from the St. Charles car line, and the fresh, beautifully painted houses he passed filled him with vague and dreamy longings.
Palmer Avenue uptown was his favorite street and it seemed to him at times that if he could live someday in a white two-story house on that street, he’d know perfect happiness.
He also came into contact with music very early at the Loyola Conservatory. And it was the sound of the lute, at a public Renaissance concert, that drew him away from his ardent desire to enter the priesthood.
He went from altar boy to passionate student as soon as he encountered a kindly teacher who taught him for nothing. He produced a purity of tone on the lute that astonished her. His finger work was fast, and the expression he gave to his playing was excellent, and his teacher marveled at the beautiful airs he could play by ear, and those included the songs I’ve mentioned above that always haunted him. He heard his grandmothers singing to him when he played. He played for his grandmothers sometimes in his mind. He played popular songs on the lute with great dexterity, giving them a wholly new sound, and an illusion of integrity.
At one point, one of his teachers put the records of the popular singer Roy Orbison into Toby’s hands, and he soon found he could play the slower songs of this great musician, and give them tender expression through the lute that Orbison had so accomplished with his voice. He soon knew every “ballad” that Orbison had ever recorded.
And as he rendered all popular music in his own style, he learned a classical composition for every popular song, so that he could switch back and forth between them, bringing up the rapid and contagious beauty of Vivaldi one moment, and the mournful tender suffering of Orbison the next.
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 great Summa 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.
But Toby knew he could not give enough time to that, and having trained Emily and Jacob as to how to watch and handle their drunken mother, he was out on the French Quarter streets all Saturday and Sunday, the lute case open at his feet as he played, earning every cent he could to supplement his father’s meager pension.
Fact was, there was no pension, though Toby never told anyone that. There were just the silent stipends of the family and the regular handouts of other policemen, who had been no worse and no better than Toby’s father.
And Toby had to bring in the money for anything extra or “nice,” and for the uniforms his brother and sister required, and any toys they were to have in the miserable apartment that Toby so detested. And though he worried every moment as to the condition of his mother at home, and the abilities of Jacob to keep her quiet should she go into a rage, Toby took great pride in his playing, and in the attitudes of the passersby who never failed to drop large bills in the case if they lingered.
Even though the earnest study of music went slowly for Toby, he still dreamed of entering the Conservatory of Music when he came of age, and of landing a job playing in a restaurant where his income would be steady. Neither plan was beyond possibility by any means, and he lived for the future, while struggling desperately through the present. Nevertheless when he played the lute, when he made enough money easily to pay the rent and buy the food, he knew a joy and a sense of triumph that was solid and beautiful.
He never ceased trying to cheer and comfort his mother and assure her that things would be better than they were now, that her pain would go away, and that they would someday live in a real house in the suburbs, and have a backyard for Emily and Jacob and a real front lawn and all the other things that normal life offered.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, he thought that someday, when Jacob and Emily were grown and married and his mother had been cured by all the money he would make, he would perhaps think again about the seminary. He couldn’t forget what it had meant to him once, to serve Mass. He couldn’t forget that he had felt called to take the host in his hands and say, “This is My Body,” thereby making it the very flesh of the Lord Jesus Christ. And many a time as he played on a Saturday evening, he turned to liturgical music that delighted the ever-shifting crowd as much as the familiar tunes of Johnny Cash and Frank Sinatra that so delighted the audience. He cut a sharp picture as a street musician, hatless and trim in a blue wool jacket and dark wool pants, and even these traits gave him a sublime advantage.
The better he became, playing requests effortlessly and pulling the full range out of the instrument, the more the tourists and the natives grew to love him. He soon came to recognize regulars on certain nights, who never failed to give him the largest bills.
He sang one modern hymn, “I am the bread of life, he who comes to Me will not hunger …” It was a rousing hymn, one that used his full range, and his full ability to forget everything else as he played, and those who clustered around him always rewarded him for it. In a daze, he’d look down and see the money that could buy him a little peace for a week or even more. And he’d feel like crying.
He also played and sang songs that he made up, variations on themes he’d heard in the records his teacher gave him. He wove together the airs of Bach and Mozart and even Beethoven, and other composers whose names he couldn’t remember.
At one point he began to jot down some of his compositions. His teacher would help him to copy them outright. Music for the lute wasn’t written like ordinary music. It was written in tabulature, and this he specially loved. But the real theory and practice of written music was hard for him. If only he could learn enough to teach music someday, he thought, even to little children, that would be a workable life.
Soon enough, Jacob and Emily were able to dress themselves, and they too had the grave look of little adults as did he, riding alone on the St. Charles car to school, and never bringing anyone home as their brother had forbidden it. They learned how to do the wash, to iron the shirts and blouses for school, and how to hide the money from their mother, and distract her if she became maddened and started to tear the house to pieces.
“If you have to pour it down her throat, then do it,” Toby told them, for in truth there were times when nothing but the drink would stop his mother from raving.
I observed all these things.
I turned the pages of his life and raised the light to read the finer print.
I loved him.
I saw the Daily Prayer Book ever on his desk, and beside it another book, which he read from time to time for pure delight, and sometimes read to Jacob and Emily.
This book was The Angels by Fr. Pascal Parente. He’d found it in the same Magazine Street shop where he’d found his books on crime and bloody murder, and he bought it, along with a life of St. Thomas Aquinas by G. K. Chesterton, which he struggled from time to time to read to himself though it was difficult.
You might say that he lived a life in which what he read was as important as what he played on the lute, and these things were as important to him as his mother, and Jacob and Emily.
His guardian angel, always desperate to guide him on the right path in the most chaotic of times, seemed perplexed by the combination of loves that gripped Toby’s soul, but I didn’t come to observe that angel, but only to see Toby, not the angel who labored so hard to keep faith blazing in Toby’s heart that Toby would somehow save all of them.
One summer day, as Toby read on his bed, he turned over on his belly, clicked open his pen, and underlined these words:
As of faith we need only hold that the Angels are not endowed with cardiognosis (knowledge of the secrets of the heart) nor with a certain knowledge of future acts of the free will; these being exclusively divine prerogatives.
He had loved that sentence, and he had loved the atmosphere of mystery that enveloped him when he read this book.
In truth, he didn’t want to believe that angels were heartless. Somewhere once he’d seen an old painting of the crucifixion in which the angels above had been weeping, and he liked to think that the guardian angel of his mother wept when he saw her drunken and despondent. If angels didn’t have hearts or know hearts, he didn’t want to know it, yet the concept enthralled him, and angels enthralled him, and he talked to his own angel as often as he could.
He taught Emily and Jacob to kneel down every night and say the age-old prayer:
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.
He even bought a picture of a guardian angel for them. It was a common enough picture, and he’d first seen a print of it himself in a grade school classroom. This print he matted and framed with the materials he could buy in the drugstore. And he hung it on the wall in the room the three of them shared, he and Jacob in the bunk bed and Emily against the far wall on her own cot, which could be folded up in the morning.
He had chosen an ornate gold frame for the picture, and he liked the beading on it, the leafy corners and the wide margin it established between the world of the picture and the faded wallpaper of the little room.
The guardian angel was huge and womanly with streaming golden hair and great white blue-tipped wings, and she wore a mantle over her flowing white tunic as she stood above a small boy and girl who made their way together over a treacherous bridge with gaping holes in it.
How many millions of little children have seen that picture?
“Look,” Toby would say to Emily and Jacob when they knelt down for night prayers. “You can always talk to your guardian angel.” He told them how he talked to his angel, especially on those nights downtown when the tips were slow. “I say, Bring me more people, and sure enough, he does it.” He insisted upon it though Jacob and Emily both laughed.
But it was Emily who asked if they could pray to Mother’s guardian angel too and stop her from getting so drunk so much.
This shocked Toby, because he had never spoken the word “drunk” under his own roof. He had never used the word “drunk” to anyone, not even his confessor. And he marveled that Emily, who was only seven at this time, knew everything. The word sent a dark shiver through him, and he had told his little brother and sister that life would not always be like this, that he would see to it that things got better and better.
He meant to keep his word.
At Jesuit High, Toby soon rose to the top of his class. He played fifteen hours at a stretch on Saturdays and Sundays to make enough that he didn’t have to play after school, and could keep up his musical education.
He was sixteen when a restaurant hired him for Saturday and Sunday nights, and though he made a little less, he knew he could count on it.
When needed, he waited tables and made good tips. But it was his spirited and unusual playing that was wanted of him and he was glad of it.
All this money over the years he hid in various places around the apartment—in gloves in his drawers, beneath a loose board, beneath Emily’s mattress, under the bottom of the stove, even in tinfoil in the refrigerator.
On a good weekend, he was making hundreds, and when he passed his seventeenth birthday, the Conservatory gave him a full college scholarship to study music in earnest. He had made it.
That was the happiest day of his life and he came home brimming with the news. “Ma, I did it, I did it,” he said. “Everything’s going to be good, I’m telling you.”
When he would not give his mother money for drink, she took his lute out and smashed it over the edge of the kitchen table.
The breath went out of him. He thought he might die. He wondered if he could make himself die simply by refusing to breathe. He became sick and sat down on the chair with his head down and his hands between his knees, and he listened as his mother went roaming the apartment, sobbing and murmuring and cursing in foul language all those whom she blamed for all that had become of her, arguing with her dead mother in turns, and then blubbering, “Dan, Dan, Dan,” over and over again.
“You know what your father gave me?” she screamed. “You know what he gave me from those women downtown? You know what he left me with?”
These words terrified Toby.
The apartment stank of booze. Toby wanted to die. But Emily and Jacob were due to get off the St. Charles car a block away at any minute. He went to the corner store, bought a flask of bourbon, though he was underage, and brought it home and forced it down her throat, swallow after swallow, until she passed out cold on the mattress.
After that, her cursing increased. As the children dressed for school, she’d call them the worst names imaginable. It was like a demon lived inside her. But it wasn’t a demon. The booze was eating her brain, and he knew it.
His latest teacher gave him a new lute, a cherished lute, one far more expensive than the one that had been broken.
“I love you for this,” he said to her and he kissed her on her powdered cheek, and she told him again that someday he’d make a name for himself with his lute and a string of recordings of his own.
“God forgive me,” he prayed as he knelt in Holy Name Church, looking up the long shadowy nave to the high altar, “I wish my mother would die. But I can’t wish it.”
The three children cleaned the place from top to bottom that weekend as they always did. And she, the mother, lay drunk like an enchanted princess under a spell, her mouth open, her face smooth and youthful, her drunken breath almost sweet, like sherry.
Under his breath, Jacob whispered, “Poor drunk Mommy.”
This shocked Toby as much as the time Emily had said something like it.
When he was halfway through his senior year, Toby fell in love. It was with a Jewish girl from Newman School, the coeducational prep school in New Orleans that was as good as Jesuit. Her name was Liona and she came to Jesuit, an all-boys’ school, to sing the lead in a musical that Toby made time to attend, and when he asked her to go with him to the prom, she said yes immediately. He was overwhelmed. Here was a lovely dark-haired beauty with a marvelous soprano voice, and she took to him completely.
In the hours after the prom they sat in her backyard uptown, outside of her beautiful home on Nashville Avenue. In the warm, fragrant garden, he broke down and told her about his mother. She had nothing but sympathy and understanding for him. Before morning they had slipped into her family guesthouse and been intimate together. He didn’t want her to know that it was his first time, but when she confessed it was hers, he admitted it.
He told her that he loved her. This made her cry, and she told him that she had never known anyone like him.
With her long black hair and dark eyes, her soft soothing voice, and her immediate understanding, she seemed everything that he could ever desire. She had a strength he greatly admired, and something of a searing intelligence. He felt dreadful fear of losing her.
Liona came down to be with him in the heat of spring as he played on Bourbon Street; she brought him cold Cokes from the grocery store, and stood only a few paces away listening to him. Only her studies kept her away from him. She was clever and had a great sense of humor. She loved the sound of the lute, and she understood why he cherished this instrument for its unique tone and its beautiful shape. He loved her voice (which was much better than his), and soon they attempted duets. Her songs were Broadway songs and this brought a whole new songbook to his repertoire, and when time would allow, they played and sang together.
One afternoon—after his mother had been all right for a little while—he brought Liona home, and try as she might, she couldn’t conceal her shock at the small overcrowded apartment, and at his mother’s drunken slatternly manner as she sat smoking and playing solitaire at the kitchen table. He could tell that Emily and Jacob were ashamed. Jacob had asked him afterwards, “Toby, why did you ever bring her here with Mom like that? How could you do that?” Both his sister and brother looked at him as if he’d been a traitor.
That night, after Toby finished playing on Royal Street, Liona came down to meet him and they talked for hours once more, and crept again into her parents’ darkened guesthouse.
But Toby felt increasing shame that he had confided his deepest secrets to anyone. And he felt in his heart of hearts that he wasn’t worthy of Liona. Her tenderness and warmth confused him. Also he believed it was a sin to make love to her when there was no chance that they could ever be married. He had so many worries that normal courtship through their college years seemed an utter impossibility. He was deeply afraid that Liona pitied him.
As the period of final exams came on, neither of them had time to see each other.
The night of his high school graduation, Toby’s mother began to drink at four o’clock, and finally he ordered her to stay home. He couldn’t bear the thought of her coming downtown, with her slip showing beneath her hem, and her lipstick smeared and her cheeks too rouged, and her hair a mass of tangles. He tried for a time to brush her hair, but she slapped him repeatedly until, gritting his teeth, he grabbed her wrists and yelled, “Stop it, Mama.” He burst into sobs like a child. Emily and Jacob were terrified.
His mother wept on her folded arms at the kitchen table as he took off his good clothes. He wasn’t going downtown to his graduation either. The Jesuits could mail him the diploma.
But he was angry, angrier than he’d ever been in his life, and for the first time in his life, he called her a drunk and a slut. He shivered and cried.
Emily and Jacob sobbed in the other room.
His mother began to bawl. She said she wanted to kill herself. They struggled together over a kitchen knife. “Stop it, stop it,” he said between his clenched teeth. “All right, I’ll get the damn booze,” he said, and he went out for a six-pack and a bottle of wine, and a flask of bourbon. Now she had the seemingly endless supply that she wanted.
After she drank a beer, she begged him to lie down on the bed beside her. She drank the wine in gulps. She cried and asked him to say the rosary with her. “It’s a craving in the blood,” she said. He didn’t answer. He’d taken her to meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous many a time. She’d never stay even for fifteen minutes.
Finally he settled next to her. And they said the rosary together. In a low voice, devoid of drama or complaint, she told him how her father had died of the drink, a man he never knew, and his father before him. She told him about all those uncles who had gone before who’d been drunkards. “It’s a craving in the blood,” she said again. “A positive craving in the blood. You have to stay with me, Toby. You have to say the rosary with me again. Dear God, help me, help me, help me.”
“Listen, Ma,” he said to her. “I’m going to make more and more money playing music. This summer I have a full-time job playing at the restaurant. All summer I’ll be making money every night seven nights a week. Don’t you see what that means? I’ll be making more than ever.”
He went on as her eyes glazed over and the wine made her stuporous.
“Ma, I’m going to get a degree from the Conservatory. I’ll be able to teach music. Maybe I’ll even be able to make a record sometime, you know. But I’ll get my degree in music, Ma. I’ll be able to teach. You have to hang on. You have to believe in me.”
She stared at him with eyes like marbles.
“Look, after this coming week, I’ll have enough to get a woman to come in, to do the laundry and all and help Emily and Jacob with their homework. I’ll work all the time. I’ll play outside before the restaurant opens.” He put his hands on her shoulders and her mouth worked itself into a skewed smile. “I’m a man now, Ma. I’m going to do it!”
She slowly slipped into sleep. It was past nine o’clock.
Do angels really lack knowledge of the heart? I wept as I listened to him and watched him.
He went on and on talking to her as she slept, about how they’d move out of this crummy little apartment. Emily and Jacob would still go to Holy Name School, he’d drive them in the car he was going to buy. He already had his eye on it. “Ma, when I perform at the Conservatory for the first time, I want you to be there. I want you and Emily and Jacob to be in the balcony. That won’t be long at all. My teacher’s helping me now. I’ll get the tickets for us all to come. Ma, I’m going to make things all right, you understand? Ma, I’ll get you a doctor, a doctor who knows what to do.”
In her drunken sleep, she murmured. “Yes dear, yes dear, yes dear.”
Around eleven o’clock, he gave her another beer and she went dead asleep. He left the wine beside her. He saw to it Emily and Jacob were in their pajamas and tucked in, and then he put on the fine black tuxedo and boiled shirt he’d bought for graduation. They were, of course, the finest of the garments he had. And he’d bought them outright because he knew that he could use them on the street to good effect, and maybe even in the better restaurants.
He went downtown to play for money.
There were parties all over the city that night for the Jesuit graduates. They were not for Toby.
He parked himself very near to the most famous bars on Bourbon Street, and there he opened his case, and began to play. He sank his heart and soul into the saddest litanies of woe ever penned by Roy Orbison. And soon the twenty-dollar bills came flying at him.
What a spectacle he was, already at his full height, and so finely dressed compared to the ragged street musicians seated here or there, or the mumblers simply begging for coins, or the ragged but brilliant little tap dancers.
He played “Danny Boy” at least six times that night for one couple alone, and they gave him a hundred-dollar bill that he slipped into his wallet. He played all the ripping crowd-pleasers he knew, and if they clapped for the bluegrass then off he went, the country fiddler with the lute, and they jigged around him. He put everything out of his mind, except his music.
When early morning came, he went into the St. Louis Cathedral. He prayed the psalm he had so loved from his grandmother’s Catholic Bible:
Save me, O God, for the waters have come up to my neck. I am stuck fast in the mire of the deep, and there is nowhere to set my foot. I am come into deep waters, and the waves overwhelm me. I have grown weary from crying, my throat has become hoarse; my eyes have failed while I await my God.
Finally, he whispered, “Dear God, will you not end this pain!”
He had over six hundred dollars now to pay the bills. He was way ahead. But what did it matter if he couldn’t save her?
“Dear God,” he prayed. “I don’t want for her to die. I’m sorry I prayed for her to die. Dear Lord, save her.”
A beggar came up to him as he left the cathedral. She was poorly dressed and murmured under her breath of her need for medicine to save a dying child. He knew she was lying. He’d seen her many a time, and heard her tell the same story. He stared at her for a long time, then silenced her with a wave of his hand and a smile, and he gave her twenty dollars.
Tired as he was, he walked through the Quarter rather than spend the few bucks for a cab, and he rode the St. Charles car up home, staring dumbly out the window.
He wanted desperately to see Liona. He knew that she had come last night to see him graduate—she and her parents, in fact—and he wanted to explain to her why he had not been there.
He remembered that they had had plans afterwards, but now it seemed remote and he was too tired to think of what he would say to her when he finally spoke to her. He thought of her large loving eyes, of the ready wit and sharp intellect she never concealed, and her ringing laugh. He thought of all the wondrous traits she had, and he knew that as the college years passed, he would surely lose her. She had a scholarship at the Conservatory too, but how could he compete with the young men who would inevitably surround her?
She had a glorious voice, and in the production at Jesuit, she had seemed a natural star, loving the stage, and graciously but confidently accepting applause and flowers and compliments.
He didn’t understand why she had bothered with him at all. And he felt he had to draw back, let her go, and yet he almost cried thinking about her.
As the rattling clanking streetcar moved uptown, he hugged his lute and even went to sleep against it for a little while. But he woke with a start at his stop, and got off and dragged his feet as he went down the pavement.
As soon as he entered the apartment he knew something was wrong.
He found Jacob and Emily drowned in the bathtub. And she, with her wrists slit, lay dead on the bed, the blood soaking the spread and half of the pillow.
For a long time, he stared at the bodies of his brother and sister. The water had drained out but their pajamas were in moist wrinkles. He could see the bruises all over Jacob. What a fight he had put up. But the face of Emily at the other end of the tub was smooth and perfect, with eyes closed. Maybe she hadn’t been awake when their mother had drowned her. There was blood in the water. There was blood on the waterspout where Jacob must have cracked his head as she pushed him down.
The kitchen knife lay beside his mother. She’d all but chopped off her left hand, so deep was the wound, but she’d bled to death from both wrists.
All this had happened hours ago, he knew it.
The blood was dry or at best sticky.
Yet still he lifted his brother out of the tub and actually tried to breathe life into him. His brother’s body was icy cold, or so it seemed. And it was soggy.
He couldn’t bear to touch his mother or his sister.
His mother lay with her lids half shut, her mouth open. She looked already dried out, like a husk. A husk, he thought, exactly. He stared at the rosary in the blood. The blood was all over the painted wood floor.
Only the smell of wine hung over all these pitiable visions. Only the smell of the malt in the beer. Outside cars passed. A block away, there came the roar of the passing streetcar.
Toby went into the living room, and sat for a long time with his lute on his lap.
Why hadn’t he known such a thing could happen? Why had he left Jacob and Emily alone with her? Dear God, why had he not seen that it would come to this? Jacob was only ten years old. How in the name of Heaven had Toby let this happen to them?
It was all his fault. He had no doubt of it. That she might hurt herself, yes, of this he’d thought, and God forgive him, maybe he had even prayed for that in the cathedral. But this? His brother and sister dead? His breathing stopped again. For a moment he thought he’d never be able to breathe again. He stood up and only then did the breath come out of him in a dry soundless sob.
Listlessly he stared at the mean apartment with its ugly mismatched furnishings, its old oak desk and cheap flowered chairs, and all the world to him seemed filthy and gray and he felt a fear and then a growing terror.
His heart pounded. He stared at the drugstore prints of flowers in their ugly frames—these foolish things he’d bought—ranged around the papered walls of the apartment. He stared at the flimsy curtains he’d bought as well, and the cheap white window shades behind them.
He didn’t want to go into the bedroom and see the print of the guardian angel. He felt he would rip it to pieces if he saw it. He would not ever again, ever, raise his eyes to such a thing.
A gloom followed the pain. A gloom came when the pain could not be sustained. It covered every object that he beheld, and concepts such as warmth and love seemed unreal to him, or forever beyond reach, as he sat in the midst of this ugliness and ruin.
Sometime or other during the hours he sat there, he heard the answering machine on the phone. It was Liona calling him. He knew that he could not pick up the phone. He knew that he could never see her again, or speak to her, or tell her about what had happened.
He didn’t pray. It didn’t even occur to him. It didn’t even occur to him to talk to the angel at his side, or the Lord to whom he’d prayed only an hour and a half ago. He’d never see his brother and sister alive again, or his mother, or his father, or anyone he knew. This is what he thought. They were dead, irrevocably dead. He believed in nothing. If someone had come to him at that moment, as his guardian angel sought to do, and told him, You will see them all again, he might have spat at that person in a perfect fury.
All day he remained in the apartment with his dead family ranged around him. He kept the bathroom and bedroom doors open, because he didn’t want the bodies to be alone. It seemed horribly disrespectful.
Liona called twice more, and the second time he was half dozing and wasn’t sure whether or not he had really heard her.
Finally he fell deep asleep on the sofa, and when he first opened his eyes, he forgot what had happened, and he thought they were all alive and things were as usual. At once, the truth came back to him with the force of a hammer.
He changed into his blazer and khakis and packed up all his fine clothes. He got them into the suitcase his mother had taken to the hospital years ago when she’d had her babies. He took all the cash from the hiding places.
He kissed his little brother. Rolling up his sleeve, he reached down into the soiled bathtub to put a kiss with his fingers on his sister’s cheek. Then he kissed his mother’s shoulder. Again he stared at the rosary. She hadn’t been saying it as she died. It was just there, caught in the snarled spread, forgotten.
He picked it up, took it into the bathroom, and ran the basin water over it until it was clean. Then he dried it on a towel and put it in his pocket.
Everybody looked very dead now, very empty. There was no odor yet, but they were very dead. The rigidity of his mother’s face absorbed him. The body of Jacob on the floor was dry and wrinkled.
Then, as he turned to go, he went back to his desk. He wanted to take two books with him. He took his prayer book, and he took the book called The Angels by Fr. Pascal Parente.
I observed this. I observed it with keen interest.
I noticed the way that he packed these treasured books in the bulging suitcase. He thought about other religious books that he loved, including a Lives of the Saints, but he had no room for them.
He took the streetcar downtown and, outside the first hotel he reached, he caught a cab to the airport.
Only once, it crossed his mind to call the police, to report what had happened. But then he felt such rage that he put these thoughts out of his mind forever.
He went to New York. Nobody could find you in New York, he figured.
On the plane, he clutched his lute as if something might happen to it. He stared out the window and he knew a misery so deep that it didn’t seem possible life could ever hold a particle of joy again.
Not even murmuring melodies to himself of the songs he most liked to play meant anything to him. In his ears, he heard a din as if the imps of Hell were making a horrid music to drive him out of his mind. He whispered to himself to silence it. He slipped his hand into his pocket, found his rosary, and prayed the words but he didn’t meditate upon the mysteries. “Hail Mary,” he whispered under his breath, “… now and at the hour of our death. Amen.” These are just words, he thought. He could not imagine eternity.
When the stewardess asked him if he wanted a soft drink, he answered, “Someone will bury them.” She gave him a Coke with ice. He didn’t sleep. It was only two and a half hours to New York but the plane circled for more than that before it finally landed.
He thought about his mother. What could he have done? Where could he have put her? He had been looking for places, doctors, some way, any way to buy time until he could save everyone. Maybe he hadn’t moved fast enough, been clever enough. Maybe he should have told his teachers at school.
Didn’t matter now, he told himself.
It was evening. The dark giant buildings of the East Side of the city seemed infernal. The sheer noise of the city astonished him. It enclosed him in the bouncing taxi, or battered him at the stoplights. Behind a thick window of plastic the driver was a mere ghost to him.
Finally banging on the plastic, he told the man he needed a cheap hotel. He was afraid the man would think he was a child and take him to some policeman. He didn’t realize that at six foot four inches of height and with the grim expression on his face, he didn’t look like a child at all. The hotel was not as bad as he’d expected.
He thought about bad things as he walked the streets in search of a job. He carried his lute with him.
He thought of the afternoons when he was little and he would come home and find both of his parents drunk. His father was a bad policeman, and everyone knew it. None of his mother’s people could stand him. Only his own mother had pleaded with him over and over to treat his wife and children better.
Even when Toby was small, he knew his father bullied the loose women in the French Quarter, forcing favors out of them before he would “let them off.” He’d heard his father brag about that kind of thing with the few other cops who had come over for beer and poker. They’d shared those stories. When the other men said that his father ought to be proud of a boy like Toby, his father had said, “Who, you mean Pretty Face over there? My little girl?”
Now and then when he’d been very drunk, his father had taunted Toby, pushing him, asking to see what Toby had between his legs. Sometimes Toby had gotten a beer or two from the icebox for his father to move him along to the time when he’d pass out and doze with his arms crossed on the table.
Toby had been glad when his father went to prison. His father had always been coarse and cold, and had a shapeless and red face. He was mean and ugly and he looked mean and ugly. The handsome young man he’d been in photographs had turned into an obese and red-faced drunk with jowls and a roughened voice. Toby was glad when his father was stabbed. He couldn’t remember any funeral.
Toby’s mother had always been pretty. In those days, she’d been sweet. And her favorite words for her son had been “my sweet boy.”
Toby resembled her in face and manner, and he’d never ceased to be proud of that, no matter what had happened. He never ceased to be proud of his increasing height, and he took pride in the way he dressed to wring the money from the tourists.
Now as he walked through the streets of New York, trying to ignore the great booming noises that accosted him at every turn, trying to weave amongst the people without being knocked about, he thought over and over again, I was never enough for her, never enough. Nothing I did was ever enough. Nothing. Never had anything he had done been enough for anyone, except perhaps his music teacher. He thought of her now and he wished he could call her and tell her how much he loved her. But he knew he wouldn’t do this.
The long dreary day of New York suddenly switched dramatically to evening. Cheerful lights went on everywhere. Store awnings sparkled with lights. Couples moved swiftly along to movie theaters or to stage plays. It wasn’t hard to realize that he was in the Theater District and he loved looking in the windows of the restaurants. But he wasn’t hungry. The thought of food revolted him.
When the theaters let out, Toby took up his lute, set down the green velvet–lined case, and began to play. He shut his eyes. His mouth was half open. He played the darkest most intricate music by Bach that he knew, and he saw every now and then, through a slit of vision, the bills piling in the lute case, and heard even here and there applause from those who stopped to hear him.
Now he had even more money.
He went back to his room and decided he liked it. He didn’t care that it looked on rooftops and a shiny wet alley below. He liked the real bedstead and the little table, and the large television that was an infinite improvement on the one he’d watched all those years in the apartment. There were clean white towels in the bathroom.
The next night, on the recommendation of a cabbie, he went to Little Italy. He played on the street between two busy restaurants there. And this time he played all the melodies he knew from the opera. Poignantly he played the songs of Madame Butterfly and Puccini’s other heroines. He went through stirring riffs and wove together the songs of Verdi.
A waiter came out of one restaurant and told him to move on. But someone interrupted the waiter. It was a big heavyset man in a white apron.
“You play that again,” said the man. He had thick black hair and only a little white at the sides over his ears. He rocked back and forth as Toby played the music from La Bohème, and attempted again the most heart-wrenching arias.
Then he moved on into the gay and festive songs of Carmen. The old man clapped for him and wiped his hands on his apron and clapped some more.
Toby played every tender song that he knew.
The crowd shifted, paid, and filled out again. The pudgy old man stood listening to all of it.
Over and over the pudgy man reminded him to collect the bills out of his case and hide them. The money kept coming.
When Toby was too tired to play anymore, he started to pack up but the pudgy old man said, “Wait a minute, son.” And he asked him to play Neapolitan songs that Toby had never played, but he knew them by ear and it was easy.
“What are you doing here, son?” asked the man.
“Looking for a job,” said Toby, “any kind of job, dishwasher, waiter, anything, I don’t care, just work, good work.”
He looked at the man. The man was wearing decent trousers and a white dress shirt open at the neck with the sleeves rolled just below the elbows. The man had a soft fleshy face, graven with kindliness.
“I’ll give you a job,” said the man. “Come inside. I’ll fix you something to eat. You’ve been out here all night playing.”
By the end of his first week he had a little second-floor hotel apartment downtown, and a fake set of identification papers saying that he was twenty-one (old enough to serve wine) and he had the name Vincenzo Valenti because the name had been suggested to him by the gentle old Italian who had hired him. A real birth certificate had come with the suggestion.
The man’s name was Alonso. The restaurant was beautiful. It had huge glass windows facing the street, and very bright lights, and in between their waiting tables, the waiters and waitresses, students all, sang opera. Toby was the lutist beside the piano.
It was good, good for Toby who didn’t want to remember that he had ever been Toby.
Never had he heard such fine voices.
On many a night, when the restaurant was crowded with convivial parties, and the opera was sweet, and he could play his lute in a ripping fashion, he felt almost good and didn’t want for the doors to close, or the wet pavements to be waiting for him.
Alonso was good-hearted, smiling, and took a special liking to Toby, who was his Vincenzo.
“What I wouldn’t give,” he said to Toby, “just to see one of my grandchildren.”
Alonso gave Toby a little pearl-handled gun and told him how to shoot it. It had a soft trigger. It was just for protection. Alonzo showed him the guns he kept in the kitchen. Toby found himself fascinated with these guns, and when Alonso took him into the alley behind the restaurant and let him shoot with these guns, he liked the feel of them, and the deafening sound that echoed up the high blind walls on both sides of them.
Alonso got work for Toby at weddings and at engagement parties, paid him well, bought him fine Italian suits for the job, and sometimes sent him to serve private dinners in a house only a few blocks from the restaurant. People unfailingly found the lute to be elegant.
This house where he played was a handsome place, but it made Toby uneasy. Though most of the women living there were old, and kind, there were a few young women, and men came to see them. The woman who ran the place was named Violet and she had a deep whiskey voice, and wore heavy makeup, and treated all the other women as her young sisters or children. Alonso loved to sit for hours and talk to Violet. They spoke Italian mostly but sometimes English and they seemed involved in times gone by, and there were hints they had once been lovers.
There were card games there, and sometimes little birthday gatherings, mostly of elderly men and women, but the young women smiled at Toby lovingly and teasingly.
One time, behind a painted dressing screen, he played the lute for a man who made love to a woman, and the man hurt her. She hit the man and the man slapped her.
Alonso waved it away. “She does that all the time,” he explained as if the conduct of the man had not been involved in it. Alonso called the girl Elsbeth.
“What kind of name is that?” Toby asked.
Alonso shrugged. “Russian? Bosnian? How do I know?” He smiled. “They have blond hair. The men love them. And she’s run away from some Russian, that I can tell you. I’ll be lucky if the bastard doesn’t come looking for her.”
Toby grew to like Elsbeth. She did have an accent that might have been Russian, and once she told him that she had made up her name, and as Toby was now calling himself Vincenzo, he felt a certain sympathy with that. Elsbeth was very young. Toby wasn’t sure she was past sixteen. The makeup she wore made her look older and less fresh. With a bit of lipstick only on Sunday morning, she was beautiful. She smoked black cigarettes on the fire escape as they talked together.
Alonso sometimes took Toby home for a plate of spaghetti with him and his mother. This was in Brooklyn. Alonso served Northern Italian food at the restaurant, since that was what the world wanted now, but as for the old man, he liked his meatballs and red gravy. His own sons lived in California. His daughter was dead from drugs when she was fourteen. He pointed to her picture once and that was the last of it.
He would sneer and wave his hand at the mere mention of his sons.
Alonso’s mother didn’t speak English, and would never sit at the table. She poured the wine, cleaned up the dishes, and stood against the stove, with her arms folded, staring at the men as they ate. She made Toby think of his grandmothers. They had been women like that, who stood while the men ate. Such a dim memory.
Alonso and Toby went to the Metropolitan Opera several times, and Toby concealed what a revelation this was, to be hearing one of the greatest companies in the world, to be sitting in good seats with a man who knew the story and the music perfectly. Toby knew something in those hours that was the perfect imitation of happiness.
Toby had been to operas in New Orleans, with his teacher from the Conservatory. And he had heard the students at Loyola sing opera too, and been moved by these dramatic spectacles. But the Metropolitan Opera was infinitely more impressive.
They went to Carnegie Hall and also to the symphony.
It was a thin emotion, this happiness, drawn like a gossamer sheet over the things he remembered. He wanted to be joyful as he looked around these great auditoriums and listened to the dazzling music, but he didn’t dare to trust in anything.
One time he told Alonso he needed a beautiful necklace to send to a woman.
Alonso laughed and shook his head.
“No, my music teacher,” said Toby. “She taught me for free. I have two thousand dollars saved up.”
Alonso said, “You leave it to me.”
The necklace was stunning, “an estate piece.” Alonso paid for it. He wouldn’t take a dime from Toby.
Toby shipped it to the woman at the Conservatory because that was the only address he had for her. He put no return address on the package.
One afternoon, he went to St. Patrick’s Cathedral and sat for an hour staring at the main altar. He believed nothing. He felt nothing. The words of the psalms he had so loved did not come back to him.
As he was leaving, as he was lingering in the foyer of the church, looking back at it as if it were a world he would never behold again, a rough policeman forced a young tourist couple to leave because they had been embracing. Toby stared at the policeman, who gestured for him to get out. But Toby just took his rosary out of his pocket and the policeman nodded and moved away from him.
In his own mind, he was a failure. This world of his in New York wasn’t real. He had failed his little brother, his sister, his mother, and he had disappointed his father. Pretty Face.
At times, an anger began to blaze in Toby but it wasn’t directed at anyone.
This is an anger angels have trouble understanding because what Toby had long ago underlined in the book of Pascal Parente was true.
We angels do in some respects lack cardiognosis. But I knew intelligently what Toby felt; I knew from his face and from his hands, and even from the way that he now played his lute, more darkly and with a forced gaiety. His lute, with its deep roughened tones, took on a melancholy sound. Both sorrow and joy were subjected to it. He couldn’t put his own private pain in it.
One night his employer, Alonso, came to Toby’s little hotel apartment. He carried a big leather knapsack over his shoulder.
This was a place Alonso had sublet to Toby on the very edge of Little Italy. It was a fine place as far as Toby was concerned, though the windows looked out on walls, and the furniture was fine and even a little fancy.
But Toby was surprised to open the door and see Alonso. Alonso had never come there. Alonso might put him in a cab to go home after the opera, but he’d never come home with him.
Alonso sat down and asked for wine.
Toby had to go out to get it. He never kept liquor in his apartment.
Alonso started to drink. He took out from his coat a large gun and laid it on the kitchen table.
Alonso told Toby he was up against a force that had never threatened him before: Russian mobsters wanted his restaurant and his catering business, and they had taken his “house” away from him.
“They’d want this hotel,” he said, “but they don’t know I own it.”
A small band of them had gone right into the house where Toby had played for the card gamers and the ladies. They had shot the men there, and four of the women and girls, and run off everybody else, and put in their own girls in place of them.
“I’ve never seen this kind of evil,” said Alonso. “My friends won’t stand by me. What friends do I have? I think my friends are in this with them. I think my friends have sold me out. Why else would they let this happen to me? I don’t know what to do about this. My friends blame me for this.”
Toby stared at the gun. Alonso took the clip out of it, then shoved it back in. “Know what this is? This will shoot more rounds than you can imagine.”
“Did they kill Elsbeth?” Toby asked.
“Shot her in the head,” said Alonso. “Shot her in the head!” Alonso began to shout. Elsbeth was the reason these men had come, and Alonso’s friends had told him how foolish it was for him and Violet to have given her shelter.
“Did they shoot Violet?” Toby asked.
Alonso began to sob. “Yes, they shot Violet.” He wept uncontrollably. “They shot Violet first, an old girl like that. Why would they do that?”
Toby sat thinking. He wasn’t thinking about all the crime dramas he had once watched on television, or the true-crime novels he had read. He was thinking his own thoughts, about those who prevail in this world and those who don’t, those who are strong and resourceful, and those who are weak.
He could see Alonso getting drunk. He detested this.
Toby thought for a long time and then he said, “You have to do to them what they are trying to do to you.”
Alonso stared at him and then broke into laughter.
“I’m an old man,” he said. “And these men, they’re going to kill me. I can’t go up against them! I’ve never fired a gun like this one in my life.”
He talked on and on as he drank wine, getting drunker and angrier, explaining that he had always cared about “the basic things,” a good restaurant, a house or two where men could relax, play a little cards, have a little friendly companionship.
“It’s the real estate,” Alonso sighed. “If you want to know. That’s what they want. I should have gotten the Hell out of Manhattan. And now it’s too late. I’m finished.”
Toby listened to everything that he said.
These Russian gangsters had moved right into his house, and brought the deeds for the house to the restaurant. They had deeds for the restaurant as well. Alonso, confronted at the crowded dinner hour, and safe amongst witnesses, had refused to sign anything.
They’d bragged about the lawyers who handled their deeds and the men at the bank who worked for them.
Alonso was supposed to sign his businesses away. They promised if he signed the deeds and cleared out, they’d give him a piece of things, and they wouldn’t hurt him.
“Give me a piece of my own house?” Alonso bawled. “It’s not enough for them, the house. They want the restaurant my grandfather opened. That’s what they really want. And they’ll move on this hotel soon as they find out about it. They said if I didn’t sign the papers, they’d have their lawyer take care of it, and no one would ever find my body. They said they could do to the restaurant the things they’d done in the house. They would make it look to the cops like a robbery. That’s what they said to me. ‘You’re murdering your own people if you don’t sign.’ These Russians are monsters.”
Toby pondered this, what it would mean if these gangsters had moved on the restaurant at night, shut the big blinds to the street, and murdered all the employees. He felt a shiver when he realized that death was coming very close to him.
Without words, he pictured the bodies of Jacob and Emily. Emily with her eyes closed underwater.
Alonso drank another glass of wine. Thank Heaven, Toby thought, that he had bought two fifths of the best Cabernet.
“After I’m dead,” Alonso said, “what if they find my mother?”
A sullen silence came over Alonso.
I could see his guardian angel beside him, seemingly impassive yet striving somehow to comfort him. I could see other angels in the room. I could see those that give off no light.
Alonso brooded and so did Toby.
“As soon as I sign these deeds,” said Alonso, “as soon as they legally own the restaurant, too, they’ll kill me.” He reached into his coat and he took out another large gun. He explained that it was an automatic weapon and could shoot even more rounds of ammunition than the first one. “I swear, I will take them with me.”
Toby didn’t ask, Why not go to the police? He knew the answers to such questions as that and nobody from New Orleans ever trusted the police very much in these sorts of affairs anyway. After all, Toby’s father had been a drunken crooked cop. It wasn’t in Toby’s nature.
“These girls they’re bringing in,” said Alonso. “They’re children, slaves, just children.” He continued, “No one’s going to help me. My mother will be alone. No one can help me.”
Alonso checked the clip of bullets in the second gun. He said he would kill all of them if he could, but he didn’t think he could do it. He was very drunk now. “No, I can’t do this. I have to get out, but there’s no way out. They want the deeds, the legal deeds done. They have their men in the bank, and maybe even in the licensing offices.”
He reached into his knapsack and took out all the deeds and spread them on the table. He spread out the two business cards these men had given him. These were the papers that Alonso had yet to sign. They were his death warrant.
Alonso got up, staggered into the bedroom—the only other room in the place—and passed out. He began to snore.
Toby studied all of these items. He knew the house very well, its back door, its fire escapes. He knew the address of the lawyer whose name was on the card, or rather where he could find the building; he knew the location of the bank, though the names of these people meant nothing, obviously.
A glorious vision seized Toby, or I should say Vincenzo. Or should I say Lucky? He had always had a stunning imagination and a great capacity for visual imagery, and now he saw a plan and a great leap forward from the life he led. But it was a leap into pure darkness.
He went into the bedroom. He shook the old man’s shoulder.
“They killed Elsbeth?”
“Yeah, they killed her,” the old man said with a sigh. “The other girls were hiding under the beds. Two of them got away. They saw those men shoot Elsbeth.” He made his hand into a gun, and made the noise of the gun with his lips. “I’m a dead man.”
“You really think so?”
“I know so. I want you to care for my mother. If my sons come around, don’t talk to them. My mother has all the money I have. Don’t talk to them.”
“I’ll do it,” said Toby. But it was not an answer to Alonso’s entreaty. It was a simple private confirmation.
Toby went into the other room, gathered up the two guns, and went out the back door of his building. The alley was narrow and the walls went up five stories on either side. The windows appeared, as best he could see, to be covered. He studied each gun. He tested the guns. The bullets flew with such speed it jolted and shocked him.
Somebody opened a window and shouted for him to shut up down there.
He went back into the apartment and put the guns into the knapsack.
The old man was cooking breakfast. He set down a plate of eggs for Toby. And then he sat down himself and began dipping his toast in his egg.
“I can do it,” Toby said. “I can kill them.”
His employer looked at him. His eyes were dead the way Toby’s mother’s eyes used to die. The old man drank half a glass of wine and wandered back into the bedroom.
Toby went and looked down at him. The smell made Toby think of his mother and father. The dead glassy gaze of his employer as he looked up at Toby made him think of his mother.
“I’m safe here,” the old man said. “This address, nobody has it. It’s not written down anywhere at the restaurant.”
“Good,” said Toby. He was relieved to hear it, and had been afraid to ask about it.
In the wee hours as the new clock ticked on the sideboard in the little kitchen, Toby studied all the deeds and both the business cards, and then he slipped the cards into his pocket.
He woke up Alonso again and insisted that he describe the men he’d seen, and Alonso tried to do it, but finally Toby realized he was too drunk.
Alonso drank more wine. He ate a dried crust of French bread. He asked for more bread and butter and wine, and Toby gave him these things.
“Stay here, and don’t think of anything until I come back,” said Toby.
“You’re just a boy,” said Alonso. “You can’t do anything about this. Get word to my mother. That’s what I ask. Tell her not to call my boys on the coast. Tell her, the Hell with them.”
“You can stay here and do as I say,” said Toby. Toby was powerfully exhilarated. He was making plans. He had certain specific dreams. He felt superior to all the forces collected around him and Alonso.
Toby was also furious. He was furious that anyone in the world thought he was a boy who could do nothing about this. He thought of Elsbeth. He thought of Violet with her cigarette on her lip, dealing the cards at the green felt table in the house. He thought of the girls talking together in whispers on the sofa. He thought over and over of Elsbeth.
Alonso stared at him.
“I’m too old to be defeated in this way,” he said.
“So am I,” said Toby.
“You’re eighteen,” said Alonso.
“No,” said Toby. He shook his head. “That’s not true.”
Alonso’s guardian angel stood beside him, staring at him with an expression of sorrow. This angel was at the limit of what he could do. The angel of Toby was appalled.
Neither angel could do anything. But they didn’t give up trying. They suggested to Toby and to Alonso that they should flee, get the mother from Brooklyn and get on a plane for Miami. Let the men of violence have what they wanted.
“You’re right that they’ll kill you,” said Toby, “as soon as you sign these papers.”
“I have nowhere to go. How do I tell this to my mother?” asked the old man. “I should shoot my mother, so that she doesn’t suffer. I should shoot her and then shoot myself and that would be the end of it.”
“No!” said Toby. “Stay here as I told you.”
Toby put on a recording of Tosca, and Alonso sang along with it and was soon snoring.
Toby walked for blocks before he went to a drugstore, bought a black cosmetic hair rinse, and unflattering but fashionable black-rimmed tinted glasses, and, from a table vendor on West Fifty-sixth Street, an expensive-looking briefcase and, from another vendor, a fake Rolex watch.
He went into another drugstore, and he bought a series of items, little items no one would notice, such as plastic devices people use to place between their teeth when they sleep, and lots of the soft rubber and plastic offered to help people line their shoes. He bought a pair of scissors, and he bought a bottle of clear nail polish and an emery board for trimming his nails. He stopped again at a vendor’s table on Fifth Avenue and bought himself several pairs of lightweight leather gloves. Handsome gloves. He also bought a yellow cashmere scarf. It was cold and it felt good to have this around his neck.
He felt powerful as he walked along the street, and he felt invincible.
When he came back to the apartment, Alonso was sitting there anxiously, and the music was Callas singing Carmen. “You know,” Alonso said, “I’m afraid to leave.”
“You should be,” said Toby. He began polishing his nails and filing them.
“What on earth are you doing?” Alonso asked him.
“I’m not certain yet,” said Toby, “but I notice when there are men in the restaurant who have polished nails, people notice it, especially women.”
Alonso shrugged.
Toby went out to get some lunch and several bottles of excellent wine so that they could make it through another day.
“They might be killing people at the restaurant now,” said Alonso. “I should have warned everyone to get out.” He sighed and put his heavy head in his hands. “I didn’t lock up the restaurant. What if they go there and gun down everybody?”
Toby merely nodded.
Then he went out, walked a couple of blocks, and called the restaurant. No one answered. This was a terrible sign. The restaurant should have been crowded for dinner, with people grabbing for the phone and jotting down evening reservations.
Toby reflected that he’d been wise to keep his apartment a secret, to make friends with no one but Alonso, to trust no one just as he had trusted no one when he was growing up.
Early morning came.
Toby showered and put the black tint in his hair.
The employer slept in his clothes on top of Toby’s bed.
Toby put on a fine Italian suit that Alonso had bought for him, and then he added the accoutrements so that he didn’t look like himself at all.
The plastic bite device changed the shape of his mouth. The heavy frames of the tinted glasses gave his face an expression that was alien to it. The gloves were dove gray and beautiful. He wrapped the yellow scarf around his neck. He put on his only and best black cashmere overcoat.
He’d fitted his shoes with plenty of material to make him look taller than he was, but not by much. He put the two automatic weapons in his briefcase, and the small handgun he put in his pocket.
He looked at his employer’s knapsack. It was black leather, very fine. So he slung it over his shoulder.
He went to the house before the sun came up. A woman he’d never seen before opened the front door. She smiled at him and welcomed him in. No one else was in sight.
He took the automatic weapon from his briefcase and shot her, and he shot the men who came running down the hall towards him. He shot the people who thundered down the stairs. He shot the people who seemed to run right into the gunfire as if they did not believe it was happening.
He heard screaming upstairs and he went up, stepping over one body after another, and shot through the doors, breaking big holes in them until everything was silence.
He stood at the very end of the hall and waited. Out came one man cautiously, gun visible before his arm and then his shoulder. Toby shot him immediately.
Twenty minutes passed. Maybe more. Nothing stirred in the house. Slowly, he made his way through every room of it. All dead.
He gathered up every cell phone he could find, and put them in the leather shoulder bag. There was a laptop computer there, and he folded it up and took it too, though it was a little heavier than he wanted it to be. He cut the wires to the computer desk, and to the landline phone.
As he was leaving, he heard the sound of someone crying and talking in a low pathetic voice. He kicked open the door and found a very young girl there, blond with red lipstick, crouched down on her knees with a cell phone to her ear. She dropped the phone in terror when she saw him. She shook her head, she begged in some language he couldn’t understand.
He killed her. She fell down dead instantly and lay there as his mother had lain on her bloody mattress. Dead.
He picked up her phone. A gruff voice demanded of him, “What’s happening?”
“Nothing,” he said in a whisper. “She was out of her mind.” He slammed the phone shut. The blood coursed hot through his veins. He felt powerful.
Now he made his way again very fast through every room. He found one man wounded and moaning and he shot him. He found a woman bleeding to death and he shot her too. He collected more phones. His knapsack was bulging.
Then he went out, walked several blocks, and caught a taxi.
It took him uptown to the office of the lawyer who had handled the transfer of the property.
Affecting a limp as he walked and sighing as if the briefcase weighed too much, and the shoulder bag were dragging him down, he made his way into the office.
The receptionist had just unlocked the door, and smiling, she explained her boss had not come in yet, but would come any minute. She said the yellow scarf around his neck was beautiful.
He slumped down on the leather couch and, carefully removing one glove, he wiped his forehead as though a terrible ache were bothering him. She looked at him tenderly.
“Beautiful hands,” she said, “like those of a musician.”
He laughed under his breath. In a whisper, he said, “All I want to do is go back to Switzerland.” He was very excited. He knew that he was lisping as he whispered because of the plastic bite plate in his mouth. It made him laugh, but only to himself. He had never been so tantalized in all his life. He thought for one split second that he understood the old words, “the glamour of evil.”
She offered him coffee. He put back on his glove. He said, “No, it will keep me awake on the plane. I want to sleep over the Atlantic.”
“I can’t recognize your accent. What is it?”
“Swiss,” he whispered, lisping effortlessly because of the device in his mouth. “I’m so eager to go home. I loathe this city.”
A sudden noise from the street startled him. It was a pile driver beginning the day’s work on a construction site. The noise was repetitive and shook the office fiercely.
He winced in pain, and she told him how sorry she was that he had to endure this.
In came the lawyer.
Toby stood up to his full commanding height and said in the same lisping whisper, “I’ve come on an important matter.”
The man was immediately afraid, as he let Toby into his office.
“Look, I’m moving as fast as I can,” said the man, “but that old Italian’s a fool. And he’s stubborn. Your employer expects miracles.” He rummaged through the papers on his desk. “I have found out this. He’s sitting on a teardown just a few blocks from the restaurant, and the place is worth millions.”
Again, Toby almost laughed, but he didn’t. He took the papers from the man, glancing at the address, which was that of his hotel, and shoved them in his briefcase.
The lawyer was petrified.
There were clanging noises from outside, and huge reverberating shocks as if heavy loads of material were being dropped to the street. Toby saw a big white painted crane when he looked out the window.
“Call the bank now,” Toby whispered, struggling over the lisp. “And you’ll find out what I’m talking about.” Again he almost laughed to himself. And it came across as a smile to this man, who instantly punched in a number on his cell phone.
The lawyer cursed. “You guys think I’m some kind of Einstein.” His face changed. The man at the bank had answered.
Toby took the cell phone out of the lawyer’s hand. He said into the phone, “I want to see you. I want to see you outside the bank. I want you to be waiting for me.”
On the other end the man gave his consent immediately. The number in the little digital window on the phone was the same as the number on one of the business cards in Toby’s pocket. Toby closed the phone and slipped it in his briefcase.
“What are you doing?” asked the lawyer.
Toby felt total power over the man. He felt invincible. Some vagrant wisp of romance prompted him to say, “You are a liar and a thief.”
He took the small gun out of his pocket and shot the man. The sound was swallowed by the booms and clatters from the street.
He looked at the laptop computer on the desk. He couldn’t leave it. Awkwardly he jammed it into the shoulder bag with the others.
He was loaded down, but he was very strong with good broad shoulders.
He found himself laughing again under his breath as he stared at the dead man. He felt wonderful. He felt marvelous. He felt as he had felt when he imagined himself playing the lute on a world-famous stage. Only this was better.
He was deliciously giddy, as giddy as he’d been when he’d first thought of all these things, these bits and pieces of things which he’d garnered from television crime dramas and occasional novels, and he forced himself not to laugh but to move on quickly.
He took all the money in the man’s wallet, some fifteen hundred dollars.
In the outer office, he smiled lovingly at the young woman. “Listen to me,” he said, leaning over the desk. “He wants you to leave now. He’s expecting, well, some people.”
“Ah, yes, I know,” she said, trying to look very clever and very approving and very calm, “but how long should I be out?”
“The day, take the day,” said Toby. “No, believe me, he wants you to.” He gave her several of the man’s twenty-dollar bills. “Take a taxi home. Enjoy yourself. And call in the morning, you understand? Don’t come in before calling.”
She was charmed by him.
She went out with him to the elevator, very elated to be with him, such a tall young man, such a mysterious and handsome young man, he knew this, and she told him again that his yellow scarf was gorgeous. She noticed his limp but pretended not to notice.
Before the elevator doors closed, he gazed down at her through the dark glasses, smiling as brightly as she smiled, and said, “Think of me as Lord Byron.”
He walked the few blocks to the bank, but stopped a few yards from the entrance. The thickening crowd almost knocked him aside. He moved to the wall, and he punched in the number of the banker on the phone he’d stolen from the lawyer.
“Come outside now,” he said in his now practiced lisping whisper, as his eyes moved over the crowd before the bank’s entrance.
“I am outside,” the man said gruffly and angrily. “Where the Hell are you?”
Toby easily spotted him as the man shoved the phone back into his pocket.
Toby stood looking about himself in amazement at the speed of those moving in both directions. The roar of the traffic was deafening. Bicycles whizzed through the sluggish rumble of trucks and taxis. The noise rolled up the walls as if to Heaven. Horns blared and the air was full of gray smoke.
He looked up at the slice of blue sky which gave no light whatsoever to this crevice of the giant city, and he thought to himself he had never been so alive. Not even in Liona’s arms had he felt this vigor.
He punched the number again, this time listening for the ring and watching for the man, almost lost in this ever-shifting glut of people, to answer.
Yes, he had his man, gray haired, heavy, red faced now with fury. The victim stepped to the curb. “How long do you want me to stand out here?” he barked into the phone. He turned and walked back to the granite wall of the bank and stood to the left of the revolving door, looking around coldly.
The man glared at everybody passing him, except the lean bent-over young man who limped as if because of his heavy shoulder bag and briefcase.
This man he didn’t notice at all.
As soon as Toby moved behind him, Toby shot the man in the head. Quickly he shoved the gun back in his coat and, with his right hand, helped the man slide down the wall to the pavement, with his legs out in front of him. Toby knelt solicitously right beside him.
He took out the man’s linen handkerchief and wiped his face. The man was dead, obviously. Then in plain sight of the unseeing crowd, he took the man’s phone, his wallet, and a small notebook from his breast pocket.
Not a single person passing had paused, not even those who were stepping over the banker’s outstretched legs.
A flash of memory surprised Toby. He saw his brother and sister, wet and dead in the bathtub.
Emphatically, he rejected this memory. He told himself it was meaningless. He folded the linen handkerchief as best he could with one gloved hand, and laid it across the man’s moist forehead.
He walked three blocks before catching a cab, and left the taxi three blocks from his apartment.
Toby went upstairs, his fingers shaking as he held the gun in his pocket. When he knocked on the door, he heard Alonso’s voice. “Vincenzo?”
“You’re alone in there?” he asked.
Alonso opened the door, and pulled him in. “Where have you been, what’s happened to you?” He stared at the darkened hair, the tinted glasses.
Toby searched the apartment.
Then he turned to Alonso and told him, “They’re all dead, the people who were bothering you. But this is not finished. There was no time to get to the restaurant and I don’t know what’s going on there.”
“I do,” said Alonso. “They fired all my people and closed the place up. What in Hell are you telling me?”
“Ah, well,” said Toby, “that’s not so bad.”
“What in the world do you mean they’re all dead?” Alonso asked.
Toby told him everything that had happened. Then he said, “You have to take me to people who know how to finish this. You have to take me to your friends who wouldn’t help you. They’ll help you now. They’ll want these computers. They’ll want these cell phones. They’ll want this little notebook. There’s data here, tons of data about these criminals and what they want and what they’re doing.”
Alonso stared at him for a long time without speaking, and then he sank down in the only armchair in the room and ran his fingers through his hair.
Toby bolted the door of the bathroom. He kept the gun with him. He laid the heavy porcelain top of the toilet tank against the door, and he took a shower with the curtain open, washing and washing until all the dark tint was gone from his hair. He smashed the glasses. He wrapped up the gloves, the shattered glasses, and the scarf and put them in a towel.
When he came out, Alonso was talking on the phone. He was deeply absorbed in his conversation. He was talking in Italian or a Sicilian dialect, Toby wasn’t sure. He’d picked up some words at the restaurant, but this stream of words was much too fast.
When the man hung up, he said, “You did get them. You got all of them.”
“That’s what I told you,” said Toby. “But others will come. This is only the beginning of something. The information in this lawyer’s computer is invaluable.”
Alonso stared at him in quiet amazement. His guardian angel stood with his arms folded watching everything sadly—or that is as well as I can describe in human terms his attitude. The angel of Toby was weeping.
“Do you know people who can help me use these computers?” Toby asked. “There were desktops in the house and in the office. I didn’t know how to get out the hard drives. I need to know that next time, how to remove the hard drive. All these computers, they have to be loaded with information. There are phone numbers here, hundreds most likely.”
Alonso nodded. He was amazed.
“Fifteen minutes,” he said.
“Fifteen minutes what?” asked Toby.
“They’ll be here, and they’ll be very glad to see you and very glad to teach you anything that they can.”
“You sure of this?” he asked. “If they wouldn’t help you before, why won’t they simply kill both of us?”
“Vincenzo,” said Alonso. “You’re just what they don’t have right now. You’re just what they need.” Tears came to Alonso’s eyes. “Son, do you think I would betray you?” he said. “I am in your debt forever. Somewhere there are copies of all these deeds, but you’ve killed the men who were handling them.”
They went downstairs. A black stretch limousine was waiting for them.
Before they got into the car outside, Toby threw the towel with the glasses and the scarf and the gray gloves into a trash can, pushing it deep down into the crackling mess of paper cups and plastic sacks. He hated the smell of it on his left hand. He had his suitcase and his lute, and the briefcase and the leather shoulder bag with the computers and the cell phones.
He didn’t like the look of the car and he didn’t want to get into it, though he had seen many such cars inching up Fifth Avenue in the evenings, and lumbering past the entrances of Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera.
Finally, after Alonso, he slipped in and sat facing two young men on the opposite black leather seat.
Both of them were fiercely curious. They were pale, and blond haired, almost certainly Russians.
Toby almost stopped breathing like he had the time his mother had smashed his lute. He kept his hand on the gun in his coat. Neither man had a hand in a pocket. All hands were in plain sight except for Toby’s hand.
He turned and looked at Alonso. You’ve betrayed me.
“No, no,” said the man opposite, the elder of the two, and Alonso was smiling as if he had just heard a perfect aria. The man spoke like an American, not a Russian.
“How did you do it?” the younger blond-haired man asked. He too was American. He looked at his watch. “It’s not even eleven o’clock.”
“I’m hungry,” Toby said. He held the gun steady in his pocket. “I’ve always wanted to eat at the Russian Tea Room.” Whether he was to die or not, this answer made Toby feel profoundly clever. Also it was true. If he was to have a last meal, he wanted it to be in the Russian Tea Room.
The older man laughed.
“Well, don’t shoot either of us, son,” he said, gesturing to Toby’s pocket. “That would be stupid because we’re going to pay you more money now than you’ve ever seen in your life.” He laughed. “We’re going to pay you more money than we’ve ever seen in our lives. And of course, we’ll take you to the Russian Tea Room.”
They stopped the car. Alonso got out.
“Why are you leaving?” Toby asked. Again came that breath less fear and his hand tightened on the little gun that was almost tearing his pocket.
Alonso leaned in and kissed him. He grabbed his head and kissed his eyes and kissed him on the lips, then let him go.
“They don’t want me,” he said. “They want you. I sold you to them but for your sake. You understand? I can’t do the things you can do. We can’t follow up on this, you and me. I sold you to them for your protection. You’re my boy. You’ll always be my boy. Now go with them. They want you, not me. You go on. I’m taking my mother down to Miami.”
“But you don’t have to do this now,” Toby protested. “You can have the house back. You can have the restaurant back. I took care of things.”
Alonso shook his head. Toby immediately felt stupid.
“Son, with what they paid me, I’m glad to go,” Alonso said. “My mother will see Miami and she’ll be happy.” He grabbed Toby’s face with both hands again and kissed him. “You brought me luck. Every time you play those old Napoli songs, you think of me.”
The car moved on.
They ate lunch at the Russian Tea Room, and while Toby ate the Chicken Kiev almost greedily, the older man said:
“Do you see those men over there? They’re New York policemen. And the man with them is from the FBI.”
Toby didn’t look. He just stared at the man who was speaking. He still had the gun in easy reach, though he hated the weight of it.
He knew that he could, if he wanted to do it, shoot both of the men with him, and probably shoot one of those other men before the others got him. But he wasn’t going to try any such thing yet. Another, better moment would present itself.
“They work for us,” said the older man. “They’ve been following us since we left your place. And they’ll follow us now out of town and into the country. So just relax. We’re very well protected, I assure you.”
And that’s how Toby became a hit man. That’s how Toby became Lucky the Fox. But there is just a little more to the transition.
That night as he lay in bed, in a large country house, miles from the city, he thought about the girl who had crouched down and put up her hands. He thought about how she had begged in words that needed no translation. Her face had been stained with tears. He thought about how she had doubled over and shaken her head and put out her two hands against him.
He thought about her after he’d shot her, lying there, still, like his brother and sister had lain in the bathtub.
He got up, put on his clothes and his overcoat, keeping the gun in his pocket, and he went down the steps of the big house, past the two men playing cards in the living room. The room was like a great cavern. There were groups of gilded furnishings everywhere. And plenty of dark leather. It was like one of those old elegant private clubs in a black-and-white movie. You expected to see gentlemen peering at you from wing chairs. But there were only the two playing cards under a lamp, though a fire did burn in the grate giving off a cheerful flicker in the darkness.
One of the men got up. “You want something, a drink maybe?”
“I need to walk,” Toby said.
No one stopped him.
He went out and he walked around the house.
He noticed the way the leaves looked in the trees that were nearest the lampposts. He noticed how the branches of barren trees were gleaming with ice. He studied the tall steep slate roofs of the house. He looked at the glint of light in the diamond-paned windows. A northern house, built for the heavy snow, built for the long winter, a house he’d only known from pictures, perhaps, if ever he had noticed them.
He listened to the sound of the frozen grass under his feet, and he came to a fountain that was running in spite of the cold, and he watched the water erupt from the jet and fall down in an airy white shower into the basin that boiled under the dim light.
Light came from the lantern in the porte cochere. The black limousine stood there gleaming under this lantern. Light came from the lamps that flanked the many doors of the house. Light came from small fixtures that lined the many garden paths of pea gravel. The air smelled of pine needles and of burning wood. There was a freshness and a cleanness he had not experienced in the city. There was a deliberate beauty.
It made him think of a summer when he’d gone for the holidays to a home across Lake Pontchartrain with two of the richer boys at Jesuit. They were nice boys, twins, and they liked him. They liked to play chess, and they liked classical music. They were good in the plays at school, which were so well done that everybody in the city came to see them. Toby would have been friends with those two boys, but he had had to keep his own life at home a secret. And so he never really became friends with them at all. By senior year, they hardly spoke.
But he had never forgotten their beautiful house near Mandeville, and how handsome the furnishings had been, and how their mother spoke perfect English, and their father had several records of great lutists that he had let Toby play in a room he called his study that was actually lined with books.
This house in the country here was like that house in Mandeville.
I watched him. I watched his face and his eyes, and saw those images in his memory and in his heart.
Angels don’t really understand human hearts, no. That’s true. We weep at the sight of sin, at the sight of suffering. But human hearts we have not. Yet theologians who write down observations like that do not really take into consideration our full intelligence. We can string together an infinite number of gestures, expressions, changes in respiration, and movements and draw from all this many deeply moving conclusions. We can know sorrow.
I formed my concept of Toby as I did this, and I heard the music he’d heard in that long-ago Mandeville house, an old recording of a Jewish lutist playing themes from Paganini. And I watched Toby standing under the pine trees until he was near frozen with cold.
Toby made his way back towards the house slowly. He couldn’t sleep. The night meant nothing to him.
Then a strange thing occurred as he drew near the ivy-covered stone walls, which was wholly unexpected. From within the house he heard a subtle stirring music. Surely a window was open to the cold for him to hear something of such tenderness, and subtle beauty. He knew it to be a bassoon or a clarinet. He wasn’t certain. But there was the window up ahead, tall and made of leaded glass and opened to the cold. From there the music was coming: a long swelling note, and then a cautious melody.
He came closer.
It was like the sound of something waking, but then the melody of the lone horn was joined by other instruments, so raw, they were like the sound of an orchestra tuning up, yet held together by some fierce discipline. Then the music lapsed back to the horns, before once again an urgency began to drive it, the orchestra swelling, the horns soaring, becoming more piercing.
He stood outside the window.
The music went mad suddenly. Violins strummed and the drums beat as if a locomotive were roaring through the night made up of sound. He almost put his hands to his ears, it was so fierce. The instruments squealed. They wailed. It seemed crazed, the crying trumpets, the dizzying torrent of the strings, the pounding of the kettledrums.
He could no longer identify what he was hearing. At last the thunder stopped. A softer melody took over, grounded in peace, in musical transcriptions of solitude and an awakening.
He stood at the very windowsill now, his head bowed, his fingers at his temples, as if to stop anyone who would come between him and this music.
Though soft random melodies began to intertwine, a dark urgency beat under them. Again the music swelled. The brass rose unbearably. The shape of it was threatening.
Suddenly the whole composition seemed full of menace, the prelude and recognition to the life he had lived. You couldn’t trust the sudden descents into tenderness and quietude, because the violence would erupt with rolling drums and violins shrieking.
On and on it went, dying to melody or near quiet and then erupting into a surge of industrial violence so fierce and dark it paralyzed him.
Then the strangest transformation took place. The music ceased to be an assault. It became the governing orchestration of his own life, his own suffering, his own guilt and terror.
It was as if someone had thrown an all-encompassing net over what he had become and how he had destroyed all things he held to be sacred.
He pressed his forehead to the icy-cold side of the open window.
The guided cacophony became unbearable, and when he thought he could not endure any more, when he almost reached to cover his ears, it stopped altogether.
He opened his eyes. Inside a deep dark firelit room, a man sat in a long leather chair, looking at him. The fire glinted on the edge of the man’s square silver-rimmed glasses, and on his short white hair, and on his smiling mouth.
He beckoned with a languid motion of his right hand for Toby to go around to the front and, with his left hand, he motioned Come in to me.
The man at the front door said, “The Boss wants to see you now, kid.”
Toby walked through a string of rooms that were furnished in gilt and velvet, with heavy draperies. The draperies were tied with golden tasseled ropes. There were two fires going, one in what seemed a vast library, and just beyond it, there was a room of white-painted glass that contained a small steaming pool of ice blue water.
In the library, and it could be nothing else, for all its towering shelves of books, “The Boss” sat as Toby had seen him through the window, in his high-backed chair of oxblood leather.
Everything in the room was fine. The desk was black and heavily carved. There was a special bookcase to the man’s left with figures carved on both sides of the doors. The figures intrigued Toby.
It looked German, all this, as if it were furnishings from the German Renaissance in Europe.
The carpet had been woven for the room, an immense sea of dark flowers, banded in gold along the walls and their high polished baseboards. Toby had never seen a rug made for a room, cut away around the half columns that flanked the double doors, or cut away around the protruding edges of the window seats.
“Sit down and talk to me, Son,” said the man.
Toby took the leather chair opposite. But he said nothing. Nothing would come out of his mouth. The music still rang in his ears.
“I’m going to tell you exactly what I want you to do,” said the man, and then he described it.
Elaborate, yes, but hardly impossible, and elegantly challenging.
“Guns? Guns are crude,” said the man. “This is simpler, only you have but one chance.” He sighed. “You sink the needle into the back of the neck, or into the hand, and you keep moving. You know how to do that, to keep walking, with your eyes focused ahead as if you never even brushed up against the guy. These people will be eating, drinking, off their guard. They think the men outside are watching for the gunmen whom they have to fear. You hesitate? Well, your chance is gone, and if they catch you with that needle—.”
“They won’t,” Toby said. “I don’t look dangerous.”
“That’s true!” said the man. He opened his hands as he spoke in surprise. “You’re a handsome boy. I can’t place your voice. I think Boston, no. I think, New York, no. Where did you come from?”
This didn’t surprise Toby. Most people of Irish and German descent who lived in New Orleans had accents that no one could place. And Toby had cultivated the uptown accents of the rich and that must have been even more confusing.
“You look English, German, Swiss, American,” said the man. “You’re tall. And you’re young and you’ve got the coldest eyes I’ve ever seen.”
“You mean I look like you,” said Toby.
The man was startled again, but then he smiled. “I suppose so. But I’m sixty-seven and you’re not even twenty-one.”
Toby nodded.
“Why don’t you stop clutching that gun and talk to me?”
“I can do everything you’ve asked,” said Toby. “I’m eager to do it.”
“You understand, one chance.”
Toby nodded.
“You do it right and he won’t notice. He won’t die for at least twenty minutes. By that time, you’ll be out of the restaurant, normal pace, just keep on walking and we’ll pick you up.”
Toby was powerfully excited again. But he didn’t let on. The music in his head wouldn’t stop. He heard the first major drive of strings and kettledrums.
I knew how excited he was as I watched him. I could see it in his breathing and in the warmth in his eyes, which perhaps the man did not notice. Toby looked like Toby for a moment, innocent, with plans.
“What is it you want for all this, besides money?” asked the man.
Now Toby was the one who was startled. And there was a dramatic change in his face. The man noticed it, the blood in Toby’s cheeks, and the flash in his eyes.
“More work,” said Toby. “Lots of it. And the finest lute you can buy.”
The man studied him.
“How did you come to all this?” the man asked him. He made a little gesture with his open hands again. He shrugged. “How did you manage to do the things you did?”
I knew the answer. I knew all the answers. I knew the exhilaration Toby was feeling; I knew how much he distrusted this man, and how he liked the challenge of carrying out what the man wanted and then trying to stay alive. After all, why shouldn’t this man kill him after he did this work for him? Why not indeed?
An errant thought took hold of Toby. It wasn’t for the first time that he found himself wishing that he were dead. So what did it matter if this man killed him? This man wouldn’t be cruel. It would be fast and over, and then the life of Toby O’Dare would be no more, he figured. He tried to imagine, as countless humans have, what it means to be annihilated. The despair took hold of him as if it were the deepest chord he would strike on his lute, and its reverberation went on unendingly.
The coarse excitement of the job at hand was its only counterweight, and the chord throbbing so steadily in his ears gave him what passes for courage.
This man seemed reachable. But in truth, Toby didn’t trust anybody. Nevertheless, it was worth a try. The man was educated, confident, polished. The man was, in his own way, very alluring. His calm was alluring. Alonso had never been calm. Toby pretended to be calm. But he didn’t really know the meaning of it.
“If you never betray me,” Toby said, “I’ll do anything for you, absolutely anything. Things other people can’t do.” He thought of that girl sobbing, pleading, he thought of her stretching out her arms, her palms up to push him away. “I mean I will do absolutely anything. But there’s bound to come a time when you won’t want me around.”
“Not so,” said the man. “You’ll outlive me. It’s imperative that you trust me. Do you know what ‘imperative’ means?”
Toby nodded. “Absolutely,” he said. “And for the moment, I don’t think I have too many choices, so yes, I trust you.”
The man was thoughtful.
“You could go into New York, do the job, and keep on going,” said the man.
“And how would I be paid?” Toby asked.
“You could take half up front, and just disappear.”
“Is that what you want me to do?”
“No,” said the man. He pondered.
“I could love you,” the man said under his breath. “I mean it. Oh, not, you know, that I want you to be my bitch, I’m not saying that. Nothing like that. Though at my age, I don’t much care whether it’s a boy or a girl, you know. Not when they’re young and fragrant and tender and beautiful. But I don’t mean that. I mean, I could love you. Because there’s something beautiful about you, about the way you look and talk and about the way you move through a room.”
Exactly! That is what I was thinking. And I was understanding now, what they say angels cannot understand, about their two hearts, both of them.
I was thinking about Toby’s father and how he used to call him “Pretty Face” and taunt him. I was thinking of fear and the utter failure to love. I was thinking of the way that beauty on earth survives though thorns and wretchedness try perpetually to choke it. But my thoughts were in the background here. The foreground is what matters.
“I want these Russians pushed back,” said the man. He looked off, musing, finger curled for a moment under his lip. “I never planned on these Russians. No one did. I never even dreamed of anything like these Russians. I mean I never thought of them operating on so many levels. You can’t imagine the things they do, the scams, the rackets. They work the system in any conceivable way they can. That’s what they did in the Soviet Union. That’s how they lived. They have no concept that it’s wrong.
“And then these crude kids come along, somebody’s third cousins, and they want Alonso’s house and his restaurant.” He made a disgusted sound and shook his head. “Stupid.”
He sighed. He looked at the open laptop on the little table to his right. Toby hadn’t noticed it before. It was the laptop he’d taken from the lawyer.
“You keep pushing them back for me, over and over again,” the man said, “and I’ll love you even more than I do now. I’ll never betray you. In a few days you’ll understand that I just don’t betray anybody, and that’s why I’m … well, who I am.”
Toby nodded. “I think I understand already,” he said. “What about the lute?”
The man nodded. “I know people, yes, of course. I’ll find out what’s on the market. I’ll get it for you. But it can’t be the finest. The finest of lutes would be too ostentatious. Cause talk. Leave a trail.”
“I know the meaning of the word,” said Toby.
“Fine lutes are on loan to young soloists, never really given to them, I don’t think. There are only so many in the entire world.”
“I understand,” said Toby. “I’m not that good. I just want to play a good one.”
“I’ll get you the finest that can be bought without any trouble,” said the man. “Only you have to promise me one thing.”
Toby smiled. “Of course. I’ll play it for you. Anytime that you like.”
The man laughed. “Tell me where you come from,” he said again. “Really. I want to know. I can place people like that,” he snapped his fingers, “by the way they talk, no matter how much training they’ve had, no matter how much polish has been added. But I can’t figure your voice at all. Tell me.”
“I’ll never tell you,” Toby said.
“Not even if I tell you that you’re working for The Good Guys now, Son?”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Toby. Murder is murder. He almost smiled. “You can think of me as coming from no place. Just someone who popped up at the right time.”
I was astonished. This is just what I was thinking. He is someone who has popped up at the right Time.
“And one more thing,” said Toby to the man.
The man smiled and opened his hands. “Ask me.”
“The name of that piece of music you just played. I want to buy a copy of it.”
The man laughed. “That’s easy enough,” he said. “The Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky.”
The man was beaming at Toby, as though he’d found someone of priceless mettle. So was I.
By noon, Toby was deep asleep and dreaming of his mother. He was dreaming that he and she were walking through a big beautiful house with coffered ceilings. And he was telling her how grand it was all going to be, and his little sister was going to go to the Sisters of the Sacred Heart. Jacob would go to Jesuit.
Only something was very wrong in this spectacular house. It became labyrinthine, and impossible to comprehend as one wholesome dwelling. Walls rose up like cliffs, floors tilted. There was a giant black grandfather clock in the living room and on the front of it was the figure of the Pope, as if hanging from a gibbet.
Toby woke up, alone, and for a moment frightened and unsure of where he was. And then he began to cry. He tried to hold it in, but it became uncontrollable. He turned over and buried his face in the pillow.
He saw the girl again. He saw her lying dead in her little short silk skirt and ludicrous high-heel shoes, like a child playing dress-up. She had had ribbons in her long blond hair.
His guardian angel laid his hand on Toby’s head. His guardian angel let him see something. He let him see the soul of the girl rising upwards, retaining the shape of her body out of habit and out of ignorance that it now knew no such bounds.
Toby opened his eyes. Then his cries became worse, and that deep chord of despair grew louder than ever.
He got up and began to pace. He looked at his open suitcase. He stared at the book about angels.
He lay back down and cried until he fell asleep, the way a child might do it. He was also saying a prayer as he cried. “Angel of God, my guardian dear, let ‘The Good Guys’ kill me sooner than later.”
His guardian angel, hearing the despair in that prayer, hearing the grief and the utter misery, had turned his back and covered his face.
Not me. Not Malchiah.
He’s the one, I thought.
Flash forward ten years of your time to the point where I began: He’s Toby O’Dare, to me, not Lucky the Fox. And I’m going for him.