Angel Time

Toby O’Dare – Lucky the Fox – is a contract killer of underground fame. In his youth Lucky had dreamt of being a priest, instead he fell into a life danger and violence.

Living under a series of aliases he long ago lost any sense of his true self, becoming a pawn to ‘The Right Man’, a contractor of dark and unknown allegiances.

Lucky has one place where he can be without disguise, but his latest assignment is at this sanctuary, The Mission Inn. And it is an order to kill. Into this nightmarish world of lone and lethal missions, comes a mysterious stranger, a seraph, who offers him a chance to save lives, rather than destroy them. Now he has his chance to repair the damage of his past.

About the Author

Born in New Orleans in 1941, the second daughter of an Irish Catholic family, Anne Rice came to international fame for ‘The Vampire Chronicles’, which include Interview with the Vampire (filmed by Neil Jordan, starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt), The Tale of the Body Thief and the latest volume Blood Canticle. Her other fiction includes the shorter vampire novels, Pandora and Vittorio the Vampire, as well as The Witching Hour, Lasher, The Mummy, The Feast of All Saints and Cry to Heaven. She was born in New Orleans, where she lived for many years, and now lives in Rancho Mirage, California.

Also available by Anne Rice

Angel Time

The Songs of the Seraphim

Anne Rice

That in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven.

Likewise, I say unto you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth.

They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone.

CHAPTER ONE

Shades of Despair

First off, I didn’t want to do a job at the Mission Inn. Anywhere in the country, I would have been willing, but not the Mission Inn. And in the bridal suite, that very room, my room. Bad luck and beyond, I thought to myself.

Of course my boss, The Right Man, had no way of knowing when he gave me this assignment that the Mission Inn was where I went when I didn’t want to be Lucky the Fox, when I didn’t want to be his assassin.

The Mission Inn was part of that very small world in which I wore no disguise. I was simply me when I went there, six foot four, short blond hair, gray eyes—a person who looked like so many other people that he didn’t look like any special person at all. I didn’t even bother to wear braces to disguise my voice when I went there. I didn’t even bother with the de rigueur sunglasses that shielded my identity in every other place, except the apartment and neighborhood where I lived.

I was just who I am when I went there, though who I am was nobody except the man who wore all those elaborate disguises when he did what he was told to do by The Right Man.

So the Mission Inn was mine, cipher that I was, and so was the bridal suite, called the Amistad Suite, under the dome. And now I was being told to systematically pollute it. Not for anyone else but myself, of course. I would never have done anything to harm the Mission Inn.

A giant confection and confabulation of a building in Riverside, California, it was where I often took refuge, an extravagant and engulfing place sprawling over two city blocks, and where I could pretend, for a day or two or three, that I wasn’t wanted by the FBI, Interpol, or The Right Man, a place where I could lose myself and my conscience.

Europe had long ago become unsafe for me, due to the increased security at every checkpoint, and the fact that the law enforcement agencies that dreamed of trapping me had decided I was behind every single unsolved murder they had on the books.

If I wanted the atmosphere I’d loved so much in Siena or Assisi, or Vienna or Prague and all the other places I could no longer visit, I sought out the Mission Inn. It couldn’t be all those places, no. Yet it gave me a unique haven and sent me back out into my sterile world a renewed spirit.

It wasn’t the only place where I wasn’t anybody at all, but it was the best place, and the place to which I went the most.

The Mission Inn was not far from where I “lived,” if one could call it that. And I went there on impulse generally, and at any time that they could give me my suite. I liked the other rooms all right, especially the Innkeeper’s Suite, but I was patient in waiting for the Amistad. And sometimes they called me on one of the many special cell phones I carried, to let me know the suite could be mine.

Sometimes I stayed as long as a week in the Mission Inn. I’d bring my lute with me, and maybe play it a little. And I always had a stack of books to read, almost always history, books on medieval times or the Dark Ages, or the Renaissance, or Ancient Rome. I’d read for hours in the Amistad, feeling uncommonly safe and secure.

Often, undisguised, I drove over to nearby Costa Mesa to hear the Pacific Symphony. I liked it, the contrast, moving from the stucco arches and rusted bells of the Inn to the immense Plexiglas miracle of the Segerstrom Concert Hall, with the pretty Cafe Rouge on the first floor.

Behind those high clear undulating windows, the restaurant appeared to float in space. I felt, when I dined in it, that I was indeed floating in space, and in time, detached from all things ugly and evil, and sweetly alone.

I had just recently heard Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in that concert hall. Loved it. Loved the pounding madness of it. It had brought back a memory of the very first time I’d ever heard it, ten years before—on the night when I’d met The Right Man. It had made me think of my own life, and all that had happened since then, as I’d drifted through the world waiting for those cell phone calls that always meant somebody was marked, and I had to get him.

I never killed women, but that’s not to say that I hadn’t before I became The Right Man’s vassal or serf, or knight, depending on how one chose to view it. He called me his knight. I thought of it in far more sinister terms, and nothing during these ten years had ever accustomed me to my function.

Often I even drove from the Mission Inn to the Mission of San Juan Capistrano, south and closer to the coast, another secret place, where I felt unknown and sometimes even happy.

Now the Mission of San Juan Capistrano is a real mission. The Mission Inn is not. The Mission Inn is a tribute to the architecture and heritage of the Missions. But San Juan Capistrano is the real thing.

At Capistrano, I roamed the immense square garden, the open cloisters, and visited the narrow dim Serra Chapel—the oldest consecrated Catholic chapel in the state of California.

I loved the chapel. I loved that it was the only known sanctuary on the whole coast in which Blessed Junípero Serra, the great Franciscan, had actually said Mass. He might have said Mass in many another Mission chapel. In fact surely he had. But this was the only one about which everyone was certain.

There had been times in the past when I’d driven north to visit the Mission at Carmel, and look into the little cell there that they’d re-created and ascribed to Junípero Serra, and meditated on the simplicity of it: the chair, the narrow bed, the cross on the wall. All a saint needed.

And then there was San Juan Bautista, too, with its refectory and museum—and all the other Missions that had been so painstakingly restored.

I’d wanted to be a priest for a while when I was a boy, a Dominican, in fact, and the Dominicans and the Franciscans of the California missions were mixed in my mind because they were both mendicant orders. I respected them equally, and there was a part of me that belonged to that old dream.

I still read history books about the Franciscans and the Dominicans. I had an old biography of Thomas Aquinas saved from my school days, full of old notes. Reading history always soothed me. Reading history let me sink into ages safely gone by. Same with the Missions. They were islands not of our time.

I went there not to remember the devotion I’d known as a boy. That was gone forever. Fact was, I simply wanted the blueprint of the paths that I’d traveled in those early years. Maybe I just wanted to walk the sacred ground, walk through places of pilgrimage and sanctity because I couldn’t actually think about them too much.

I liked the beamed ceiling of the Serra Chapel, and its darkly painted walls. I felt calm in the quality of gloom inside it, the glimmer of the gold retablo at the far end of it—the golden framework that was behind the altar and fitted with statues and saints.

I loved the red sanctuary light burning to the left of the tabernacle. Sometimes I knelt right up there before the altar on one of the prie-dieux obviously intended for a bride and a groom.

Of course the golden retablo, or reredos, as it’s often called, hadn’t been there in the days of the early Franciscans. It had come later, during the restoration, but the chapel itself seemed to me to be very real. The Blessed Sacrament was in it. And the Blessed Sacrament, no matter what I believed, meant “real.”

I always knelt in the semidarkness for a very long time, and I’d always light a candle before I left, though for whom or what I couldn’t have said. Maybe I whispered, “This is in memory of you, Jacob, and you, Emily.” But it wasn’t a prayer. I didn’t believe in prayer any more than I believed in actual memory.

I craved rituals and monuments, and maps of meaning. I craved history in book and building and paint—and I believed in danger, and I believed in killing people whenever and wherever I was instructed to do it by my boss, whom in my heart of hearts I called simply The Right Man.

Last time I’d been to the Mission—scarcely a month ago—I’d spent an unusually long time walking about the enormous garden.

Never have I seen so many kinds of flowers in one place. There were modern roses, exquisitely shaped, and older ones, open like camellias, there were trumpet flower vines, and morning glory, lantana, and the biggest bushes of blue plumbago that I’d ever seen in my life. There were sunflowers and orange trees, and daisies, and you could walk right through the heart of this on any of the many broad and comfortable newly paved paths.

I’d taken my time in the enclosing cloisters, loving the ancient and uneven stone floors. I’d enjoyed looking out at the world from under the arches. Round arches had always filled me with a sense of peace. Round arches defined the Mission, and round arches defined the Mission Inn.

It gave me special pleasure at Capistrano that the layout of the Mission was an ancient monastic design to be found in monasteries all over the world, and that Thomas Aquinas, my saintly hero when I was a boy, had probably spent many an hour roaming just such a square with its arches and its neatly laid out paths, and its inevitable flowers.

Throughout history monks had laid out this plan again and again as if the very bricks and mortar could somehow stave off an evil world, and keep them and the books they wrote safe forever.

I stood for a long time in the hulking shell of the great ruined church of Capistrano.

An earthquake in 1812 had destroyed it, and what remained was a high gaping and roofless sanctuary of empty niches and daunting size. I’d stared at the random chunks of brick and cement wall scattered here and there, as if they had some meaning for me, some meaning, like the music of The Rite of Spring, something to do with my own wretched wreck of a life.

I was a man shaken by an earthquake, a man paralyzed by dissonance. I knew that much. I thought about that all the time, though I tried to detach it from any continuity. I tried to accept what seemed my fate. But if you don’t believe in fate, well, that is not easy.

On my most recent visit, I’d been talking to God in the Serra Chapel, and telling Him how much I hated Him that He didn’t exist. I’d told Him how vicious it was, the illusion that He existed, how unfair it was to do that to mortal men, and especially to children, and how I detested Him for it.

I know, I know, this doesn’t make sense. I did a lot of things that didn’t make sense. Being an assassin and nothing else didn’t make sense. And that was probably why I was circling these same places more and more often, free of my many disguises.

I knew I read history books all the time as though I believed a God had acted in history more than once to save us from ourselves, but I didn’t believe this at all, and my mind was full of random facts about many an age and many a famous personage. Why would a killer do that?

One can’t be a killer every moment of one’s life. Some humanity is going to show itself now and then, some hunger for normality, no matter what you do.

And so I had my history books, and the visits to these few places that took me to the times of which I read with such numb enthusiasm, filling my mind with narrative so that it wouldn’t be empty and turn in on itself.

And I had to shake my fist at God for the meaninglessness of it all. And to me, it felt good. He didn’t really exist, but I could have Him that way, in anger, and I’d liked those moments of conversation with the illusions that had once meant so much, and now only inspired rage.

Maybe when you’re brought up Catholic, you hold to rituals all your life. You live in a theater of the mind because you can’t get out of it. You’re gripped all your life by a span of two thousand years because you grew up being conscious of belonging to that span.

Most Americans think the world was created the day they were born, but Catholics take it back to Bethlehem and beyond, and so do Jews, even the most secular of them, remembering the Exodus, and the promises to Abraham before that. Never ever did I look at the nighttime stars or the sands of a beach without thinking of God’s promises to Abraham about his progeny, and no matter what else I did or didn’t believe, Abraham was the father of the tribe to which I still belonged through no fault or virtue of my own.

I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore.

So that’s how we go on acting dramas in our theater of the mind even when we don’t believe anymore in the audience or the director or the play.

I’d laughed thinking about that, as I’d meditated in the Serra Chapel, laughed out loud like a crazy man as I knelt there, murmuring in the sweet and delicious gloom and shaking my head.

What had maddened me on that last visit was that it was just past ten years to the day that I’d been working for The Right Man.

The Right Man had remembered the anniversary, talking about anniversaries for the first time ever and presenting me with a huge monetary gift that had already been wired to the bank account in Switzerland through which I most often received my money.

He’d said to me over the phone the evening before, “If I knew anything about you, Lucky, I’d give you something more than cold cash. All I know is you like to play the lute, and when you were a kid you played it all the time. They told me that, about your playing. If you hadn’t loved the lute so much, maybe we never would have met. Realize how long it’s been since I’ve seen you? And I always hope you’re going to drop in, and bring your precious lute with you. When you do that, I’ll get you to play for me, Lucky. Hell, Lucky, I don’t even know where you really live.”

Now that was something he brought up all the time, that he didn’t know where I lived, because I think he feared, in his heart of hearts, that I didn’t trust him, that my work had slowly eroded the love for him which I felt.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was a consistency, though I doubt anyone ever caught on. Grease-slicked black hair, heavy dark glasses, a bill cap, leather pilot’s jacket, the usual dragging foot, but never the same foot.

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

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

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

Whenever I went to Capistrano, however—and last time had been no exception—I heard Mass in the new Basilica, the grand re-creation of the big church broken to pieces in 1812.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You know, Boss,” I’d said more than once, “there are questions I’d like to ask you, like who you really are, and who you work for. But I don’t ask you, do I?”

“You’d be surprised at the answers,” he said. “I told you once, kid, you’re working for The Good Guys.” And that’s where we left it.

The Good Guys. The good gang or the good organization? How was I to know which? And what did it matter, because I did exactly what he told me to do, so how could I be good?

But I could dream, from time to time, that he was on the good side of things, that government legitimated it, cleaned it up, made me an infantryman, made me okay. That’s why I could call him The Right Man, and tell myself, Well, maybe he is FBI, after all, or maybe he’s Interpol working in this country. Maybe we’re doing something meaningful. But in truth, I didn’t believe it. I committed murder. I did it for a living. I did it for no reason at all except to go on living. I killed people. I killed them without warning and without an explanation as to why I did it. The Right Man might have been one of The Good Guys, but I certainly was not.

“You’re not afraid of me, are you, Boss?” I asked him once. “That I’m just a little bit out of my mind, and someday, I’ll bail on you, or come back at you. Because you don’t need to be afraid of me, Boss. I’m the last person who’ll ever hurt a hair on your head.”

“I’m not afraid of you, no, Son,” he said. “But I worry about you out there. I worry because you were a kid when I took you up. I worry . . . about how you make it through the night. You’re the best I’ve got, and sometimes it just seems too easy calling you, and your always being there, and things working out perfectly, and me having to say so few words.”

“You like to talk, Boss, that’s one of your characteristics. I don’t. But I’ll tell you something. It’s not easy. It’s thrilling, but it’s never easy. And sometimes it takes my breath away.”

I don’t remember what he’d said to that little confession, except that he’d talked for a long time, saying, among other things, that everybody else who worked for him periodically checked in. He saw them, knew them, visited them.

“It’s not going to happen with me, Boss,” I’d assured him. “What you hear is what you get.”

The call had come last night and woken me up in my Beverly Hills apartment. And I hated it.

CHAPTER TWO

Of Love and Loyalty

AS I SAID before, there never was a real Mission, like San Juan Capistrano, at the hotel in Riverside called the Mission Inn.

It was one man’s dream, a giant hotel full of courtyards, arbors, and Mission-style cloisters, with a chapel for weddings and a multitude of charming Gothic elements, including heavy arched wood doors, and statues of St. Francis in niches, and even bell towers, and the oldest-known bell in Christendom. It was a conglomeration of elements that suggested the world of the Missions from one end of California to the other. It was a tribute to them that people found more dizzying and wonderful sometimes than the Missions themselves, fragments that they were. The Mission Inn was also unfailingly lively and warm and inviting, and throbbing with cheerful voices and gaiety and laughter.

From the beginning, I suspect, it was a labyrinth, but it had developed in the hands of new owners so that now it had the conveniences of a top-notch hotel.

Yet you could easily get lost in it, wandering its many verandas, following its innumerable staircases, drifting from patio to patio, or simply trying to find your room.

People create these extravagant habitats because they have vision, love of beauty, hopes, and dreams.

Many an early evening, the Mission Inn swarmed with happy people, brides being photographed on random balconies, families cheerfully wandering the terraces, the many restaurants lighted and filled with lively parties, pianos playing, voices singing, and even a concert, perhaps in the music room. It was dependably festive, and it enfolded me and gave me peace for just a little while.

I had the love of beauty that drove the owners of the place, and a love of excess as well, a love of a vision carried to near divine extremes.

But I had no plans or dreams. I was strictly a messenger, the embodiment of a purpose, go do this, not a man at all.

But over and over, the homeless one, the nameless one, the dreamless one, returned to the Mission Inn.

You could say I loved the fact that it was rococo and meaningless. Not only was it a tribute to all the Missions of California, it had set the architectural tone for some of the town. There were bells on the lampposts on the streets around it. There were public buildings done in the same “Mission style.” I liked that consciously created continuity. It was all made up, the way I was made up. It was a concoction, the way that I myself was a concoction with the accidental name of Lucky the Fox.

I always felt good when I walked under the arched entrance called the campanario, on account of its many bells. I loved the giant tree ferns and the soaring palm trees, their thin trunks wrapped in twinkling light. I loved the flowerbeds of bright petunias that banked the front walk.

On any given pilgrimage, I spent a good deal of time in the public rooms. I often sought out the vast dark lobby to visit its white marble statue of the Roman boy pulling the thorn from his foot. I was soothed by the shadowy interior. I loved the laughter and gaiety of the families. I sat in one of the big comfortable chairs, breathing the dust, and watching people. I loved the friendliness that the place seemed to induce.

I never failed to venture into the Mission Inn restaurant for lunch. The piazza was beautiful, with its multistory walls of rounded windows and bowed terraces, and I propped up the New York Times to read, as I ate under the shade of the dozens of overlapping red umbrellas.

But the interior of the restaurant was no less enticing, with its lower walls of bright blue tile, and the beige arches above artfully painted with twining green vines. The scored ceiling was painted like a blue sky with clouds and even tiny birds. Rounded interior doors with many mullions were paneled in mirrors, and similar doors to the piazza brought the sunshine inside. The pleasing chatter of others was like the sound of water gurgling from a fountain. Nice.

I wandered the dark corridors and the different areas of decorative and dusty carpet.

I stopped in the atrio before the St. Francis chapel, my eyes moving over the hugely ornate frame of the doorway, a poured-concrete masterpiece of Churrigueresque style. It warmed my heart to glimpse the inevitable lavish and seemingly eternal wedding preparations, with banquets laid out on draped tables, in silver chafing dishes, and eager people darting about.

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

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

I thought of Hamlet’s Ghost often when I killed people. I thought of his tragic complaint to his son.

Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin . . .

No reckoning made, but sent to my account

With all my imperfections on my head.

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was in another country,

And besides, the wench is dead.

I hadn’t been back to New Orleans since I became Lucky the Fox, and I figured I never would go back, and so I’d never sleep in one of its antique tester beds.

New Orleans was where the important bodies were buried, not those of the men I’d dispatched for The Right Man.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Angel of God, my guardian dear,

to whom God’s love commits me here,

ever this day be at my side,

to light and guard, to rule and guide.

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

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

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

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

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

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

About the Book

About the Author

Also available by Anne Rice

Angel Time

The Songs of the Seraphim

Anne Rice

CHAPTER ONE

Shades of Despair

CHAPTER TWO

Of Love and Loyalty