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.”
And that was … my room.
I gave away nothing.
But without making a sound I said an oath, I said a prayer. God, help me. Not that place.
To put it in the simplest terms, a bad feeling came over me, a feeling of falling.
The dumbest prayer of my old repertoire came back to me, the one that made me the angriest:
Angel of God, my guardian dear,
to whom God’s love commits me here,
ever this day be at my side,
to light and guard, to rule and guide.
I felt weak listening to The Right Man. I felt fatal. No matter. Turn that into hurt. Turn that into pressure, and you’ll be just fine.
After all, I reminded myself, one of your chief assets is you think the world would be better if you died. A good thing for any and every single person I was yet to destroy.
What makes people like me continue day after day? What does Dostoyevsky say about it when the Grand Inquisitor is speaking? Without a stable conception of the object of life, man would not consent to go on living.
Like Hell. But then we all know that the Grand Inquisitor is evil and wrong.
People go on under unbearable circumstances, as I well knew.
“This one has to look like a heart attack,” said The Boss. “No message—just a little subtraction. So leave the cell phones and the laptops behind. Leave everything as you find it, except be sure the man’s dead. Of course the woman can’t see you. Blow her away and you blow the cover. The woman’s an expensive tramp.”
“What’s he doing with her in the bridal suite?” I asked. Because that is what the Amistad Suite was, the bridal suite.
“She wants to get married. She tried it in Vegas, failed, now she’s pushing for it in the chapel in this crazy place where people go to get married. It’s some kind of a landmark, this place. You won’t have any trouble finding it or finding the bridal suite. The bridal suite’s built under a tiled dome. You can spot it from the street before you take your look around. You know what to do.”
You know what to do.
That meant the disguise, the method of approach, the choice of poison for the syringe, and the departure, under the same circumstances as I’d made my way inside.
“This is what I know already,” The Boss said. “The man stays in; the woman shops. That was the Vegas pattern anyway. She leaves about ten o’clock in the morning after screaming at him for an hour and a half. Maybe she lunches. Maybe she drinks, but you can’t count on it. Get in as soon as she leaves the room. He’ll have two computers going, and maybe even two cell phones. You do it right. Remember. Heart attack. Won’t matter if all the equipment goes dead.”
“I could download the cells and the computers,” I said. I was proud of my abilities at all that, or at least of picking up every scrap of decodable equipment. It had been my calling card with The Right Man ten years ago, that, and a dazzling measure of ruthlessness. But I’d been eighteen years old then. I hadn’t really understood how perfectly ruthless I was.
Now I lived with it.
“Too easy for someone to pick up on it,” he said. “Then they know it was a hit. I can’t have that. Leave it, Lucky. Do as I say. This is a banker. You don’t pull this off, and he gets on a plane to Zurich, and we’re in a fix.”
I didn’t say anything.
Sometimes we left a message with these things, and other times we came and went like a cat in an alley, and t
hat was the way this would be.
Perhaps it was a blessing, I thought. There would be no talk of murder among the employees of the one place where I felt solace, and just a little glad to be aboveground.
He laughed his usual laugh. “Well? Aren’t you going to ask me?”
And I gave my usual answer. “No.”
He was referring to the fact that I didn’t care why he wanted me to kill this particular man. I didn’t care who the man was. I didn’t care to know his name.
What I cared about was that he wanted it done.
But he always pushed with that question, and I always pushed back with the no. Russians, bankers, money laundering—that was a common framework, but not a motive. It was a game we’d been playing since the first night I’d met him, or been sold to him, or offered to him, however one might describe that remarkable turn of events.
“No bodyguards, no assistants,” he said now. “He’s on his own. Even if there is somebody, you know how to handle it. You know what to do.”
“Already thinking about it. Worry not.”
He clicked off without saying goodbye.
I loathed all this. It felt wrong. Don’t laugh. I’m not saying that every other murder I’d ever committed had felt entirely right. I’m saying that something here was dangerous to my equilibrium, and therefore to what might go down.
What if I’d never be able to go back and sleep under that dome again in peace? In fact, that is probably just what would happen. The pale-eyed young man who sometimes carried his lute with him would never appear there again, handing out twenty-dollar tips and smiling so warmly at everyone.
Because another brand of that same young man, heavily disguised, had put murder at the heart of the entire dream.
It seemed foolish suddenly that I’d dared to be myself there, that I’d played the lute softly under that domed ceiling, that I’d lain back on the bed and stared at the upholstered half tester, that I’d gazed up for an hour or more into that blue sky dome.
After all the lute itself was a link to the boy who’d vanished out of New Orleans, and what if some good-hearted cousin was still looking? I had had good-hearted cousins, and I had loved them. And lute players are rare.
Maybe it was time to detonate a bomb before someone else did.
No mistake, no.
It had been worth it to play the lute in that room, to strum it softly and go over the melodies I used to love.
How many people know what a lute is, or what it sounds like? Maybe they’ve seen lutes in Renaissance paintings, and don’t even know such things exist just now. I didn’t care. I liked to play it so much in the Amistad Suite, I didn’t care if the room service waiters heard or saw me. I liked that very much, the way I liked playing the black piano in the suite at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills. I don’t think I ever played a note in my own apartment. Don’t know why. I’d stare at the lute and think of Christmas angels with lutes on richly colored Christmas cards. I’d think of angels hanging from the branches of Christmas trees.
Angel of God, my guardian dear …
One time, Hell, maybe just two months back at the Mission Inn, I’d made a melody to that old prayer, very Renaissance, very haunting. Only I was the only one who was haunted.
So now I had to think of a disguise to fool people who had actually seen me many more times than once, and The Boss said this had to be done now. After all, the girl might get him to marry her tomorrow. The Mission did have that brand of charm.
CHAPTER THREE
Mortal Sin and Mortal Mystery
I KEPT A GARAGE IN LOS ANGELES, SIMILAR TO THE one I kept in New York: four panel trucks, one advertising a plumbing company, another a florist, one painted white with a red light on top of it so that it looked like a special ambulance, and one that was simply a beat-up handyman’s set of wheels, with rusted junk in the back. These vehicles were as transparent to the public as Wonder Woman’s famous invisible plane. A beat-up sedan attracted more attention. And I always drove just a little too fast, with my window rolled down and my bare arm showing, and nobody saw me at all. Sometimes I smoked, just enough to reek of it.
I used the florist truck this time. No doubt it was the very best thing, and especially with a hotel in which tourists and guests mingle freely, and wander freely, in and out and at random and nobody ever asks you where you’re headed, or whether or not you’ve got a room key.
What works in all hotels and hospitals is a resolute attitude, a steady momentum. It would certainly work at the Mission Inn.
No one sees a dark shaggy-headed man with a florist logo stitched to his green shirt pocket, with a soiled canvas bag over one shoulder, carrying only a modest bouquet of lilies in a foil-wrapped earthen pot, and no one cares that he goes in with a quick nod to the doormen, if they even bother to look up. Add to the wig a pair of thick-rimmed glasses that completely distorted the habitual expression on my face. The bite plate between my teeth would give me the perfect lisp.
The garden gloves I wore hid the plastic gloves that were more important. The canvas sack over my shoulder smelled like peat moss. I held the pot of lilies as if it might break. I walked with a weak left knee and a regular swing to my head, something somebody might remember when they didn’t remember anything else. I put out a cigarette in a flowerbed on the main path. Someone might make note of that.
I had two syringes for the job, but only one was needed. There was a small gun strapped to my ankle under my trouser, though I dreaded the thought of having to use it, and for what it was worth, I had, in the lapel of my starched company shirt, a long thin blade of plastic, stiff and sharp enough to cut a man’s throat, or both his eyes.
The plastic was the weapon I could use most easily when I encountered difficulty, but I never had. I dreaded the blood. I also dreaded the cruelty of it. I detested cruelty in any form whatsoever. I liked things to be perfect. In the files, they call me the Perfectionist, the Invisible Man, and the Thief in the Night.
I counted entirely on the syringe to do this job, obviously, because the heart attack was the desired effect.
It was an over-the-counter syringe of the kind used by diabetics, with a micro needle that some men couldn’t even feel. And the poison had a huge fast-acting chaser of another over-the-counter drug that would sink the man almost immediately so that he’d be in a coma when the poison reached his heart. All trace of both drugs would clear his bloodstream in less than an hour. No autopsy would reveal a thing.
Just about every chemical combination I used could be bought in any drugstore nationwide. It’s astonishing what you can learn about poison if you really want to hurt people and you do not care what becomes of you, or whether or not you have any heart or soul left. I had at least twenty poisons at my disposal. I bought drugs in suburban drugstores in small amounts. I used the leaf of the oleander now and then, and oleander grew everywhere in California. I knew how to use the poison of the castor bean.
It went as planned.
I was there by nine-thirty. Black hair, black-rimmed glasses. Smell of cigarettes on the soiled gloves.
I took the creaky little elevator up to the top floor along with two people who never glanced at me once, and followed the snaking corridors out into the air and past the herb garden till I came to the green railing over the courtyard. I leaned on the railing and observed the clock.
All this was mine. To the left was the long red-tiled veranda, the long rectangular fountain, with its bubbling urn-shaped jets, with the room at the end, and the iron table and chairs beneath the green umbrella right across from the double doors.
Damn. How I loved to sit in the sun, in the cool California breeze, at that very table. I felt an intense temptation to scrap this job, and sit at that table until my heart stopped racing, and to simply walk off, leaving the pot of flowers there for anyone who might care.
I moved sluggishly up and down the veranda, even making my way around the rotunda, with its plunging circular stairways, as if I were checking the numbers
on the doors, or just gaping at things as people do who roam the whole place as I did, on a whim. Who says a delivery boy cannot look around?
Finally the lady came out of the Amistad Suite and slammed the door. Big red patent-leather purse and breakneck high heels full of sequins and gold, skintight skirt, pushed-up sleeves, yellow hair flying. Beautiful and costly no doubt.
She was walking fast as if she was angry and she probably was. I moved closer to the room.
Through the dining area window of the suite, I saw the dim outline of the banker, beyond the white curtains, hunched over his computer on the desk, not even noticing that I was looking in at him, probably oblivious because tourists had been looking in all morning.
He was talking on a tiny phone, with an earpiece, and hammering the keys at the same time.
I made my way to the double doors and knocked.
At first he didn’t answer. Then gruffly he came to the door, opened it very wide, stared at me, and said: “What!”
“From the management, sir, with compliments,” I said, in the usual hoarse whisper, the bite plate making it hard for me to pronounce the words. I held up the lilies. They were beautiful lilies.
Then I moved right past him towards the bathroom murmuring something about water, they needed water, and with a shrug, the man went back to the desk.
The open bathroom was empty.
There might be someone in the tiny toilet compartment, but I doubted that and heard not a single telltale sound.
Just to be sure, I went in there for the water, and drew it from the spout in the tub.
No, he was the only one here.
The door to the veranda was hanging wide open.
He was talking into the phone and hammering on the computer keyboard. I could see a cascade of numbers flashing by.
Sounded like German, and I could understand only that he was irritated with somebody and mad in general at the whole world.
Sometimes bankers make the easiest targets, I reflected. They think their vast wealth protects them. They rarely use the bodyguards that they need.