Of Love and Evil

  I had no doubt that my mission had been amongst real people. And I read on amongst the various sources about the times.

  I soon learned what I should never have forgotten, that Rome was sacked in 1527, at which time thousands of lives were lost. Some sources said the whole Jewish community was annihilated at this time.

  This meant just about everyone I’d known in Rome might have died at this point in history, only some nine years or less after the time of my visitation.

  I thanked God that I hadn’t known this part of the story while I was there. But more importantly, I realized in an instant what I hadn’t grasped in my entire selfish life: that it is imperative for us in this world not to know for certain what the future holds. There could be no present if the future were known.

  I might have known this intellectually at the age of twelve. But now it struck me with a mystical force. And it reminded me that I was dealing with creatures in Malchiah and Shmarya who knew much more about the future than I wanted to know. To be angry with them or resentful of them because they lived with this burden made no sense.

  There were many things I wanted to ponder.

  Instead I typed a brief and concise account of all that had happened to me since my last “report.” I wrote down not only the story of my adventure in Rome, but also the story of my meeting with Liona and Toby, and what had taken place.

  It occurred to me as I finished that there were distinct reasons why my second assignment had been different from my first. In the first adventure, I’d been sent to do something fairly straightforward—save a family and a community from an unjust charge. I’d solved the problem presented to me with duplicity, but there had not been the slightest doubt in my mind that it was the right path to take.

  Maybe angels couldn’t encourage lies as I had done in Angel Time, but they had let me do it, and I felt that I knew why.

  Many in this world have lied to save themselves from evil and injustice. Who would not have lied to save Jews in our own time from genocide at the hands of the Third Reich?

  But my second assignment had involved no such situation. I had sought to use the truth to solve the problems confronting me, and found it a very complex and hard thing to do indeed.

  So was it safe to assume each of my missions would be more complex than the last? I was just beginning to reflect on these things, when finally I broke off.

  It was noon. I’d been awake for ten hours, and writing for most of that. I’d eaten nothing. I might start seeing angels who weren’t there.

  I put on my jacket and went down for lunch in the Mission Inn Restaurant, and found myself sitting there pondering again after the dishes had been cleared away.

  I was drinking my last cup of coffee when I noticed a young man at another table staring at me, though when I fixed on him, he pretended to be reading his paper.

  I let myself stare at him for a good while. He seemed neither angel nor dybbuk. Just a man. He was younger than me, and as I watched him, he looked at me more than once, and finally got up from the table and left.

  I wasn’t surprised to see him in the lobby, seated in one of the large chairs, with his eyes turned towards the restaurant entrance.

  I memorized what I saw: he was young, maybe four or five years my junior. He had short brown wavy hair and almost pretty blue eyes. He’d worn dark-rimmed glasses when he’d been reading. And he was dressed a bit nattily in a well-fitted brown corduroy Norfolk jacket, with a white turtleneck sweater, and gray pants. There had been a certain vulnerability to his expression, an eagerness, that completely negated any question in my mind of danger, but I didn’t like it that I was being noticed by anybody, and I wondered who he was and why he’d been there.

  If he was another angel on the case, I wanted to know. And if he was another devil, well, he didn’t have the presence or the confidence of Ankanoc and I couldn’t figure his approach.

  The question of danger was a real one. Lucky the Fox had always had his antennae out for those who might be watching him, whether sent by his enemies or his boss.

  But this man simply did not look the part of a dangerous individual at all. No cop, or agent of The Right Man, would have stared so obviously at me. Another assassin would have never made himself known. If anything the incident served to make me aware of how very safe I felt, though I still had some lingering anxiety about having told my real name to The Right Man.

  I forgot about it, found a quiet place on a patio outside, where the sun was pleasantly warm and the breeze cool, and I called Liona.

  The sound of her voice almost brought tears to my eyes. And only as we chatted did I realize it had been five days since she and Toby had flown home.

  “Believe me,” I said, “I wanted to call you before now. I’ve been thinking about you both since you left. I want to see you again and soon.”

  She wanted that too, she said. All I had to do was name the time and place. She explained she’d been to her lawyer with all the legal documents I’d given her. Her father was pleased that I’d taken responsibility for my son in this way.

  “But Toby, there’s something that’s been bothering me,” she explained. “Do your cousins down here know you’re alive?”

  “No, they don’t,” I admitted. “And if I come back there, well, I feel I have to see them.”

  “There’s something I didn’t tell you before, but I think you should know. About three years ago, when you were declared …”

  “Legally dead?” I offered.

  “Yes, well, your cousin Matt took all your old things out of storage, and he came by and gave us some of your old books. Toby, he knew, at least I had told him that Toby was your son.”

  “That’s good, Liona, I’m glad. I don’t mind at all about Matt knowing. I can’t blame you for telling him.”

  “Well, there’s more to it than that. You know my father, you know he’s a doctor first and foremost.”

  “Yes?”

  “He asked Matt for permission to run some DNA tests on the evidence taken from your mom’s apartment. Dad said he wanted it for medical reasons, to know if there were any medical problems in the family that Toby might …”

  “I understand.” I went cold all over. I struggled to keep my voice steady. “That’s fine. That’s completely reasonable,” I lied. “Matt said yes, and your father tested my family’s DNA and Little Toby’s DNA.” Which means there is a record of DNA close to that of Lucky the Fox in a file. My heart was skipping a beat or two. “You’re not trying to tell me there was some congenital problem—.”

  “No. I just wanted you to know. We thought you were dead, Toby.”

  “Liona, don’t worry. It’s all fine. And I’m glad you did it. Your father knows for sure that Little Toby is mine.”

  “Well, that was part of it, too,” she confessed. “He has proof of affinity, as they call it, and that will have to do.”

  “Listen, my love,” I said. “I have some work to do. I have to talk to my employer. And when I find out what my schedule is, I’ll call you right away. Now I’m on a prepaid cell here and you have this number. Call me whenever you want.”

  “Oh, I won’t bother you, Toby,” she insisted.

  “If I don’t pick up, it means I can’t,” I said.

  “Toby?”

  “Yes.”

  “I want you to know something, but I don’t want it to frighten you.”

  “Of course. What?”

  “I love you,” she said.

  I let out a long sigh. “Am I ever glad to hear that,” I whispered. “Because my heart is in your hands.”

  I clicked off.

  I was acutely happy and acutely distressed. She loved me. And I loved her, and then all the other dark truths intruded, faster than I could name them or recognize them. No one tracking Lucky the Fox had ever obtained a sample of DNA, but now Lucky the Fox and Toby O’Dare were known to be one and the same to The Right Man, and there was DNA of Toby O’Dare’s family in a file in New Orleans. And I had foolishly
told The Right Man that I had come from New Orleans.

  “There are things you have to do,” Shmarya had said in so many words, and he had been right. I couldn’t do anything about this DNA question, and indeed, it might not matter, considering how my various hits had been accomplished, but there were other things I could do and ought to do promptly.

  I checked out of the inn and drove to Los Angeles.

  My apartment was as I’d left it, with the doors wide open to the patio, and the jacaranda blossoms still littered the quiet street below.

  I dressed in some old clothes, and drove to the garage where I’d kept my trucks and my disguises and my other materials for some two or three years. For two hours, carefully gloved and gowned, I destroyed things.

  Now, I had never brewed my poisonous concoctions from so-called “controlled substances.” Just about every lethal cocktail I’d ever devised had been from over-the-counter drugs or flowers and herbs available everywhere. I’d used micro-syringes any diabetic can buy without difficulty. Nevertheless the assemblage of items in the garage constituted a kind of evidence and I felt much better when every last bottle had been emptied and every last package burned. Ashes went down the drains. And a great deal of water went after them.

  I wiped down the trucks very carefully, and then drove them to different areas of downtown Los Angeles where I left them with the keys in the ignition. The licenses and registration were a dead end, so I had no fears there. I walked for about six blocks after leaving the last truck, speculating that all of them might have already been stolen, and I took a cab back to the vicinity of the garage.

  The place was now empty. I left the doors opened and unlocked.

  Within a matter of hours homeless people would come into this place, seeking shelter or whatever valuables they might find. Their personal belongings, their fingerprints and their DNA would soon be everywhere, and that was a fitting end, as it had been in the past, for any such garage that Lucky the Fox had used.

  I drove home feeling a little more safe, and feeling that Liona and Toby were a little more safe. I couldn’t be sure of anything, really. But I was doing what I could to protect Lucky the Fox from harming them.

  The anxiety I felt was considerable and inevitable. I realized that no matter what happened with me and Malchiah and Shmarya, I was becoming Toby O’Dare in the world, and Toby O’Dare had never really existed before as he did now. I felt naked and vulnerable, and I didn’t like it. In fact, I was surprised how much I didn’t like it.

  That night I took a plane to New York.

  And the next day, I did the same things in the garage that I kept there. It had been almost a year since I’d been in that particular way station, and I didn’t like going back there at all. New York had too many shocking memories for me, and I felt especially sensitive to them now. But I knew this had to be done. I dumped the vehicles in areas where they would most certainly be stolen, and left the garage finally as I had done the other one, open to whoever might wander in.

  I wanted to leave New York then, but there was something else I wanted badly to do. I had to think about it a great deal before executing my little plan. I spent the evening and the next morning doing just that. I was very glad that the angels weren’t visibly with me. I understood now why they were not. And the terms of my new existence were making a little more sense to me.

  When afternoon came, I left my hotel and went out walking to find a Catholic church.

  I must have walked for hours before coming upon a church that looked and felt the way that I wanted it to feel; and this was all purely feelings, as I had no thoughts on the matter at all.

  I knew only that I was somewhere in Midtown when I rang the bell at the rectory and told the woman who answered that I wanted to go to confession. She stared at my hands. It was warm and I was wearing gloves.

  “Can you ask the oldest priest in the house?” I asked her.

  I wasn’t sure she heard or understood. She showed me into a small sparsely furnished parlor with a table and several upright wooden chairs. There was a small window with dusty curtains revealing part of a yard paved in asphalt. A large old-fashioned crucifix hung on the wall. I sat very still, and I prayed.

  It seemed I waited half an hour before a very elderly priest came in. Had it been a young priest, I would probably have left a donation and gone out without a word. As it was, this man was ancient, somewhat shrunken, with an extremely large squarish head, and with wire-rimmed glasses that he took off and set on the table to his right.

  He took out his requisite purple stole, a long thin strip of silk required for the hearing of confessions, and he put it around his neck. His gray hair was thick and messy. He sat back in his wooden chair and closed his eyes.

  “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” I said. “It has been over ten years since my last confession and I have been too far from the Lord. For ten years I’ve committed terrible sins more numerous than I can mention, and I can only estimate how many times I have done any one bad thing.”

  There was no change in his demeanor whatsoever.

  “I took life willfully and deliberately,” I said. “I told myself I was killing men who were bad, but in fact I destroyed the lives of innocent persons, especially in the beginning, and I cannot now name how many there were. After those first and most terrible crimes, I went to work for an agency which used me to kill others, and I obeyed their orders without question, annihilating about three persons on average a year for ten years. This agency told me we were The Good Guys. And I think you understand why I can tell you no more about this than what I’ve said so far. I cannot tell you who these people were, nor for whom specifically I did these things. I can only tell you that I am sorry for them, and I have vowed on my knees never to take life again. I have repented with my whole heart. I have also resolved to walk a path of reparation, to make up in my remaining years for what I did in these last ten. I have a spiritual director who knows the full extent of what I have done and is directing me to reparation. I am confident God has forgiven me but I have come for absolution to you.”

  “Why?” he asked. He had a deep sonorous baritone voice. He did not move or open his eyes.

  “Because I want to go back to Communion,” I said. “I want to be in my church with others who believe in God as I do, and I want to go to the banquet table of the Lord once again.”

  He remained as before.

  “This spiritual director?” he asked. “Why doesn’t he give you absolution?” He said the last word with force, his deep voice almost a rumble in his chest.

  “He’s not a Roman Catholic priest,” I said. “He’s a person of impeccable credentials and judgment, and his advice has guided my repentance. But I’m a Catholic man, and that’s why I’ve come to you.” I went on to explain that I’d committed other sins, sins of lust and sins of greed and sins of pedestrian unkindness. I listed everything that I could think of. Of course I had missed Mass on Sundays. I had missed Holy Days of Obligation. I had not kept feast days such as Christmas or Easter. I had lived away from God. I went on and on. I told him that as the result of my early indiscretions, I had a child, and I had now made contact with that child, and that almost all the money I had earned from my past actions was being set aside for the child and the mother of the child. I would keep what I required to sustain me, but I would never kill again.

  “I beg you to give me absolution,” I said, finally.

  A silence fell between us. “You realize some innocent person might be charged with the crimes you’ve committed?” he ventured. His baritone voice quavered slightly.

  “It’s never happened to my knowledge. Well, except for my blundering actions in the beginning, everything I did for hire was covert. But even in the case of those early murders, to my knowledge, no one was ever charged. And I did have some knowledge, and no, no one was ever charged.”

  “If someone is charged you have to come forward,” he said. He sighed but he didn’t open his eyes.

  “I
will.”

  “And you will not kill again even for these people who call themselves The Good Guys,” he murmured.

  “Correct. Never. No matter what happens I will not.”

  He sat quiet for a moment. “This spiritual director,” he started.

  “I ask that you not press me on his identity, any more than you would press me on the identity of those for whom I did the killing. I ask that you trust me that I am telling you the truth. I’ve come here for no other reason.”

  He reflected. The deep voice rolled out of him once more. “You know that to lie in the confessional is sacrilege.”

  “I have left out nothing. I have lied about nothing. And I thank you for your compassion in not pressing me for further details.”

  He didn’t respond. One gnarly wrinkled hand came down uneasily on the surface of the table.

  “Father,” I said, “it’s hard for a man like me to be a responsible person in the world. It’s impossible for me to confide my history to anyone. It’s impossible for me ever to bridge the gap between me and those innocent human beings who have never done the awful things that I have done. I am consecrated now to God. I will work for Him and for Him only. But I am a man in this world, and I want to go to my church in this world with other men and women, and I want to hear Mass with them, and I want to reach out and hold their hands as we say the Lord’s Prayer together under God’s roof. I want to approach Holy Communion with them and receive it with them. I want to be part of my church in this world in which I live.”

  He took a deep rattling breath.

  “Say your Act of Contrition,” he said.

  Sudden panic. This was the only part of this I hadn’t gone over in detail in my mind. I couldn’t remember the whole prayer.

  I put everything out of my thoughts except that I was talking to the Maker.

  “ ‘O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, and I despise all my sins because they have separated me from Thee, and though I fear the loss of Heaven and the pains of Hell, I am sorry for my sins because of that separation, and because of the terrible harm I have done to the souls whose journeys I have interrupted, and I know that I can never undo those wrongs done them no matter what I do. Please, Dear God, affirm my repentance and give me the grace to live it day in and day out. Let me be your child. Let my remaining years be years of serving you.’ ”