Angel Time Read online

  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 tw
o 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.”