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.”
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 that 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.