For a moment I thought my heart would stop.
I’d expected her to be pretty because she’d been pretty when she was a girl, but that had been the bud to this, the radiant flower, and I didn’t want to do anything except stare at her, to drink in the woman she’d become.
She was only twenty-seven. Even I at twenty-eight knew that’s not very old, but she had a womanly manner about her, and she was dressed in the most becoming and most finished way.
She wore a red suit, fitted at the waist and flaring over her narrow hips, with a short flared skirt that just covered her knees. Her pink blouse was open at her throat and there she wore a simple string of pearls. There was a tiny bit of pink handkerchief in her breast pocket, and her purse was patent leather pink, and so were her graceful high-heeled shoes.
What a picture she was in those clothes.
Her long full black hair was loose over her shoulders, with only some of it drawn back from her clear forehead and fixed perhaps with a barrette, the way she’d done it when she was a girl.
A sense came over me that I would remember her this way forever. It didn’t matter what would happen next or hereafter. I would simply never forget the way she looked now, so gorgeous in red, with her full and girlish black hair.
In fact a passage came to me from a film, and it’s one that many people love. It’s from the film Citizen Kane, and an old man named Bernstein speaks the passage as he reflects on memory and how things can strike us that we see for no more than a few seconds. In his case, he’s describing a young woman he once glimpsed on a passing ferryboat. “A white dress she had on,” he says, “and she was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second and she didn’t see me at all, but I’ll bet a month has not gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl.”
Well, I knew that I would always remember Liona in that very way as to how she looked now. She was looking around, and she had about her the self-confidence and self-possession I remembered, and yet the pure uncomplicated courage that I had always associated with her simplest gestures or words.
I couldn’t believe how lovely she was. I couldn’t believe how simply, inevitably lovely she’d become.
But right beside her was the ten-year-old boy who was my son, and when I saw him, I saw my brother Jacob who’d died at that age, and I felt my throat tighten and the tears stand in my eyes. This is my son.
Well, I’m not going to meet them weeping, I thought, but just as I pulled out my handkerchief, she saw me and she smiled at me, and taking the little boy by the hand she brought him right up the path towards me, and she said in the most sprightly and confident voice,
“Toby, I would have known you anywhere. You look exactly the same.”
Her smile was so vibrant and so generous that I couldn’t answer her. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t tell her what it meant to me to see her, and when I looked down at the little boy looking up at me, this dark-haired, dark-eyed image of my long-dead brother Jacob, this perfect straight-shouldered and regal little boy, this confident and clever-looking little boy that any man would want for a son, this fine and splendid little boy, well, I did start to cry.
“You’re going to make me cry if you don’t stop,” she said. She put her hand out and clasped my arm.
There was nothing hesitant or reticent about her, and when I thought back on it, I realized there never had been at all. She was forceful and confident and she had a deep, soft voice that underscored her generous character.
Generous, that was the word that came to me as I looked into her eyes, as she smiled up at me. She was generous. She was generous and loving and she’d come all the way here because I asked her to do it, and I found myself saying it out loud.
“You came. You came all the way. You came. I thought up until the last moment that you wouldn’t come.”
The little boy took something out of his breast pocket and he handed it to me.
I bent down the better to look at him, and I took what he had given me and I saw it was a little picture of me. It had been cut out of my school yearbook and it had been laminated.
“Thank you, Toby,” I said.
“Oh, I always carry it,” he said immediately. “I always tell people, ‘That’s my dad.’ ”
I kissed him on the forehead. And then he surprised me. He put his arm around me, almost as if he was the man and I was the boy. He put his arm around me and he held me. I kissed him again on his soft little cheek. He looked at me with the clearest simplest eyes. “I always knew you’d come,” he said. “I mean I knew you’d show up someday. I knew you would.” He said all that as simply as he’d said the rest.
I stood up, swallowed, and then I looked at both of them again, and put my arms around them both. I drew them close to me, and held them, and I was conscious of her softness, of her pure sweetness, a feminine sweetness so alien to me and the life I’d lived, and of a lovely floral perfume coming from her silky dark hair.
“Come on, the room’s ready,” I stammered as if these were momentous words. “I checked you in, let me take you up.”
I realized then that the bellhop had been standing there all the while with the cart of luggage, and I gave him a twenty-dollar bill, told him it was the Innkeeper’s Suite and we’d meet him on the top floor.
For a moment I merely looked at her again, and it came back to me what Malchiah had said. What you tell her, you tell her for her sake. Not for your own.
Something else hit me full force as I looked at her, as well, and that was how serious she was, that seriousness was the other side of her self-confidence. Seriousness was why she would pick up and come here without a moment’s hesitation and let her son meet his father. And that seriousness reminded me of someone I’d known and loved on my adventures with Malchiah, and I realized now that when I’d been with that person—a woman in a long-ago age, I’d been reminded then of this beautiful and living and breathing woman who stood with me in my own day and age now.
This is someone to love. This is someone to love with all your heart the way you loved those people then, when you were with the angels, when you were with people you could never bring to your heart. All these ten years you’ve lived at a remove from every living being, but this is someone as real as Malchiah’s people were real, a person that you can truly and totally love. Never mind whether or not you can get her to love you. You can love her. And this little boy, you can love him.
As we crowded into the little elevator together, Toby showed me other pictures of me from the yearbook. He’d been carrying them around for a long time too.
“So you always knew my name,” I said to him, not knowing what to say really, and so stressing the obvious, and he replied that yes, he told everybody his daddy was Toby O’Dare.
“I’m glad. I’m glad you’ve done that. I can’t tell you how proud I am of you,” I said.
“Why?” he asked. “You don’t even know what I’m really like.” He was just small enough that his voice had a child’s ring to it rather than an older boy’s, and when he said these words they had a crisp clever sound. “I could be a bad student for all you know.”
“Ah, but your mother was a brilliant student,” I said.
“Yes, and she still is. She goes to Loyola to take courses. She’s not happy teaching grammar school. She makes straight A’s.”
“And you do too, don’t you?” I asked.
He nodded. “I’d skip a grade if they’d let me. They think it would be bad for my social development, and my grandfather thinks so too.”
We’d come to the rooftop and I shepherded them around the balconies and then down the long red-tiled veranda. They had the suites in the hotel at the end of the veranda which were close to my own.
Now the Innkeeper’s Suite at the Mission Inn is the only one that is really modern and lavish in the five-star sort of way. It’s only available when the owners of the hotel aren’t in residence, so I’d made certain that I could reserve it for this time.
They were suitab
ly impressed with the three fireplaces, the immense marble bath, the lovely open veranda, and even more impressed when they discovered I’d engaged the adjacent room for Toby on the grounds that being ten years of age he might well want his own room and bed.
Then I took them into the Amistad Suite, my favorite, to show them the beautiful painted dome, and the tester bed, and the quaint fireplace that didn’t work, and they did note it was very “like New Orleans” but I think they were thrilled with the luxurious digs they had, and so the whole thing went as I’d planned.
We sat down together at the iron-and-glass table, and I ordered some wine for Liona, and a Coke for Toby because he admitted that now and then, bad as it was for you, he did drink a Coke.
He took out his Apple iPhone and showed me all the things it could do. He had filed all the pictures of me in it and now, if it was all right with me, he was going to take a bunch more.
“Absolutely,” I said, and he instantly became the professional photographer, backing up, holding the phone out the way an old painter might have held out his thumb, and photographed us from numerous angles as he moved around the table.
At this point, as Toby took picture after picture, a chilling realization descended on me. I’d done murder in the Amistad Suite. I’d done murder here at the Mission Inn, and yet I had brought these two people here as if this had never happened.
Of course Malchiah had come to me here, a Seraph who asked me why in the name of God I didn’t repent of the miserable life I’d been living. And I had repented, and my entire existence had been forever altered.
He’d lifted me out of the twenty-first century, and sent me back in time to avert disaster for am imperiled community in medieval England. And when I’d finished that first assignment for my new angelic boss, I’d awakened here, at the Mission Inn, and it was here that I’d written out my entire account of that first journey into Angel Time. The manuscript was in the room. It was on the desk where I’d killed my last victim with a needle to the neck. And it was here that I’d called my old boss, The Right Man, and told him I would never kill for him again.
Notwithstanding, I’d done murder here. And it had been cold, calculated murder, the kind for which Lucky the Fox was justly famous. I shuddered inwardly, murmuring a prayer that no shadow of that evil would ever touch Liona or Toby, that no consequence of that evil would ever harm them.
This place had been my solace before that murder. It had been the one place where I felt at ease, and it was for this reason surely that I’d brought Liona and my son to this very spot, this very table where Malchiah and I had talked together. It seemed natural that they should be here, it seemed natural that I should experience this new joy of having them both, in this place where my grim, sarcastic prayers for redemption had actually been answered.
All right, my own ways made some sense to me. And what safer place was there for Lucky the Fox than the scene of his most recent crime? Who would ever expect a hired killer to go back to the scene of the crime? No one. I was confident of that. After all, I’d been a contract assassin for ten years and I’d never gone back to the scene of a single crime, until now.
But I had to admit, I’d brought these beloved innocents to a place of remarkable significance.
I was so unworthy of my long-ago love, and my newfound son, so utterly unworthy, and they had no conception of it.
And you had better make sure they never know, because if they do know who you were and what you did, if they ever glimpse the blood on your hands, you will have done them the most unspeakable harm and you know it.
I felt I heard a small voice, not very far away, say distinctly. “That’s right. Not a word that could harm them.”
I looked up to see a young man passing by, making his way along the wall, past the door of the Amistad Suite and off out of my vision. It was that same young man I’d seen below by the lobby doors, same suit identical to mine, and the shock of reddish blond hair, and the urgent engaging eyes.
I will not hurt them!
“Did you say something?” Liona asked.
“No, I’m so sorry,” I whispered. “I mean I was talking to myself, I think. I’m sorry.”
I stared at the door of the Amistad Suite. I wanted to get that murder out of my mind. The needle to the neck, the banker dying as if from a stroke, an execution carried out so smoothly no one had ever suspected foul play.
You are one coldhearted man, Toby O’Dare, I thought, that you could so easily seek to exploit a new lease on life at the very crossroads where you destroyed another’s life with such abandon.
“I’ve lost you,” Liona said gently with a smile.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Too many thoughts, too many memories.” I looked at her and it was as if I were seeing her for the first time. Her face was so fresh, so trusting.
Before she could answer, we were interrupted.
One of the guides had come at my request, and I entrusted Toby to him for a tour of “the catacombs” and all the other wonders that the giant hotel had to offer. He was thrilled.
“We’ll have lunch when you get back,” I assured him. Though of course for them it would be an early supper as they had had lunch on the plane.
Now came the moment I had dreaded and most looked forward to, because Liona and I were alone. She’d taken off the red jacket, and she looked suitably shapely in the pink blouse and I felt an immense overwhelming desire to be with her, and to have nothing and no one interfere, and that included angels.
I was jealous of my son at that moment that he would very soon come back. And I was so aware of the angels watching that I think I blushed.
“How can you forgive me for disappearing like that?” I asked suddenly.
There were no tourists wandering the veranda. We were there alone at the glass table as I’d been so often in the past. We were sitting among the potted fruit trees and the lavender geraniums and she was the fairest flower of the lot.
“Nobody blamed you for going off,” she said. “Everybody knew what had happened.”
“They did? How?”
“When you didn’t show up for graduation, they figured you’d been out playing for tips. And it was easy enough to find out that you’d played all night. So you’d come home in the morning and you’d found them there. And after that, well, you’d just left.”
“Just left,” I said. “I didn’t even see to their burial.”
“Your uncle Patrick took care of the whole thing. I think the fire department might have paid for it, or no, your father was a policeman. I mean I think that they paid. I’m not sure. I went to the funeral. All your cousins were out in force. People thought maybe you’d show up, but everybody understood when you didn’t.”
“I got on a plane for New York,” I said. “I took my lute and the money I had and the few books I loved, and I got on a plane and I just never looked back.”
“I don’t blame you.”
“But what about you, Liona? I never even called to find out how you were. I never even called to tell you where I’d gone or what I’d done.”
“Toby, you know when a woman loses her mind like that, the way your mother did, when she kills her children—I mean when a woman does that, she can kill a boy your age too. There was a gun in the apartment. They found it. She could have shot you, Toby. She was just out of her mind. I didn’t think about me, Toby. I just thought about you.”
I didn’t say anything for a long time. Then finally,
“I don’t care anymore about it, Liona. What I care about is you forgive me that I never called you. I’ll get some money to my uncle Patrick. I’ll pay for the funeral. That’s no problem. But what I care about is you. I care about you and Toby and I care about, well, the men in your life and what all that might mean.”
“There are no men in my life, Toby,” she said. “At least there weren’t until you showed up. And don’t think I expect you to marry Toby’s mother. I brought Toby here for you and for him.”
Marry Toby’s mo
ther. If I thought I could do that I would get down on my knees right here on this veranda and propose.
But I didn’t do that. I was looking off and thinking of the ten years of my life I’d wasted, working for The Right Man. I was thinking of the lives I’d taken working for “the agency” or “The Good Guys” or whoever the hell it was to whom I’d so cheerfully and exuberantly sold my eighteen-year-old soul.
“Toby, you don’t have to tell me what you’ve been doing,” she said suddenly. “You don’t have to explain to me what your life has been like. I haven’t had a man in my life because I don’t want my son to have a stepfather, and I was darned determined he was never going to have a stepfather of the month.”
I nodded. I was more grateful for that than I could put into words.
“There haven’t been any women for me, Liona,” I said. “Oh, now and then, just to prove I was a man, I suppose, there was some contact. But that’s all you’d call it: contact. Money was exchanged. It was never … intimate. It was never anything even approximating that.”
“You’ve always been such a gentleman, Toby. You were that way when you were a boy. You use all the proper words for things.”
“Well, it wasn’t very often, Liona. And improper words would give it an exuberant color it never had.”
She laughed. “Nobody talks like you do, Toby,” she said. “I’ve never met anyone like you. Never anyone who even remotely made me think of you. I’ve missed you.”
I know I blushed. I was painfully aware of Malchiah and my guardian angel, whether they were visible or not.
And what about Liona’s angel? Good Lord. For a split second I imagined a magisterial winged being behind her. Fortunately no such creature materialized.
“You still look innocent,” she said. “You still have that same look in your eye—like everything you see is a miracle.”