teacher marveled at the beautiful airs he could play by ear, and those included the songs I've mentioned above that always haunted him. He heard his grandmothers singing to him when he played. He played for his grandmothers sometimes in his mind. He played popular songs on the lute with great dexterity, giving them a wholly new sound, and an illusion of integrity.
At one point, one of his teachers put the records of the popular singer Roy Orbison into Toby's hands, and he soon found he could play the slower songs of this great musician, and give them tender expression through the lute that Orbison had so accomplished with his voice. He soon knew every "ballad" that Orbison had ever recorded.
And as he rendered all popular music in his own style, he learned a classical composition for every popular song, so that he could switch back and forth between them, bringing up the rapid and contagious beauty of Vivaldi one moment, and the mournful tender suffering of Orbison the next.
His was a busy life, what with after-school study, and then the demands of the Jesuit High School curriculum. So it wasn't so hard to keep at arm's length the rich boys and girls he knew, for though he liked many of them very much, he was determined they were never to enter the slovenly apartment in which he lived, with two drunken parents, either of whom could hopelessly humiliate him.
He was fastidious as a child and, later on, fastidious as a killer. But in truth, he grew up afraid, a keeper of secrets, a child in permanent dread of shabby violence.
Later, as a full-blown hit man, he thrived on danger, remembering at times with amusement the television dramas he'd once loved, with the thought that he was now living something far more darkly glorious than had ever been revealed to him. While never admitting it to himself, he took some pride in his particular brand of evil. Despair might be the tune he sang to himself about what he did, but a deep polished vanity lay beneath it.
He had, in addition to this passion for the hunt, one truly precious trait which separated him completely from lesser killers. It was this: he didn't care whether he lived or died. He didn't believe in Hell because he didn't believe in Heaven. He didn't believe in the Devil because he didn't believe in God. And though he remembered the ardent and sometimes hypnotic faith of his youth, though he respected it far more than anyone would ever have guessed, it didn't warm his soul in the slightest. To repeat, he had early on wanted to be a priest, and no fall from grace had taken him from that. Even when he played the lute, he prayed constantly to bring beautiful music from it, and he often devised new melodies for prayers that he loved.
It's worth noting here that he had once wanted to be a saint as well. And he had wanted, young as he was, to understand the whole history of his church, and he had delighted in reading about Thomas Aquinas in particular. It seemed his teachers were always mentioning that name, and when a Jesuit priest came from the nearby university to talk to the grade school class, he told a tale of Thomas that lodged itself permanently in Toby's memory.
It was that the great theologian Thomas had been granted a vision in his last years that caused him to turn against his earlier work, the greatSumma Theologica. "It is so much straw," said the saint to those who asked him, in vain, to continue it.
The tale was something he thought on even to the very day that he came into my relentless gaze. But he didn't know whether it was fact or beautiful fiction. Lots of things said about the saints weren't true. And yet that never seemed to be the point.
Sometimes, in his later ruthless and professional years, when he was tired of playing the lute, he would jot down his thoughts on these remembered things that had once meant so much to him. He conceived of a book that would shock the world:Diary of a Hit Man. Oh, he knew that others had written such memoirs but they weren't Toby O'Dare, who still read theology when not taking down bankers in Geneva and Zurich; who, carrying a rosary, had penetrated Moscow and London long enough to commit four strategic murders within sixty-two hours. They weren't Toby