old mysteries that meant nothing to me. I merely lost myself in the mantric chant.Hail Mary, Full of Grace, as if I believe you exist. Now and at the Hour of our Death Amen Like Hell For Them are you ever there?
Mind you, I was certainly not the only hit man on this planet who went to Mass. But I was one of a very small minority who paid attention, murmuring the responses and sometimes even singing the hymns. Sometimes I even went to Communion, soaked in mortal sin, and defiant. I knelt afterwards with head bowed and I thought:This is Hell. This is Hell. And Hell will be worse than this.
There've always been criminals great and small who went to Mass with their families and presided over sacramental occasions. I don't have to tell you about the Italian Mafioso of cinematic legend who goes to his daughter's First Communion. Don't they all?
I had no family. I had no one. I was no one. I went to Mass for myself who was no one. In my files at Interpol and the FBI, they said so: he is no one. No one knows what he looks like, or where he came from, or where he will appear next. They didn't even know if I worked for one man.
As I said, I was a modus operandi to them, and they'd taken years to refine it, listing vaguely disguises poorly glimpsed by video surveillance, never yielding to precise words. Often they detailed the hits with considerable misunderstanding of what had actually taken place. But they did have it almost right: I was nobody. I was a dead man walking around in a live body.
And I did work for only one man, my boss, the one I called, in my heart of hearts, The Right Man. It simply never occurred to me to work for someone else. And nobody else could have sought me out for an assignment, and no one else ever would.
The Right Man might have been the bearded God the Father, of the retablo, and I his bleeding son. The Holy Ghost was the spirit that bound us, because we were bound, that was certain, and I never thought past the commands of The Right Man.
That's blasphemy. So what?
How did I know these things about police files and agency files? My beloved boss always had his connections, and he'd chuckle with me on the phone about the information that came his way.
He knew what I looked like. On the night we met, some ten years back, I'd been myself with him. That he hadn't laid eyes on me in years disturbed him.
But I was always there when he rang, and whenever I dumped the cell phones, I called him with the new numbers. In the beginning, he'd helped me get the phony papers, passports, driver's licenses, and such. But I'd long known how to acquire that sort of material on my own, and how to confuse the people who provided it to me.
The Right Man knew I was loyal. Not a week went by that I didn't call in, whether he called me or not. Sometimes I felt a sudden breathlessness when I heard his voice, just because he was still there, because fate hadn't taken him away from me. After all, if one man is your entire life, your vocation, your quest, well, then, you're going to be afraid of losing him.
"Lucky, I want to sit down with you," he sometimes said. "You know, the way we did that first couple of years. I want to know where you come from." I'd laugh as gently as I could.
"I love the sound of your voice, Boss," I'd say.
"Lucky," he asked me one time, "do you yourself know where you come from?"
That had really made me laugh, but not at him, just at everything.
"You know, Boss," I'd said more than once, "there are questions I'd like to ask you, like who you really are, and who you work for. But I don't ask you, do I?"
"You'd be surprised at the answers," he said. "I told you once, kid, you're working for The Good Guys." And that's where we left it.
The Good Guys.The good gang or the good organization? How was I to know which? And what did it matter, because I did exactly what he told me to do, so how could I be good?
But I could dream, from time to time, that he was on the good side of things, that