Hitman Melodies Section 1

Hit Man Melodies

Sebastian Chronic was a musical genius. It might be said, if the joke were cracked in the proper context, that he wrote killer music. However, this remark would only have been funny over marinara sauce and clams, at, say, Tony's in the Bronx, because Tony's was one of the few places where Sebastian was known--known as the Milano Family's chief enforcer.
Sebastian was a composer by day, and a hit man by night. He worked all day bringing beauty and truth into the world, illuminated by the light of divine inspiration radiating from the highest celestial spheres; stray dogs and pidgeons, not to mention crowds of street urchins, would gather round his windows, looking up to the 2nd floor from whence floated down song-fragments of derring-do like bold snowflakes brisked from a rocky mountain outcrop. At night he dealt with the scum of the earth, ruffling, scuffling, and shuffling off their mortal coils for them with impunity, sending them to Hell, or Wherever; each mark's final chorus was flavored with wit and pizazz, but they ended up quite dead, notwithstanding.
From this you may well ask if such a man were conscious of any dissonance coming from the fact of his dual (duel?) schizoid life style, a life-style divided between the sainted creative work of bringing beauty and new life into the world in the morning, and blowing human heads off at night. You may well ask, but Sebastian thought, "In an integrated life, who can tell the preparation from the finished work itself, the dancer from the dance?" To Sebastian, the music and the murder were linked in a special way--it was a link he was proud to know, but which he did not advertise; he kept the knowledge and the pride to himself. He was a very private artist, and rarely exposed his work to public view. Indeed, hardly anyone anywhere has heard a note of his music except those select few for whom the sigh of his song has provided a segue into that first faint tinkle of heaven's gates opening; for those whose vision he has unveiled, to gaze out onto glorious astral terrains, as they go to meet their final ecstasy. There are no reviews.
Now, to say that Sebastian's music was composed for the non plus ultra of occasional social events, is not to say that his art was lacking in enduring, legitimate, artistic integrity--that it was some kind of cutesy, low-minded, merely sadistic stylistic twist on contract murder, the performance of some pathological sublimation of childhood trauma, bad chemicals in his brain. No, Sebastian Chronic was no dabbling tunesmith with a head complex; he was the real thing, a consummate singer of death. It was art for art's sake--with a little blood on the side.
Sebastian's artistic credo was somewhat perverse, yet simple and elegant: he felt that the moment of a man's passing should be a precious peak experience--that the transformation from flesh to spirit should be beautiful, an experience as high and sacred as any virgin birth. He felt that if he, Sebastian, could aid in the exaltation of someone's death, he was actually performing a humanitarian act, a public service. He rationalized the murder part, the stealing of the rest of a man's life part, in this way: since all the guys he killed were dead already, (or the job would not be coming to him), he wasn't really stealing anything from anybody that wasn't already lost; somebody had to get rid of these people, and if they had to go, they might as well surrender themselves into the hands of a master, and not some crude, dumb sadistic schmuck, who was only in it for the buck and the grin. Sebastian saw the bright pathway between the ecstatic musical moment and heavenly pastures. He saw death in the most beautiful things, and the most beautiful things in death. He saw in, death, that same celestial home up to which the pilgrim spirit ascends every time it witnesses the spiritual truth, the living, moving, intelligence-bearing truth of music. It's a good place. "If we like that place so much, why shouldn't I just arrange for these folks to spend a little more time there? We're all going there anyway, our lives are a single sparkle on the hands of a vast Mickey Mouse clock." He felt that if, through music, he could forge a connection between the soul of the mark and the divine mind, he might be able to elevate the mark to a point of spiritual consciousness wherein the pain of passage would be eased in cosmic comfort; he actually felt his victims suffered less from his gentle hand than most. Anyway, nobody lives forever.

In case you're not completely getting this, let's be clear: Sebastian Chronic used MUSIC to commit contract murder--to knock off talkative junkies, sticky-fingered numbers runners, too-zealous competitors, and the occasional crooked cop. You want to know how, right? It's a good question, and deserves some attention, because the answer is slightly complicated; how do you describe the technique of an angel of death? What is the nature of harp music that, Orpheus-like, transports you from one side of the River Styx to the other?
Well, you might say the essence of his genius was this: rather than relying on some hackneyed repetitive formula for cranking out corpses, he invented a different personalized method of graduating each new mark to the celestial choir. It's difficult to generalize about his methods, because each killing was unique, of a highly original design, and, for the genre, highly unpredictable. Of course, there were some generalized, stock-in-trade, technical categories: explosions, poisons, decapitations, etc. For boring or hasty executions, for instance, there was your standard sound-triggers-detonator technique; you know, the high note on a strolling violin that sets the wine glass with a plastic explosive base to vibrating, or the Frank Sinatra cassette with the surprise insertion that triggers a car bomb. But there were other more exotic methods with which Sebastian flamboyantly displayed his power to conjure doom out of a melodic interlude.
A special mark deserved a special death--such as Eddy the Weasel, a hardguy with a twist: Eddy was kind of a cross between a drill sergeant and a drag queen--he was a tough macho man, in the traditional mobster sense of the term (he routinely beat his collectors' faces to pulp with a baseball bat before asking why their drop was late, and he could throw down a 250 lb. wrestler and slice off an ear before the body hit the floor); but he also liked to nurture his feminine side by dressing up in clownish mardi-gras-type costumes--festive, lacy, diaphanous bridesmaid's outfits crowned with plastic tiaras. He wore face paint an inch thick, and carried his 357 Magnum in a sequin-festooned handbag, hung over his padded shoulder by a psychedelic Jimi Hendrix guitar strap, real aesthetic-like. Eddy was cool and Eddy was smart, but he was also an asshole, and Jack Milano was not thrilled to hear that Eddy had indulged in some street-corner face-rearranging on one of his boys over a border dispute of about 20 feet. Eddy had sent an apology and a case of Dom Perignon over to Tony's, and Jack had accepted the apology in the same breath that he commissioned Eddy's Requiem Mass.
Sebastian lavished an unprecedented amount of time and inventiveness on Eddy's execution. First he insinuated his way into the chorus line at Eddy's cabaret, and in two weeks was promoted to a solo spot-- all of this in drag mind you; he was a master of cross-dress fashion and disguise, and he had a beautiful counter-tenor voice. (Hell, he could out-rainbow Judy Garland--one time he did his version of "You Made Me Love You" at Tony's after hours, just for the crew, and it broke every heart in the joint--but never mind.) Finally, after gaining his confidence, as Marla deMort (ha ha), Sebastian took Eddy's head off using a left-handed combination of Deanna Durbin and makeup.
It happened this way: he secretly treated the jar of Eddy's pancake base with a parafin-like additive which would erupt into poison-fuming flame if touched by the faintest suggestion of salt water. He then dressed himself in boobs, bangles, and a wig, and performed, onstage at the Satin Doll, his own touching arrangement of "My Own, Let Me Call You My Own". The rendition gave a perfect imitation of Deanna's beautiful, pure, elegant, lonely-16-year-old-virgin voice--so tender, so fragile, so feminine. Sebastian's arrangement featured subtle harmonic misdirection and subterfuges which enhanced the tearfulness of the sentiment, the syrene's call; and when his falsetto crowned the climax of the song, piercing the high G with a tremble and a sigh, Eddy's tear-drenched face burst into flame, taking him and Rocko Margiano with him, who breathed in too much cyanide trying to put out the fire. Thus was the iconic glitter of 30's Hollywood transformed into the last scene of Don Giovanni complete with devil chorus and brimstone.
One always wonders about the time factor: how long does it take for the human nervous system to register: "My face is on fire!"?
"Ideally," Sebastian thought, "if the aesthetic response is profound enough, the mark will experience a cosmic rush so distracting and transporting that he won't even feel the pain of passing on up to Gloryland. A painless death--how many wouldn't pay for that? This is hire and salary not murder."

Anyway, when all was, like, said and, like, done, Sebastian Chronic had it made. He was an acclaimed master of his art, made a more-than-comfortable living from it, and had a fulfilling career performing a service that was highly respected and in constant need. He knew no woman's love of course, that goes without saying--dating a guy who might turn around and poison your Evian bottle tomorrow, is a scenario that most women find unattractive. But Sebastian had his opinions about that, too--an artist, completely absorbed in his work, needed no artificial, third-party. personal reinforcement reflected by Aphrodite's mirror; as to the sex part, he negotiated those transactions with fair-minded, balanced equanimity. He was as satisfied with his life as he thought any man had a right to be, and he trod the Buddha's middle path with a detached serenity unruffled by petty ontological or psychic insecurities. In his mind, he had pretty much ironed out all the important philosophical questions--his moral universe was an edifice of logical opacities; chinkless it admitted not even the faintest, slivery glimmer of doubt or guilt; he had his ducks in a row, his priorities in order, his bow rosined.

This is the story of how Sebastian Chronic threw it all over for a broad.

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