Virgin (35 page)

The intercom
beeped. "Dr. Weiskopf is here."

"Weiskopf?"
Karras said. "From radiology? What's--? Oh, shit. Excuse me." He all
but leapt from the examining room door.

A few moments
later he was back, trailing in his wake a tall, bearded man whom he introduced
as Dr. Weiskopf. He looked about fifty and wore a yarmulke; a large manila
X-ray envelope was tucked under his left arm.

"I've
never met a walking miracle," Dr. Weiskopf said softly as they shook
hands.

Vincenzo
suddenly felt weak. "Miracle?"

"What else
can you call it? I looked at your scan from today, then called up your initial
scan from July, and I said to myself, Moshe, a trick this Karras kid is playing
on you, trying to make a fool of you by asking you to compare the very sick
liver of one man to the perfectly healthy liver of another. And then I spied an
osteophyte--doctorese for a bone spur--on one of the vertebrae of the new scan;
much to my shock, there was the very same spur on the old scan. So I had to
come and see this man for myself."

Vincenzo looked
from Weiskopf to Karras. "What . . . what's he saying?"

"He's
saying your liver scan's normal, Monsignor."

"You mean
the tumor's shrinking?"

"Shrinking?"
Dr. Weiskopf said. "It's gone!
Pfffftt!
Like it was never there. On
your first scan your liver was, if you'll pardon the term, Swiss-cheesed with
tumors--"

"Nodular,"
Dr. Karras added. "And half again its normal size."

"But now
it's perfectly homogeneous. Not even a little fatty degeneration."

"And it's
back to normal size," Dr. Karras said. "I can barely feel it
anymore."

"Is that
what you were doing to me?" Vincenzo said, feeling giddy and dizzy,
wanting to laugh or cry or both, wanting to fall to his knees in prayer but
struggling to maintain his composure.
"For a while there I thought
you were trying to feel my spine from the front."

Dr. Karras
smiled weakly. "Last week your liver was big and nodular. Your liver
enzymes were climbing. Now--"

"Maybe
we're onto something with this new protocol," Dr. Weiskopf said.

Dr. Karras was
shaking his head, staring at Vincenzo. "No. The protocol's a bust. We
haven't seen significant tumor regression with anyone."

"Until
now," Dr. Weiskopf said, tapping this X-ray envelope.

"Uh-uh,"
Dr. Karras said, still shaking his head and staring. "Even if it were the
protocol, tumor regression would be gradual. A slow shrinking of the tumors,
and even in a best-case scenario we'd be left with a battered and scarred but
functioning liver. The Monsignor's CT shows a perfectly healthy liver. Almost
as if he'd had a transplant."

"
I
can't explain it," Dr. Weiskopf said.

"Maybe you
already did," Vincenzo said. "It's a miracle."

Vincenzo was
regaining his inner composure now. He hadn't been totally unprepared for this.
After the apparition had passed through him three nights ago, he'd been racked
with horrific pain for a few moments, and then it had passed, leaving him weak
and sweaty. He'd staggered back to his quarters at the mission where he fell
into an exhausted sleep. But when he awakened early the next morning he'd felt
better than he had in years. And each passing day brought renewed strength and
vigor. A power had touched him outside that alley. He'd been changed inside.
He'd wondered how, why. He'd prayed, but he'd dared not hope . . .

Until now.

A miracle . . .

The doctors'
smiles were polite but condescending.

"A figure
of speech, Monsignor," Dr. Weiskopf said.

Dr. Karras
cleared his throat. "I'd like to admit you for a day or two, Monsignor. Do
a full, head-to-toe workup to see if we can get a handle on this and--"

Vincenzo shook
his head as he slipped off the examining table and reached for his cassock.

"I'm sorry, but I have no time for that."

"Monsignor,
something extraordinary has happened here. If we can pin this down, who knows
how many other people we can help?"

"You will
find nothing useful in examining me," he said as he fastened his Roman
collar.
"Only confusion."

"You can't
say that."

"I wish it
were otherwise. But unfortunately what happened to me cannot be applied to your
other cases. At least not in a hospital or clinic setting."

"Where
then?"

"I do not
know. But I'm going to try and find out."

Vincenzo was
returning to the Lower East Side. Something was drawing him back.

"Y'soup's
goin' cold, guy. Ain't y'gonna eat it?"

Emilio glanced
to his right at the scrawny little man next to him--bright eyes crinkled within
a wrinkled face framed by a mass of gray hair and beard matted with food and
dirt; a gnarled finger with a nail the color of asphalt pointed to the bowl
that cooled before him on the table.

"Do you
want it?" Emilio said.

This was
Emilio's third meal at the church-basement soup kitchen called Loaves and
Fishes and so far he'd managed to get through each time without having to eat a
thing.

"Well, if
you ain't gonna be eatin' it, it'd sure be a sin to waste it."

Emilio switched
bowls with the old man, trading his full one for an empty. He placed his slice
of bread on the other man's plate as well.

"Ain'tcha
hungry?" the old man said, bending over the
fresh bowl and adding his slurps to the chorus of guttural noises around
them.

"No. Not
really." He'd had a big breakfast in the East Village before walking over
to St. Joseph's. "I'm not feeling well lately."

"Yeah?"
the old man said. "Well, then, this is the place to be." He leaned
closer and spoke out of the side of his mouth. "Miracles happen
here."

"So I've
heard," Emilio replied.

It was talk of
miracles that had brought him to Loaves and Fishes.

Emilio had been
in town a week and a half and hadn't uncovered anything. And he didn't expect
to. A waste of time as far as he was concerned. But the opinion of Emilio
Sanchez did not count in this matter. The
senador
wanted him here,
sniffing about, turning over any rocks that the CDC might miss, and so here he
was. The
senador
would get copies of the official CDC reports as they
were filed. What he wanted from Emilio was the unofficial story, "the view
from street level," as the
senador
called it.

To do that,
Emilio had rented a room in one of the area's seedy residential hotels, stopped
taking showers, and let his beard grow. He'd picked up some thrift-shop clothes
and begun wandering the Lower East Side, posing as a local.

And it was as a
local that he'd run into someone named Pilgrim who ranted on about this blind
friend Preacher who'd begun to see at a place called Loaves and Fishes, and how
all the men who'd been cured of AIDS used to come to Loaves and Fishes.

And so now
Emilio came to Loaves and Fishes.

Not that he
suspected to find anything even vaguely supernatural going on, but there was
always the chance that the place might be frequented by someone pedaling a drug
or a folk medicine that might have been responsible for the now-famous AIDS
cures.

But there was
nothing going on here. Just a crowd of hungry losers stuffing their faces with
anything edible they could lay their hands on. No fights, which struck Emilio
as unusual with this sort of group. Maybe they were just too
busy eating. Nothing special about the staff, either.
Mostly lonely
old biddies filling up their empty days toiling in what they probably thought
was service to mankind, plus a beautiful young nun who spent too much of her
time in the kitchen.

And a young
priest who seemed to be in charge. Emilio had been startled to recognize him as
the same priest the
senador
had chewed up and spit out in front of the
Waldorf last spring. He doubted the priest would recognize him, but just the
same, Emilio kept his head down whenever he came around.

Disgusted, he
decided to leave. Nothing here. No miracles of any kind, medical or otherwise.
As he rose to his feet, he heard the priest say he was running back to the
rectory for something, but instead of leaving through the front of the room, he
used a door in the rear of the kitchen.

Emilio wove
through the maze of long tables and hurried up the steps to the street. As he
ambled along, blinking in the sun's glare and trying to look aimless, he
glanced down the alley between the church and the rectory. He stopped. Hadn't
he seen the priest go out a door in the kitchen? He'd assumed it led up to street
level. But there was no corresponding door in the alley. Where had the priest
gone if he hadn't returned to the rectory?

He looked up at
the rectory and was startled momentarily to see the priest's blond head pass a
window. Emilio smiled. An underground passage. How convenient. He supposed
there were all sorts of passages between these old buildings.

He walked on,
taking small satisfaction in having cleared up a mystery, no matter how
inconsequential. Emilio didn't like mysteries.

Farther along
he passed a man wearing a white lab coat and holding an open briefcase before
him. The briefcase was lined with rows of three-ounce bottles.

"Hey,
buddy!" the guy said. "You got the sickness?"

Emilio looked
at him and the guy's eyes lit with sudden recognition. He backed up two steps.

"Oh, shit.
Hey, sorry. Never mind."

Emilio walked
on without acknowledging him.

How could he
learn anything, or even make sense of anything in this carnival atmosphere?
The entire area
seemed to have gone mad. People were wandering about in droves at night
carrying candles and chanting the Rosary and seeing the Virgin Mary everywhere.
Hucksters were set up on every corner selling I
love mary-hunting
badges,
our
lady of the lower east side
T-shirts, Virgin Mary statues, slivers of
the True Cross, rosaries, and sundry other religious paraphernalia.

Quick-buck
grifters and con artists had moved in too. Emilio had already had run-ins with
a few of them, and the guy he'd just passed had been the first. He'd approached
Emilio just as he'd started to today, asking him if he had "the
sickness"--the local code for AIDS.

Curious, Emilio
had said, "What if I do?"

With that the
guy had launched into a spiel about his cure-all tonic, claiming his elixir,
"Yes, the stuff right in these bottles you see before you here," was
the stuff that had cured the AIDS cases everyone was talking about.

Emilio had
listened awhile, then pushed him into a corner and knocked him around until he
admitted that he hadn't even come to the city until he'd read about the cures.

Emilio had
similar run-ins with a number of the snake-oil salesmen he'd come across and
under pressure the stories were all the same: charlatans preying on the weak,
the sick, and the desperate.

Not that Emilio
cared one way or the other, he simply didn't want to bring one of their potions
back to Paraiso and look like a fool in the eyes of the
senador.

This whole trip
seemed a fool's errand.

And yet . . .

There was a
feeling in the air . . . and in Emilio himself . . . a twinge in his gut, a
vague prickling at the back of his neck, a sense that these littered streets,
these leaning, tattered buildings, hid a secret. Even the air felt heavy,
pregnant with . . . what? Dread? Anticipation? A little of both, maybe?

Emilio shook it
off. The
senador
had not sent him here for his
impressions
of the
area; he wanted facts. And
whatever it was
that was raising his gooseflesh, Emilio doubted it would be of any use to the
senador
and Charlie. But
something
was going on down here.

Vincenzo Riccio
stood in the dusk on the sidewalk in front of St. Joseph's church. He did not
stare up at its Gothic facade, but at the doorway that led under its granite
front steps. People carrying candles were beginning to gather on those front
steps. They carried rosaries and clustered around an elderly woman in a
wheelchair who was preparing them for a prayer meeting tonight. Vincenzo paid
them little heed.