Virgin

  He ran across the hatch and searched the entire afterdeck but could not find a trace of her. So he ran and told the captain.

  Liam Harrity puffed his pipe and stared out at him from the mass of red hair that encircled his face.

  “What have we discussed about you hitting the Jameson’s while you’re on duty, Denny?” he said.

  “Captain, I swear, I haven’t touched a drop to me lips since last night.” Maguire leaned closer. “Here. Smell me breath.”

  The captain waved him off. “I don’t want to be smelling your foul breath! Just get to your bunk and don’t be after coming to me with anymore stories of women on my ship. Get!”

  Dennis Maguire got, but he knew in his heart there’d been someone out there in the storm tonight. And somehow he knew they hadn’t seen the last of her.

  Paraiso

  “Charlie, Charlie, Charlie,” the Senador said, shaking his head sadly.

  Emilio Sanchez stood at a respectful distance from the father and son confrontation. He had moved to leave the great room after delivering Charlie here, but the Senador had motioned him to stay. Emilio was proud of the Senador’s show of trust and confidence in him, but it pained him to see this great man in such distress. So Emilio stepped back against the great fireplace and stared out at the seamless blackness beyond the windows where the clouded night sky merged with the Pacific. He watched their reflections in the glass. And listened.

  “I thought we had an understanding, Charlie.” The Senador leaned forward, staring earnestly across the long, free-form redwood coffee table at his son who sat with elbows on knees, head down. “You promised me six months. You promised me you’d stay here and go through therapy … learn to pray.”

  “It’s not what you think, Dad,” Charlie said softly in a hoarse voice. He sounded exhausted. Defeated.

  The fight seemed to have gone out of Charlie. Which didn’t jibe at all with his recent flight from Paraiso. If he wasn’t bucking his father, why did he run?

  Two days ago the Senador had called Emilio to his home office in a minor panic. Charlie was gone. His room was empty, and he was nowhere in the house or on the grounds. Juanita said she’d passed a taxi coming the other way when she’d arrived early this morning.

  Emilio had sighed and nodded. Here we go again.

  Fortunately Juanita remembered the name of the cab company. From there it was easy to trace that particular fare—the whole damn company was buzzing about picking up a fare at Paraiso that wanted to be taken all the way to Frisco. The driver had dropped his fare off on California Street.

  Charlie had run to his favorite rat hole again.

  Over the years, during repeated trips in search of Charlie, Emilio had been in and out of so many gay bars in San Francisco that some of the regulars had begun to think he was a maricon himself. To counteract that insulting notion, he’d made it a practice to bust the skull anyone who tried to get friendly.

  But this time he hadn’t found Charlie down in the Tenderloin. Instead, he’d traced him to the Embarcadero. Charlie had taken a room in the Hyatt, of all places.

  When Emilio had knocked on his door, Charlie hadn’t acted surprised, and he hadn’t launched into his usual lame protests. He’d come quietly, barely speaking during the drive back.

  That wasn’t like Charlie. Something was wrong.

  “What am I to think, Charlie?” the Senador was saying. “You promised me. Remember what you said? You said you’d ‘give it the old college try.’ Remember that?”

  “Dad—”

  “And you were doing so well! Doctor Thompson said you were very cooperative, really starting to open up to him. And you seemed to be getting into the spirit of the prayer sessions, feeling the presence of the Lord. What happened? Why did you break your promise?”

  “I didn’t break my promise.” He didn’t look up. He stared at the table before him, seemingly lost in the redwood whorls. “I was coming back. I needed—”

  “You don’t need that … sort of … activity,” the Senador said. “By falling back into that sinfulness you’ve undone all your months of work!”

  “I didn’t go back for sex.”

  “Please don’t make this worse by lying to me, Charlie.”

  During the ensuing silence, Emilio realized that normally he too would have thought Charlie was lying, but today he didn’t think so.

  “It’s the truth, Dad.”

  “How can I believe that, Charlie? Every other time you’ve disappeared to Sodom-On-The-Bay it’s been for sex.”

  “Not this time. I … I haven’t been feeling well enough for sex.”

  “Oh?”

  A premonition shot through Emilio like a bullet. The Senador should have felt it too, but if he did, his face did not betray it. He was still staring at Charlie with that same hurt, earnest expression. Emilio rammed his fist against his thigh. Bobo! Charlie’s pale, feverish look, his weight loss … he should have put it together long before now.

  “I’ve been having night sweats, then I developed this rash. I didn’t run off to Frisco to get laid, Dad. I went to a clinic there that knows about … these things.”

  The Senador said nothing. A tomblike silence descended on the great room. Emilio could hear the susurrant flow through the air conditioning vents, the subliminal rumble of the ocean beyond the windows, and nothing more. He realized the Senador must be holding his breath. The light had dawned.

  Charlie looked up at his father. “I’ve got AIDS, Dad.”

  Madre. Emilio turned.

  “Wh-what?” The Senador was suddenly as pale as his son. “That c-can’t be t-true!”

  He was stuttering. Not once in all his years with him had Emilio heard that man stutter.

  Charlie was nodding. “The doctors and the blood tests confirmed what I’ve guessed for some time. I’ve just been too frightened to take the final step and hear someone tell me I’ve got it.”

  “Th-there’s got to be some mistake!”

  “No mistake, Dad. This was an AIDS clinic. They’re experts. I’m not just HIV positive. I’ve got AIDS.”

  “But didn’t you use protection? Take precautions?”

  Charlie looked down again. “Yeah. Sure. Most of the time.”

  “Most of the time …” The Senador’s voice sounded hollow, distant. “Charlie … what on earth … ?”

  “It doesn’t matter, Dad. I’ve got it. I’m a dead man.”

  “No, you’re not!” the Senador cried, new life in his voice as he shot from his seat. “Don’t you say that! You’re going to live!”

  “I don’t think so, Dad.”

  “You will! I won’t let you die! I’ll get you the best medical care. And we’ll pray. You’ll see, Charlie. With God’s help you’ll come through this. You’ll be a new man when it’s over. You’ll pass through the flame and be cleansed, not just of your illness, but of your sinfulness as well. You’re about to be born again, Charlie. I can feel it!”

  Emilio turned away and softly took the stairs down to his quarters. He fought the urge to run. Emilio did not share the Senador’s faith in the power of prayer over AIDS. In fact, Emilio could not remember finding prayer useful for much of anything, especially in his line of work. Rather than listen to the Senador rattle on about it, he wished to wash his hands. He’d touched Charlie today. He’d driven Charlie all the way back from San Francisco, sitting with him for hours in the same car, breathing his air.

  When he reached the bottom floor, he broke into a trot toward his quarters. He wanted more than to wash his hands. He wanted a shower.

  The Greenbriar—east of Gibraltar

  “A woman on board,” Captain Liam Harrity muttered as he thumbed tobacco into the bowl of his pipe. “What utter foolishness is this? Next they’ll be after telling me the ship can fly.”

  Gibraltar lay three leagues ahead, its massive
shadow looming fifteen degrees to starboard against the hazy stars. Lights dotted the shores to either side as the Greenbriar prepared to squeeze between two continents and brave the Atlantic beyond. A smooth, quiet, routine trip so far.

  Except for this woman talk.

  Harrity leaned against the Greenbriar’s stern rail and stared at the glowing windows in the superstructure amidships. A good old ship, the Greenbriar. A small freighter by almost any standards, but quick. A tramp merchant ship, with no fixed route or schedule, picking up whatever was ready to be moved, from the Eastern Mediterranean to the UK and all points between, no questions asked. Harrity had been in this game a long time, much of it spent on the Greenbriar, and this was the first time any of his crew had talked about seeing a woman wandering the decks.

  Not that there weren’t enough places to hide one, mind you. Small though the ship might be, she had plenty of nooks and crannies for a stowaway.

  But in all his years helming the Greenbriar, Harrity had never had a stowaway—at least that he knew of—and he wasn’t about to start now. Like having a prowler in your house. You simply didn’t allow it.

  Maguire had started the talk that first night out of Haifa. Harrity’s thought at the time was that Dennis had been nipping at the Jameson’s a little earlier than usual. He’d let it go and not given it another thought until two nights ago when Cleary said he’d seen a woman on the aft deck as they were passing through the Malta Channel.

  A temperate man, Cleary. Not the sort who’d be after seeing things that weren’t there.

  So Harrity himself was keeping watch on the aft deck these past two nights. And so far no woman.

  He turned his back to the wind and struck a wooden match against the stern rail. As he puffed his pipe to life, relishing the first aromatic lungfuls, a deep serenity stole over him. The phosphorescent flashes churning in the wake, the balmy, briny air, the stars overhead, lighting the surface of the Mediterranean as it stretched long and wide and smooth to the horizon. Life was good.

  He sensed movement to his left, turned, and fumbled to catch his pipe as it dropped from his shocked-open mouth.

  She stood there, beside him, not two feet away. A woman…at the rail, staring into the east, back along the route they’d sailed. She was wearing a loose robe of some sort, pulled up around her head. Its cowl hid her features. Now he knew why Maguire had thought she’d been wrapped in a blanket.

  He shook off the initial shock and stuck his pipe bit between his teeth. He should have been angry—furious, for sure—but he could find no hostility within him. Only wonder at how she’d come up behind him without him hearing her.

  “And who would you be now?”

  The woman continued her silent stare off the stern.

  “What are you after doing on me ship?”

  Slowly she turned toward him. He could not make out her features in the shadow of the cowl, but he felt her eyes on him. And the weight of her stare was a gentle hand caressing the surface of his mind, erasing all questions.

  She turned and walked away. Or was she walking? She seemed to glide along the deck. Harrity had an urge to follow her but his legs seemed so heavy, his shoes felt riveted to the deck. He could only stand and watch as she followed the rail along the starboard side to the superstructure where she was swallowed by the deeper shadows.

  And then she was gone and he could move again. He sucked on his pipe but the bowl was cold. And so was he. Suddenly the deck of the Greenbriar was a lonely place.

  Cashelbanagh, Ireland

  Like everyone else, Monsignor Vincenzo Riccio had heard the endless talk about the green of the Irish countryside, but not until he was actually driving along the roads south of Shannon Airport did he realize how firmly based in fact all that talk had been. He gazed through the open rear window at the passing fields. This land was green. In all his fifty-six years he could not remember seeing a green like this.

  “Your country is most beautiful, Michael” he said. His English was good, but he knew there was no hiding his Neapolitan upbringing.

  Michael the driver—the good folk of Cashelbanagh had sent one of their number to fetch the Monsignor from the airport—glanced over his shoulder with a broad, yellow-toothed smile.

  “Aye, that it is, Monsignor. But wait till you see Cashelbanagh. The picture-perfect Irish village. As a matter of fact, if you’re after looking up ‘Irish village’ in the dictionary, sure enough it’ll be saying Cashelbanagh. Perfect place for a miracle.”

  “It is much farther?”

  “Only a wee bit down the road. And wait till you see the reception committee they’ll be having for you.”

  Vincenzo wished he’d come here sooner. He liked these people and the green of this land enthralled him. But the way things were looking lately, he wouldn’t get a chance for a return visit.

  And too bad he couldn’t stay longer. But this was only a stopover, scheduled at the last minute as he was leaving Rome for New York. He was one of the Vatican’s veteran investigators of the miraculous, and the Holy See had asked him to look into what lately had become known as the Weeping Virgin of Cashelbanagh.

  The Weeping Virgin had been gathering an increasing amount of press over the past few weeks, first the Irish papers, then the London tabloids, and recently the story had gained international attention. People from all over the world had begun to flock to the little village in County Cork to see the daily miracle of the painting of the Virgin Mary that shed real tears. Healings had been reported—cures, visions, raptures. “A New Lourdes!” screamed tabloid headlines all over the world.

  It had been getting out of hand. The Holy See wanted the “miracle” investigated. The Vatican had no quarrel with miracles, as long as they were real. But the faithful should not be led astray by tricks of the light, tricks of nature, and tricks of the calculated human kind.

  They chose Vincenzo for the task. Not simply because he’d already had experience investigating a number of miracles that turned out to be anything but miraculous, but because the Vatican had him on a westbound plane this weekend anyway, to Sloan-Kettering Memorial in Manhattan to try an experimental chemotherapy protocol for his liver cancer. He could make a brief stop in Ireland, couldn’t he? Take a day or two to look into this weeping painting, then be on his way again. No pain, no strain, just send a full report of his findings back to Rome when he reached New York.

  “Tell me, Michael,” Vincenzo said. “What do you know of these miracles?”

  “I’ll be glad to tell you it all, Monsignor, because I was there from the start. Well, not the very start. You see, the painting of the Virgin Mary has been gracing the west wall of Seamus O’Halloran’s home for two generations now. His grandfather Danny painted it there during the year before he died. Finished the last stroke, then took to his bed and never got up again. Can you imagine that? ‘Twas almost as if the old fellow was hanging on just so’s he could be finishing the painting. Anyways, over the years the weather has faded it, and it’s become such a fixture about the village that it became part of the scenery, if you know what I’m sayin’. Much like a tree in someone’s yard. You pass that yard half a dozen times a day but you never take no notice of the tree. Unless of course it happens to be spring and it’s startin’ to bloom, then you might—”

  “I understand, Michael.”

  “Yes. Well, that’s the way it was after being until about a month ago when Seamus—that’s old Daniel O’Halloran’s grandson—was passing the wall and noticed a wet streak glistening on the stucco. He stepped closer, wondering where this bit of water might be trickling from on this dry and sunny day, for contrary to popular myth, it does not rain every day in Ireland—least ways not in the summer. I’m afraid I can’t say that for the rest of the year. But anyways, when he saw that the track of moisture originated in the eye of his grandfather’s painting, he ran straight to Mallow to fetch Father Sullivan. And since t
hen it’s been one miracle after another.”

  Vincenzo let his mind drift from Michael’s practiced monologue that told him nothing he hadn’t learned from the rushed briefing at the Vatican before his departure. But he did get the feeling that life in the little village had begun to revolve around the celebrity that attended the weeping of their Virgin.

  And that would make his job more difficult.

  “There she is now, Monsignor,” Michael said, pointing ahead through the windshield. “Cashelbanagh. Isn’t she a sight.”

  They were crossing a one-car bridge over a gushing stream. As Vincenzo squinted ahead, his first impulse was to ask, Where’s the rest of it? But he held his tongue. Two hundred yards down the road lay a cluster of neat little one- and two-story buildings, fewer than a dozen in number, set on either side of the road. One of them was a pub—Blaney’s, the gold-on-black sign said. As they coasted through the village, Vincenzo spotted a number of local men and women setting up picnic tables on the narrow sward next to the pub.

  Up ahead, at the far end of the street, a crowd of people waited before a neat, two-story, stucco-walled house.

  “And that would be Seamus O’Halloran’s house, I imagine,” Vincenzo said.

  “That it would, Monsignor. That it would.”

  There were hands to shake and Father Sullivan to greet, and introductions crowded one on top of the other until the names ran together like watercolors in the rain. The warmest reception he’d ever had, an excited party spirit running through the villagers. The priest from Rome was going to certify the Weeping Virgin of Cashelbanagh as an inexplicable phenomenon of Divine origin, an act of God made manifest to the faithful, a true miracle, a sign that Cashelbanagh had been singled out to be touched by God. There was even a reporter from a Dublin paper to record it. And what a celebration there’d be afterward.

  Vincenzo was led around to the side of the house to stare at the famous Weeping Virgin on Seamus O’Halloran’s wall.

  Nothing special about the painting. Rather crude, actually. A very stiff looking half profile of the Blessed Mother in the traditional blue robe and wimple with a halo behind her head.