Virgin

  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?” Weiskopf said. “It’s gone! Pfffft! Like it was never there. On your first scan your liver was, if you’ll pardon the term, Swiss-cheezed with tumors—”

  “Nodular,” Karras added. “And half again it’s normal size,”

  “But now it’s perfectly homogeneous. Not even a little fatty degeneration.”

  “And it’s back to normal size,” Karras said. “I can barely feel it anymore.”

  “Is that what you were doing to me?” Vincenzo felt 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.”

  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,” Weiskopf said.

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

  Weiskopf tapped his x-ray envelope. “Until now.”

  “Uh-uh.” Karras was 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,” 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 wracked 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,” Weiskopf said.

  Karras cleared his throat. “I’d like to admit you for a day or two, Monsignor. Do a full, head-to-toe work-up 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 at the scrawny little man to his right—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? Well, then, this is the place to be.” The old man leaned closer and spoke out of the side of his mouth. “Miracles happen here.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  Talk of miracles had brought him to Loaves and Fishes.

  Emilio had been in town a week and a half and hadn’t uncovered a thing. And 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 the CDC might miss, and so here he was. The Senador was receiving 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 had put 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 his 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 he’d found nothing 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.

  Further along he pass
ed a man wearing a white lab coat and holding an open brief case before him. The briefcase was lined with rows of three-ounce bottles.

  “Hey, buddy! 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. At night people wandered about in droves carrying candles and chanting the Rosary and seeing the Virgin Mary everywhere. Hucksters were set up on every corner selling “I ♥ 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 …

  A feeling was in the air … and in 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 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.

  He had wandered the Lower East Side all day, tracing a spiral path from the Con-Ed station by the FDR, following a feeling, an invisible glow that seemed to be centered in the front of his brain, pulling him. Where or why it was drawing him, he could not say, but he gave himself over to the feeling, allowed it to lead him in shrinking concentric circles to this spot.

  And now he was here. The invisible glow, the intangible warmth, the only warm spot in the city lay directly before him, somewhere within this church.

  In the course of the weeks he had spent down here searching for the vision, Vincenzo had passed St. Joseph’s numerous times. He had crossed himself as he’d come even with its sanctuary, and even had stopped in once to say a prayer. But he had not been struck by anything especially important about the place. A stately old church that, like its neighborhood, had seen better days.

  Now it seemed like … home.

  But what precisely was it that he had followed here? He had no doubt that the strange sensation was connected to the apparition that had touched him with ecstasy and cleansed him of the malignancy that had been devouring him. Neither did he doubt that the apparition was a visitation of the Blessed Virgin. A true visitation. Not an hallucination, not a wish fulfillment, not a publicity stunt. He had seen, he had been touched, he had been healed. This was the real thing. His wish had been granted: He had witnessed a miracle before his death. But as a result of that miracle, his death was no longer imminent. He had been granted extra time. And he’d used some of that extra time to find this place.

  Why? What was so special about this St. Joseph’s church? What significance could it have for the Virgin Mary? It was built on land that had been an undeveloped marsh until a millennium and a half after the birth of Christianity. Vincenzo did not know of any sacred relics housed here.

  And yet …

  Something was here. The same warm glow that had suffused his entire being a few nights ago seemed to emanate from this building. Not from where he would have expected—from the sanctuary of the church itself—but from its lower level. From the basement which appeared to be some sort of soup kitchen.

  What could be here? The remains of some American saint unrecognized by the Church? Was that the reason behind the Blessed Mother’s visitations?

  Inside … it’s inside.

  Vincenzo was drawn forward. Why shouldn’t he go in? After all, he was wearing his cassock and collar. Who would stop a priest from entering a church? Especially a monsignor on a mission from the Holy See. Yes. Hadn’t the Vatican itself asked him to investigate the reports of visitations in this parish? That was precisely what he was doing.

  As he descended the short flight of stone steps he passed under a hand-painted sign that read “Loaves and Fishes.” He pushed through a battered door and entered a broad room lined with long tables and folding chairs. Toward the rear, a serving counter. And beyond that, a kitchen.

  Further inside …

  Feeling as if he were in a dream, he skirted the tables and moved toward the kitchen. A growing excitement quivered in his chest. He heard voices, running water, and clinking crockery from the kitchen. He rounded the corner and came upon three women of varying shapes, sizes, and ages busily scrubbing pots, plates, and utensils. The big, red-cheeked one glanced up and saw him.

  “Sorry, we’re closed until—oh, sorry, Father. I thought you were one of the guests. Are you looking for Father Dan?”

  Vincenzo had no idea who Father Dan was.

  “Is he the pastor?”

  “No. Father Brenner is the pastor. Father Dan is the associate pastor. He went back to the rectory about half an hour ago.”

  Down … it’s beneath your feet.

  “Is there a basement here?”

  “This is the basement, Father,” another woman said.

  “But there’s a furnace room below here,” said the thinnest and oldest of the three.

  Vincenzo saw a door in the rear corner and moved toward it.

  “Not that one,” said the old woman. “That leads to the rectory. “There’s another door on the far side of the refrigerator there.”

  Vincenzo changed direction, brushing past them, unable to fight the growing urgency within him.

  So close … so close now.

  He pulled the door open. A sweet odor wafted up from the darkness below.

  Flowers.

  As his eyes adjusted, Vincenzo made out a faint glow from the bottom of the rutted stone steps. He started down, dimly aware of the women’s voices behind him speaking of Father Dan and something about a Sister Carrie. Whether they were speaking to him or to each other he neither knew nor cared. He was close now … so close.

  At the bottom he followed the light to the left and came upon a broad empty space with a single naked bulb glowing from the ceiling.

  No … this can’t be it … there’s got to be more here than an empty basement.

  Off to his left … a voice, humming. He followed th
e sound around a corner and found the door to a smaller room standing open. As he stepped inside, his surroundings became more dream like.

  I’m here … this is the place … I’ve come home …

  Candlelight flickered off the walls and low ceiling of a room that seemed alive with sweet-smelling blossoms. He saw a woman there, her back was to him and she was humming as she straightened the folds of the robes draped around some sort of statue or sculpture recumbent on—

  And then Vincenzo saw the glow. He recognized that glow, knew that glow. The same soft, pale luminescence had enveloped the apparition. He could not be mistaken. Hadn’t it touched him, been one with him for a single glorious instant? How could he forget it? He realized then that this was no statue or sculpture before him. This was a human body laid out on a makeshift bier.

  But whose body?

  Suddenly Vincenzo knew, and the realization was like a physical blow, staggering him, numbing him, battering his consciousness until it threatened to tear loose from its moorings and … simply … drift.

  This was no holy relic, no unsung, uncanonized saint. This was her!

  He knew it and yet a part of him stubbornly refused to accept it. Impossible! Tradition held that she was assumed body and soul into Heaven. And even if tradition were wrong, even if her body had remained preserved for two thousand years, she would not—could not—be here in this church basement in Lower Manhattan. It defied all reason, all belief, all common sense.

  Can it be her? Can it truly be her?

  As he lurched forward he heard a voice speaking. His own. In his native tongue.

  “Puo essere lei? Puo essere veramente lei?”

  Carrie cried out in shock and fear at the sound of the strange voice behind her. She turned and saw a man in black silhouetted in the light from the door, staggering toward her. Reflexively, she began to dodge aside, but stopped and forced herself to stand firm. Anyone trying to get to the Virgin would have to go through her first.