Yes, he could survive, perhaps even benefit from public disclosure of the cause of Charlie’s death. His only worry was what rats might crawl out of the woodwork when they heard that Charlie had died of AIDS. What vermin from his past might step forward and say, “Like father, like son.”
Arthur knew he could weather either one alone, but he would fall before the combination of the two.
Everyone would be properly supportive at first, but he knew it wouldn’t be long before the various elements of the coalition he’d been forging began edging away from him. All his born-again friends and admirers would begin looking around for someone else to support, someone who’s immediate family was not so intimately associated with sodomy.
And then his dream of a renewed America would go down in flames, be reduced to ashes.
He treasured two things most in his life: his son and his dream. Charlie’s AIDS was going to steal both.
He looked again at the Times and Daily News clippings in his lap. Like everyone else who read a paper or watched the network news, he’d heard about the four supposedly-cured cases of AIDS in New York. They’d sparked some hope in the growing darkness within him, but after his experience with Olivia he’d learned that cynicism was the only appropriate response to miracle cures. It saved a lot of heartache.
But the Times article said the CDC was getting involved... budgeting an epidemiological study. If Arthur was correctly reading between the lines, it meant that these cures had been sufficiently verified for the CDC to judge them worth the effort and expense of sending an investigative team to Manhattan.
Interesting...
The CDC was headquartered in Atlanta. Arthur had myriad contacts in the Bible Belt. No problem learning what was going on in the CDC, but it might be wise to have his own man on the scene.
“Emilio, how would you feel about a trip to New York?”
‡
Manhattan
Monsignor Vincenzo Riccio suppressed the urge to vomit as he walked along Catherine Street near the Governor Alfred E. Smith Houses and waited for dark.
Dark would not be a safe time here, but he did not worry about that. He hadn’t shaved for days and was dressed in the shabbiest clothes he’d been able to find at the Vatican Mission uptown. He was not an attractive mugging prospect. But even if he were killed tonight, it would not matter.
The new chemotherapy protocol was not working. It had succeeded only in suppressing his white cell count and making him violently ill. He’d lost more weight. The tumors continued their relentless spread. The end was not far off, and human predators could do nothing to him that the cancer and the chemicals had not already tried. A quick death here might be preferable to the slow death that threatened to linger into the fall, but surely not beyond.
But please, God, not before I see her again.
The Vatican had called today. Since he was already here in Manhattan, would he mind looking into these Blessed Virgin sightings that had become epidemic on the Lower East Side?
He’d agreed, of course. What he did not say was that he’d been investigating for weeks.
He’d read of the sightings and had been struck immediately by the similarity between the witnesses’ descriptions of the faintly glowing woman they’d seen down here and the woman he’d seen walking on the fog over the River Lee back in July. He did not resist the yearning to search out this Stateside apparition to see if she was the same.
So far his quest had been as successful as the new chemotherapy.
He scanned the streets around him. He spotted numerous Asian shoppers scurrying home through the fading light, each carrying their purchases in identical red plastic sacks. On his right sat rows of deserted, dilapidated, graffiti-scarred buildings, with empty windows in front and dark, litter-choked alleys on their flanks. All forlorn and forbidding
She had been spotted twice near here. So like her son to appear among the social cast offs. If indeed it was her. Perhaps tonight she once more would grace this lowly neighborhood with her presence.
‡
Israel
Kesev could feel the sweat trickle from his armpits as he clutched the ends of his arm rests and stared out the window of El Al flight 001. He saw Tel Aviv and the coast of Israel fall away beneath him. Anyone watching him would think he was afraid of flying. He did not like it, true, but that was not what filled him with such anxiety.
Never before in his long life had he left his homeland. The very idea had been unthinkable until now. And even under these extraordinary circumstances, he was uneasy. He had never wanted to be more than a few hours away from the Resting Place. Now there would be a continent and an ocean between him and the site in the Wilderness where he had vowed to spend the rest of his days.
Not that it mattered now. The Mother was gone. His duty was to follow her to wherever she now lay.
And Kesev had a pretty good idea now where that might be.
New York.
He couldn’t be sure, of course. The visions of the Virgin Mary in Manhattan meant nothing by themselves. On any given day, someone somewhere thought he or she had been gifted with a vision of the Mother of God, and this was nothing new for New York. Since the 1970’s a woman named Veronica in a place called Bayside had claimed to see and speak to the Virgin on a regular basis. And more recently in Queens had been the painting of the Mother that had seeped oil.
Since the Mother’s theft Kesev had accumulated a huge collection of reports on these visions. Lately the vast majority seemed to occur in America. Some were utterly absurd—the image of the Blessed Virgin in the browned areas on a flour tortilla, in a patch of mold on the side of a refrigerator, in a forkful of spaghetti, on the side of a leaking fuel tank—and could be discarded without a second thought.
Others were more traditional apparitions, often repeated on a scheduled basis, such as the first Sunday or first Friday of the month, but although thousands would be in attendance for the occasion, the actual vision was restricted to a single individual. Kesev marked these as possible but most likely the product of one unbalanced mind and fed by the public’s yearning for something, anything that might indicate a Divine Presence. Visions had been occurring long before the theft of the Mother and would certainly continue after she was returned to where she belonged.
But these Manhattan visions...something about them had sparked a flicker of hope in Kesev. They didn’t follow the pattern of the other sightings. They appeared to be random, had been reported by a wide variety of people belonging to a polyglot of races and religions. When Muslims and Buddhists began reporting visions of a softly glowing woman in an ankle-length cowled robe, identical to the image Kesev had seen countless times atop the tav rock, he had to give them credence.
And then there was the matter of the cures.
The tabloid press was always touting cures for the incurable, but these were linked to no miracle drug or quack therapy. These were as spontaneous and random as the sightings of the Virgin Mary.
And just like the sightings they all seemed to be clustered in the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
He glanced at his watch. The flight was due to arrive in Kennedy at 5:20 a.m. local time. Shortly after that, Kesev, too, would be in Lower Manhattan. Searching.
If the Mother was there, Kesev would find her. He had to. And when he did he would silence the thieves so they could not reveal what they knew. Then he would return the Mother to the Resting Place where she belonged, where she would remain until the Final Days.
Only two questions bothered Kesev. Who were these people who had stolen the Mother away from him? The job was so smoothly and skillfully done, leaving not a trace of a trail, they had to be professionals. If that were so, why was no one trumpeting her discovery? He was overjoyed that there had been no such announcement, for that meant he could still set matters right before irreparable damage was done. But why the silence? Could it be they didn’t know what they had? Or were they, perhaps, trying to verify what they had? Whatever the reason, he could not let this opportunity pass.