“Damn!” he muttered as his fingers probed more deeply under Vincenzo’s ribs.
“Something wrong?” Vincenzo said, exhaling at last.
“No. I mean, yes. I mean...”
Vincenzo sat up and pulled down his undershirt.
“I don’t understand.”
Karras ran a hand through his short black hair. “Neither do I.”
“Perhaps you’d better tell me the problem, Doctor. I think I deserve to know.”
The examination had started out routinely enough, with Vincenzo arriving at the outpatient cancer clinic, reading in the waiting room until his name was called, and then being examined by Dr. Karras. But after examining him just as he had now, Karras had stepped over to the chart and pulled out yesterday’s blood test results. After checking those for what seemed like an unduly long time and shuffling through the sheaf of previous reports, he examined Vincenzo’s abdomen again, then sent him for a CT scan of the liver, with comparison to the previous study.
“Stat,” he’d said into the phone. “Double stat.”
So Vincenzo had allowed himself to be swallowed by the metal gullet of the scanner where his liver could be radiographically sliced and diced, and now he was back again on the examining table. He had an inkling as to the nature of Dr. Karras’s discomfiture, but dared not voice it...dared not even think it.
“The problem is—”
The intercom beeped. “Doctor Weiskopf is here.”
“Weiskopf?” Karras said. “From radiology? What’s—? Oh, shit. Excuse me.” He all but leapt for 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,” 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?” 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.