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 passed 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 (heart symbol) 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.