Virgin (32 page)

between the
figure and the AIDS cures. Therefore I would strongly caution anyone with AIDS

from abandoning
their current therapy and coming down here looking for a miracle cure. You

might just find
the opposite."

The Daily News

CDC to Begin Epidemiological Study On
Lower
East Side

(Atlanta, AP) The Center for Disease Control
has announced it will begin a limited

epidemiological
study of the five cases of AIDS reported cured of the Lower East Side of

Manhattan.
Spokesman for the Center .
.
.

The
New York Times

Paraiso

"Are these
all the clippings?" Arthur Crenshaw asked as he reread the
Times
article
for the third time.

"The
latest batch," Emilio said.

Arthur slipped
the rest of the clippings back into the manila envelope but held on to the
Times
and
Daily News
pieces. For a moment he stared through the glass at
the Pacific, glistening in the early afternoon sun, then glanced to his right
where Charlie lay.

He'd turned the
great room into a miniature medical facility: a state-of-the-art AIDS clinic
with round-the-clock nursing, a medical consultant with an international
reputation in infectious diseases, and a patient census of one.

All to no
avail.

Charlie was
fading fast. He'd received maximum doses of the standard AIDS medications,
including triple therapy, and had even undergone a course of a new and
promising drug that was still in the experimental stages. Nothing worked.
Apparently he'd picked up a particularly virulent strain of the virus and had
ignored the symptoms in the early stages. Only scant vestiges of Charlie's
immune system had
remained by the time he'd
started treatment. On his last visit, Dr. Lamberson would not commit to how
much time he thought Charlie had, but he said the prognosis was very grave
indeed. Ordinarily Lamberson would laugh at the thought of a house call, but
with what Arthur was paying him, he came when called. He'd just brought Charlie
through a severe bout of
pneumocystis
pneumonia and said another would
certainly kill him.

Charlie was
sleeping now. His hospital bed had been wheeled closer to the glass wall so he
could read in the sunlight, and he'd dozed off after a few pages. He had no
strength, no stamina, and the pounds were melting from his frame like butter.
And he was so
pale.
Arthur had begun insisting on colored sheets so that
he could look at his son without feeling he was being absorbed into the
mattress.

Charlie,
Charlie, Arthur thought as he stared at his son. If only you'd listened! Dear
boy, you never meant to hurt anyone. You don't deserve this. Please don't die,
not until I can work up the courage to tell you I understand, that for a while
I . . . I was like you. Almost like you.

It had been
back in the sixties, in the hedonistic dens behind the Victorian facades of Haight
Ashbury. Arthur had been looking for himself, trying anything--drugs, and sex.
All kinds of sex.
For a year he had lived in a commune where group sex was a
nightly ritual. Every combination was tried--men and women together, women with
women, and . . . men with men. He had tried it for a while, even enjoyed it for
a while, but as time went on, he realized it wasn't for him.

Been there,
done that,
as the expression went.

But he'd never
considered it as a lifestyle. Yet the memories haunted him. What if someone
from those days stepped forward with stories of young Artie Crenshaw having sex
with other men?

Many a night
the possibility dragged him sweating and gasping from his sleep.

Not fair. Those
days were long past. An aberration. He'd repented, and he was sure he'd been
forgiven. He wanted
Charlie to be forgiven as
well. But would learning about his father's past lighten Charlie's burden?

Arthur didn't
know. If only he
knew.

So much he
didn't know. Especially about AIDS. Arthur had begun his own research, learning
all he could--more than he wished to know--about HIV, ARC, CD4, p24, AZT, TP-5,
and all the rest of the alphabet soup that was such an integral part of the
AIDS canon. He hired a clipping service to comb the world's newspapers,
magazines, and medical journals for anything that pertained to AIDS. The flow
of information was staggering, mind-numbing. What he could not comprehend he
brought to Dr. Lamberson's attention.

The phone rang.
Emilio answered it, said a few harsh words, then hung up.

"Who was
it?" Arthur said without looking around.

"That
puta
reporter again. She wants an interview with Charlie."

Arthur closed
his eyes. Gloria Weskerna from the
Star.
It still baffled him how she'd
got his home number.

Somehow she'd
picked up word that Senator Crenshaw's son was sick. Something was wrong with
the son of a potential presidential candidate. What could it be? She and others
of her tribe had started sniffing around like stray dogs in a garbage dump,
hunting for anything ripe and juicy. Emilio had tightened security, carefully
screening the nurses, setting up a round-the-clock guard at the front gate, and
spiriting Dr. Lamberson and the nurses in and out in the black-glassed
limousine.

"Change
the phone number, Emilio," he said without looking around.

"Yes,
Senador.
If you wish, I can change this reporter's mind about hounding you."

Arthur turned
to face his security man. "Really? How would you do that?"

"She might
have a serious accident--a bad fall, perhaps, after which her home could burn
and her car could be stolen. She would have so many other things on her mind
that she would not have time to bother you."

Emilio said it
so casually, as if planning a shopping list for the supermarket. Not a glimmer
of amusement lightened his Latin features. Arthur knew he was not being put on.
Emilio's sense of humor was about as active as Charlie's immune system.

Arthur trusted
Emilio implicitly, but sometimes he was very frightening.

"I don't
think so, Emilio. We'll just continue to stonewall. Our position will remain
aloof: We admit nothing, we deny nothing. Implicit in our silence is the stance
that these rags are not worthy of serious attention. That's the only way to keep
the lid on things."

"As you
wish,
Senador."

Arthur realized he could keep the lid on Charlie's illness only so
long as he stayed alive. If he died . . . he reminded himself with a pang that
it wasn't really an
if
--it was a
when . . .
and soon.

When Charlie died, the shit would hit the fan. He might be able to
dissuade the medical examiner from doing an autopsy, but the death certificate
was another matter. He could not expect Dr. Lamberson to jeopardize his
reputation, his medical license, and his entire career by falsifying a legal
document.

He winced as he
imagined the headlines.

SENATOR CRENSHAW'S SON DIES OF AIDS!!

That would be
damaging, but he could weather it. He could not be held accountable for his
son's actions. In fact, he could turn it around and blame Charlie's death on
the moral bankruptcy of modern America. America was on the road to ruin, and
who better to turn it around and lead it from the darkness into the light than
a man who had been so grievously wounded by the nation's moral turpitude?

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,"
he said, "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 to be 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, so 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 down here 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 armrests
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.