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Another of those rehearsed shrugs. "I'm a bouncer at the
whorehouse where your son spent much of his money last night."

The father
sighed and shook his head in dismay. "Charlie, Charlie, Charlie," he
whispered to
the floor. Then he looked back at Emilio. "That's not
much of a resume."

"I know
the value of silence."

The father
considered this. "Okay. I'll give you a shot. Apply for a work visa and
I'll fit you into plant security. We'll see how you work out."

"I will
work out, senor. I promise." The father kept his word, and within a matter
of weeks Emilio was patrolling
CrenSoft's
Silicon
Valley plant, dressed in the gray uniform of
a security guard. It was deadly dull, but it was a start.

Charlie came by
one day to thank him. He said he remembered being attacked by the three punks,
but little else. Emilio found the boy very shy---he must have needed a tankful
of tequila to work up the courage to walk into The Blue Senorita--and completely
normal in most ways. As the years went on, Emilio actually grew fond of
Charlie. Strange, because Emilio had always hated
maricones.
In truth,
Charlie was the only one Emilio had ever really known. But he liked the boy.
Maybe because there was nothing swishy about him. In fact, no one in security,
or anywhere else in CrenSoft, seemed to have the vaguest notion that Charlie
was a
maricon.

Which was probably why the father called on Emilio to find Charlie
the next time he ran off. Each time Emilio brought the boy back, the father
offered him a bonus, and each time he refused. Emilio was waiting for a bigger
payoff.

That came when
the father sold his company. The entire staff, including security, went with
the deal. All except Emilio. Mr. Crenshaw took Emilio with him when he built
his mansion into a cliff overlooking the Pacific between Carmel and Big Sur. He
put Emilio in charge of security during the construction, and when it was
finished, he kept him on as head of security for the entire estate. The
senador
called the place Paraiso. The papers, the architectural magazines, and the
TV reporters compared Paraiso to San Simeon, and people from all over the world
came to gawk at it. It was Emilio's job to keep them out. He was aided in the
task by the fact that access was limited to a single road which wound through
rough terrain and across a narrow, one-car bridge spanning a deep ravine with a
swift-flowing stream at its base.

After Mr.
Crenshaw became Senator Crenshaw, Emilio often shuttled between Washington and
California on the Crenshaw jet. And now he was shuttling down the West Side of
Manhattan in a stretch limo.

Life was good
on the fast track.

Emilio hadn't
wasted his spare time during the past ten years. He'd gone to night school to
improve his English and his reading. And he'd kept in shape. He'd sworn off the
steroids but kept working out. The result was a slimmer, meaner frame, with
smaller but denser muscles. At forty-one he was faster and stronger than he'd
been in his halcyon days at The Blue Senorita. And this Dog Collar place might
be a little like his old stomping grounds . . . and he did mean
stomping.

He popped his knuckles. He almost hoped somebody got in his way
when he picked up Charlie.

"It's up here on the left," Fred said.

But Emilio was
watching to the right. On the near side of West Street, near the water, a group
of young men dressed in everything from leather pants to off-the-shoulder
blouses were drinking beer and prancing around. Every so often a car would stop
and one of them would swish over and speak to the driver. Sometimes the car would
pull away as it had arrived, and sometimes the young man would get in and be
whisked off for a rolling quicky.

Fred did a
U-turn and pulled up in front of The Dog Collar. As Emilio stepped out, Decker
and Molinari appeared from the shadows. Decker was fair, Molinari was almost as
dark as Emilio.
They were his two best men from the Paraiso security force.

"He's
still there. Want us to--?"

"I'll get
him," Emilio said. "You two watch my back." He pulled out a pair
of plain, black leather gloves. "And be sure to wear your gloves. You
don't want to split a knuckle in this place."

They smiled warily and pulled on their gloves as they followed
Emilio inside.

"He's
wearing a red parka," Decker said as he and Mol flanked the door.

Crowded inside,
and dark. So dark Emilio had to remove his shades. He scanned the bar that
stretched along the wall to his right. No women--not that he'd expected any--and
no red parka. He met some frank, inviting stares, but no sign of Charlie. He
checked out the floor--crowded with cocktail tables, a row of booths along the
far wall, and an empty stage at the rear. Slim waiters with boyish haircuts and
neat little mustaches slipped back and forth among the tables with drinks and
bar food. Emilio spotted two women-- together, of course--but where was Charlie?

He edged his
way through the tables, searching the faces. No red parka. Maybe he'd taken it
off. Who knew what Charlie might look like these days--the color of his hair,
what he'd be wearing? One thing Emilio had to say for the boy, he was discreet.
He wasn't deliberately trying to ruin his father's political chances. He
usually rented a place under an assumed name, never told any of his rotating
lovers who he was, and generally kept a low profile. But nonetheless he
remained a monster political liability.

Maybe that was
why the
senador
had decided it was time to reel Charlie in. He'd been
gone for almost two years now. Emilio had tracked him to New York through the
transfers
from his trust fund. He'd traced him
across the country but now he couldn't spot him across this single room. Had he
made Decker and slipped out the back?

Emilio was
about to return to the door to quiz Decker when he saw a flash of red in the
rearmost booth and homed in on it like a beacon. Two guys in the booth--the one
holding the parka had his back to him. Emilio repressed a gasp when he saw his
face. It was Charlie. The curly brown hair was the same, as were the blue eyes,
but he looked so thin. Emilio barely recognized the boy.

Why do I still
think of him as a boy? he wondered. He's twenty-five.

Perhaps it was
because part of his brain would always associate Charlie with the pudgy
teenager he'd carried out of that Tijuana alley.

Charlie looked
up at Emilio with wide blue eyes that widened further when he recognized him.

"Oh,
shit," Charlie said. "You found me."

"Time to
go home, Charlie."

"Let me
be, Emilio. I'm settled in here. I'm not bothering anybody. I'm actually
happy
here. Just tell Dad you couldn't find me."

"That
would be lying, Charlie. And I never lie . . . to your dad."

He grabbed the
boy under his right arm and began to pull him from his seat. Charlie tried to
wriggle free but it was like a Chihuahua resisting a pit bull.

The guy in the
other half of the booth stood up and gave Emilio a two-handed shove.

"Get your
mitts off him, fucker!"

He was beefier than Charlie, with decent pects and a
good set of shoulders under the T-shirt and leather vest he wore, but he was
out of his league. Way out.

"No
me
jodas!"
Emilio said and smashed a right uppercut to his jaw that
slammed him back into the inner corner of the booth. He slumped there and
stared up at Emilio with a look of dazed pain.

Emilio turned
and started dragging Charlie toward the
door,
knocking over tables in his way. He didn't want a full-scale brawl but he
wouldn't have minded another
maricon
or two trying to block his way. But
most of them seemed too surprised and off guard to react. Too bad. He was in
the mood to kick some ass. He saw the bartender come out from behind the bar
hefting an aluminum baseball bat. Decker and Mol intercepted him, and after a
brief struggle Mol was holding the bat and the bartender was back behind the
bar.

Once he was
free of the tables, Emilio swung the stumbling Charlie around in front of him
and propelled him toward the door. Decker and Mol closed in behind them as they
exited. Emilio heard the bat clank on the floor as the doors swung closed. Half
a dozen steps across the sidewalk and then they were all inside the limo,
heading uptown.

Charlie opened
the door on the other side but Emilio pulled him back before he could jump out.

"You'll
get killed that way, kid."

"I don't
care!" Charlie said. "Dammit, Emilio, you can't do this! It's
kidnapping!"

"Just
following orders. Your father misses you."

"Yeah.
Sure."

Charlie folded
his arms and legs and withdrew into himself. He spent the rest of the trip
staring at the floor.

Emilio kept a
close eye on him. He didn't want him trying to jump out of the car
again--although that might be a blessing for all concerned.

He sighed. Why
did the
senador
want this miserable creature around? He seemed to love
the boy despite the threat posed by his twisted nature. Was that parenthood?
Was that what fathering a child did to you? Made you lose your perspective?
Emilio was glad he'd spared himself the affliction. But if he'd had a child, a
boy, he'd never have let him grow up to be a
maricon.
He would have
beaten that out of him at an early age.

What if Charlie
did die by leaping from a moving vehicle? Or what if he fell prey to a
hit-and-run driver? A
major stumbling block on
the
senador's
road to the White House would be removed.

Emilio decided
to start keeping a mental file of "accidental" ways for Charlie to
die should the need suddenly arise. The
senador
would never order it,
but if the need ever arose, Emilio might decide to act on his own.

I was two decades and a half in the desert when they came to me.
How they found me, I do not know. Perhaps the Lord guided them. Perhaps they
followed the reek of my corruption.

They too
were in flight, hiding from the Romans and their lackeys in the Temple. The
brother of He whose name I deserve not to speak led them. They were awed by my
appearance, and I by theirs. Barely did I recognize them, so exhausted were
they by their trek.

I was
astounded to learn that they had brought the Mother with them.

from the Glass scroll

Rockefeller
Museum translation

5

Father Dan
Fitzpatrick strolled the narrow streets of his Lower East Side parish and drank
in the colors flowing around him. Sure there was squalor here, and poverty and
crime, all awash in litter and graffiti, but there was
color
here. Not
like the high-rise midtown he'd visited last night, with its sterile
concrete-and-marble plazas, its faceless glass-and-granite office towers.

A mere forty
blocks from the Waldorf, the Lower East Side might as well be another country.
No skyscrapers here. Except for aberrations like the Con-Ed station's quartet
of stacks and the dreary housing projects, the Lower East Side skyline rises to
a uniform six stories. Window-studded facades of cracked and patched brick
crowd together cheek by jowl for block after block, separated occasionally by a
garbage-choked alley. They're all brick of varying shades of red, sometimes
brown or gray, and every so often a daring pink or yellow or blue. With no room
behind or to either side, a mazework of mandatory fire escapes hangs over the
sidewalks, clinging to the brick facades like spidery steel parasites,
ready-made perches for the city's winged rat, the pigeon.

Everywhere Dan
looked, everything was old, with no attempt to recapture youth. Graffiti formed
the decorative motif, layer upon layer until the intertwined snake squiggles
and balloon letters were indecipherable even to their perpetrators. The store
signs he could read advertised old bedding, fresh vegetables, used furniture,
and the morning
paper, offered food, candy, magazines,
cashed checks, and booze, booze, booze. And some signs he couldn't read--
Koreans and Vietnamese were moving in. He passed pawnshops, bodegas, boys'
clubs, schools, churches, and playgrounds. Children still played, even here.

He looked up at
the passing windows. Behind them lived young, hopeful immigrants on their way
up, middle-aged has-beens on their way down, and too many running like hell
just to stay in place. And out here on the streets dwelt the never-weres and
the never-will-bes, going nowhere, barely even sure of where they were at any
given moment.