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.”

“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, but 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 injured 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, 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.