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.

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.