Free F Paul Wilson - Novel 03 by Virgin (as Mary Elizabeth Murphy) (v2.1)

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.
                  He wore