"Christopher Moore - Our Lady of the Fishnet Stockings" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moore Christopher)

church about the single most important event in a millennium. It was decided that Sister Octavia would be
given important but low-profile position at the Vatican and brought out and paraded around on holidays
or when someone threatened war (which had stopped all over the world, by the way, since the miracle).
So while Sister Octavia picked up and delivered the papal dry cleaning (the most important work given a
woman in the church) Estrella was sent to very private schools to be trained for Sainthood.
 Eleven years passed before Estrella appeared in public again. Over the years the church leaked
selected tidbits of Estrella's life to the press: She was a perfect student, an accomplished athlete, a painter
and a poet. She was teaching crippled children to walk with crutches, helping deaf children learn sign
language and blind children to read Braille. There was always enough information about Estrella in the
news to keep the public aware of her, but never enough for the Bigfoot chasers to distort. By her
eighteenth birthday the church decided it was time for Estrella to meet the world and prove to them that
she was not a little girl whose shoes were too tight. She was a Saint (or would be soon). The world
moved to the edge of its seat.
 She arrived at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York looking much as the world expected her to look,
that is: Quintessentially Catholic. She wore a white blouse and a plaid skirt with knee socks and saddle
shoes. Her dark hair was done in braids and her face made-up only by nature. She was given a tour of
New York by the Archbishop and the media had a field day with images of the miracle girl against a
backdrop of the Big Apple. At Columbia's primate laboratory she spoke sign language with a chimp in
front of five networks and thirty-nine countries. When a reporter asked her to sign something for the
camera she graciously obliged him and for a few moments only the hearing impaired people of the would
knew that she had told the reporter to "go jump up a porcupine's ass."
 Temptation is the constant companion of Saints and Saviors, martyrs and messiahs, but unlike most
who resist it, Estrella challenged its creativity. The next time the media caught up with her she was at a
fashionable New York disco wearing her knee socks and saddle shoes -- only her knee socks and
saddle shoes. She flew to Los Angeles with a rock group in their private jet and they canceled three
performances so they could rest from the flight. She sat in some cement outside Grumann's Chinese
Theater, played a bit part in a picture called Ninja Babysitters, did a guest spot on a game show, won
ten thousand-dollars, went to bed with the host and two contestants, and was on a plane for Paris before
she'd been in town forty-eight hours. Temptation didn't have a chance.
 The supermarket scandal sheets hadn't had anything like it since the "stopping of the bullets". The
television networks were euphemizing at a furious pace while trying to mobilize camera teams to follow
Estrella. When her plane landed in Paris she was met by a special envoy from the Vatican with a message
from the Pope. It said simply: "Why are you doing this?" Her answer, scribbled on the back of a "shrine
of the Blessed Bullets" postcard, was equally simple: "It beats shining the shoes of a fisherman?" The
Pope was at a loss.
 Within hours Estrella was put in jail when the curators of the Louver refused to acknowledge her claim
that Saint Estrella Screwing a Guard was a major work of living sculpture and should be allowed to
remain on display for its religious significance. She was put in solitary confinement when she caused a
minor riot by insisting the cowards put her in front of a firing squad. The next morning she was released in
care of her lawyer, B. Sneed Banducci, who herded her through a seething maggotry of reporters to a
nearby cathedral where he announced that Estrella would take confession before holding a press
conference.
 Estrella emerged from the confessional a blossom of renewed purity, soul, retreaded, spiritual hymen
replaced. Her confessor was dragged out ears bleeding, face locked into a rictus of frustrated ecstasy.
(Estrellas penance, seventy-three million Hail Mary's, was later appealed by Banducci and reduced to
five stations of the cross and ten weeks of service as mistress of ceremonies on the Vatican cable
networks bingo show.)
 On the steps of the cathedral Estrella threw her arms around B. Sneed Banducci and announced that
she planned to marry the corpulent attorney whom she had fallen in love with when he had come to her
school to teach a course in corporate canon law. The wedding would be held -- God willing -- at the