The Stone That Never Came Down Read Online Free

last time.
    “‘Whereas Sicilian peasants, whose brutal Mafia-dominated culture has ruined their own homeland and who have no less tenuous connection with Britain than the fact that both islands were ruled by Norman bandits some nine centuries ago, are permitted to go and come as they please, blacks from the Commonwealth to whom the British owe an incalculable debt are barred from the nation that grew fat by sucking their ancestors’ blood, or if by some miracle they do achieve entry are constantly at risk of being deported.’ ”
    Valentine interrupted her with a gesture. “Now you all done like I said? You all bought different papers and marked up bits that prove the truth of what the man says there?”
    They had, and one by one they read out what they had found. Brooding, he sat and tried to listen, but found he was hearing more clearly the renewed coughs of his half-white son.

III

    Brother Bradshaw was in California. His home overlooked a magnificent vista, clear down a long valley, over the silvery mist shrouding Los Angeles, and out to sea. It had been bought before his conversion, when he was one of the world’s highest-paid TV stars. If anything, he was handsomer now than he had been at the height of his career; a touch of grey at his temples added distinction, and a little more weight conveyed an impression of trustworthy maturity.
    In the old days, the wall of this huge room, which currently was decorated with pictures of him chatting to the Pope, the Cardinal Archbishop of New York, and a great many Just Plain Folks who had Seen the Light because of him, had been covered with a montage of photos showing him in very different postures and many fewer clothes.
    “But I don’t want to go to England!” he kept insisting, in a voice which annoyance had heightened from its usual resonant baritone towards a querulous tenor. “Don’t I have enough to do over here? What with nearly three hundred murders in Greater Los Angeles last month–”
    “But this invitation is personal from Lady Washgrave,” Don Gebhart insisted. He had said it all before, but he had been a professional evangelist himself until he took over the management of Brother–formerly Bob–Bradshaw, so he was well used to saying the same thing over and over with equal conviction every time. “You know how much weight she swings. Her Campaign Against Moral Pollution has a hundred fifty local chapters. A cabinet minister regularly speaks at her meetings, this guy Charkall-Phelps. And she’s batting one-oh-oh in her drive to clean up literature and TV. It’s three years since she last had an obscenity verdict overturned on appeal. Nobody monkeys with Lady Washgrave!”
    “I know!” Bradshaw barked. “I know !”
    “So why won’t you accept?” Gebhart pressed.
    Bradshaw didn’t answer.
    “Listen, Bob,” Gebhart said at last. “You never knew me to give you bum advice, did you? Well, what I’m saying is this. You join in her New Year’s Crusade, and you’ll be on the map for good and all. It would make you–well, it would make you the Billy Graham of the nineteen-eighties!”
    More silence. Eventually, with dreadful reluctance, Bradshaw sketched a nod.
    “Great!” Gebhart exclaimed. “I’ll call her right away–I guess the time is okay in England now–and explain how you want to spend Christmas with your folks, of course, but you’ll be right there on December twenty-eighth ready to join in her grand crusade!”

    “Damn,” muttered Lance-Corporal Dennis Stevens after they had toured the block for the third time. “Nothing else for it, then. You’ll have to double-park while I go in alone.”
    “What else have I been telling you for the past half-hour?” his driver sighed. “Look, lance, the busies aren’t going to give us a ticket, are they?”
    “I suppose not,” Stevens admitted, reaching into the back seat of the olive-drab Army car for the cardboard roll containing the posters he was scheduled to deliver at