The Sixth Station (11 page)

He must have picked up my concern, because he called back, “Don’t worry, God is on your side.”

Oh. “Next time he chooses up sides, you think I can be spared from His team?” I said, waiting for an answer that didn’t come.

“Eugene? Father Sadowski?” I heard him mount the stairs and open the door. Then I heard it slam shut.

10

I tried to feel my way along the wall. It was damp and felt cool-going-to-cold. Like a tomb.
Like the tomb of Jesus Himself,
I thought for no reason, and I suddenly had an overwhelming need to get out of there.

I felt my way along the damp walls and reached the stairs. I mounted a few steps, forgetting that I was wearing the damned habit, and caught a stacked heel on the hem. I fell backward probably six or so steps and hit my head against the rear stone wall.
OK, I really, really need to get outta here,
I thought, frantically rubbing the back of my head over the veil. Was I bleeding? I didn’t feel anything wet, so I stood back up carefully and felt for the stairs again.

I made my way back up and reached for the doorknob. Locked.

Panic hit in a way that I hadn’t experienced since I let go of my mom’s hand at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade when I was seven. The difference was on Thanksgiving my mom had reached through the crowd and grabbed me up in about ten seconds. There was no one to grab me now—although I feared that right outside that locked door there may well, in fact, be two people: one in Armani and one in a clerical collar. Was I simply having an anxiety attack, or were my reporter instincts taking over?

Be rational.

I moved back down the stairs and felt my way through the tunnel and up the opposite stairs to the rectory door. Locked again. Why would Eugene lock me in?

Just then I heard the other door opening on its old hinges. Sadowski called out, “Alessandra? Where are you? It’s safe. Come on, we don’t have time.”

In full anxiety attack mode now, I heard him climbing down the stairs.

“Oh, boy,” I heard him mutter. Then, “Alessandra! Dammit. Where are you? Alessandra!”

I was barely breathing, or trying my hardest not to, my heart pounding so hard I was sure it was echoing around the tunnel.

“Alessandra!”
Ms. Russo, you don’t know what you’re dealing with.

He called out, “I had to check to see if there was anybody out there.”

At that, the lights came blazing back on, and there he was standing right at the bottom of the steps below me. Holding a gun.

I let out a cry, and he looked down and said, “Oh. This.”

I tried to make myself as small as possible as he started up the stairs. “I went back into the rectory to get it,” he said. “In case—”

“In case of what?” I whispered, my voice almost leaving me completely.

“In case the goons who trashed your place were out there.” He was three steps from me now.

“It’s all clear,” he said, holding out his free hand.

“No!” I said.

He seemed surprised. “I told you, there’s nobody out in the school or the yard. It’s okay. Really.”

“What do you want? Why are you doing this? You have a gun and you locked me in.”

“No,” he said, dragging out the word. “I locked
them out,
in case there
was
a them, that is. But there isn’t. Come on now … just step down toward me.…”

“No.”

“What choice do you have? You can trust me, or you can stay there until you get older than the wine.”

“Not funny.”

“But I think you have more important things to do.”

“What?”

“Alessandra, Alessandra, Alessandra,” he said more like a frustrated dad than a frustrated father. “Haven’t you started to figure anything out yet? Me? I think you’re the one who gets to tell the story.…”

“I don’t know what you mean!” I looked at him, one hand held out like a lifeline, while in the other he held a gun that could end my life.

When I didn’t move, he raised the hand with the gun, as I let out a groan. “Oh, God…”

“Here,” he said. “Take it.”

Was he going to fire the instant I grabbed the gun? Self-defense and all that? With no choice, I took the gun from him. Just like that.

He took my free hand. “Come on now, we don’t have much time.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. Time? As of that morning, I either had too much time or none at all. I slipped the gun into my red bag and held on to his hand. Crazy? Definitely.

We walked through the church’s tunnel once more, came up the opposite stairs, and emerged into the same area we’d walked through the night before. School was not in session. The crowds made it too dangerous.

Sadowski and I walked through the play area, filled with the overflow crowd avoiding the construction site, onto Forty-eighth Street.

How can life go on normally when everything in yours is in upheaval?

For now we were just two clerics walking through. There was a full contingent of guards at the Libya House across the street where Gadhafi used to stay when he gave his rants at the United Nations.

If I’d thought that a press pass helped in parting the crowds, it was nothing compared to a nun’s habit. Nobody messed with the sisters. The sea of humans parted like the Red Sea before Moses. Sadowski chuckled at my reaction. I was starting to trust him again.

“There are some advantages to a life of celibacy,” he yelled above the noise of the protesters.

We managed to turn onto Second Avenue, push through the walls of people, and finally make it to Grand Central. There were police posted at every entrance. I boldly pushed forward and stood on the line to get in.

“Ah, you can’t pass through the metal detectors,” Sadowski reminded me. “The gun?”

“Oh. What now?”

I felt him reach into my bag and slip the gun out and under his cassock.

“How will you get on the subway with the gun?” I asked.

“Clearly, I won’t. You’re on your own. The parking garage is West 125th Street between Adam Clayton and Malcolm X. You can’t miss it. Well, you could, but most people wouldn’t.” He handed me a key and said, “It’s spot number G156—self-park.”

When I was near the front of the line, the priest handed me his iPhone. “Good luck. And remember, God is on your side!” In a second he was swallowed up by the crowd—just another cleric in a city full of them. I climbed down into the belly of the station until I got to the “7” train’s dirty platform, where I peered down the tracks for an oncoming train, and then back around the platform for—what?—I didn’t really know. The “German”?

The train finally roared into the station, and hundreds of passengers rushed out as an equal number rushed back in. It was beyond “SRO,” so I planted my fat stacked heels on the floor, grabbed a pole, and held on, making sure not to curse un-nun-like at anyone who would have dared to push me. But no one did. It was the habit. In fact, two people got up to offer me their seats. I took one, I’m ashamed to say.

I switched to the “D” train at the Bryant Park station. I was a nun—not a reporter.
Don’t call attention to yourself,
I kept repeating like a mantra.

Again several people who’d probably gone to Catholic school offered up their seats. The fear of nuns runs deep.

I exited at 125th Street, Harlem’s busiest, where fast-food chain restaurants thrive along with the local fried-chicken joints, coffee shops, and mom-and-pop clothing shops blaring old-school funk out of their exterior speakers.

I almost cried at the real life out there that had nothing to do with the unreality that my life had become.

I walked a couple of blocks in my nun’s habit noticing how people nodded and smiled and showed the kind of respect that New Yorkers just don’t give to people wearing normal clothes.

In the middle of the block, I saw the big illuminated plastic
UPARKIT.COM
sign mounted sideways to the building. A low-rent joint if ever I’d seen one. It would be safer to park on an abandoned street. Didn’t Sadowski ever watch TV? Everyone who walks into a parking garage on TV gets beaten, killed, and/or raped.

Luckily the
G
in G156 stood for “ground,” so at least I didn’t have to climb any stairwells.

Who’d rape a nun? Oh, right, Riverside, California, Chicago, and here in Harlem, when they left that nun carved up with twenty-seven crosses decades ago—case study Journalism 101. Don’t think about that now.…

A big brand-new shiny black Cadillac SUV—like the kind the mayor drove around in—was in the space.

This had to be wrong. It was like renting a Smart car and getting a Rolls by mistake.

I clicked the key-lock button for the hell of it and heard the door unlock. I jumped in as quickly as possible, heard it lock, and removed the habit, keeping on the wimple. The GPS lit up, and I punched in “Grinnell St., Rhinecliff, NY.” “No address found” was the answer.

Hoping I’d figure out all the electronics as I drove, I pulled out into the bright light of day, turned east onto 125th Street and from there over the Willis Avenue Bridge, onto the Deegan, past Yankee Stadium, and onto the Taconic Parkway.

Checking my rearview mirror, expecting a tail—the “German” maybe—I saw nothing. But, hey, I’d been on enough surveillances myself to know that meant nothing. A tail was never detectable unless an amateur was at the wheel or the professional driver wanted the tail to be seen.

Twenty minutes into the drive north I finally relaxed, fairly sure I was OK. I removed the wimple, hit “cruise control,” and let go and let God, as Sadowski might have said.

I hit the satellite button for Fox all-news radio to catch up on the morning’s events at the tribunal.

Whose voice did I hear but Dona’s!
Radio?
She was reporting live from the UN. Her firsthand, eyewitness reports yesterday on the tribunal must have made her “sourced” enough to take the lead for all of the Fox outlets.
At least something good came out of this fiasco,
I thought. I also felt a twinge of jealousy.
She gets to lead and I get led out the door. And I’m the one he “chose”?

Her first words snapped me back to reality. “It’s been a wild, wild day so far at the trial of suspected terror mastermind Demiel ben Yusef. As of now, we do not have an answer as to why ben Yusef spoke as though his biological father were still alive. According to his lawyers, Demiel ben Yusef was either an orphan or raised by a single mother, who also is now dead. If you recall, in court yesterday ben Yusef had handed his attorney a slip of paper, written in Aramaic, which stated that he would only answer to his father.

“When court resumed this morning, Chief Judge Fatoumata Bagayoko addressed that by informing the defendant and his attorneys that since the man on trial has, on record, no living relatives, and we know that his father is dead these past thirty-three years, he must have been talking about the ‘Master of the Universe’ or ‘God.’ In that case, she went on, and I quote, ‘That means Mr. ben Yusef, that you will have to answer to this court, because that is the closest you are going to get to God. In this lifetime, at any rate.’ The remark caused even the assembled heads of state to snicker.

“However, not everyone was amused. A reporter from Aljazeera, Abdul-Basit Hassan, yelled out, ‘And not in the next lifetime, either, traitor of Allah!’ Again, for the second day, near rioting broke out as Hassan was grabbed kicking and screaming by UN security forces and escorted out to a loud chorus of boos by reporters in the press area.

“It is unclear at this time if the words written in Aramaic correspond to or are connected to those that he whispered to
New York Standard
reporter Alessandra Russo at the opening of yesterday’s tribunal, since she was only able to repeat them phonetically, which was how she wrote them in her column. If so, the implications are great, because, according to at least one linguistic expert at the United Nations with whom I spoke, it is possible that he was trying to give her some sort of coded message. Reporting live from the United Nations, this is Dona Grimm.”

Message, my ass. The whole brouhaha was over a clichéd phrase like that? Jesus! Holy crap!

Comfortable now with the fancy car, I clicked on the priest’s iPod icon on the dashboard, figuring I’d get Gregorian chants. I hit “favorites,” and Sadowski’s voice filled the car.

“Hello, Alessandra,” the recording began. “By now you know this is more than blind good luck.…”

11

“Good luck?” I shouted to the invisible Sadowski. “Bastard! You set me up, didn’t you?” as though this were a two-way.

What’s he up to? He was probably responsible for the effing break-in!

Sadowski’s voice continued; clearly the recording hadn’t heard me.

“Well, despite what you are thinking right at this moment, Alessandra, the fact that you are sitting in this car means that your luck is not just good, but so extraordinary that it took thousands of years for you to be right here, right now. Can you believe that?”

No!

“In fact,” he continued, “we don’t even know why you’re in this car or where you are supposed to be headed. We just had a car standing by in case. Frankly, until yesterday, we thought it was meant to be your buddy, Dona. You weren’t even on our radar. But it’s a wonderful, wonderful surprise, by the way,” and then he cackled. Cackled!

“Wonderful? Maniac,” I called out, hoping that somehow he could hear me. I was sure there was a camera somewhere and I was being watched.

And I was worried about the damned “German”? He’d probably
sent
the “German” just to scare me into this whole situation. Maybe even the Maureen Wright-Lewis call was part of the setup. What a schmuck.

“Wherever this car is taking you, we wish you Godspeed,” he went on in his best sermonizer voice. “Oh, and that phone I gave you? It’s a satellite phone with a secure line. There’s a charger in the glove box. Please take it out and put it in that red bag of yours. Remember to do that, will you?

“Anyway, my number’s programmed in, as well as others you may need on your journey. God! I hate saying things like that. I sound like the secret love child of Dr. Phil and Oprah.” Another giggle.
A regular laugh riot, Father Lying Bastard!