The Sixth Station (8 page)

“Right.”

This whole bullshit is because of me! Everything I know is changing at the speed of light.

If only I’d known then that my world had already changed. Thing is, everyone knew that but me. And that was only my first big failing. If I’d only understood.…

5

The second sign that I was no longer just plain old (and feeling very old at the moment, actually) Alessandra Russo was that Dona started bugging me about the interview. I mean, I couldn’t even imagine interviewing her. We already knew everything about each other. But I knew that if I didn’t give in, she’d keep it up until I did it.

Feeling all banged up from the day’s bizarre events, I managed to compose myself as Dona turned her camera on me. No, I’d never met Demiel ben Yusef; yes, I was shocked that he kissed me; no, I didn’t feel compromised nor did I feel assaulted or shamed. I intended to continue working as though nothing extraordinary had happened, and I could only assume it was because I was in the right place at the wrong time. Or something.

God knows what she got me to say, because I was in such a rush to get my column done that I wasn’t paying all that much attention.

I’d also forgotten to turn my cell phone back on after I’d left the UN because, hey, these things can happen when you’re being chased by a mad crowd into the sanctuary of a Catholic church (OK, a garden of a Catholic church), an institution you hadn’t stepped into for at least ten years.

When I turned my cell back on, I saw that I had forty messages and that my mailbox was full. I assumed thirty-nine of them were from Dickie Smalls, so without playing any of them back, I called the desk.

“What the hell have you been doing?” Dickie screamed into the phone without once pausing to hear what I had to say. “Do you not know this is the biggest story of the frigging year? Have you written your column? We want forty inches—more if you want. What was it like? The kiss? Wet? What? Why you? Direct from Bob, put in how disgusted you were by the whole thing and that you want the world to know that this baby killer should die.”

“But Dickie—” I tried to say.

To which he responded, “Get it done in fifteen minutes. We’re putting out a special because of this, and we’re going big and going early.”

“Am I columning on it?”

“You bet.” And with that he again hung up.

Father handed me coffee and a big cognac, while I feverishly wrote and then filed a column exactly twenty-three minutes later using the present tense. (Newspaper reporters always write for the next day, but if you’re filing online, you write in the present tense.)

Kiss of Death

By Alessandra Russo

Nothing would, could, should have, in my life, ever prepared me for what happened to me today.

Not kissed by a lover nor a friend but by someone I thought of as a mass murderer. And after nearly being mobbed by reporters because the man I thought of as a mass murderer had kissed me, that man once again sought me out.

At the end of today’s proceedings he came up to me and whispered words that I still can’t decipher or comprehend.

I can see by the instant blogs and rush-to-air / should-know-better newscasts that I am now considered a “friend” of ben Yusef’s, someone who’s known him secretly or, as one idiot blogger maintains, “for longer than she will admit.”

Admit? Admit to what?

No, I’d never met this man before in my life. No, he’s not my Facebook “friend,” and no, we aren’t secret lovers who plan to overthrow the world.

I don’t know why I was singled out. I still can’t figure it out—and I would love to say that I don’t want to figure it out either and be done with it, but I do of course want to figure it out.

Why me? What does he want with me?

I’d like to think that it’s because I’m so important, so irresistible, and so well read, but, hey, that’s just not true.

So, really, here’s how it went down, and this is all I know myself:

As the reporters scuffled in front of the UN today, my pal, video blogger and Fox 5 reporter Dona Grimm, and I managed to steal some space at the curb. We expected to get a good look at the suspect from that angle. We got the shock of our lives instead.

For reasons I still can’t explain, except for maybe dumb luck or bad luck, the van holding the suspect, Demiel ben Yusef, stopped right in front of us. As you know by now, as he exited the van, shackled hand and foot, we saw him (and this I can positively attest to) nod his head so slightly that it was almost more of a thought than an action.

At that moment, everything stopped for me. The roar of the crowd, the insanity of the mob, the aggression of the reporters, and even the movement of the federal agents turned into slow motion, or maybe
sluggish
is a better term.

Then I found that even I, intrepid, note-taking reporter, lowered my pad as ben Yusef ambled toward me. He stared at me—and I was shocked to see a depth of feeling in those eyes (and I can’t for sure explain what the feeling was), and then without warning, he leaned into me and kissed me on the mouth!

So what does it feel like to be kissed by an alleged terrorist? I’d like to say that it’s no different from any kiss I’ve ever received, but that would be a lie.

It was, in fact, not like any kiss I’ve ever received. For one thing, the world has never stopped when I was kissed before. I always thought that was just an expression! But in fact, the world did stop; everything seemed so calm and serene in the midst of the madness.

Yes, his mouth was like the mouth of any other man, but then again, not like the mouth of any other man.

And a second later he was gone—pulled away by the federal and UN agents, and suddenly the world around us became filled once more with movement and sound. I don’t know what happened. I don’t know why it happened. And for sure I don’t know why it happened to
me.

Later, when the tribunal wrapped for the day and the suspect was being escorted back out of the grand hall of the UN General Assembly, Demiel ben Yusef again leaned into me and whispered what sounded like “Annie one rakes lehi.” I have no idea what this means. It sounds like a sports headline for a high school girls’ basketball team. Then he whispered, “Go forth for I am six.”

I’m sure the experts will figure it out. Again, Grimm and every camera crew there recorded it all.

I was, of course, once more stunned. Why me? What does he want? Where is this going? Already, the bloggers are calling for my head, as though I am his co-conspirator. That is probably as unsettling and as awful as everything else that has happened to me today.

You know, today I made some remark to Grimm about “mass murderer” and she brought me up short, saying that I must ascribe to a philosophy of “innocent until proven guilty.”

She was right, and you, bloggers and rumormongers out there in cyberspace, couldn’t be more wrong about me, either. But it made me realize that in the same way that you are rushing to judgment about me, I have rushed to judgment about him.

As Judge Bagayoko wisely warned today, no matter how it looks from the outset and the outside (and that’s you in the blogosphere and all the TV talking heads who don’t know what the heck you’re talking about), “Let us then be guided to find the truth so that justice, not the mindless will of the mob, will prevail.”

Edward Gibbon, the eighteenth-century historian, once said about mob mentality, “Man has much more to fear from the passions of his fellow creatures than from the convulsions of the elements.”

I heard that from a priest today—as I was being chased by a crazed mob.

Again: Why me? What does Demiel ben Yusef want from me? Where is this going? Stay tuned.

6

Father Sadowski offered us more coffee and then ordered in Chinese takeout.

“Can I get another cognac?” I asked. Not that I knew one from the next, but the label, “Courvoisier L’Esprit,” sounded calming—and expensive.

Sadowski poured me a generous snifter full, and I downed it like a frat boy chugs a carton of wine cooler, just as the garden-gate bell rang. He checked the video surveillance monitor, and we could all see it was thankfully the delivery guy from Mee takeout.

As we were divvying up the moo shu chicken and fried rice, we were astonished to see our delivery man already on TV, and every other outlet, standing terrified outside the gates of Mary’s Garden, saying to hundreds of crazed reporters, “Nobody! I have paper! Legal! Nobody inside. Priest! Fathah! That all!”

“Oh, God,” I moaned. “How the hell are we ever going to get out of here?”

“There’s a tunnel,” Sadowski said calmly.

“A what?” Brunhilda, whom I’d found out was named Sergeant Carol Clements, said. “Why in hell, excuse me, Father, for my language, but why is there a tunnel, and where does it go?”

“I think it led to a bunch of old storehouses for the riverboats that delivered along the river.”

We knew he was lying. Why he’d lie about such a thing, I couldn’t say—then—but I knew why we thought he was lying. We were all New Yorkers and, worse, reporters and cops, so we naturally assumed most people were lying about most things most of the time. After all, in our businesses we generally only asked questions of people who had something to hide.

“Or whatever,” Sadowski continued. “Anyway, there is a tunnel that comes out in back of the Family School next door, and into the back of Forty-eighth Street.”

It was oddly quiet.

“Where do you live?” he asked me. Why did I have the feeling he somehow already knew?

“Right on the corner there—that white building.”

Carol née Brunhilda informed us, “That’s why it’s closed off to pedestrians except for those with ID who actually live on the street and need to get home.”

I was astonished. Clearly they knew where I lived and so had closed off my street.

“Look! Here we are,” Dona broke in, glued to Sadowski’s giant flat screen, excited to see her interview with me not just on Fox 5 but on Fox News.

“I look fat,” I said. Nobody answered.

“Good, then,” Carol said. “When you’re ready we’ll get you home. We’ll have some officers outside your building and outside your door tonight—”

“Oh, that’s not necessary, really—”

“Yeah. It is,” was all she said.

Concerned that I hadn’t heard back from Dickie or anyone since I’d filed my story, I made one last call to the newsroom before we packed up our stuff.

“News desk,” one of the copy kids answered.

“Hey, it’s Russo. Is Smalls around?”

He put me on hold, then came back on the line. “Dickie said you’re good to go.”
That’s it?
I thought at least I’d hear “Good job” or “Rewrite” or something. “Good to go?” That could mean “it’s edited and in”—or that they were spiking the story.

“So I’m okay?”

“I guess,” answered the kid.

I hung up uneasily. Sadowski stood and walked us across the well-appointed rectory, through a door, and down a flight of stairs to the basement, which held what looked like a wine cellar worthy of the Franciscan brothers in Assisi. “Come back on a less-crazy day and we’ll talk about God and mobs over wine,” the good father quipped.

A door at the back of the wine cellar led to a tunnel—or more like a passageway—which was illuminated with fluorescents when Sadowski flicked the wall switch.

“It’s straight,” he joked. “Can’t get lost.”

We—that would be Dona, four cops, and me—walked the hundred feet or so and came to another stairwell. Ten steps up to another door, and sure enough we were in the back of the adjacent school. It was literally just a stone’s throw through a new construction site to Forty-eighth Street.

Meantime, the crazed mob, trying to get a “get” with Dona or me, was on Forty-seventh, completely surrounding the church and Mary’s Garden.

Forty-eighth between First and Second Avenues was fairly quiet—mostly just sanitation trucks and crews noisily running overtime trying to clean up the masses of flyers, candy and gum wrappers, napkins, half-eaten hot dogs, pieces of bready NYC-style pretzels, cans, and debris that the protestors had heedlessly left behind.

Crossing the cordoned-off avenue with a bunch of cops was a breeze, and within a minute I was back at my building and Dona was in a patrol car on her way—home? Who knew with her.

George, the doorman, usually the one with a joke, a bit of gossip, and an inappropriate question, was on duty. He was uncomfortably quiet as I passed through the lobby with just a head nod his way as three cops led me to the elevator and to my apartment door.

I walked in, flicked on the lights. The cops did a cursory search to make sure no one was lurking, ready to spring out from behind the curtains for an ambush interview.

“Me or one of my officers will be right outside your door all night. Here’s the cell number,” Carol said, handing me her card. “Just in case you hear, see, or smell something and don’t want to open the door.”

“Not necessary, but thanks,” I said.

“It’s our job.”

With that she and her minions stepped outside before I could even offer them a Coke or a cookie.

My answering machine was flashing. That meant that my voice mail had automatically gone to the machine.

I hit the “play” button. There were ten messages from various media who needed/wanted/had to have an interview. My number wasn’t exactly secret: They had mine and I had theirs from years of working side by side.