The Sixth Station (3 page)

And now? If I had believed in God I would have prayed for a break like this—a chance to not just cover but possibly voice my opinion on the ben Yusef tribunal for a mainstream news outlet. Yes, I was unprepared, bleary-eyed, and retaining water. But still …

I hadn’t done serious prep work, because I’d been told earlier in the week that I was to cover “color” only—getting reactions from local parish priests, imams, and rabbis.

But I was never better than when I was under pressure.

I picked up the same white T-shirt that had looked so good when it was still clean the night before. I sniffed it. Clean enough. I pulled on a pair of black jeans, my beat-up brown leather jacket, and Frye boots. Then I looked down. Damn! Dead center on the T was a moderate-to-terrible chicken-scarpiello stain from the night before. With no time to change, I grabbed the white gauze Gap scarf hanging on my doorknob, looped it long around my neck, and—voilà—instant stain repair. Good enough.

I hauled my red leather satchel that held my iPad holographic tablet, cell phone, four reporter’s pads (I still take notes the old-fashioned way), pens, wallet, keys, lipstick, and under-eye concealer, which I buy by the kilo, onto my shoulder and started out of my apartment.

A quick look in the mirror revealed that my formerly chic bob had frizzed and I now looked like I’d stolen Eleanor Roosevelt’s head.

Whatever.

I hung my press credentials—three plastic cards with my photo—on a cheap hardware-store drain chain around my neck and checked that my passport was in the zipper compartment of my bag for backup ID just in case. Then I took the elevator down the twenty-four flights and walked out of my apartment building into the gorgeous spring day and into the end of my life as I knew it.

2

Outside I became part of a sea of people filling Forty-eighth Street, busting out from the police barricades erected to keep them in. Parking was suspended and traffic banned on the avenues, with the exception of single lanes for emergency vehicles between Twenty-third and Fifty-seventh Streets, to discourage the protestors from coming in.

Right, good luck with that.

There were countless protestors even on my street, which is several blocks from the United Nations. It looked like pickpocket paradise—more crowded than Times Square on New Year’s Eve, suffocating even on this crisp day.

The NYPD had recruited cops from all over as well as whatever U.S. soldiers could be spared from fighting on the fronts in the endless wars on terrorism. They were manning the metal detectors set up all over the city.

The plan had been to keep demonstrators at the west side docks (ben Yusef’s supporters up toward the Intrepid Museum, and his detractors downtown at Chelsea Piers) and, failing that, on Tenth and Eleventh Avenues—twelve full blocks away from the UN. When the crowd projection swelled to millions, that plan went out the window and U.S. President Lydia Wallingford-Hudson decided that the best course of action was for the cops, soldiers, and security forces to take a Gandhian approach of passive resistance—unless and until the paid troublemakers and rabble-rousers acted up.

That didn’t stop the crowds from pushing, yelling, and smelling, however. It just stopped the uniforms from pushing back. The cops and soldiers were so polite, I noticed that they were saying things like, “Excuse me sir, but I would appreciate it if you’d put your backpack on this screening device, please.” What city was I in?

Not known for my patience, I didn’t even attempt to get into the passive resistance groove. In fact, I felt trapped inside the rudeness, the pushing, the incessant pressing against my body, the constant shoving of my bag against my side; the arms, the legs that were everywhere, refusing to allow for any kind of personal space. I could smell the onions on the fat lady’s breath next to me. Somewhere cigar breath; elsewhere the unavoidable body odors from a thousand different cultures—curry seeping from the pores of some, garlic oozing out of others, and everyone was sweating despite the sixty-eight-degree temperature.

With an unbelievable effort, I pushed and shoved like all the other people who had to be there that day for whatever reasons, and managed to skirt over to the outer edge of the street on the south side.

Being on that side, albeit shoved up against the barricades, gave me a good view of the sidewalk, where the vendors were hawking everything from T-shirts with ben Yusef’s picture emblazoned on the front baring slogans like “King of the Terrorists” and “King of the News,” to the obscene, “He Made a Killing in New York!” Others were selling flags, balloons, and other totally inappropriate items for an occasion that was supposed to be so solemn.

It seemed like foods from every nation were being sold from carts whose smells assaulted and invigorated my senses: Thai satay, peppers-sausage-onions, steaming hot dogs, and toasted soft pretzels that could always bring me back to my first autumn in New York as cub reporter, when I’d left the comfort of my parents’ Long Island row house to make it “on my own” all of thirty-five miles away.

Despite being 1960s hippies who were still true believers in peace, love, and granola, they acted like overly protective suburbanites when it came to my brother and me, as they went about saving the world—my dad as head of a NYC homeless organization, and my mom as a pediatrician in a clinic.

When I moved out of the first apartment I’d had with roommates in the city and took a studio in the Village on my own, they worried I’d be lonely and alone at best, and murdered by an intruder at worst.

Despite their terror, I had not been murdered by a crazed serial killer/intruder, nor had “alone” ever been my problem. Except for when I was out of work, I always felt, if anything, that my life was
too
crowded. There was always another story, never a shortage of interesting friends and interested men. No one like Donald, of course, but I suspected that he was my excuse for not getting involved with anyone who might actually be available. I wanted my freedom to rush to a story wherever there was one.

Now I was in it again full force—in a massive mess of humanity. And I loved it.

But even more overwhelming than the smell and sight and push of the crowd was the din. The Super Bowl, the World Series,
and
the World Cup at the same time. It seemed that the very air had turned solid with sound—filled with deafening chants, curses, and complaints.

Over all of that was the ever-present blast of police-car sirens, ear-shattering blasts when they were near you. I made a mental note to never have a drink again as long as I lived.

“SOS. Save our Savior!” “Kill the pig! Kill him dead!” “Kid killer!” the protestors screamed, trying to out-decibel each other.

Crazy,
I thought,
that there hasn’t yet been an incident
. Incredible, actually. But that day there weren’t any—unless you count the personally earth-shattering incident that awaited me not half an hour later.

The angry people, I understood—but it was the others, the terrorist’s so-called “followers” and “believers,” that I didn’t understand—or want to.

Crazy conspiracy-theorist morons,
I thought. I wished the damned Internet had never been invented. It alone had made the mass-murdering “prophet,” whom we’d all nonetheless come to see that day, possible.

To millions he was the Savior; to others, Hitler reincarnated—and they were all out here yelling.

It had taken just four years for ben Yusef to rise, via cyberspace, from just another tweeting YouTube ranter to a man known throughout the world.

By the time the mainstream media paid attention, it was almost too late. They filled their editorial pages with fire and filled their airspaces with TV talking heads gasbagging about how such a terrorist monster was loved and slavishly followed by the loonies, the lonely, the desperate, “the fringers”—in other words, people for whom life hadn’t been good.

For everyone else—including me—for whom life had been good, he was a terrorist.

As I continued to try to make my way, I thought about the first time I’d ever heard of Demiel ben Yusef—maybe three or four years earlier. He was first identified as part of a terrorist cell based somewhere in or around Ankara, Turkey, which had allegedly planted a bomb in a marketplace full of citizens and tourists in the resort town of Bodrum.

Almost immediately after that bombing, credit had been taken by a renegade cell (is there any other kind?) of al-Qaeda, a cell that no one had ever heard of, called Al Okhowa Al Hamima, roughly translated to mean “Beloved Brotherhood.”

Nobody thought much about him or the group. I mean, how much more harm could a young, uneducated dirty desert rat (granted, a very angry rat) hiding out with other filthy desert rats do on the lam? It would be, they thought, a matter of days before they were caught. They were wrong.

To deny that group’s involvement in the marketplace carnage, the group’s spokesperson, a woman who called herself
il Vettore
(Italian for “the Vector”), appeared in podcasts from places even the most sophisticated spy satellites couldn’t recognize. Their beloved leader, Demiel ben Yusef, il Vettore proclaimed in perfect English, French, Spanish, and Arabic, was not a man of violence but a man of peace, the embodiment of the Living Christ. Right. Christ with a car bomb.

As I was remembering all of this, I felt someone grab my shoulder from behind and heard a familiar voice scream, “Ali! Hey, Russo!”

I turned, as much as I could in that sea of humans, and saw that it was my friend Dona Grimm, whom I’d known forever. “Going to Holy Family to interview a priest?” she asked, squeezing up alongside me. Since I stand all of five feet four, I normally had to double-step to keep up with all six feet of her, but today it was so crowded we were moving like slugs, and it only got worse when we hit the sidewalk skirting the outer edges of Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza.

“Frankie-the-genius Donahue, who is too good for public transportation, is stuck on the bridge. So I got the gig.”

“This sucks,” Dona said, referring to the crowd, and we both simultaneously held our UN credentials, newspaper credentials, and all-access NYPD “Permitted to Cross Police Barricades” press passes aloft, as she started pushing and calling, “Press coming through.… Excuse us.… Let us in and see yourself on TV tonight,” she yelled.

Dona and I were pals, despite the fact that aside from being reporters we basically had little in common. We’d often worked side by side over the years, and it had led to a friendship.

I had seven years on her, and she had eight inches on me. I was working at one of only three remaining NYC print dailies left in the digital world, and despite evidence to the contrary, I was a believer who, God help me, continued to believe in print almighty. I followed the journalistic rules as closely as I could, while Dona, the video blogger who had to fill up dead air, did precisely as she pleased, going to air with rumor, innuendo, and often a brilliant breaking story.

We both look exactly like who we are on and off the job.

I’m smallish, constantly worried about being fat, and tend to be lazy about the whole makeup routine, so I’ve always let my Italian complexion do the heavy lifting for me. It’s my best feature. I try to keep my thick black hair always well cut. I have dark brown eyes and wide lips, and never scrimp on the reddest lipstick I can find, which I have convinced myself takes the place of bothering with a whole makeup routine. All in all an OK package, but I would never stop traffic.

Grimm, on the other hand, is a British-born, cocoa-skinned beauty, roughly six-one in her heels (and she always wears heels), with this fantastic head of totally unruly shoulder-length hennaed curls. Earrings that could have been pressed into service as rolling pins offset the red cashmere sweater coat she was sporting that day.

She could, and did, stop traffic.

Dona pulled me into the Korean deli on the corner. “Can’t meet him with ripped panty hose, can I,” she said.

“What? Are you insane? We’re late.” I tried reasoning against reason. But it was go with the giant or try to push through the crowds alone again.

“Panty hose! Who the hell even wears panty hose anymore?”

“Plenty of people, darling,” she retorted. “Obviously. Or they wouldn’t be selling them in the delicatessen.”

“You want to be fashion forward to impress the mass-murdering terrorist baby killer? That makes a lot of sense.”

“Excuse me?” she said, stopping to give me a withering stare. “We should at least try some objectivity here. Have you decided it’s ‘guilty until proven innocent’?”

As though she hadn’t just smacked me down, and rightfully so, she picked up a pair of panty hose, paid the guy, and said, “Block me, will you?” as she pulled on the only ones they had in stock, in size “gigantic.”

“Those panty hose must be older than me. They’re in a plastic egg, for chrissakes! And they’re blue,” I chided her as we ran out, leaving the shocked deli owner shaking his head.

“No need to curse. Press coming through!” she yelled.

We tried pushing through the mass of humanity, all of whom wanted to be exactly where we had to be—at the gates of the United Nations building, still half a block away.

“I can’t believe we’re going to be shut out!”

“We’re not going to be shut out, and I’m going to meet him, too,” Dona said.

“You drive me nuts.”

“O ye of little faith!”

“You mean ye of
no
faith,” I corrected her.

“Press coming through!” we both then called out.

“If I miss this trial … Damn—why did I stop with you?” I moaned as I elbowed a man who turned around and pulled back his arm, ready to let one fly right at my eye. “Just try it, you bastard!” I said, which caught the attention of one of the riot-gear-suited cops, who came barreling through.

“Hey, you! Put down that fist,” he called to the man, grabbing his arm and pulling it behind him in one motion so swift I hadn’t realized at first what was happening.

The cop, still holding the man with one arm, started talking into his shoulder two-way when he stopped, surprised, and said, “Wait a second—aren’t you, whazzername—the reporter?”