The Sixth Station Page 3

  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?”

  “Well, yes, I am,” Dona said, always assuming that all men were talking to her at all times. “And you, gorgeous man, are…”

  “Holy crap,” the cop answered instead, realizing who she was too. “On Fox, right? And you’re in the paper, right? The Standard—Russo—right?” he asked.

  “Yup,” I said.

  I looked at the cop desperately. “We’re gonna be locked out if we don’t get through.…”

  The cop waved over two other cops, who elbowed their way through the crowd. “Let’s get these ladies inside there,” the first cop said, pointing to the UN driveway, and within seconds the seas began to part before us and our armed escorts.

  Dona looked smug as she was pressed through the throng. I felt besieged.

  The cops brought us to the barricades skirting First Avenue, signaled for one of the patrolmen to unlock a link on one barricade, and we walked through as the crowd grew increasingly unruly behind us—all demanding to know why we got preferential treatment.

  “Hope I see you tomorrow…,” the cute cop said.

  “Do you think he’ll call me?” Dona asked, never even thinking he might have been addressing me, as we trotted across First Avenue. “I mean he knows how to find me—at Fox, right?”

  Ignoring her, I turned my head toward downtown. Coming toward us at a good clip was a caravan of fifty-something armored vehicles.

  “Hurry up. They’re almost here!” I screeched, and we rushed the UN gates. They’d already started closing.

  “Please, please, sir, please let us pass,” I cried to the guard, who looked right through us and continued the slow slide of the automatic gates.

  “No, wait!” Dona said to him, holding her press pass aloft. “I’d love to get your comments on camera—Dona Grimm, Fox News,” she said, reaching in with her video cam.

  “This one is for history,” Dona added. The offer proved too much for the officer, and he said in clipped English, “Okay, but hurry up,” smiling into the camera. “Sergeant Mohammed Fahreed—that’s spelled F-a-h-r-e-e-d,” he said as he checked and rechecked our credentials and we slipped all the way inside the gate.

  I could feel my stomach relax a bit for the first time all morning. At least we were inside the gates. After a perfunctory interview with Fahreed, which would never see air, we rushed to the press area outside the entrance to the building. Hundreds of reporters from all over the world were jockeying for position.

  Settling for spots in the back of the horde, which was three reporters deep, I said, “You should carry me on your shoulders for what you’ve put me through today.”

  The pack of hungry reporters suddenly all moved as one as the gates swung open again. “Tell me what’s going on! Please,” I begged, because I could see nothing but a lot of backs.

  “The gates, they’re opening. Wow … two tanks, five vans, you name it,” Dona reported.

  As the caravan started to make its way around the pavement in front of the General Assembly Building, the reporters went wild, rushing the vehicles. The cops, in turn, rushed the reporters. It couldn’t have been more than thirty seconds before a scuffle broke out between three cops and four reporters who’d tried to climb the lead van, hoping to shoot from its roof.

  Suddenly, the entire bunch rushed from the sidewalk, giving Dona and me the chance to move directly to the curbside. Better to have a front-row view of “him” than report on a bunch of squabbling reporters.

  When two dozen cops in riot gear moved in, the pack of reporters angrily but obediently moved back to the curbside. Two of them even tried to unseat us from our new curbside positions. Good luck.

  “Step two checked and completed,” Dona said. “Now it’s just a matter of seconds before I meet ‘him’ personally and deliver into my producer’s grubby little hands the interview of the century.”

  “Right,” I answered, looking skyward. “And I’m going to have his baby.”

  I whipped out my notebook, and she set up her Minicam on a tripod and started shooting footage of the police commissioner, who got out of the lead vehicle behind his own bodyguards and walked up to a mic on the police podium that had been erected on the lawn to address the reporters.

  “Now listen up, you guys,” he said. “That scene that just transpired? On my watch? If I have to ban the whole damned lotta you, I will. And don’t think I’m some candy ass who won’t.” The reporters, unbowed, jeered as he signaled for the circus to begin.

  The vehicles began slowly moving again around the section where we were standing.

  “This doesn’t feel good,” I said. “Do you think they’re scamming us and bringing him in a whole other way?”

  “Probably not. I wouldn’t be able to meet him if that happened, would I?”

  “Will you stop with that? Anyway … something isn’t right.…” I felt my stomach flip. Dona peered over the cops’ heads in front of us to watch the circus train and its clown cars full of freaks, Feds, and fanatics move forward.

  The twentieth vehicle, an armored van, pulled up and around the driveway, and then it stopped—directly in front of us. Would what happened next have happened if it had stopped in front of different reporters? That I can never say, can never know.

  What I do know is that the doors slid open and six Secret Service agents simultaneously jumped out of the van, assault rifles at the ready, wearing body armor and helmets, followed by two other “plainclothes,” who stood on either side of the open door. The terrorist Demiel ben Yusef appeared in the opening. He stepped out of the van, an agent in front and in back, his head down. He was shackled hand and foot with heavy chains that were just long enough to allow him to walk. A bulletproof vest bulged beneath his jacket.

  Although we’d seen video of him a million times, he was much smaller than I’d expected—maybe five-nine, with no heft to him at all—even thinner than he normally was, since he’d been fasting for the past month. But his scruffy long beard, waist-length dreads trailing out from under his NYPD riot helmet, dark, swarthy complexion, and calm face were nonetheless unmistakable. He was, after all, the most famous man in the world.

  His attorneys had dressed him for the occasion in a second-rate dark blue suit, white shirt, blue-striped tie, and fake leather loafers that smacked of cheap when they hit the ground.

  “Dear God! I could lift him with one hand,” Dona said, directing her sexiest smile his way.

  The troops began rushing him inside as the roar of the reporters grew deafening. “Over here! Demiel! Over here!”

  Demiel, suspected terrorist leader and mass murderer, whom many called “Savior,” simply shook his head so slightly that eyewitnesses—of which there would be thousands more than were ever there that day—would later say it was more of a thought than an actual motion. While that motion would remain forever in dispute, what I can never dispute is that after that shake, thought, or whatever it was, everything grew quiet—for me, at least.

  In fact, for me it had all become so still that the deafening din on the packed streets, which moments before had sounded like the roar of ten oceans, went so quiet I could hear a single birdsong in the park. I think it was a robin.

  It even seemed that the federal agents who were supposed to be perp-walking Demiel—parading him in shackles for the benefit of the media—slowed down and walked calmly, neither rushing him nor pushing him.

  It felt as though a mass fugue had suddenly affected nearly everyone who had come to see the sight. It wasn’t until later that I learned that I was the only one who was suddenly so calm and distant.

  I could hear Dona’s remote Minicam running next to me. I was holding on to my reporter’s notebook, but I was no longer all that interested in writing anything down. It wasn’t that I couldn’t; it was just that I didn’t want to.

  All I could really focus on was Demiel slowly moving forward, the sound of his shoes slapping the pavement growing louder as he came nearer to me. And then that sound seemed to die away, too. When the shackled suspected terrorist was right in front of us, he stopped and looked directly at me. I could see the pores in his face, the small irritation where his starched collar had scraped his neck, and even smelled his freshly laundered shirt.

  Reflexively, without knowing why, I returned his stare.

  He leaned into me, and I could hear the hundreds of reporters, in unison, letting out a muffled “Ohhhh,” as I stood there, unmoving.

  Then he kissed me on the lips.

  3

  It took a quarter of a second for the federal agents to realize what had just transpired on their watch. It took another quarter of a second for ben Yusef’s two “handlers” to spring back to action in unison, shove him hard, and hustle him inside the building.

  Immediately the world around the UN came back to life for me—the din, the frenzy—as though it had never stopped. The realization that something very, very strange had happened finally hit the crowd as ben Yusef was being hustled inside.

  When I personally could no longer see him, I became conscious that my fingers were on my lips. I’d done it blindly, unaware that anyone was watching, when in fact the whole world was watching.

  I could feel the wetness of his kiss on my lips and closed my eyes as though savoring the kiss of a lover who had just walked out the door. It was similar to the feeling I’d had when I’d kissed Donald good-bye that last time—when I knew he was going for good. All of that seemed to happen in the nanosecond before I instinctively wiped his saliva off my mouth and cheek with my scarf. But regardless, I could still feel his wiry moustache and the bristles of his beard on my face against the background of whizzing, clicking, buzzing cameras. I put my fingers to my lips again.

  Dona smacked my hand away protectively and whispered, “Stop it … just stop it.”

  It was pretty much all they had, the images of me touching my lips, in place of the big photo—the one of the kiss—that every reporter had gotten from some obscure angle, but none had gotten up close and personal the way Dona had. She had both shots from thisclose in 12-megapixel still, and video versions.

  I heard her saying somewhere in the background, “Damn, girl! And I’m the one who bought new panty hose!”

  Inexplicably near tears, I croaked, “Why me?” The answer I would later learn was more complex, more dangerous, and more horrible than any poison gas or weapon of mass destruction that humans in their infinite wisdom had yet to devise.

  Within an hour those pictures of me touching my mouth were posted on the front page of every media and gossip site in the free and unfree world, blasted to millions of e-mails, Tweeted, Facebooked, forwarded, YouTubed, and you name it on millions of monitors and phones, shown on JumboTrons, and on loops on every 24/7 news channel.

  Dona knew, though, that she alone was holding the best video of the kiss, and with that she could become a very wealthy woman. Because Fox News had relegated her to “permanent freelancer,” Dona’s film did not belong to them.

  “‘God works in mysterious ways,’ my mother always told me,” Dona said as we began to make our way inside.

  Before I could focus, we were shoved so hard that Dona almost lost her cameras. “What the hell…” she snapped, turning around to see what looked like the entire media descending upon us.

  The frenzy snapped me out of my confused state. Oh, my God. I realized I was no longer part of the pack covering the story; I was now a part of the story. No longer one of them, I was one of them—the people that people like me chased down the street.

  What was I supposed to do? Give interviews? How weird would that have been? But there was no time to think, because in seconds the crowd was pushing us both, surrounding us, suffocating us.

  “Hey Russo—you know ben Yusef personally?” “Ali—over here! Over here!” Microphones were shoved in our faces, and for the first time in my life, I knew how terrifying it was to be on the other side of all that need, that want—that terrible insatiable hunger of the 24/7 news machine. I, Alessandra Russo, was dinner.

  We then both did what we hate for news “victims” to do: We hid our faces and tried to run like indicted Mafia capos—from our own colleagues.

  The police commissioner finally gave the OK for a few cops to go in and grab us. The commissioner was proving a point: show the taxpayers that the “mainstream media” were self-serving lefties who’d eat their own young for a story.

  Two plainclothes cops grabbed Dona, while a bruiser of a woman and her slightly smaller male colleague grabbed either side of me, wires clearly poking from their suit jackets into their ears. “C’mon ladies, let’s get you inside,” the bruiser said calmly.

  “Stand back!” the commissioner bellowed over the electronic megaphone. “Everybody back!”

  Then he said under his breath, “Bunch of animals. Real goddamned animals.” The statement was nonetheless picked up by the hundreds of mics in the hands of the hundreds of reporters, which caused a near riot. Police officers in equal number to the reporters immediately put up their riot shields and began moving on the pack. We were hustled toward the entrance.

  “I wish we were covering us,” I cracked, trying to bring some sense to what had just become a completely surreal experience. We were led to the glass doors of the UN, rubbed our index fingers on the fingerprint scanners for approval, and were escorted inside into the General Assembly, where the proceedings would take place.

  We could see the Secret Service agents conferring and watched as they changed all the assigned press seats around. We were seated in the front of the press row.

  “Nice,” Dona noted, raising her eyebrows in approval.

  “You’re hot today thanks to moi, my friend,” I replied, settling into my newly assigned seat and breaking out my tablet.

  “I stand in your reflection, baby girl. You are not just hot today,” Dona said, “you are on fire! Do you realize what just happened back there?” She turned on her cameras to get her first look at both the still photos and taped footage she had managed to shoot.

  “Will you look at this? Jee-sus! Excuse me, Lord!” she said, practically jumping out of her seat with joy. Dona was a die-hard New Age born-again Baptist, despite the fact that she had the body of a stripper and the hair of a supermodel.