The Sixth Station(11)

“It could take the rest of our lives to get these guys settled,” Dona whined. “I mean, I don’t have all day!”

“Yeah. You do. It’ll give you time to call your agent to start negotiating fees for my photos. Lucky you.”

“Lucky you too,” Dona sniffed. “I’m not stiffing you, so don’t be so bitchy.”

“I’m having a bad day.”

“No, my sweet. You are having the best day of your life. You’re the woman with the story—and your big news is going to make us big money. And win you a Pulitzer, of course.”

“Et tu, Brute?! And seriously, keep your voice down. You want the entire reporter pool to hear you?”

“Oh, sorry,” Dona snapped back. “Like they don’t know…”

“What I don’t know,” I whispered back, “is how everything stopped. I mean, it seemed like everyone was suddenly paralyzed as he approached me before the kiss.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” she asked, pulling back in her seat to give me a hard stare. “I never saw our so-called friends and colleagues going so wild. I mean, there was rioting!”

“What?”

I just looked at her. This would have to be a discussion for another time. Clearly, something had happened to me beyond being kissed by a killer.

It took nearly an hour to seat the press in the designated area. The UN ambassadors and foreign-service types, then the “distinguished guests,” who were seated in the front VIP assembly viewing areas, followed us in. Packed to capacity—over eighteen hundred people would be admitted that day—the room buzzed with the excitement from the chosen few who were invited to witness history.

The two lead prosecutors (and an international team of twenty) plus two lawyers for the defense (period) milled around the front of the chamber, where huge desks had been set up for both sides.

In the front, a massive golden-hued wall that rose to the ceiling framed a specially built massive marble desk on a raised platform, four steps above the throng.

We all waited anxiously to see who would become the seat’s temporary occupants—the four justices and one presiding justice from around the globe who had been chosen by the 203 member countries of the United Nations for ben Yusef’s terror tribunal, a tribunal that had not just international political ramifications for all concerned, but would have ramifications for every established religion on earth.

The wrong verdict—not guilty—could, would, rock the world order of things (Demiel had famously referred to it as “the man-made disorder of things”). Scholars and TV “talking heads” had speculated for months that a decision favoring the terrorist—which was as likely as a second virgin birth—could destroy humanity’s very notion of God.

The world leaders who were to occupy the second row came next. For the opening day, the vice president of the United States, Lester Wallace, the Speaker of Israel’s Knesset, and top governmental ministers of countries such as Russia, Great Britain, Iran, North and South Korea, and China were seated. In all, 314 leaders from 203 countries were present to witness this historic event.

To the shock of even the jaded press, the clerics were seated next.

“And you didn’t think this was about religion,” I whispered to Dona. The religious leaders were actually being seated after the heads of state—the place in line, so to speak, reserved for the most important.

“Well, of course they’d be here; it was their houses of worship that were blown up, their followers killed.” There’s no doubt but that we were all taken aback not just by the magnitude, but more specifically by the choices of the clerics who’d been invited—and who had actually shown up.

Since, for security reasons, the guest list, so to speak, had been kept so secret, a court officer began passing out the press materials at this point, identifying the clerics present.

First came the secretary to the pope, who was followed by John Cardinal Benning of the Archdiocese of New York, then the high rebbes from both the NYC and Jerusalem Hasidic communities, followed by four of Iraq’s five Shia Grand Ayatollahs, as well as two Sunni leaders. Next came the “lesser” Catholic, Anglican, and British archbishops, as well as the president of the American National Association of Evangelicals, the prophet and president of the Mormon church, Lane B. Gardener, as well representatives for the Bahá’í, Jainist, Shinto, Cao Dai, and Zoroastrian faiths. Representatives of the Quakers and the Unitarians, both large faiths in the United States, declined to take part in what they called a predetermined lynching.