The Sixth Station(19)

Father Eugene led us into the rectory kitchen, and it smelled—I swear!—like fresh-baked bread and wine.

A woman and what I assumed was her adolescent son stuck their heads in the kitchen’s swinging door. The kid was holding a dry-cleaning bag with his altar-boy black-and-white robes. “Need anything before we take off, Father?” she asked.

“We’re good, Laurie, thanks.”

In half a second the bruiser was all over the pair like a bad smell. “ID, please, ma’am.”

The thirty-something-year-old mother in her too-tight jeans and too-blond hair looked at Sadowski.

“Mrs. Braunthauler works for me,” the priest said to the cops. “It’s all right. I can vouch for her.”

That’s a church lady?

“ID, ma’am,” the second cop repeated, as though Sadowski had said nothing.

Mrs. Braunthauler reached into her purse and pulled out her wallet and showed her driver’s license. “Take it out, please,” the bruiser said.

Mrs. Braunthauler complied, and the cop wrote down the information.

“Is that necessary?” I asked, putting my two cents in where they didn’t belong.

“Yes,” was all Bruiser said, and I swear she sounded pissed off. “In case you don’t understand, you are in danger, Ms. Russo.”

“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.”