The Sixth Station(6)

“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.