The Sixth Station: A Novel (Alessandra Russo Novels) - Hardcover

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New York City, N.Y., USA
Thirty-three Years Later
 
 
It wasn’t my beat, it wasn’t my assignment, and it wasn’t my intention to alter reality that morning when my cell phone rang at 7:15 after a night highlighted by too many martinis with Donald, the ex.
Oh, God. Why didn’t we stay away from each other? Again.
We had no future and the past was a decade-old fantasy.
 
Baghdad, October 5, 2005
Kick-ass war correspondent and bad-boy photojournalist married by army chaplain amidst horrors of war in the lounge of the Palestine Hotel. Many drunken colleagues in attendance.
Or something like that.
Two days after the terribly romantic nuptials and drunken party that followed, the retreating Iraqis gave Donald and me an unforgettable wedding present: A bomb hidden inside a cement-mixer truck was detonated outside the hotel, taking out the lobby. Gucci bags and Fendi fur coats from the high-end lobby shops were blown out of the stores and lay among broken glass and giant hunks of falling plaster.
When the blast hit (we were in bed, of course), Donald jumped up, threw on jeans, and grabbed his cameras. He wasn’t worried about our (my) safety; he was worried about missing the action, i.e., the photos.
Instead of thinking he was a big horse’s ass, I jumped into a tracksuit and we both took the partially collapsed stairs four steps at a time. I too was probably more terrified of missing the action (i.e., the story) than I was about the danger. I should have realized it was a defining moment.
We weren’t allowed back into our hotel to collect our things, so we bunked down with three other journos in the apartment of a friend of a friend.
Donald left early one morning—he was imbedding with the Second Battalion of the Fourth Infantry Regiment. He gave me a perfunctory kiss, but I grabbed him tight and pulled him close. “Be careful,” I said.
He put his big hands around my face and kissed me as though we were alone. “I’m too mean to get hurt,” he said.
About two hours later Donald was riding shotgun in a jeep when another roadside bomb exploded, throwing him thirty feet, breaking his femur and a few ribs.
When I finally got to him in the makeshift army hospital, I kissed his head and said, “Time to get outta Dodge, baby,” trying for sardonic and missing completely.
I made arrangements for us to get back to NYC, where I nursed his cranky self back to health and got my first and only Pulitzer nomination from the New York Post, who’d employed me at the time.
Our crazy wartime marriage was hot and dangerous. We couldn’t get enough of each other—and even though he was a giant pain in the ass when he was busted up, the broken-femur sex was sensational. Who knew?
I—we—were very happy, happy enough, in fact, for me to start thinking about maybe having a baby. Yikes.
Donald said he didn’t think a baby was a great idea, because a family would keep me tied at home when he knew I’d be desperate to get to the next war/murder/scandal/whatever. I pouted for three months straight.
Finally, one night when he was well enough to hit the road again—he was off to cover the wildfires in Texas—he turned to me with a dopey grin and said, “Okay, whatever you want.”
“You’re acting like I want to get a dog,” I said.
“Not a bad idea—maybe test-drive the mother thing with a nice German shepherd for a few years first?” he teased, and we fell onto the bed laughing.
Somehow, though, it—a pregnancy—never happened. Great sex doesn’t always lead to greater things.
Two years later we ended as abruptly as we had started, although not as dramatically.
It was a fast and clean break to a messy marriage, which involved much sex and even more fighting. Kiss-and-make-up is only fun in the movies.
One Monday morning Donald and I were off to cover different assignments—he back to Iraq, me to cover the presidential campaigns.
As I got out of the cab at JFK, he kissed me hard and simply said, “Time to get outta Dodge, baby.” I knew he wasn’t talking about leaving the country. He was talking about leaving the marriage.
And that was that.
I knew he was right. He liked gambling on sports, staying up all night, and hanging out in strip clubs in disease-riddled cities with names that weren’t composed of letters in the English alphabet. He was a horrible dancer who made duck lips when he was really feeling it.
I like sports that I play myself, getting into bed early with a good book or, better yet, a bad boy, and going dancing with my gay men friends who never make duck lips no matter how much they’re feeling the music.
Donald and I had nothing in common other than that we were both agnostics, preferred fast stick shifts to fancy SUVs, and would risk everything for a story.
He was resentful that I’d been nominated for a Pulitzer for covering the same war at the same time, while his newsweekly, U.S. News, hadn’t nominated him. And he’d taken one for the Gipper, while I’d come home in one piece.
Me? I was jealous that I never got sent back to a war zone again. Weird? Sure.
But I took his leaving me like a bullet to my heart anyway. I cried for a month straight, drank too much with my friend Dona and my hairdresser pals, hardened my heart, and threw myself into my work.
A decade after we’d said “I do,” however, we still couldn’t say “I won’t.”
And so I found myself—all those years later—faced with a ringing phone. Since it is for reporters a genetic impossibility to ignore a ringing phone, I reached for it.
I sincerely wished he wouldn’t call the morning after the night before. (Big lie.) Better yet, I wished we wouldn’t ever have a night before again. (Truth.)
Be careful what you wish for.
I picked it up without bothering to look at the caller ID. “Go away, Donald,” I said.
“Alessandra?” I heard a copy kid at the other end say. Oops.
“It’s the City Desk. Can you hold for Dickie Smalls?” As if holding for Dickie Smalls were an option. I knew it would take about fourteen seconds for the whole newsroom to know I’d slept with Donald. Damn!
Mildly surprised, I held on, of course, knowing that it was usually not good when a call came through from Dickie early in the morning: It always meant something unexpected—an assignment that would send me to the Bronx or Queens or, worse, complaints about a story I’d filed the night before.
Bleary and hung over, I nonetheless held on for Managing Editor Dickie Smalls, a man who devoted his life to overcoming his name. His job was second only to that of editor in chief—the only one to whom Smalls ever spoke with any respect.
“Russo? Dickie,” Dickie yelled into my headache. Dickie, who usually didn’t have his first drink until at least 11:00 A.M, was probably still sober, I realized.
“You got the TV on? Put on New York One,” he continued yelling without expecting an answer.
I obliged by reaching for the remote on the nightstand, and flicked to NY1. They were showing a helicopter view of my neighborhood, the United Nations area of Manhattan, while the voice of Simon Franks, one of their top reporters, clearly trying to keep his voice controlled, was announcing, “I’m looking down on this massive sea of humanity, the likes of which I certainly have never seen! The crowd, the mob—whatever you can call such a thing—stretches along the Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza park over onto Forty-seventh Street and First Avenue, up and down First Avenue from Forty-second Street to Fifty-seventh Street, and the cross streets from Forty-fourth through Forty-seventh as far west as Madison Avenue!
“Seriously folks, this city has never experienced a sight like this before!”
And he was right about that. Today was the start of the terror trial—tribunal, actually—of terrorist Demiel ben Yusef.
While a tribunal like this one would normally have been held at The Hague, the World Court building had sustained huge damage in a terrorist bombing several months earlier and was still uninhabitable. The perpetrators had never been caught. So, no, while most New Yorkers were not happy to have this mess of a security risk in our town, we reporters were thrilled.
You could hear it in Franks’s voice:
“And I venture to say,” he continued, not missing a beat, “that every person down there is desperate to catch even the tiniest glimpse of Demiel ben Yusef, who goes on trial today—perhaps as soon as a couple of hours from now!”
I am a jaded reporter. I have reported on everything from 9/11 to war to Hurricanes Katrina and Anthony, the earthquake in Haiti, and many of the increasingly now-commonplace natural disasters of incalculable suffering around the planet.
This was different. Something, indeed something I didn’t really understand—maybe it was blind faith or deep hatred—had driven hundreds of thousands of folks out of their homes, jobs, and schools. They’d wheeled, walked, and traveled from their apartments, condos, houses, hospitals, nursing homes, churches, synagogues, mosques, banks, and government offices to protest, to ogle, to see in person the most vicious criminal of our time.
Even I was shocked by the size of the crowds.
“You watching? You understand what’s going on here?” Dickie said.
“Of course I do,” I said, trying not to let my excitement show.
My heart started pounding. What did Dickie really want?
Please let this be the break I need. I swear this time I’ll do it their way. Please tell me something good. Tell me I’m gonna cover ...
All Dickie would give me, though, was, ...