Harlem’s busiest, where fast-food chain restaurants thrive along with the local fried-chicken joints, coffee shops, and mom-and-pop clothing shops blaring old-school funk out of their exterior speakers.
I almost cried at the real life out there that had nothing to do with the unreality that my life had become.
I walked a couple of blocks in my nun’s habit noticing how people nodded and smiled and showed the kind of respect that New Yorkers just don’t give to people wearing normal clothes.
In the middle of the block, I saw the big illuminated plastic UPARKIT.COM sign mounted sideways to the building. A low-rent joint if ever I’d seen one. It would be safer to park on an abandoned street. Didn’t Sadowski ever watch TV? Everyone who walks into a parking garage on TV gets beaten, killed, and/or raped.
Luckily the G in G156 stood for “ground,” so at least I didn’t have to climb any stairwells.
Who’d rape a nun? Oh, right, Riverside, California, Chicago, and here in Harlem, when they left that nun carved up with twenty-seven crosses decades ago—case study Journalism 101. Don’t think about that now.…
A big brand-new shiny black Cadillac SUV—like the kind the mayor drove around in—was in the space.
This had to be wrong. It was like renting a Smart car and getting a Rolls by mistake.
I clicked the key-lock button for the hell of it and heard the door unlock. I jumped in as quickly as possible, heard it lock, and removed the habit, keeping on the wimple. The GPS lit up, and I punched in “Grinnell St., Rhinecliff, NY.” “No address found” was the answer.
Hoping I’d figure out all the electronics as I drove, I pulled out into the bright light of day, turned east onto 125th Street and from there over the Willis Avenue Bridge, onto the Deegan, past Yankee Stadium, and onto the Taconic Parkway.
Checking my rearview mirror, expecting a tail—the “German” maybe—I saw nothing. But, hey, I’d been on enough surveillances myself to know that meant nothing. A tail was never detectable unless an amateur was at the wheel or the professional driver wanted the tail to be seen.
Twenty minutes into the drive north I finally relaxed, fairly sure I was OK. I removed the wimple, hit “cruise control,” and let go and let God, as Sadowski might have said.
I hit the satellite button for Fox all-news radio to catch up on the morning’s events at the tribunal.
Whose voice did I hear but Dona’s! Radio? She was reporting live from the UN. Her firsthand, eyewitness reports yesterday on the tribunal must have made her “sourced” enough to take the lead for all of the Fox outlets. At least something good came out of this fiasco, I thought. I also felt a twinge of jealousy. She gets to lead and I get led out the door. And I’m the one he “chose”?
Her first words snapped me back to reality. “It’s been a wild, wild day so far at the trial of suspected terror mastermind Demiel ben Yusef. As of now, we do not have an answer as to why ben Yusef spoke as though his biological father were still alive. According to his lawyers, Demiel ben Yusef was either an orphan or raised by a single mother, who also is now dead. If you recall, in court yesterday ben Yusef had handed his attorney a slip of paper, written in Aramaic, which stated that he would only answer to his father.
“When court resumed this morning, Chief Judge Fatoumata Bagayoko addressed that by informing the defendant and his attorneys that since the man on trial has, on record, no living relatives, and we know that his father is dead these past thirty-three years, he must have been talking about the ‘Master of the Universe’ or ‘God.’ In that case, she went on, and I quote, ‘That means Mr. ben Yusef, that you will have to answer to this court, because that is the closest you are going to get to God. In this lifetime, at any rate.’ The remark caused even the assembled heads of state to snicker.
“However, not everyone was
I almost cried at the real life out there that had nothing to do with the unreality that my life had become.
I walked a couple of blocks in my nun’s habit noticing how people nodded and smiled and showed the kind of respect that New Yorkers just don’t give to people wearing normal clothes.
In the middle of the block, I saw the big illuminated plastic UPARKIT.COM sign mounted sideways to the building. A low-rent joint if ever I’d seen one. It would be safer to park on an abandoned street. Didn’t Sadowski ever watch TV? Everyone who walks into a parking garage on TV gets beaten, killed, and/or raped.
Luckily the G in G156 stood for “ground,” so at least I didn’t have to climb any stairwells.
Who’d rape a nun? Oh, right, Riverside, California, Chicago, and here in Harlem, when they left that nun carved up with twenty-seven crosses decades ago—case study Journalism 101. Don’t think about that now.…
A big brand-new shiny black Cadillac SUV—like the kind the mayor drove around in—was in the space.
This had to be wrong. It was like renting a Smart car and getting a Rolls by mistake.
I clicked the key-lock button for the hell of it and heard the door unlock. I jumped in as quickly as possible, heard it lock, and removed the habit, keeping on the wimple. The GPS lit up, and I punched in “Grinnell St., Rhinecliff, NY.” “No address found” was the answer.
Hoping I’d figure out all the electronics as I drove, I pulled out into the bright light of day, turned east onto 125th Street and from there over the Willis Avenue Bridge, onto the Deegan, past Yankee Stadium, and onto the Taconic Parkway.
Checking my rearview mirror, expecting a tail—the “German” maybe—I saw nothing. But, hey, I’d been on enough surveillances myself to know that meant nothing. A tail was never detectable unless an amateur was at the wheel or the professional driver wanted the tail to be seen.
Twenty minutes into the drive north I finally relaxed, fairly sure I was OK. I removed the wimple, hit “cruise control,” and let go and let God, as Sadowski might have said.
I hit the satellite button for Fox all-news radio to catch up on the morning’s events at the tribunal.
Whose voice did I hear but Dona’s! Radio? She was reporting live from the UN. Her firsthand, eyewitness reports yesterday on the tribunal must have made her “sourced” enough to take the lead for all of the Fox outlets. At least something good came out of this fiasco, I thought. I also felt a twinge of jealousy. She gets to lead and I get led out the door. And I’m the one he “chose”?
Her first words snapped me back to reality. “It’s been a wild, wild day so far at the trial of suspected terror mastermind Demiel ben Yusef. As of now, we do not have an answer as to why ben Yusef spoke as though his biological father were still alive. According to his lawyers, Demiel ben Yusef was either an orphan or raised by a single mother, who also is now dead. If you recall, in court yesterday ben Yusef had handed his attorney a slip of paper, written in Aramaic, which stated that he would only answer to his father.
“When court resumed this morning, Chief Judge Fatoumata Bagayoko addressed that by informing the defendant and his attorneys that since the man on trial has, on record, no living relatives, and we know that his father is dead these past thirty-three years, he must have been talking about the ‘Master of the Universe’ or ‘God.’ In that case, she went on, and I quote, ‘That means Mr. ben Yusef, that you will have to answer to this court, because that is the closest you are going to get to God. In this lifetime, at any rate.’ The remark caused even the assembled heads of state to snicker.
“However, not everyone was
Similar Books
