Burn Down the Sky: Part Three

 

 

2

 

That’s what Alan was thinking about as he looked out across Chicago skyline from the window of his 8^th floor office. A bright morning sun scattered light from the big glass office towers along bustling Wacker Drive. Bathed in that light the street, running parallel to the river, appeared to be at the bottom of a fishbowl. Alan could see his reflection superimposed against the cityscape, where it appeared ghost-like in the broad window. The face in the window was tired and sad in some respect. Gray hair that had sprouted seemingly overnight during the terrible months of the Bosnian war had now overtaken the close-cropped dishwater blond hair of his youth. He measured his reflection against that foolhardy boy who had stumbled into Vietnam. Alan sighed heavily and studied his aging hands for a moment. The television was on across the room, turned to one of those 24-hour news channels.

“Serbia’s Foreign Minister will visit France next week for discussions on the ongoing violence in that region. Citing security threats French officials have been unusually tight-lipped, and are following up on a number of leads to thwart Albanian nationalists bent on disrupting the talks… ”

Alan ignored the report. He had a good man in Paris who would turn in a top-notch report on the Foreign Minister’s visit. It all seemed a million miles away from him at that moment, though the report evoked images of mass graves, refugees and Press conferences with bored Balkan officials who knew they were lying, and knew that no one else was fool by their lies! The rush of battle and the drive to go anywhere and take almost any risk for a story was leaving him in these final years of his career. He would not miss the bed bug ridden hotels, the bouts with dysentery or malaria, or the ever-present worry of dying in a strange land among stranger people. But the report had opened a door, and now other images came rampaging inside of his mind.

He thought about Emina from time to time. He wondered why tragic affairs never seemed to fade, but instead grew to something much larger, returning again and again to haunt the soul. Memories of her crept into the trials of the day. Odd and meaningless things, such as a color, a face in a crowded restaurant or wood smoke, stoked memories of her. Wood smoke always reminded him of Sarajevo, and reminded him of Emina’s soft hair and her clothes. Her face was so clear to him, and it was as if she was standing there in the room him.

He shook the thought away, and tried to convince himself that it wasn’t Emina, but the ghost of something long passed. He tried to convince himself that thoughts of her held no greater importance than accidentally running his fingers over an old scar.

Alan suddenly realized how the world had changed in the ten years since he had last seen her. The world had been transformed, and had witnessed nothing short of a revolution. After the collapse of the Soviet Union there was a chance, a sense of infinite possibility as the Twentieth Century drew to a close. There was a quiet sense of relief that mankind had, for now, averted nuclear annihilation, though perhaps as much by accident as intentionally. Now the world faced fresh dilemmas in the new millennium. The planet had become, with the dawning of the computer age, a much smaller place, with many more mouths to feed. More people competed for fewer resources, and asserted themselves against those who they felt controlled more than their fair share, or against those coveting resources beyond their own borders. Terrorism was merely a symptom of this larger disease. It was one that wore the face of fear. That fear came as strong as a tidal wave, and it was damned hard not to be swept along by that fear until it eclipsed any clear vision of morality. Those who understood these perils fought those who would mire the world in its slovenly and selfish heritage. They hoped that overcoming that one hurdle would propel mankind into a higher purpose, and to a renewed resolve to evolve beyond mankind’s primitive curses.

Alan felt colder for the thought. He shook it away and turned his thoughts to the coming days, which would require his full attention. But he could only shake those thoughts so far. Tragic memories, like a disease of the blood, were always just below the surface of the skin.  Something caught his attention on the television for a moment, bringing back a cascade of memories:

“Police are looking into the shooting deaths of two Muslim men on the City’s west side. Both men, in their late fifties were shot execution style. Muslim leaders are calling it a hate crime, citing an explosive increase in attacks on Muslims since the September attacks. Police dismissed the complaints and are calling it a botched carjacking…”

Alan looked around the comfortable office and pursed his lips. This was not journalism, he thought, this was what journalism paid for. This office was not really him and a part of him missed being out in the field. The excitement of uncovering a story, or of stumbling into unfolding history was an addiction not easily beaten. As the foreign editor for Chicago’s second largest newspaper, The Post, he merely presided over foreign correspondents scattered around the globe, jealous to read their reports only after the event was over. It was difficult to recall now that he had longed for this all those years.

For the first time since he left college in the spring of 1967 Alan had a stable life. After all the wars and insurrections, the strange beds and being rousted in the middle of the night by thugs of some fly-by-night junta he was finally settling down. But it came with a certain degree of sadness and longing.

“Married.” He said the word aloud. It seemed impossible that he was finally settling down. It almost made him laugh that he was about to be married and retire all at the same time! Well, not quite at the same time. He still had a few years to go before he could retire to a quiet comfortable life, but it was within sight. More than, the life he had dreamed of was within sight, and now there was nothing that could keep him from it, or so he thought.

Alan was getting married to a woman that exceeded dreams he didn’t know that he had. Her named was Donna Martin, a successful doctor from the North shore. She was a brilliant woman, and way out of his league, he was often heard to say. Of course, he would say it with his telltale smirk as though he was joking. She would see right through that smirk, deeper than most others had, and admonish him sweetly. In the morning they would be married in a small, but elegant, ceremony in the back yard of her home.  

Everything in their lives was perfect. To Alan, the unromantic fool that he was, the wedding almost seemed like a technicality. To Donna is a bold step to reclaim a future she feared had died with her late husband. Donna’s children and grandchildren had accepted Alan as if he was family, and most everyone who saw them acting like giddy lovers half their age could not believe that the couple weren’t already newlyweds.

A knock at the door tore him from these rambling, incongruous thoughts. He turned to find his secretary of the last six years, Mrs. Sangee. She was a super efficient woman of Indian heritage, and still held all of the grace and much of the beauty of her youth. She was so efficient that Alan sometimes wondered if the office might not run better without him!

“Mr. Kirby,” she said with the hint of a dutiful bow, a relic of her Indian upbringing, “just to remind you of your three o’clock luncheon with Mr. Kellerman at the Russian Tea Room.”

Kellerman was the Post’s editor-in-chief. Whatever Kellerman wanted Alan knew that it wasn’t going to be good news. The Tea Room was his place to dispense bad news, as though the opulence of the restaurant had a way of dulling catastrophic news, and this had all the earmarks of that. He and Kellerman had nurtured a contentious and sometimes devious relationship ever since the Vietnam War. Alan could only guess what Kellerman wanted, but he was already making plans for an early retirement.

“Mrs. Sangee, would you send a dozen red roses to my home?” Whatever it was that Kellerman wanted to tell him Alan resolved not to let it ruin this weekend. Monday morning he and Donna would board a plane to Paris for their honeymoon. Alan had waited his whole life for this and nothing, not Kellerman nor the folly of the world would interfere with that. He took a deep breath and tried not to worry.

“Shall I call a taxi, sir?”

“No,” he said, looking out over the river again, “the walk will do me good. It will give me a chance to think of some good comebacks for whatever Kellerman has to say.”

“Mister Kirby,” Misses Sangee said, her tone softer than usual, “whatever happens I just wanted to say that you are the best boss I have ever worked for here at the Post.”

“Little early to put flowers on my grave, isn’t it,” he smiled.

“It is just, well, sometimes things happen in this business and we don’t have the opportunity to say the things that must be said.”

He wanted to give her a big hug, instead he nodded in agreement. “You are a good soul, dear.

It was a short walk across the river to the Tea Room. It was a glorious autumn day. The sun felt warm upon Alan’s face. A breeze off the river swept the gold and blue designer tie across his shoulder. He still was terribly uncomfortable in suits. All those years of wearing khaki and canvas, jungle boots and flak jackets had spoiled him from the finer points of fashion. Alan could well remember being happy going years without wearing a suit and tie. He missed that sturdy loose-fitting clothing, and always felt like the suits were trying to go places in his body where they shouldn’t!

He turned down Wells Street beneath the Elevated Train tracks where the air was mustier and smelled like rust and wet stone. The street here had seen little more than grimy, filtered light in years. An El Train rattled loudly over head. It disturbed a flock of pigeons. Their wing beats thundered loudly in the canyon of tall office towers.

“Have you been saved?” cried a small, wide-eyed man momentarily blocking Alan path. “Is Christ your Lord and savior?”

Alan gave a perfunctory and thoroughly ambiguous nod. It was one of those carefully crafted defenses city folks construct to stymie and discourage the natural obstacles of the urban jungle. Normally it was enough, but not this time. Apparently unfamiliar with Alan’s urban defense tactics the man followed, waving several small pamphlets at him. He was babbling something, spewing a thoroughly insane mixture of current events, cultural paranoia and Biblical scripture. The poor fellow looked dejected and older than his years. His teeth were yellowed and uneven. Alan constructed a scenario in his head that drew a picture of a man clinging desperately to something that would rescue him from the despair of booze or drugs or desperate loneliness. 

Alan had long eschewed religious doctrine and fanaticism. He had seen too much misery and hate perpetrated under the guise of organized religion. More than that, he had seen children suffer terrible wounds, had seen them starved or killed and wondered what kind of God would allow such cruelty without giving man the blessing of learning how not to repeat such acts. If it was true, he thought, that God had made man to love, why had he also allowed hate the chance to grow so much stronger than love?

The way a religion was evangelized was reflective of the society, Alan knew. Living among Buddhists, Hindu’s, Christian’s, Muslims, Jews and even Pagan African tribes had taught him that much. Organized religions, he had argued in dark and dangerous parts of the world, were little more than a pyramid schemes, crafted through fear and guilt and peer pressure, feeding off the lonely and the greedy to feed the unabashed wealth of a few. Religious leaders live in opulence and luxury, while their poor and destitute followers dropped coins and trinkets as offering to feed that luxury.

Truth be told, it wasn’t so much that Alan hated religion. He had come to believe that all religions were one in the same. Each offered a message of love, and encouraged toleration for other belief systems. What difference existed between religions were largely cosmetic affectations of the land and sky and heritage of a community. At their purest religion dealt with the intimate dialogue of each the soul to understand what was truly beyond human comprehension. Indeed, no one saw God, or life or religion quite the same way, which in essence made each person a religion separate unto all others. Community came when the loneliness in each person became so overpowering that they were drawn to common purpose. Each religion was a song of the soul, and since there was not one song that could adequately describe music, there was no religion that could properly describe God. They were all different windows into the same house. 

“There’s a war on!” the little man persisted. “A culture war for your soul and for America; a war for the kingdom of God! The heathens and Islamists won’t rest until all that Christ has proclaimed and ordained is trampled underfoot! And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle! It has been a thousand years since the rise of Islam. Satan has come to the world in Islamic clothing for the final battle between good and evil. Wake up, man!”

The guy had nearly worked himself into a frenzy. His face was red and contorted, his brow so tense and deeply furled that Alan half expected the guy to lunge at him. For an instant Alan felt threatened and had half a mind to slug the lout. Alan thought to shout at him, grab him by the shoulders and tell him to wake up to the insanity around him, and to the hate he and others like him were toying with. Alan knew all too well the logical, and certain outcome of that hate. Instead he let it go, for the man who had already lost interest in him and was shouting at someone else. Alan shrugged it off and hurried the last couple of blocks to the restaurant.

Bob Kellerman was a tall man with snow-white hair. Alan would have had no trouble recognizing him even if the restaurant wasn’t nearly empty. He sat alone amid a sea of brushed white linen tablecloths. In the soft pale light of crystal chandeliers silverware, and fat wine goblets sparkled like jewels against a palette of dark wood and red-satin drapery. Alan took a deep breath and thought that this was the place where their long and contentious history together would finally come to a head. Seeing Alan, Kellerman waved without rising. Alan feigned a smile.

“Alan,” Kellerman extended his hand. Alan took it and looked in the man’s eyes as resolutely as a condemned man resigning himself to his executioner. The bitterness of their long history had not diminished at all, though it become something much more civil in the last several years. It went back to their fresh-faced, naïve freelance days in Vietnam. Alan had edged Kellerman out on a search and destroy mission against a Vietcong unit. The mission went horribly awry, netting Alan a story that won him a Pulitzer Prize. They ran into each other continuously over the ensuing decades, in a dozen different wars around the planet.

The community of war correspondents was a small and competitive one, but the bitter nature of Kirby and Kellerman’s rivalry soon became legendary. Somehow Alan was always at the scene first, well ahead of Kellerman. So, it came with a certain satisfaction to Kellerman when he became Alan’s boss, a privilege he managed to impress upon Alan every chance he got.

“Bob, I suppose that I’d be happier to see you if this place hadn’t gained a rather inauspicious reputation.”

Kellerman smiled knowingly and shook his glass. Ice cubes swam and jangled in golden-brown Chivas Regal. He waved over the red-jacketed waiter and motioned for another drink.

“Get you something, Al?”

“Are you asking or recommending?”

“Have a drink, Alan,” Kellerman said ominously.

“Bushmills on the rocks,” said Alan. He could see that wily look in Kellerman’s sage green eyes. It had always been a dead giveaway that Kellerman was up to something. It was Alan’s long held secret that all those times he beat Kellerman to a story it was because he got the first tip from the poor guys piss-poor poker face. “Might as well go for the good stuff while I can, huh?”

“Boy, reputation can burden even the best of intentions.”

“We’ve had quite a history, Bob. It’s best that I learn to be prepared for anything.” He nodded as the waiter returned with their drinks.

 “How’s Donna?” Kellerman raised his glass for a toast. Alan could see that he was sincere. “Here is to your lovely bride. Never thought I’d see you settle down.”

Alan returned the toast, and smirked. “Well, that’s one place you managed to get before me.”

Kellerman laughed as he ran a finger around the rim of his glass. His gaze was distant, a continent and several decades away. “We do have a history.”

“Like our fates were intertwined somehow.”

“Interchangeable even. I swore as I watched you lift off in that chopper back in ‘Nam that I would get revenge somehow. When you screwed me out of getting into Afghanistan with the Mujahedeen I wished every bad thing short of death on you. I told myself that if there was a way to ruin you, beat you to a story or spoil a lead that I wouldn’t hesitate. Every time I got a tip that something big was in the offing I was going to beat you there come hell or high water, but damned if you weren’t there before me. I was sure that you were some kind of demon sent to haunt me. Took an awful long time before I could see through my envy at your talent.”

Alan smiled knowingly. He saw no need to kick a guy trying to offer a compliment. “Only keeping up with the best.”

It sounded like sucking up, and Alan hated that. He did not suck up to anyone, and least of all Kellerman. Sure, there was the occasional schmoozing now and then, but what had carried Alan through three decades of war was in finding common ground with people. Of course that talent was often strained with Kellerman. Alan studied his old nemesis and wondered what the old man was up to. Kellerman drained the last of his bourbon. His brow was deeply furled.

“Felt like I had finally whipped you when I got this job. You were off in Columbia chasing after Marxist guerillas, and my first thought was that I had won. Then one fine Autumn day I’m watching the biggest story in American history unfold, and I’ll be damned if you aren’t standing on a street corner in New York, covered in dust and reporting while the world is going to hell around you. I was back in ‘Nam watching that chopper lift off all over again. Funny how the past keeps coming back to find us.”

Alan was more confused than ever about the meaning of this meeting. Was this about the flak from a nasty boycott of the Paper’s unintended slant on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict? Did Kellerman see this as his last chance for revenge before Alan retired? Questions and schemes raced through Alan’s mind. Hell, he thought, this might be an opportunity to finally get out of the business, to retire with Donna somewhere by the sea and work on that novel he always wished to write. Or maybe he would open a shop and sell driftwood sculptures to tourists, as far from the troubles of the world as he could get.

“You didn’t call me hear to reminisce, did you, Bob?”

Kellerman gave a sigh. “Despite our history, Al, I still think you’re the best damned correspondent out there. I’ll be honest, all those years I was so jealous.”

“Luck of the draw. Just one seat on that chopper.”

“I saw you slip that Vietnamese MP a twenty to hold me up,” Kellerman smiled.

Alan couldn’t help but grin into his bourbon. Kellerman had him dead to rights, and had for all these years. What had transpired between them was nothing short of two irascible egos competing with one another.

“Owed him from a poker game.”

“Truth is, Al, you brought real insight and perspective to that battle. It took me a long time to realize that you wrote a better story than I would have. You’ve got a good eye. You see the big picture, which is why I recommended you for foreign editor.”

“You didn’t call me hear to sing my praises.”

“Al, things are getting hot in the Middle East, I don’t have to tell you. And it’s not like me to micromanage each department. You’ve got a good team there now, but we have to make a play to be the number one newspaper in this town. It’s about the bottom line. It’s about advertising revenue. The competition is killing us over there, which is where you come in. Like the president says, we’re taking the fight to the enemy. I’m pulling out the big guns. I need you over there to get us that win.”

“Bob,” Alan felt warm anger rising in his cheeks, “there is a lot more going on in the world besides the Middle East.”

“As far as the Post is concerned right now, there is nothing else going on in the world.”

“I’m getting married tomorrow, for Christ’s sake. Monday Donna and I are on a plane to Paris.”

Kellerman leaned back, stiff and straight. His demeanor had changed. He was no longer a friend, but a boss charged with running a big city newspaper, and with all the tough decisions that came with that unenviable position.

“Get married, but Monday I need you on that plane to Kuwait City.” Kellerman stood and motioned to the waiter to put the drinks on his tab. “ I’m counting on you. Have another drink and put it on my tab. And by the way, congratulations on your wedding.”

Alan stared blankly across the white tablecloths to the street beyond. People hurried past as traffic crept slowly. He looked at the faces of the people, of the frustrated Arab cab driver in his yellow taxi, the stoic expressions on a passing bus. They were going off to their homes and offices, and Alan felt so jealous of them. He wondered what might have happened to his life if he had never gone off to war. Alan downed his drink and motioned for another one.

He wondered if he would have been one of those tired looking businessmen, their tan trench coats and uniform ties tossed by the wind. He wondered if he would be going home to a family he barely knew and a wife who loved in him in some distant way and with the familiarity of a well-worn glove. A mix of emotion swam through him. Somehow Kellerman had managed to flatter and betray him at the same time.

“Another drink, sir?” asked the waiter, with a distinctly Slavic accent. Alan regarded the young man. His features were familiar, and he thought to ask him where he was from. “One more, and, um, wrap up a bottle of your best champagne and put it on Mr. Kellerman’s tab. You’re from Bosnia, right?”

The waiter nodded a little uncomfortably. “From Sarajevo. How did you know?”

“A lucky guess.”