Diplomatic Immunity (13 page)

“The guy came in a few minutes after she left. I even heard the damn door open. I thought it was her coming back for something.”

Mike bends, inspecting the coffee table. “This ever happens again, don’t go chasing the punk down the street.”

“He broke into my goddamn apartment.”

“You happen to notice if he was carrying a gun?”

The burning in my gut climbs into my chest. I shake my head and Mike continues his inspection.

Physical reaction to the shock and the sudden exertion have set in. I am perspiring freely now, my chest is tight. I go out to the kitchen and slug back a couple of glasses of water. Then I stand by the sink, brooding. Son of a bitch, I think. Goddamn son of a bitch. Five minutes earlier, it would have been Rachel instead of me who walked right into the guy. And if I wasn’t here? Suddenly I am every hang-’em-high type you have ever seen ranting on daytime TV. An unbridled redneck, zealous in defense of territory and family. Goddamn son of a bitch. I go back to the living room.

“What was I meant to do, direct him to the door and wave good-bye?”

Mike has his hands on his hips, looking down.

“What do I do next time?” I ask. “Give him my wallet?”

“Your wallet ain’t the problem here,” says Mike quietly.

And then I see what he has seen. I stare down at my phone. It has been unplugged. The mouthpiece has been removed and the inner electronics exposed. Mike points a pencil at the little gray silicone square that lies on the polished mahogany table.

“Like the three at Toshio’s?”

“At a guess,” says Mike. He peers closely at the miniature miracle of electronics, then pins the silicone square on a pencil point and holds it up between us. The hair prickles on my neck. “Real question you wanna be asking yourself,” he says, “was this thing on its way in when you disturbed the guy, or on its way out?”

I make a sound. We have to tell Patrick, I say.

Mike looks at me askance as he hands me the pencil. “I wouldn’t be telling Patrick anything just yet.” He rescrews the mouthpiece, repositions the phone on the table and plugs it in, then takes the pencil. He studies the silicone square awhile. He finally lifts his gaze. “At least not till we find out just how much that slippery fuck already knows.”

14

P
ASCAL NYERI IS WAITING FOR ME OUTSIDE THE
PORT
land Trust Bank, loitering between an enormous pair of Corinthian columns. He shakes my hand soberly.

“I have made the arrangements,” he says, turning to signal through the closed glass doors.

His suit is gray flannel, a couple of sizes too large, and he looks down, fidgeting with the cuffs. Pascal is a worried young man. Career advancement in the Secretariat is too often a reward for keeping well clear of trouble, and Pascal knows he is far enough down the pecking order and deeply enough involved in this to be scapegoated for any kind of debacle. Patrick’s failure to return his phone call yesterday was just a prelude. If the situation gets too much worse, Pascal could be the first man off the end of the plank. Now, as the giant glass doors open and we go in, I clap a hand encouragingly on his shoulder.

Inside, the bank looks like something from the Gilded Age. A high-vaulted ceiling and a dark marbled floor, the sound of our footsteps echoing across the cavernous space. Behind a counter of oak paneling the tellers are at their PCs, preparing for the day. But the man with whom Pascal has made the arrangements, a Mr. Dixon, is not in his usual place, and while Pascal wanders off to find him, I take a seat on a padded green leather bench. Dixon, I think. Then I take Toshio’s calendar from my briefcase and find the half-remembered entry quickly, a morning appointment last Friday. Dixon, PTB, 10:30
A.M.
Less than a week later, I have the morning appointment with Dixon. I close the calendar and slide it back into my briefcase. I have the morning appointment, I think, and Toshio Hatanaka is dead.

After a minute Pascal returns with Dixon, an old guy with a deep tan and improbably perfect white teeth. Dixon continues to smile as we cross the hall and descend the stairs to the archives.

“Mr. Hatanaka not coming today?” Dixon inquires over his shoulder.

Pascal reads my glance. Not today, he tells Dixon.

In the basement we are shown into a room that resembles a private library. Countless leather-bound books are arrayed on neatly aligned shelves around the walls, surrounding a broad table in the middle of the room with a row of green student lamps down its center. Pascal, familiar with the procedure, flips his briefcase open on the table. He hands Dixon a list of the paperwork we want to see and Dixon retreats through a rear door.

“Secure vault,” Pascal remarks when he sees my eyes following Dixon. “Bank officers only.”

While Pascal signs himself in at the visitors’ ledger by the door, he explains that he hasn’t ordered up every piece of paperwork that he went through with Toshio. “But what I have asked for, it will show you how the fraud occurred. And I have brought some other papers.” He indicates his briefcase.

“What if I want to see something else?”

“Ask. I will have Dixon bring it.”

I look around. “Did Toshio spend much time down here?”

“He came with me five or six times. One, maybe two hours each visit.”

“How long was the investigation running?”

“Toshio became involved in July.”

“No, I mean right back from the start.”

Pascal considers. “The auditors queried a Special Committee payment in May. That is when they called me. By the end of June we knew there was a problem.”

“We?”

“Internal Oversight.”

“By the end of June,” I say, lowering my brow. And he knows what I am thinking. By the end of June, under the regular Secretariat procedures, I should have been informed.

“It was not my decision.” Coming back to the table, he gestures to the ledger. I will have to sign myself in. “It was between Mr. Rasmussen and Mr. O’Conner,” Pascal says. “If you were not told, that was their decision.”

The enormous visitors’ ledger rests on a pulpitlike stand; after printing my name, place of work, then signing, I fold my arms and lean against the open pages. “From the end of June till now, Patrick and your Oversight colleagues were the only ones in on this?”

“And Toshio.”

“What about the audit guys?”

“After they gave it to me, their work was finished. They did not want to know if they had found a real problem or if it was a mistake. They think that is our job.”

“They must have wondered.”

Pascal shrugs. If the audit people are still concerned, he tells me, they have not mentioned it to him. That figures, I guess. A kind of battle-fatigue apathy is the UN bureaucrat’s usual response to the endless burdens dropped on him from on high. There is no reason for this to have been treated any differently from the thousand and one other problems dumped on Audit daily.

“Did Patrick come down here when he knew?”

“At first nobody came. Only me. I am not sure Mr. O’Conner believed there was a fraud. It was August before Toshio came down here. Mr. O’Conner, never.”

Mr. O’Conner. Plain Toshio. A clear indication as to how each man is, and was, regarded by Secretariat sherpas like Pascal. I remark that Patrick must have been kept informed.

“A weekly memo. That is what he wanted.”

Pascal hauls a stack of paperwork from his briefcase, and I suggest to him that we get started before Dixon returns. He switches on the nearest lamp, takes out his pen, and we begin.

Right from the start I am in trouble. Numbers. In columns, across rows, down pages. Reams of them. Payments and invoices, accounts being opened and closed. It is like one of those terrible nightmares I had before my math SAT, a sense of being rigorously examined on a subject in which only my ignorance is profound. But to Pascal this stuff is second nature; he appears to have no idea how hard I am working just to keep up with what he is telling me. It is at least ten minutes before the dim outline of what has occurred finally shimmers into view like some mirage on a lonely desert horizon.

“So all these invoices,” I say, laying a hand on the pile of slips Pascal has set to one side. “All these are bullshit?”

“Yes.”

“No money changed hands?”

Pascal makes a face. To his consternation, I have still not grasped this at all. “The money changed hands. That is what was stolen. But what the Special Committee was paying for, ‘management services,’ that is the lie. The money was going out but paying for nothing.”

The mirage seems to steady, become solid. “It’s like a public service salary.”

Smiling, Pascal directs me back to the paperwork. And listening to him, it occurs to me that he is our one piece of good fortune in this investigation so far. He cares. He wants to do this right. And it’s not just because of the ramifications in his own career. I know that because I have seen him in action before.

Eighteen months ago we flew out to Cambodia on the same plane. I was standing in for Patrick, giving my blessing to some recent election results that our observers declared were relatively clean and free of violence. Pascal was going out to give evidence against Lok Nol, a local UN field agent who it turned out had been stealing UN vehicles and reporting them as destroyed by brigand remnants of the Khmer Rouge. With time on my hands, I went to watch Pascal lay out his extensive dossier of evidence before the Cambodian judge. Pascal’s presentation of the case was exemplary. Concise and direct. The judge, however, was belligerent from the outset; he treated the evidence with something like contempt. Lok Nol sat off to one side of the courtroom with his lawyer; throughout the hearing neither one of them said a word. When the judge pretended that the translation of Pascal’s English into Cambodian left the case unclear, Pascal switched to French. We had both heard the judge speaking fluent French in the hall earlier, but now suddenly the judge’s only French vocabulary was
non.
Knowing by then that the case was lost, Pascal nevertheless pressed on grimly. An hour later on the courtroom steps, Pascal and I stood and watched Lok Nol drive away in a brand-new Mercedes. That a judge can be bought was not a new lesson for Pascal. What hurt him, what actually made him flinch, was when the judge emerged from the courtroom, strolled past us down the steps, and casually tossed over his shoulder the word
nigre.

Now Dixon reenters. The stack of files he is carrying is so heavy that he stoops. Pascal helps him unload the mountain of paperwork onto the table while I watch in despair. I simply cannot do this. When Pascal said that he would talk me through the paperwork, show me what Toshio’s investigation was all about, I had no idea he intended this huge expedition through the numbers. My aim was to review the investigation, not relive it.

“How much of that is relevant, Pascal? Really essential.”

Pascal sweeps his hand over the pile: all of it.

I shake my head. This is not going to work.

When Dixon seems about to settle himself at the far end of the table, I touch Pascal’s sleeve. “Is he staying?”

“Security,” Pascal whispers back. “While the bank documents are here, he must stay.”

I look to Dixon, then back to Pascal. “We need another file,” I say.

Dixon locks the files he has just brought into a wall safe, then goes to find the unnecessary paperwork that Pascal requests. When Dixon is gone, I tell Pascal, “I don’t have two months to do this. I don’t have the time to look through every file. Just keep it simple and tell me, in your own words, what you and Toshio found down here.”

“You should see everything.”

“I don’t have the time.”

An accountant, and schooled by Dieter in a kind of thoroughness the rest of us would call pedantry, Pascal cannot conceal his disappointment with my broad-brush approach. “I did a final memo for Toshio,” he reluctantly volunteers, gesturing to his briefcase. “But it does not give you everything.”

The memo, I say, will do just fine. He digs it out for me, three stapled pages, and I take a turn around the table, reading.

Though I have to pause a few times to ask Pascal for elucidation, the memo eventually yields up everything I really need to know. Those invoices Pascal has already talked me through are evidence of the fraud obtained from the paper trail within the UN. They gave Pascal the start he needed to track the destination of the payments. It seems the Special Committee held a perfectly legitimate account here at the Portland Trust Bank, but through a series of spurious “management services” payments, funds from the legitimate account have regularly been siphoned into a different account, designated BB7. And BB7 is the personal account of an unnamed private citizen.

I place the memo on the table. “So how much is in this BB7?”

“We cannot tell.” Pascal nods to the invoices. “We know what went in from the Special Committee. It is possible other money went in too.”

“So a few hundred thousand bucks at least. And maybe a whole lot more.”

“Maybe less. We know the account is still open. But it is a private account, unconnected with the UN. We cannot look. The money could have been withdrawn.”

“The account might be empty?”

“It is possible.”

I ask him to show me the other documents mentioned in his memo, the ones directly implicating Asahaki as the guy responsible for the fraud. Pascal digs in his briefcase again.

“These are the copies.” The originals, according to Pascal, are stored in a different vault across the street.

What Pascal hands me is incontrovertible, three letters authorizing release of UN funds for “management services” rendered to the Special Committee. All three letters are signed by B. Asahaki. Documentary evidence that the Japanese ambassador to the United Nations is a thief.

“Did Toshio confront Asahaki with this?”

“You should ask Mr. O’Conner. I gave Toshio my final memo. After that, Mr. O’Conner and Toshio decided what to do.”

“Which was?”

Pascal lifts a shoulder. He does not know.

My eyes return to his memo, dated August 15. Three weeks ago the Secretariat had ample evidence upon which to act against Ambassador Asahaki—and did not act. This is not the situation that Patrick described to me on his departure from the Operations Room last night.

“I am sure that Toshio wanted to do something,” Pascal says.

“And Patrick didn’t?”

Pascal looks down at the table.

“I’m not going to hold you to it, Pascal. Come on, I need everything I can get. I’m just asking for your opinion.”

“It is only an opinion.”

I nod and wait.

“Toshio did not want Japan to get the Council seat. When I showed him this”—Pascal indicates the paperwork—“I knew he wanted something done immediately.”

“But nothing happened?”

Pascal inclines his head.

“And you didn’t like that either, but you stayed out of it,” I say.

He nods again. No one’s fool, Pascal was not about to step into whatever disagreement Toshio might have had with Patrick. I ask him if Toshio ever mentioned why he thought Patrick was dragging his feet.

Pascal shakes his head no.

I pause a moment. Pascal looks very uncomfortable now. Telling tales against the Undersecretary-General for Legal Affairs is definitely not how he intended this visit to go.

“Did Toshio ever give you any indication he thought he was under surveillance?”

Pascal’s head rocks back.

No? I prompt.

“What surveillance?”

His evident surprise is all the answer I need. Waving his question aside, I remark that Toshio’s failure to disclose what he knew about Asahaki seems somewhat surprising. If he was getting no satisfaction from Patrick, why not tell me? Or why not go public? Toshio wasn’t known for allowing his voice to be smothered by higher powers in the Secretariat, not even by guys as far up the totem pole as Patrick.

Pascal concurs.

“Then why didn’t he do that?” I wonder out loud.

Pascal speculates that it might have something to do with the family trouble Toshio was having. “He has a cousin in the hospital in San Diego,” he explains. “Toshio went to see her last week. After he came back I called him. He did not want to speak about Asahaki then.”

I take a moment with that. “Can you recall exactly when he took this trip?”

Pascal reaches into his briefcase. “He canceled an appointment with me. It was the day he left.” Consulting his calendar, he finds the canceled appointment and gives me the date. The same day the airline ticket stub gives for Toshio’s departure for Switzerland. And Mike has confirmed with the airline that the trip took place, that the ticket was used.