Diplomatic Immunity (22 page)

Rachel’s case is unusual, he said, taking off his glasses. So often the cause of onset for anorexia was indeterminate, but with Rachel no one doubted that it was brought on by her mother’s death. From there a misplaced complex of emotions—guilt and self-blame—led her down the same horrific route taken by thousands of teenagers each year. But now, said Dr. Covey, inspecting his glasses thoughtfully, now this reversal with Rachel seems as definite as the initial cause.

It took me a moment to interpret. So you think she’ll get better, I said.

Dr. Covey chose his words with care. I believe, he said, she has a good chance. Rachel would appear to have resolved her feelings of guilt over the death of her mother. Perhaps in some self-protecting corner of her mind, he speculated softly, your daughter has acknowledged to herself that someone else was responsible.

Now here in Room Seven, with Patrick loitering outside the door, another picture comes to me, the one pinned to the Lighthouse corkboard: Rachel dancing in a wet white T-shirt among people I have never met, living a life I was not even aware that she had.

And I think to myself, What else don’t I know?

“Dad?” Lifting her head, she moves toward me along the side of the table. “He can’t do that, can he?”

Pain. It is like someone has reached into the cavity of my chest, clutched my heart, and squeezed. Squeezed hard. Stepping up to her, I wrap my arms around her, but she leans back, holding me off.

“He’s got no right. You’re a lawyer, tell him.”

“It’s not that simple.”

Her grip on my arms tightens. Her voice becomes hoarse. “Tell him,” she says.

My courage fails me totally. I do not ask Rachel the question that I had not thought of until this minute: Who was it? When she resolved her irrationally misplaced feelings of guilt over the death of her mother, who was it that she decided was responsible? In that dark, impenetrable region of her troubled mind, who was it she decided to blame?

THURSDAY

23

O
NE A.M., THURSDAY, AND I AM DRIVING SOUTH
with Mike.

After fetching the clothes and things Rachel requested from her new apartment, fending off Juan’s questions, then returning to Turtle Bay and making sure that Rachel was, as Mike promised me, under Weyland’s care, I finally went home. I did not sleep. My daughter is a hostage. The thought played over incessantly in my brain, lodged like some weird mindloop. Late-night TV, the usual Windrush family prescription for insomnia, was no help to me, so I sat there in the darkness with my back propped on pillows against the headboard and considered the kind of world I move in, the people I deal with on a daily basis. I pondered some big questions like just how far the human race has progressed since Babylonian times, when the giving and taking of hostages was accepted practice, an essential maneuver of diplomatic life.

Be patient. That is what we invariably tell the desperate families who appeal to the Secretariat for assistance. A brother missing from a package tour in Angkor Wat. A father abducted from an archaeological dig out in Lebanon. Sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, people whose curiosity or idealism has sent them venturing out from their homelands, many hoping to render aid to the wretched of the earth; innocents abroad, fated to discover firsthand that the world is a dangerous place. Good people. People like Sarah. And now that Rachel has so unexpectedly joined the lonely band of the taken, I find that my own patience, just as on that earlier occasion with Sarah, is a virtue in extremely short supply.

She did not do it. I hold fast to that belief. She is my daughter, I tell myself, I know her. And I know she can have played no part in Toshio Hatanaka’s death.

“It’s off the main drag,” says Mike, seeing me holding Toshio Hatanaka’s AmEx bill up to the dashboard light. “Brighton Beach Avenue. You know it, yeah?”

I do; at least I used to. When she was a kid, we would take Rachel to Coney Island on those hot summer weekends; occasionally we’d do the trek right up to Brighton Beach. Eating ice cream, the three of us would wander down the avenue while Sarah retold the stories she had heard about the place from her parents: Estonian immigrants, the Lebovitzes spent their first years in America living and working just off Brighton Beach Avenue. Septuagenarians now, they moved to Orlando years ago, where Josh, my brother-in-law, lives with his own family. Josh tells me that he can hardly bear to visit his parents these days. Since Sarah’s death, they seem to have given up on life themselves; he says he can’t take the silence.

In the decades since the Lebovitzes moved out of Brighton Beach, the whole area has changed. A big turn for the worse, as Mike reminds me.

“Last time I ever went there,” he says, “it was like a street war. Mayor goes there to do some election speech. He finishes late, and as we’re coming out of the hall, we hear this popping—bam, bam—like gunshots up the street. I turn to the local muscle, I say to the guy, Have we got a problem here? No problem, he says. Some gang from Moscow shooting up some thugs from Ukraine. But the mayor’s totally safe, he tells me. He says the Brighton Beach locals think it’s just great the way the mayor’s cracked down on black crime. Black crime.” Mike turns his head to look at me. “Fucking Russians. You believe ’em?”

I fold Toshio’s AmEx bill and put it in my pocket.

At the White Imperial down at Brighton Beach tonight, Yuri Lemtov, rising star in the Russian delegation and third member of the UNDCP Special Committee, has booked a table. I discovered this when I called the Russian mission an hour ago. Unable to sleep, I phoned the mission with the somewhat forlorn idea that Lemtov was the only accessible point of contact remaining to me from Toshio’s investigation of the Special Committee. At the Russian mission they were doing the same as everyone else must be doing, poring over the numbers and figuring which way the vote is likely to go. But Yuri Lemtov was not there. The junior delegate I spoke to, a guy I helped with some mission problems last year, told me in a voice of complaint that Lemtov had slunk off for a night of caviar and champagne at the White Imperial. The White Imperial. As soon as I hung up I checked the AmEx bill Mike found at Toshio’s apartment. And then I called Mike.

Mike yawns over the steering wheel. “What’s the strategy? Shout ‘Hatanaka,’ see who bolts for the door?”

“I couldn’t just sit on my hands.”

“Why not?”

I look at him.

“The way you’re telling it,” he says, “Patrick’s hanging the sword over Rachel’s head so he can get Asahaki back to do one last push for the Japanese before the vote. So the vote’s tomorrow. Not even twenty-four hours. You ask me, sitting on your hands sounds like a pretty good idea.”

“And if she was your daughter?”

The corner of his mouth rises. “So what’s Lemtov’s story? We know anything about him apart from he was on that committee?”

I take a couple of minutes telling Mike what I can. Lemtov is in his mid-forties, one of the new-breed Russians, a technocrat who emerged to prominence after the breakup of the Soviet Union. He made a name for himself working for the Russian Finance Ministry, reconstructing his country’s debt, then he switched to the Foreign Ministry, and now his negotiating skills and fluency in the English language have marked him out as the coming man on the Russian delegation.

“All three of them crooked?” says Mike skeptically. “Asahaki, okay, you’ve seen the paperwork at the bank. Maybe Po Lin’s in it somewhere too. But all three? Where’d you get all that on Lemtov anyway, the files?”

“Patrick mostly.”

Mike looks across at me.

The same troubling thought, I admit, has crossed my mind. What I know about Lemtov I have picked up from comments Patrick has made this past year. Patrick has been liaising with the IMF and the WTO over a series of conferences to be held next August on international finance and globalization. With his background in trade law, Patrick has high-level contacts in the West that are extensive, but Lemtov has been extremely helpful to him in providing the same high-level contacts in the former Eastern bloc.

“He and Patrick have done some work together,” I tell Mike.

“Lemtov and Patrick.”

“It’s no big thing.”

Mike nods to himself as he drops down a gear and pulls out to overtake.

It is raining hard when we park. Mike tugs his jacket up over his head as we dash across the street. When we skid to a halt beneath the protective awning of the White Imperial, the two doormen, in dinner jackets and bow ties, do not look impressed.

Mike stamps his feet, rolling his shoulders into his jacket. “Guests of Mr. Lemtov’s.”

The doormen turn to me then, and I say the first thing that comes into my head. “UN.”

Open sesame. They step aside and wave us through. After checking my coat, we pause on the threshold of the main room and peer in. Opulent in a brassy kind of way.

“Guests of Mr. Lemtov’s?”

“We’re in, ain’t we?” Mike scans the room. “You see him?”

The huge room is laid out cabaret style, with a stage up front and most of the floor space covered by tables. A bar along the rear wall is lit by a slanting lightning bolt of pink neon. A tuneless thunka-thunka blares out from hidden speakers and the buzz of voices is loud. A fragment of Las Vegas magicked into the heart of Brighton Beach; anything touched by light here glistens gold and silver. But I don’t see Lemtov. When a hostess approaches us, Mike steers me around her to the bar, where a minute later we’re each cradling a five-buck glass of Coke. Glancing around, Mike speculates on the possibility that Toshio was simply down here availing himself of all the female company.

“I mean, take a look. Throw a quarter, how many Olgas you gonna hit?”

There are, in truth, an extraordinary number of young women in the place, at the tables and loitering near us at the bar. Slavic. Lookers. The music dies away, a line of women in spangled leotards files onstage. U.S. and Russian flags unfurl above them. Applause. The room lights dim, the stage lights go up, and the music is suddenly pounding, the dancers moving sinuously into their routine.

Mike touches my arm and nods toward the entrance.

Lemtov has arrived. And with him an entourage of at least half a dozen men in suits, some of whom I recognize. Tariq el Jaffir, the Syrian ambassador. Rahman Abdullah, a member of the PLO observer delegation. Bepe, a Brazilian delegate and ex–national soccer star with a playboy reputation. And behind him, God help us, the Tunku.

“Oh, shit,” says Mike.

It is not the Tunku’s presence that has brought on this remark. Mike has just noticed one of the doormen at Lemtov’s shoulder, pointing directly across the tables at us.

“Stay or go?” Mike asks, sipping his Coke.

Lemtov sees us and nods to me. I raise my glass. “Stay,” I say.

Mike groans. He really does not want to be here.

As Lemtov is escorted to a table up near the stage, he pauses several times to speak with other patrons who hail him; he seems to be a known face in this garish arena. At his own table he supervises the arrival of an ice bucket and a magnum of champagne. Three young women appear. Bepe, who looks drunk, runs a hand up a skirt.

“Look at that.” Mike chews on the ice from his Coke. “One of ours?”

“Brazil.”

“Figures.”

Now Yuri Lemtov weaves his way through the tables. Arriving at the bar beside us, he turns and watches the girls onstage. Mike gives me a look: Get on with it, ask him what you want, then let’s get out of here. The opening routine finishes; there is a round of applause and Lemtov finally turns to the bar.

“You will join us?” he says.

When I decline the offer, he speaks to the barman. Two more Cokes appear on the bar.

“For my guests.” He is being ironic.

“That was a misunderstanding.”

His gaze is direct but unfathomable. He has those broad, flat cheekbones of many Russians, a touch Asiatic. A generous wave of silver hair parted on one side. And presence. It is not difficult to see how he won his reputation as a hardball negotiator. He has another few words with the barman; this time three shot glasses appear. The barman fills them with vodka. Lemtov slides one along to Mike, passes me the second, and raises the third himself.

“To my guests.”

“For chrissake,” Mike murmurs, throwing his head back, draining the vodka in one hit. Then, replacing the glass on the bar, he heads for the john. He looks tired and fed up. He does not like Lemtov’s friends. And now it is clear to me that he does not think much of Yuri Lemtov either. Lemtov watches Mike disappear through the swinging doors.

“You have come here to see me,” he says, still watching the doors.

I guess I could horse around, broach it indirectly as I first intended, but somehow this place and Lemtov’s manner do not lend themselves to subtlety.

“We wondered why Special Envoy Hatanaka was down here last week,” I say straight out.

Lemtov lifts a brow but says nothing. So I take out Toshio’s AmEx bill and hold it up to catch the pink neon glow. After inspecting the bill, Lemtov glances over to his table. More girls have arrived. No one seems to be paying any attention to us. The music starts up again, some strange Russian rap, and Lemtov knocks back his vodka. Then he touches his ear—too noisy—and gestures for me to follow him as he turns from the bar. I look toward the john. No sign of Mike. Stopping by the fire door, Lemtov glances back over his shoulder. I turn a book of White Imperial matches through my fingers; then I pocket the matches, down my vodka, and follow him out.

The corridor leads up a flight of stairs to a rear exit. When we step outside, a sharp gust of wind buffets us; the smell of the sea is strong. The rain has stopped but water runs in the drains, falling from leaking gutters in the darkness. We have emerged by a coffee shop onto the boardwalk. Wetness shines underfoot, the light trails into inky blackness out where the beach meets the sea. The music from the White Imperial is muted; you can hear small waves lapping gently on the sand.

“You should have called the mission,” Lemtov remarks, moving down the boardwalk. The Russian mission to the UN, he means. “They would have arranged an appointment.”

“For next month maybe.”

He smiles.

Then a door opens behind us. Expecting Mike, I look back but it is not Mike. It is some guy with a dark square face and an expensive suit who is built like an ox. Lemtov exchanges a few words of Russian with the guy before turning to me apologetically.

“My bodyguard. He insists he must join us.”

Lemtov is immediately walking again. I hesitate, then fall in beside him. His bodyguard, the ox, trails a few paces behind.

“Monday a week back, Special Envoy Hatanaka was down here at the White Imperial. I’m assuming he came to see you.”

“Why did you let Asahaki go?”

I look at him. “Ambassador Asahaki was never being held.”

“Why not?”

I raise a hand. “Can we stick to that Monday for the moment?”

“Was Hatanaka with me?” He shrugs, pushing his hands into his pockets. “Of course.”

“Just the two of you?”

“Yes.”

Lemtov seems unconcerned. But some minutes have passed since I showed him the AmEx bill; he has had time to determine his pose. And it is, naturally enough, the pose of the innocent party.

“Who asked whom down here?”

“He wanted to see me. I invited him for lunch.”

“What did he want to see you about?”

“Not Secretariat business,” Lemtov says, suggesting by implication that it is no business of mine.

“Toshio’s been murdered, Mr. Lemtov. Murdered while he was investigating the UNDCP Special Committee of which you were a member. I didn’t come all the way down here at this time of night to be jerked around.”

Lemtov continues walking. He gives no indication that my words have touched him in any way. “We spoke about Asahaki,” he admits at last.

“Something in particular?”

“The fraud.”

I glance across but he looks straight ahead as we walk.

“It was not the first time,” he says. “But the other times, Hatanaka was careful. He asked only general questions. Where the Special Committee met. What Po Lin said. What Asahaki said.” Lemtov makes a face, remembering. “
Kuratz.
Nonsense.”