Diplomatic Immunity (25 page)

I turn my head. I am not going to listen to any more of his self-justifying crap.

“Please yourself,” Patrick says. “But I’m telling you, she’s got some serious questions to answer. And what have you done to help exactly? You’ve instructed her to clam up, not to say a bloody word. This morning I stuck my head in the door to make sure she’s okay. I ask her if she’s comfortable. ‘Ask Dad,’ she says. Dad, for fucksake. You.” I give a thin smile. Score one for Rachel. But Patrick is not amused. “So are you going to tell me what’s going on with your kid? Or am I just meant to guess?”

“Guess.”

“Son of a bitch,” he says quietly.

Taught by a master, I think, but I save the thought.

Retreating behind his desk, Patrick retakes his chair. He pushes back, rocking in a quick staccato motion as he studies me. “Tell me something,” he says, “have you even asked her?”

“I’m not getting into that.”

“Jesus.” He stops rocking. He leans forward, placing his elbows on the desk. “You haven’t, have you? Your own daughter. She’s a suspect and you haven’t even asked her what in the name of Christ she was doing in the basement Monday night.”

“She went down to pick up her coat.”

“Is that right.”

We eyeball each other across the desk. Then the intercom buzzes. Patrick’s secretary, Leila. She informs him that she has the ambassador from Liberia back on line three.

Liberia. A country that has spent the past six months lobbying Patrick to get its name removed from this year’s list of nations that conduct their internal affairs with habitual disregard to the UN Convention on Human Rights. For the past six months Patrick has been using me to fend off their ridiculous plea: A stand, so Patrick told me as recently as last week, had to be taken against these guys.

But now Patrick needs votes for the Japanese. He lowers his eyes.

“Liberia,” I say.

Patrick’s hand pauses on the phone. He lifts his eyes and his look now is piercing. “If you don’t have the stomach for it, Sam, now might be a good time for you to leave.”

A brusque invitation to absent myself from his office during negotiations. And at a deeper level, we both know, the suggestion that I am not quite up to my job. That I should maybe consider a premature conclusion to my UN career.

26

“C
RAZY,
”
SAYS DIETER, THEN ADDS FOR GOOD MEASURE
, “stupid, crazy.”

When I begin to recite the list again, an itemized reckoning of Patrick’s poor judgment, negligence, and downright hostility to the truth in this whole affair, Dieter raises his hand. “About Asahaki, I also am not satisfied,” he concurs.

“But it’s not just Asahaki, that’s my point. Patrick kept that evidence under wraps until it was too late, you know that. But he’s done more than that, hasn’t he?”

Dieter’s hand returns to the railing, an aluminum tube that stretches the length of the low wall by the walkway that cantilevers over the FDR Drive. The New York traffic thunders past below us. “You are accusing O’Conner of lying.”

“Yes.”

“That is not all that you are accusing him of.”

“Look, I’m not accusing him.”

At this splitting of hairs, Dieter raises a brow.

“Okay, so maybe I am. But I’ve got reasons, haven’t I, Dieter? Come on. I mean, how straight has he been with you and Pascal?” I wave a hand toward Pascal, who is hovering a few paces along the railing behind his boss. Since bringing Dieter down to meet me, Pascal hasn’t said a word. But he is obviously relieved to have channeled my request higher up the line. “Or with Security?” I add. “Or with anybody?”

Dieter turns and wanders down the paved walkway, his hand sliding along the aluminum rail. When I step up beside him, his hand disappears into his coat pocket. Pascal falls in a few paces behind.

“A thief?” Dieter says. “The Undersecretary-General for Legal Affairs?”

“It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

He walks on in silence. My theory, riddled with holes as it is, has not convinced him. But in my own mind I am absolutely convinced now that Patrick, in some way, is tied up with this. I really should have listened to Mike earlier. We have been screwed around from the start, and after my encounter with Lemtov and his bodyguard last night, and my brief visit to the thirty-fifth floor this morning, I am no longer inclined to give Patrick any further benefit of the doubt.

Now Dieter asks me if I have accused Patrick to his face.

“No.”

“Good,” he says, relieved.

“Listen, no one’s accusing Patrick of murder.”

Dieter snorts. I touch his arm and we stop. We are by the rose garden now; the rose stems are thorny and bare. Faded nameplates have been spiked beside each plant: names like Peace and Hope and Brotherhood.

“One question, all right?”

He inclines his head warily.

“Do you trust him?”

There is a long pause. “I did,” he says finally.

“And now you don’t?”

Dieter puts up a hand. “What are you asking me for, Sam?”

I look away a moment. At the far side of the rose garden the moms and pops from Peoria are strolling around the North Lawn; a party of Japanese tourists is having a group photo taken near a statue. What am I asking for? My daughter’s freedom, I think. The world.

“I want you to open Patrick up,” I say, turning back. “His personal finances. And take a look at any financial authorizations he’s made this last year. Any connection he has with Asahaki, Lemtov, or Po Lin.” Dieter, to my dismay, is already shaking his head in refusal. “What’s the matter, are you afraid of what you might find?”

When Dieter shoots me a dark look, I rein myself in. “I’m not talking anything official. Just give Pascal the okay to poke around. At least make some preliminary inquiries.”

“I went to see Patrick this morning,” says Dieter. “He was not there.”

“He’s there now.” I cannot keep the bitterness out of my voice. “Maybe he can fit you in somewhere between his calls to Liberia and the damn Congo.”

“Your daughter was there. In Room Seven.”

I look at him. I know at once where this is going.

“She is detained?” he says.

“That’s just dirty politics, Dieter. A cheap ploy.”

“Detained by Patrick, yes?”

“This isn’t some stupid revenge thing. I’m not asking you to open Patrick up just to get back at him for Rachel. You think I’d do that?”

“She is your daughter.”

“This isn’t about Rachel.”

“Then it doesn’t matter if we wait. Perhaps next Monday we can see—”

“Monday?” My frustration erupts. “I’m not waiting till Monday while my daughter’s being held goddamn hostage.”

Dieter’s eyebrows rise.

“So she’s my daughter and I want her out of there,” I concede. “But that’s not why I’m asking you to flip Patrick over. I’m asking you because I honestly believe he’s involved in this damn thing somewhere. The fraud or Toshio’s murder, I don’t know where, but he’s in it. And I’m not going to find out where or how unless I get some help from you guys.” I wave a hand back to Pascal, who has his own hands braced on the railing, listening to our conversation.

Dieter glances over his shoulder. And seeing something other than Pascal, he grunts. “Your friend,” he says, facing me again.

I look over toward the building. And immediately see what Dieter has seen. Asahaki. Ambassador Asahaki. He has just emerged from the Secretariat building with Jeremiah Sekelele, the Nigerian ambassador, a senior figure in the Organization for African Unity and a major power broker in the UN General Assembly. His white robe billows as he walks with Asahaki across the walkway. Heads bowed, conferring, they stop and lean on the railing thirty yards from us while their respective entourages stay back near the building. A familiar scene. You see it every day in the Secretariat corridors and down on the floor of the Hall; by the committee rooms and out in the lobbies of any number of uptown hotels. Two men, representatives of their countries, locked in private conference, auctioning favors, cutting deals, lining up the numbers for any big vote. Normally I would not even notice. But today is different. Today I stare.

On my way down to meet Dieter I bumped into Tommy Yelland, ex-doyen of the regular UN journalists. A plum job at the CBC took him away last year, but nothing could keep him away from today’s vote. And in Tommy’s opinion the Japanese have blown it.

What I don’t get, said Tommy, buttonholing me in the elevator, is why Asahaki went back to Japan.

I shrugged. Politics. Who knows?

He probed a bit more. I remained unresponsive. Then finally he dropped the bewildered-old-man act and asked me directly. What do you think was going on between him and Hatanaka?

I was still shaking my head, walking away from the elevator, when it occurred to me that this meeting with Tommy Yelland was not simply fortuitous. I looked back over my shoulder. And sure enough, Tommy was riding back up in the elevator to find himself a more forthcoming senior Secretariat staffer to buttonhole.

With his extensive network of contacts in the Assembly, and an impartial eye to the outcome, I would guess that Tommy Yelland’s pre-vote verdict will not be easy to overturn. And the Japanese must know the numbers. So Bunzo Asahaki, though he does not show it now as I watch him conferring with Sekelele, must be worried. Extremely so.

“You know what he’s doing?” I jerk my thumb in Asahaki’s direction, addressing Dieter.

Dieter shrugs. Of course he knows.

“Asahaki’s back in the game only because of Patrick. Asahaki’s wandering around out here free as a bird, lining up the African vote, and my daughter, Rachel, she’s upstairs with a goddamn guard on her door. And I’m meant to wait till Monday?”

“Nothing will change.”

I turn from Dieter to Pascal in frustration. Though Pascal’s look is sympathetic, he does not seem surprised by my failure to carry the case. It is just as he warned me: Dieter will not touch Patrick.

“Is that your last word?”

“I can’t help you, Sam,” Dieter says.

I shove off the railing. And as I turn, there is a stir among Asahaki’s people; they have just noticed me. Fingers point. Then one of them hurries to report my presence to Asahaki, who immediately breaks off his conversation with Sekelele and looks over. Only a second or two. Just long enough to register that it is me, his supposed persecutor, and that I am making no move in his direction. Just long enough to ascertain that whatever promises Patrick has made to him remain good. Then Asahaki turns away and resumes his discussion with Sekelele, secure now in the knowledge that I will not be troubling him in the lead up to the vote. All inquiries in his direction have been temporarily suspended.

Dieter begins to speak, but I flick a hand over my shoulder. I do not have the time for his apology.

This is how it feels, I think, marching down the path through the rose garden, my eyes fixed on the ground. Patrick has delivered for the Japanese. And this is how it feels to be brought back to heel.

27

“W
HERE DID YOU GET THAT STUFF ON PO
LIN
’
S
investments?”

Marie smiles at my question. She hits the button for the elevator, then pushes a loose strand of hair over her ear. She regards me with amused condescension.

“Do I have to beg?” I ask her.

“It would not help,” she tells me. “And you know it.”

Her eyes go to the numbers above the elevator door. It occurs to me how absurd I must have seemed to the journalists who attended, albeit briefly, my course on journalism and the Secretariat. Did I honestly believe that I could teach them something? That they might actually want to listen? It’s not just the reflexive skepticism they exhibit on every subject under the sun; it’s this attitude, exactly what I’m getting from Marie here—that questions are the things they ask and you answer, that any reversal of roles is tantamount to the overthrow of the laws of nature—that sets them irredeemably apart. The give-and-take of daily life is not for them a two-way street; some essential human quality seems to be missing.

So now I raise my voice quite deliberately. “Didn’t we have a deal?”

Marie blanches. She turns to make sure no one behind us has heard my question, but the only people there are two young female staffers clutching brown paper bags. They have not heard, and would not care if they had.

“We agreed, private,” Marie reminds me, her voice a whisper. “You agreed.”

“I didn’t agree to just take whatever you dished up without question, accept it, and shut my mouth. I didn’t agree to that.”

Her look smolders. When the elevator arrives, we get in; she jabs the button for four, then fixes her gaze above the door. The two young staffers pick up the vibe; they decide not to join us.

“Internal Oversight ran through the list of companies you gave me,” I tell her when the elevator doors close. “Interested?”

“Why did you do that?” she says, turning on me. “Why must you shout it, ‘We have a deal’?”

“Nobody shouted.”

“You did.”

“Nobody heard.”

“Dieu,”
she murmurs, lifting her eyes. She takes a breath and thinks a moment. Then her expression softens somewhat, her angry frown slowly disappears. To my surprise, her hand rises and comes to rest lightly on my arm. “Please,” she says. “I took a risk to tell you anything. And it is the truth, you did agree. Private.”

Her hair spills from beneath a blue headband. My eyes wander down her hair to her neck. Unlined. Paler than Jennifer’s. Her red varnished nails slide down my arm, then away.

“I have just missed my deadline,” she explains as we leave the elevator and head down the hall. “My editor in Paris, he wants to kill me. My colleagues are shouting in my ears, and I am pissed off with everything.” She smacks her hand into an open door as we pass. “Everything,” she repeats. “Not only you.”

Some guy sticks his bald head out of the
Frankfurter Allgemeine
office; while Marie pauses to confer with him, I look down the hall. Not all the UN-accredited journalists keep offices here, but today it appears to have become the unofficial assembly point for anyone with a reporter’s scratch pad, camera, or microphone. There is a real buzz of anticipation, journalists huddled together, speculating on the vote. I hear Asahaki’s name mentioned more than once; evidently his conversation with Sekelele has been observed closely from a window up here. A correspondent from the BBC is waving fifty bucks in the air, trying to place a wager on a Yes vote but finding no takers.

When Marie rejoins me, we shoulder our way through the thickening ruck outside the
Keisan Shimbun
office door. Then someone recognizes me. An Australian Broadcasting hack, Drew Armitage, a man who has been known to receive more than his fair share of leaks from Patrick. I do not like the guy. He instinctively shoves a mike at my face and asks about Toshio. Brushing the mike aside, I repeat the official line. That we’re still waiting for the postmortem results but in the meantime he should consult our earlier press release: death by natural causes.

“Natural causes,” he calls after my retreating back. “Does that include some UN guide? Name like Windrush?”

It takes every ounce of self-control for me not to pivot. I fix my gaze firmly on a point between Marie’s shoulders and follow her straight down the hall. Drew Armitage cannot have the full story, I am sure of that. But I am equally sure that what he does have comes from Patrick, that what I have just felt is a tug on my chain from the thirty-fifth floor.

The Agence France-Presse office is empty. We go in, and I lean my back against the closed door.

“Why did he ask you that?” Marie deposits her purse on a desk. Bending, she searches a drawer. “A UN guide?” she says, idly curious. It seems she did not hear the jerk announce my name, or maybe she heard him but missed the allusion.

I wave a hand vaguely. I disclaim all knowledge. “Someone’s idea of a joke,” I say.

“A joke on you?”

Yes, I tell her. A joke on me. Something like that.

She pulls out a long reel of tape, its ribboning tail dangles. Then she crosses to the reel-to-reel machine by the wall and clicks the tape onto a spool. Like every other journalist in the building, Marie has an opinion on the vote. Now she gives hers to me. According to Marie, the Yes and No votes are evenly divided but there remains a big question mark over Africa. Less than an hour to the vote and the journalistic consensus is that the Africans will decide which way it goes. Which explains, of course, Patrick’s call to the ambassador from Liberia and Asahaki’s whispered conference with Sekelele. The last frantic push for votes is on.

I ask Marie how Agence France-Presse is calling it: thumbs up or thumbs down.

“The Africans are poor.” She shrugs. “The Japanese have money.”

“The Japanese buy themselves a Council seat?”

“Oui.”

Supremely cynical but by no means absurd. Soft loans, aid, investment in infrastructure, all perfectly acceptable weaponry in the modern power game. High finance. Diplomacy by other means.

“If Asahaki had not returned,” she adds, “I am not so sure. I think then maybe the Japanese would lose.” She points at me. “But we have not been told everything about Ambassador Asahaki. No? Him and Envoy Hatanaka?”

“You’ll get your story.”

“Oh, I am not worried. We have a deal.” Smiling as she turns to the tape machine, she darts me a look from the corner of her eye.

“I need your source on Po Lin.”

Her smile dies instantly. She turns her back on me.

“Is that a no?” I ask her.

She does not bother to reply.

I am naturally not thrilled to find yet another door being closed in my face, to find that I am butting my head against a solid slab of oak. But from the outset Marie has not pretended to be other than she is. She openly staked her claim on what she wanted, the job at
Time,
and pursued it according to the lights of her own code. How many others here at Turtle Bay could honestly say the same?

I glance around the room. A purely functional space: PCs and recording equipment on half a dozen desks, wires hanging down behind machines, then running in tangled loops across the floor. Above the door, a framed photo of the French president shaking hands with the SG. Finally I see what I’m looking for, three large filing cabinets lined up behind the door. I go over.

“Do you keep your files on the perm five delegations here?”

“Oui.”

“Delegation members?”

“Who? Po Lin?” she asks, looking over her shoulder.

“That’s a yes, I presume.”

“We have nothing on the UNDCP Special Committee.” She nods to the cabinets. “This is not my source.”

“Then you won’t mind if I take a look.”

She drops what she’s doing and comes across to the gunmetal-gray steel cabinets. She opens the middle one and hauls out a file. “You are wasting your time.”

I reach for the file but she shields it with her body. “What do you give me?” she asks.

“You?”

“Me,” she says. We look at each other, two adults suddenly aware of an unexpected undertow.

“I thought I was wasting my time.”

“If that is what you want.”

I turn my gaze back to the cabinet. “I want to see Lemtov’s file too. Give me that, and I’ll tell you something you’ll be interested to hear.”

Marie makes a clicking sound with her tongue as she studies me. Then finally she pulls Lemtov’s file from the cabinet and lays it with Po Lin’s on the desk. Smiling now. Playful. I have not the slightest doubt that if I attempted to grab the files, she would tear my eyes out. She tilts her head and waits for my news.

“Once I’ve told you, you give me both files.”

“Is it worth it?” she says.

“Po Lin’s been executed.”

Her head comes up straight. Her lips part and a sound rises in her throat.

“That’s unconfirmed. And don’t ask me if it’s connected with the fraud or his investments,” I add quickly, “because I honestly don’t know.”

“You heard this in the Secretariat?”

“From Lemtov.”

She looks down at the two files. Wang Po Lin. And Yuri Lemtov. When she lifts her eyes, I pull the files quickly from beneath her hand.

Then one of her Agence France-Presse colleagues comes barreling in. When he crosses straight to the tape machine, Marie shouts and hurries over to stop him from ruining her work. She calls a warning to me over her shoulder. “The files must stay. You can read them here.”

While she commences an argument in French with her colleague, I slide the files along the table and pull up a chair.

In the Secretariat, brief notes on the accredited delegates are kept by Protocol and somewhat more extensive pieces on the major delegations by Political Affairs. All this information is volunteered. Volunteered, of course, meaning anodyne or downright misleading. Idi Amin’s appearance at UNHQ some years back, for instance, resulted in a glowing encomium on the dictator’s contribution to human rights finding its way into the Ugandan files; rogue copies of this document still surface from time to time amid general hilarity. But on rechecking Po Lin’s and Lemtov’s files upstairs this morning, I found nothing outrageous, just the usual list of previous posts and qualifications. In Po Lin’s case, a footnote relating to his temporary recall to Beijing.

My hope here is that Agence France-Presse, free from the political constraints placed on the Secretariat, has made a more thorough and critical analysis of the two men. After a few minutes’ inspection, my hope slowly fades. Both files seem to be French translations of the documents I viewed this morning in English up in Protocol. I lift my head and glance across at Marie. She is leaning over the tape machine, her skirt riding upward. Her colleague hovers impatiently at her side, and when the guy looks my way, I rebury my head in the files. A minute later I come across the clippings.

Real clippings, not just some faxed sheet from a clippings agency. In each file there is a large envelope, buff-colored, crammed with bits of paper. I spread the Po Lin clippings on the table. A few are torn, others carefully scissored from various newspapers and magazines, maybe a dozen in all. In some pieces Po Lin is merely mentioned as one of a list of names, in others he figures more prominently, but there appears to be no particular method in the selection. Random scraps. Whatever caught the clipper’s eye. Finishing the last piece, I reach for the Lemtov envelope just as Marie appears at my side.

“You are certain Po Lin was executed?” she whispers.

“It’s what Lemtov told me.”

“You are not certain?”

“You’re the journalist, Marie.” I nod toward her colleague at the tape machine. “Put your heads together. Use your contacts. I’d be interested to hear some confirmation myself.”

She rolls her eyes. “From Paris,” she whispers, referring to her colleague. The implication being, I take it, that she has no intention of letting the guy in on her story. She points to the Po Lin clippings. “This is useful?”

“Not as useful as if you just told me your source.”

She makes a face: No chance.

I hold up the Lemtov clippings. “Can I take these?”

“No.” Unsmiling. Deadly earnest.

Then the big shot from Paris calls for her assistance and she curses quietly and goes over. Alone again, I spread out the Lemtov clippings.

Nearly all the clippings feature him prominently; unlike Po Lin, he is rarely bracketed by a list of names from his delegation. Some pieces mention Lemtov as the likely successor to the current Russian ambassador; a few go farther and speculate on a possible promotion to the post of foreign minister at some future date, speculation that I’ve heard myself from several quarters, notably Patrick, whose opinion on such matters is generally considered oracular. After wading through maybe fifteen or more clippings I notice a recurring motif, the seemingly off-the-cuff remark from Lemtov that passes directly into the journalist’s copy as a quotable quote. Self-deprecating, wry, humorous; but seen together like this they present a picture of the not-so-loyal second-in-command carefully laying the groundwork for his run at the top.

Son of a bitch, I think as I come across yet another of his casual bon mots, this one a backhanded compliment directed at the current Russian ambassador.

And then three lines down, a single word leaps out at me from the page.

Basel.

I make a sound, something like a moan.

I sit up straight. Now my eyes scour the rest of the clipping, searching for the meaning of what I’ve found. But the word does not recur. There’s just that one mention—a UN-sponsored conference in Basel that Lemtov attended—then the article moves on to the prospects of success in some long-forgotten disarmament talks. I turn quickly to the other clippings, searching, but that first mention of Basel seems to be all there is. Finally I pick up that clipping again, a scissored cutting, cheap paper, and study it carefully. It seems to be taken from some academic journal, one of those erudite publications that lie on the shelves unread in every college library. In the bottom left-hand corner someone has scribbled a date: April, three years ago. If I could take the clipping to the Dag Hammarskjöld Library I could probably find the article, cross-reference it with our files, and track down which UN-sponsored conference Lemtov attended.