Diplomatic Immunity (32 page)

FRIDAY

34

“B
ULLSHIT,
”
I SAY,
“
TOTAL BULLSHIT.
”
But I continue flipping through the file of witness statements Jennifer has handed me, the ones she says she received from the Tunku earlier this morning. Her cab arrived moments after mine; now we’re standing out by the side entrance to USUN. Neither one of us has mentioned the phone call that found me in Marie Lefebre’s bed, and now, while Jennifer searches for her keycard in her purse, I keep my head down, desperately scanning the catalogue of truth, half-truth, and lies, searching for some way out.

“Bullshit maybe,” says Jennifer, finally swiping her card down the slot, shouldering open the door. “But extremely damaging.”

“Oh, come on. You believe this?” I slap the file with the back of my hand as we go inside. The file appears to contain five statements. One from a UN guide, an Uzbeki, one from a lowly Afghan bureaucrat in Political Affairs, two from junior members of the Turkmenistan mission to the UN, and the final one from a Russian working in the Dag Hammarskjöld Library. Each of them recounts in improbable detail conversations they claim to have had with Rachel, incidents they claim to have seen. Walking down the corridor with Jennifer, I read one notably risible line out loud. “‘Then Rachel Windrush said to me, “I will have my revenge for my mother.”’” I look up. “Does that sound like Rachel, for chrissake? I will have my revenge for my mother? That’s not Rachel. That’s some stupid political hack from Kabul, that’s not an eighteen-year-old kid from Brooklyn.”

“She’s not a kid.”

“You know what I mean.”

“They’re signed statements. If this gets to a court and the witnesses stand by their statements, a jury will have to take them seriously.”

We stop by the elevator, Jennifer presses the button. Beneath the surface of her controlled exterior I have the sense of a burning heat.

“She’s innocent,” I say.

Jennifer throws up a hand.

“Really.” I hold up the statements. “This is trash.”

Stepping back, Jennifer points through a window to the UNHQ grounds across First Avenue. “See that? That’s a place I visit. Somewhere I wander across to for meetings or conferences. Even the occasional vote. But it’s not where I work.” She points to the floor. “Here’s where I work. And you know the difference? Here I know what’s happening. The NSC and State Department disagree on policy? I know. Our media people spin a story in the press? I know. Bruckner wakes up with a goddamn headache and I know that too, because I work here, Sam.” She points again to the UN grounds. “That’s foreign territory. Over there I get to know only what the locals feel like telling me.”

“We were discussing Rachel.”

“Three days ago Hatanaka was murdered over there. Since then we’ve been flying blind on this side of the street. Suddenly yesterday I hear a rumor that your security people have detained someone. This morning I find out who that someone is. We are discussing Rachel. Now, what in God’s name’s been happening over there?”

This is not the moment, I realize, to try to cover myself with the fig leaf of Article 100. The elevator arrives; as we get in, I give her the truth.

“Rachel got dragged into the investigation somehow. She was at the NGO reception, she went down to the basement briefly to grab her coat. Dragging her in as a suspect was someone’s idea of a way to muzzle me. But this stuff”—I slap the statements—“this stuff is crap.”

She looks from the statements to me. “In a couple of hours I’m due a visit from NYPD Homicide,” she says. “We’re all going to troop across to the UN guardhouse, where I’ll notify the guards that the NYPD stands ready to take Rachel Windrush into custody. The Tunku will have a piece of paper for me to sign. I’ll sign it. And once I’ve done that, Rachel will be surrendered into the custody of the New York police. She’ll get her Miranda rights read to her, then she’ll be carted down to the station and charged with murder. Once that happens, the only way you’ll be able to help is by getting her a decent lawyer. And that stuff”—she nods to the statements in my hand—“that stuff is not going to look like crap to a prosecuting attorney. That stuff is going to look like manna from heaven.”

“It’s lies.”

She looks at me a long while. Then she taps a finger on her cheek. “Lipstick,” she says.

The elevator stops. She gets out and heads for her office while I trail after her, rubbing a hand across my cheek and feeling small. “You’ve got to stop the handover,” she says when I catch up to her.

My head swings around to her, but she walks straight on, eyes fixed firmly to the front. “While she’s on UN territory she can’t be charged,” she says. “I’ll try to straighten this out. In the meantime, you have to make sure she stays there.”

“How?”

“Your problem.”

She unlocks her office door and goes in explaining how she might be able to give me some time. When the Homicide people arrive, she will ask to see some paperwork, signed papers from the D.A., warrants sanctioning the handover. Anything she can think of. “They’ll be bending over backward to make sure they don’t screw this up. I’ll give them the legal runaround, send them to the D.A.’s office or somewhere for more documentation. That’ll give us both some time.” Slinging her coat on a chair, Jennifer sits behind her desk, then forages in a drawer.

She is offering to delay the cops. Obstruction of justice. Jennifer Dale.

As so often these past few days, I have a sense here that the truth is sliding by me, that I am missing the real meaning of actions, that the motivations I search for are being carefully veiled, that those I have found I have misunderstood.

“Why?” I say.

Jennifer keeps her eyes on the drawer and does not answer me. I step nearer her desk. “Why didn’t you just do what you’d been asked? You didn’t have to call me. You don’t have to delay the cops, that’s not part of the USUN legal counsel’s brief.”

She asks me, ironically, if I am trying to say thank you.

I do not buy that. Not for one moment. Jennifer’s principles are too firm, her faith in the legal proprieties too securely anchored for her to be compromising herself on a personal whim. I am not fool enough to believe that she is offering to delay Rachel’s arrest for the sake of any feelings she might still retain for me. I look down at the witness statements in my hand, and I chew it over. What I know about Lemtov. What I know about Jennifer.

“Do you know these are bullshit?” I ask her finally.

She lifts her head from the drawer.

“Is that it?” I say as she averts her eyes. “Is that why you want to help, why you called me?”

“I’m helping you. Just accept it.” She cannot look at me. And she cannot look at me, I realize, because I have hit the target. I toss the statements on her desk.

“You know these are bullshit. You know Rachel’s being framed.”

“I never said that.”

I move around her desk so fast that Jennifer rears back in surprise. Bracing one hand on the open drawer, the other on the arm of her chair, I lean over her.

“This isn’t a legal debate. There’s no professor here to give you an A plus when you show him how fucking smart you are. This is my daughter’s life. And you know she’s innocent. And if I can’t work something out, you’re just going to let it happen? You’re just going to stand there and watch her get handed over to the Homicide cops? How do you justify that?”

“Sam—”

“What do you take, the Nuremberg plea?”

“For chrissake—”

“Just following orders?”

Her hand is so quick, I don’t see it. There is just a loud clap, my head jolts sideways, and my left cheek is suddenly burning.

We stare at each other, both furious, both ablaze with our own different fires. Rachel in a UNHQ basement room. Me in Marie Lefebre’s bed. God, I think as the sting in my cheek dies away. God, where are we? How in the world did we ever get to this place?

Jennifer finally shoves my hand off her chair. She swivels back to her desk and hefts a thick wedge of pages from the drawer onto the desktop. “I presume you noticed the connection between all those statements,” she says tightly.

I have, of course. Each statement has been given by a national whose country’s fate is tied in some way to Russia; in the case of the librarian, a Russian national himself. When I say that, Jennifer looks up at me.

“You’re not surprised?”

“I’ve got no evidence against anybody,” I tell her.

She lays a hand on the wedge of pages she has just produced from her drawer. And she studies me, appearing to weigh something up. “You haven’t seen this,” she decides.

I crane my neck to read the title, but it’s hidden by her hand.

“It’s the FBI report,” she tells me, “on Yuri Lemtov.”

My mouth opens. An FBI report on Yuri Lemtov? That Jennifer had until this moment assumed I had seen?

“Jesus,” Jennifer murmurs. She takes a second with herself, then she rises and goes to the door. “I’ve called the agent in, he’s meeting me downstairs. Maybe you can take a look at that”—she tosses her head toward the report on her desk—“before he comes up.”

She exits. Crossing to the door, I stick my head out and call her name, but Jennifer walks straight on, hurrying, and turns out of sight at the end of the hall. I take a step after her, then change my mind and return to the desk. An FBI report. On Yuri goddamn Lemtov. And the words are right there at the head of the first page: Money Laundering. When I flip to the introduction, I find that the report is a summary of an FBI investigation that has been running for nearly a year. An investigation into the financial activities of the deputy Russian ambassador to the UN, Yuri Lemtov. I lift a hand to my head. My stomach knots painfully. How long has Jennifer had this damn thing?

In the table of contents I notice a chapter dedicated to various accounts at the Portland Trust Bank, so I quickly locate that chapter and scan my way through. I cannot quite believe it at first, the sheer size of the numbers I am looking at, the staggering quantities of money involved. Not just millions of dollars. Tens of millions. As if some enormous sluice gate has opened and sent money pouring like a river through Lemtov’s accounts, a wide and deep-flowing Mississippi of cash. The BB7 account into which the defrauded UN money disappeared, that is listed here. But it is only one of many accounts, and the few hundred thousand dollars of defrauded UN money is simply inconsequential, a bubble on the stream, completely dwarfed by the scale of the money-laundering operation the FBI seems to have uncovered.

Dipping into other chapters, I find more of the same, a bewildering array of bank accounts and a volume of cash that beggars belief. Finally flipping to the back, I read the report summary. It is damning, the evidence irrefutable: Lemtov is as guilty as hell. But then comes an addendum from the senior FBI lawyer on the case. Diplomatic Immunity, says the title.

Rising, I wander up and down by the crossed U.S. flags, the State Department eagle, as I read. The whole addendum sounds like some weird legal master class, a case study from a law student’s worst nightmare. I end up by the window, one hand braced on the frame. Diplomatic Privilege. International Protocols for Foreign Missions. The Convention on the Protection of Persons of Diplomatic Standing. The phrases are all here, and they add up to a frustrated lament, a keening wail from FBI Legal. Lemtov’s position on the Russian delegation, his diplomatic accreditation, has totally screwed the FBI. The addendum is signed and dated. Then I notice another date, the date when this report was delivered to the USUN legal counsel. Lifting my eyes, I see the guards at the UNHQ guardhouse across the street. They have finished stacking the crowd barriers; now they stand on the steps, sipping coffee, watching two other guards haul flags up the poles. All totally normal. Sometime later this morning those guards will be handing my daughter over to NYPD Homicide.

I bow my head over the report and read the date again: July. She knew, I think. All this time.

When Jennifer reenters the office, my throat is so constricted with anger that my words can barely escape. “You knew this from the start. From the goddamn start. Why in hell didn’t you say?”

Jennifer glances back to the open door. When the guy enters behind her, I cannot believe it. Asian. Mid-thirties, with a ponytail.

“Agent Nagoya,” says Jennifer, crossing to her desk. “This is Samuel Windrush.” The guy comes and offers me his hand somewhat unsurely. He ventures a half-assed smile. Agent Nagoya. An Asian-American from the FBI.

“You,” I say. His look is contrite, but I swipe his hand aside. “You broke into my apartment, I’m not shaking your goddamn hand.”

“Sam,” says Jennifer.

“You want me to pretend like we’re pals? Listen, this guy—” I turn from Jennifer to Nagoya. “That was you in the car yesterday, right? Up in Harlem?”

He nods.

“No explanation?” I say. “No ‘sorry you crashed your car for no damn reason’?”

“Sam,” Jennifer intervenes, “do you want to hear this or not?”

I drop the report onto a chair and clasp the back of the chair with both hands. Jaw tight, I glare at Nagoya. He asks me if I have read the report.

“Enough. What were you doing bugging my apartment?”

“That was an error of judgment.”

An error of judgment. Civil rights in the U.S. of A.

“We had Hatanaka’s apartment under observation. You were seen entering it. You tampered with our bugs.”

“Your bugs,” I say.

“We were attempting to establish the nature of Hatanaka’s connection with Lemtov,” he tells me. “From our surveillance of Lemtov, we knew he was seeing Hatanaka. Hatanaka was the UN’s man on Afghanistan.” He points to the report. “We suspected it was drug money. That Hatanaka might be involved.”

Toshio Hatanaka, international drug baron. I swear softly and turn aside. I am almost too angry to stand here and listen. How much more wrong could these guys be? “Toshio was investigating the man, for chrissake. That’s why he was seeing Lemtov.”

“The Bureau didn’t know that,” Jennifer cuts in.

“Look,” Nagoya says. “We haven’t had this easy. Lemtov came to our attention early this year. Since then it’s been in and out with our lawyers the whole time debating the dos and don’ts. By July we thought we had a pretty decent case against the guy. You saw the numbers?”