Diplomatic Immunity (6 page)

“Hmph” is all Mike says. Then his finger moves on to Toshio’s final appointment yesterday. Moriko. Seven-thirty
P.M.

“Toshio’s sister,” I tell Mike.

Mei Tan confirms that Toshio kept the appointment with Patrick, but about the one with Moriko she’s not sure. “I went home just after he went up to see Mr. O’Conner. Anyway, that’s personal, his family.” She is becoming distinctly uncomfortable now. And when Mike asks her to fetch us the most recent editions of some obscure journal from down in the Dag Hammarskjöld Library, it is hard to tell if Mei Tan is more surprised or relieved by the request.

The moment she’s gone, Mike hands me the calendar and slips the Geneva ticket stub into his pocket. Then he reaches into one of the desk drawers and produces a bunch of keys. Toshio’s keys, which Mike must have noticed during his earlier search. He pockets them.

“Sound to you like she was lying?”

I shake my head.

“Me neither.” He lays a blank sheet of paper on the desk and writes. Large letters, black felt pen.
DO NOT OPEN. LOCKED BY ORDER
—
UN SECURITY.
Then his name and signature. Next, he finds some Scotch tape, and while he tears off a piece, I ask him what he makes of the trip to Geneva.

“Nothing yet. Don’t even know if he went.” He takes his sign over to the door and tapes it up. He nods to the calendar in my hands. “Bring that.”

After locking the door, he leads the way to the elevators. “Let’s see if that pink file’s anywhere in the basement. I wanna make sure the body’s secure in the coolroom too.”

“Then what?”

“His apartment.” Mike gives me a sideways look. “I’m guessing Patrick told you to get over there to search for the suicide note. I figure while you’re wasting your time with that, I can take a look around the place, maybe get some clue why the guy was murdered.”

6

T
HE JOURNALISTS HAVE DESCENDED. NORMALLY IT
’
S JUST THE
UN regulars idling around the corridors singly or in pairs, looking hangdog, complaining about lack of access to delegates and wondering when their editors will recall them from this journalistic wasteland. Young hacks shunted here into the slow lane of advancement. Old hacks wearing their stints of salaried idleness at Turtle Bay like lusterless crowns to inglorious careers. But for these few days each year, even the terminally embittered among them come to life, galvanized by the alluring possibility that they might actually find something here to report that their editors back home will call news.

Add to these regulars the incestuous packs that swarm around the presidents, the heads of state, and foreign ministers, and what you get is what Mike and I meet when we hit the concourse outside the General Assembly Hall: indecorous shoving, microphones and cameras being brandished like weapons, and people swearing at one another in about twenty different languages.

Mike adds his voice to the chorus. “Assholes,” he says, shouldering his way into the pack as I slide right along in his wake.

We have almost made it to the escalators, when I feel a hand on my shoulder. Turning, I find Lady Nicola Edgeworth looking up at me; she asks if she might please have a word. “Just one minute,” she adds, sensing my reluctance. When I look back, I see that Mike has plowed on; he is waiting for me at the head of the escalators. I signal him on. I will have to catch up later.

“A very quick word,” I tell Lady Nicola, unable to conceal my impatience.

“Somewhere a little more private,” she suggests.

The private place we enter is a small room off the Delegates’ Lounge. The room is hung with collages and oil paintings, social realism from the fifties, framed in pine.

“Special Envoy Hatanaka,” Lady Nicola says the moment we’re alone.

I cannot pretend to be surprised. Lady Nicola, the British ambassador, one of the Security Council’s Big Five, is also the president of the Security Council this month. Once Patrick had given the news to the SG, Lady Nicola would have been his next port of call.

“Patrick’s told you?”

“Yes.”

I look at her. I am not quite sure what she expects me to add.

“It’s rather about Mr. O’Conner that I wanted a word,” she says, and with the slightest of touches she guides me away from the door.

Lady Nicola has been a fixture at Turtle Bay for most of my career. When I was working as a rapporteur on the Sixth Committee, Legal Affairs, she was the committee chairman. My job was to compile and paraphrase the debate that took place among the committee members: what to put up to the General Assembly for a vote, what to hold back and redraft, and what to discard as totally ridiculous. And though in those days I was just one of many lowly gofers from the Secretariat, Lady Nicola went out of her way to make me feel that my work was appreciated. She astonished the entire Sixth Committee by asking for a round of applause for me at their final sitting that year. Since then she has become her country’s ambassador. The British ambassador, a big UN name.

“What can you tell me? Suicide?”

“We don’t know that.”

“I see.”

“We don’t know anything,” I add quickly. “Suicide’s possible.”

“‘Possible’ wasn’t quite the word Mr. O’Conner used,” she remarks dryly. “From memory, the word Mr. O’Conner used was ‘likely.’”

I shrug the distinction aside. “Toshio’s dead. And I don’t mean to be rude, Lady Nicola, but me standing here with you, talking about it, isn’t helping us figure out how he died.”

“You’re aware Toshio opposed a permanent Japanese seat on the Council.”

“I’m aware that some people thought so.” I cast a glance toward the door. I really do not want to be having this conversation.

“I’ve spoken briefly with each of the other perm five ambassadors,” she says. “They all share my concerns as to the impact this might have on the vote.”

“The vote?” I cannot help myself from blurting it out. “Toshio’s dead, you’re worried about the vote?”

“Please, Samuel,” she says, lifting a hand.

But I don’t apologize. I am pretty sure now that I am not going to like what is coming, the reason for this private word in my ear. The politics have begun. And to her credit, Lady Nicola broaches it directly now.

“I suggested to my perm five colleagues that I might approach you with a view to establishing an informal channel of communication about the investigation. Mr. O’Conner tells me you’re leading it.” When I don’t say anything, she goes on. “It’s an impossible situation. This vote—”

“Informal?” I break in.

She inclines her head.

“So what’s wrong with the formal channel? I report to Patrick, you ask him what’s going on.”

“We prefer our information unfiltered.”

Unfiltered. Meaning, I take it, that they do not believe they can get that from Patrick. And knowing Patrick as I do, I would have to say that the Big Five’s fears are very well founded; but I can’t admit that, of course, certainly not to Lady Nicola. She has obviously persuaded her ambassadorial colleagues that I can be trusted, that I am someone who will understand the awkward position they find themselves in. And I do understand; in some subtle way I am even flattered by this approach. But that just isn’t enough, because in the end I am what I am, a Secretariat staffer, an international civil servant pledged to hold myself above the political fray.

“I can’t do that,” I decide out loud.

Lady Nicola presses her lips together, her disappointment plain. “You couldn’t be persuaded?”

“No.” My tone is firm and unequivocal. I want to cut this dead. “If that’s all,” I say, glancing doorward.

She studies me a moment, then seems to decide that it would be futile at the moment to press me further. “Of course,” she says. Not an admission of defeat, more a tactical retreat. Her pale English skin wrinkles tightly around her mouth. As we move toward the door, she expresses a desire that this conversation should remain a private matter, a suggestion to which I diplomatically concur.

Out in the Delegates’ Lounge the French and Chinese ambassadors are both hovering and Lady Nicola moves toward them, presumably to report the bad news that she has failed to tap a purer source of information than Patrick O’Conner. When word of Toshio’s death gets out, when the storm breaks, the perm five will be navigating their way through the tempest with a compass they do not completely trust. Their problem, I think. Right now I have more than enough problems of my own.

Weaving my way swiftly through the posse of journalists outside the Delegates’ Lounge, I cross to the escalator. I am already halfway down, when I become aware of some woman behind me, saying my name.

“Mr. Windrush,” she says again.

When I turn, my heart sinks. A journalist’s microphone. Then I raise my eyes to the woman, a vaguely familiar face, probably a regular on the UN beat.

“No comment,” I say, nodding to the mike, trying to make it sound like a joke. But my heart is in my shoes. I am first deputy in Legal Affairs; about three times a year I am wheeled out to give the press a background briefing on some incomprehensible piece of legalese that might or might not have implications for some forgotten war in a distant quarter of the world. On these occasions the journalists tend to help themselves to the press release and skip my recondite lecture. Even after my fifteen minutes of fame as the poor son of a bitch whose wife was taken hostage and murdered by crazies in Afghanistan, there wouldn’t be one in ten of the UN-accredited journalists who knows me by sight. Not one in twenty who knows me by name. But this woman riding down the escalator behind me has apparently made it her business to find out. Half the world’s political big hitters upstairs, and here she is, trailing after me. Toshio? I wonder. Already?

“Aren’t you headed the wrong way?” I ask her.

“It is possible.” A French accent. She looks up over her shoulder, then back to me.
“Alors,”
she says.

I turn just in time to stumble awkwardly off the escalator.

Stepping off behind me, she says quietly, “Most dangerous.”

I take a breath and compose myself. “Is there some question that you wanted to ask me?”

“You were with the ambassador. Monsieur Froissart?”

Relief. She is fishing for a story on the French ambassador. I was with Lady Nicola Edgeworth, I tell her, not Froissart. She has made a mistake.

“A long meeting?” she asks.

“It wasn’t a meeting.”

“No?”

I turn and walk, but she stays at my side.

“Three of the perm five ambassadors left the Assembly Hall during the opening speeches,” she says. “That is strange, no?”

My glance skitters down to the mike she is holding low by her side. She follows my gaze down. Then she unplugs the thin black wire and crams it with the mike into her purse.

“Ambassador Edgeworth did not tell you why she left the Hall?”

No, I say.

“But she needed to see you?”

“We had a few words on a private matter. End of story.”

“I interviewed Monsieur Froissart. He seemed anxious. He did not say to you why?”

“To me?” I point a thumb at my chest, but the act is overdone. Her look turns skeptical.

“You do not remember me, do you?”

I glance at her as we walk. An attractive woman, early thirties, dark hair, her skin faintly freckled on either side of her slender nose. And familiar too, but she sees that I still can’t place her.

“Journalists and the Secretariat?” she prompts.

Journalists and the Secretariat. A series of seminars I conducted last year, part of a PR campaign cooked up by Patrick to get the Secretariat some decent press coverage. About a dozen journalists showed up at the first seminar, half that number at the second; by week three there were just me and two female journalists, so I called the whole thing off. One of those last two, the stayers, wasn’t one of them French?

Memory triggered, I point. “Radio France.”

Smiling, she reintroduces herself. Marie Lefebre. As we near the stairs, she takes the opportunity to remind me of just what I said in those high-minded seminars, my earnest endorsement of the journalists’ right to question and the Secretariat’s responsibility to respond.

I pull a face. “You were listening?”

“
Oui.
I have notes.”

“Well, maybe you could show your notes to Ambassador Froissart,” I suggest. “He seems a reasonable man.”

At the head of the stairs a security guard steps aside to let me pass, but when Marie Lefebre tries to join me, he plants himself in front of her. He puts out his arm, telling her that the concourse and basement are temporarily off limits. I give her a curt parting nod as I descend.

“You were not discussing the Japanese vote?” she calls after me.

I concentrate on the stairs, hoping that I can walk right out of her sphere of curiosity just as easily as I walked into it. On the ground floor I meet Mike coming up from the basement.

“No pink file in the briefcase,” he tells me.

“Let’s go.”

“You don’t wanna see where we got him?”

“Monsieur Windrush?”

Mike’s eyes dart upward, my own head lifts slowly. Marie Lefebre is leaning out from the cantilevered balcony above us, looking down at the guards Mike has stationed on the stairs to the basement. “What is so important down there?” she says.

Mike shoots me a look. He is not pleased with the curiosity I seem to have invited. Taking his arm, I guide him toward the exit while from up on the balcony Marie delivers a short burst of French at our retreating backs. The one word I hear quite distinctly is
merde.

7

“J
ESUS, CAN I CHANGE MY MIND?
”
MIKE SAYS
QUIETLY
.
The subway across to Roosevelt Island is temporarily closed, so we have chosen the fastest alternate route, a choice that Mike seems to be regretting already. When the cable car lurches out from its station into the air, Mike’s grip on the silver railing tightens, his whole body goes stiff. He watches the two uniformed attendants over by the controls as if he expects them to hit a button at any moment and send us plunging earthward.

When I tell him to relax, his eyes skate past me out the window.

“This ain’t my best thing, you know.”

I guess I did know that in the abstract, but this is the first time I have actually seen Mike in thrall to his fear of heights. People are so strange. Mike Jardine would not think twice about taking a bullet for the Secretary-General, yet now, elevated just fifty feet off the ground, perspiration is suddenly beading across his brow. It seems like a valiant effort to distract himself when he picks up our conversation again, telling me about the call he made earlier to an acquaintance from his previous life at City Hall, a pathologist at one of the city morgues.

“I told him it was some old delegate who croaked. Terminal fossilization or something. I asked him how long we could keep the body in the coolroom, what we needed to do.”

Mike braves another glance out the window, then turns straight back. It’s not just his knuckles, his whole fist around the bar has gone deathly white. Down below, a surreal landscape of flat building tops doubling as parking lots reveals itself as we climb; the cars look like toys from up here.

“How long?” I ask.

“Ten days max, unless we can freeze him. After that we’ll be needing gas masks. Just to get near the body, that’s what he said.”

The Roosevelt Island cable car shudders as we hit maximum altitude and plane out for the haul across the water. Mike moans and closes his eyes. Across the tram car a young woman, the sole passenger apart from us, rearranges the shopping bags at her feet and regards Mike curiously. When I advise Mike to look at the bridge, he does that for a while; it seems to help.

“I took a few samples,” he says, glancing back to me. “For Forensics.”

“Samples?”

His gaze drops. “Like from the syringe. Like that.”

I regard him closely. “That’s all?”

“I figure, how else we gonna know for sure if we don’t get it tested?”

“Mike.”

He looks up.

“Don’t bullshit me,” I say.

He swipes a finger across his perspiring brow.

“I took a couple of bloods too,” he concedes. Blood samples, he means, from Toshio Hatanaka’s body. “Who cares what’s in the syringe if it wasn’t injected?”

I let my look linger, he knows I’m not pleased. Not so much with what he’s done but with his apparent intention to keep it to himself.

“They’ve gone for analysis?”

He nods.

“Patel?” I ask, knowing in my bones that this is not the correct answer.

“I got a guard on it,” he admits. “He’s taking the samples down to a pathologist on Second, some guy I know. Might even be there by now.” He checks his watch, then notices the look I am giving him. “Listen. If I’d told you, you woulda had no choice, you woulda told Patrick. Once he knew, I’d spend a week filling out forms while he dreamed up a million reasons not to do it.”

“So you did it anyway.”

“Give me a break. It had to be done. I did it.”

I ask Mike when he expects the results back. Tomorrow morning, he says, first thing.

I guess now that it’s done there isn’t much point in recrimination. And in truth, I am not totally displeased with Mike’s unauthorized action; at least this way we get reliable results from the analysis, not something that could have been guaranteed from Patel’s tiny and ill-equipped lab. Patrick, when I tell him, will be livid.

“Then I’d like to hear the results,” I say, “first thing.”

Mike gives a brittle smile. He has just caught a glimpse of a barge passing way, way below us on the gray East River, and for the rest of the journey he sits rigid, staring at his feet.

Roosevelt Island is a few acres of land located smack in the middle of the East River, its whole southern shore clearly visible from UNHQ over on Manhattan. Alighting from the cable car, Mike and I turn northward, walking up into what you might call Roosevelt Island downtown. There is a post office, a bank, a few restaurants, and even a wine bar, but weirdly, the exteriors all look the same: glass-fronted and signed with standardized lettering. The place is not even pretending to be an organic civic growth, the planner’s fingerprints remain annealed to its entire structure. A toy town. Urban life as every city bureaucrat would like to see it lived. It occurs to me now what this place reminds me of, what I’d never quite pinned down on previous visits here. Toshio Hatanaka, international globetrotter and cosmopolitan twenty-first-century man, when he chose his apartment, instinctively reached for this place, a pale simulacrum of where he came from, the territory in which his roots were inescapably embedded. That’s what this place reminds me of: urban Japan.

While Mike looks around the lobby of Toshio’s apartment building for the manager or super’s room number, I go on up. Toshio’s door is the last in line down a long corridor on the sixth floor. I’m thinking the place has the feel of a midpriced hotel. Mike joins me with the keys a minute later. He cannot find anyone.

“Feels real homey, don’t it?” he remarks, gesturing along the corridor.

I point to Toshio’s door, 612. Mike tries a few keys.

“You been up here lately?” he asks.

“About three times this year.”

“Social?”

“The last two.”

“The first time?” he asks idly. When I don’t reply, he glances up.

“About Sarah,” I say simply. Sarah, my wife. Mike’s face falls, his eyes flicker down, an expression of awkward embarrassment that I have seen on so many faces so many times these past three years. Finally Mike finds the correct key. He pushes the door open and waves me in.

A regular apartment, much what you would expect from the exterior. Furnished a little on the spartan side, and neat, nothing much in the way of personal touches. It is immediately recognizable as the place of a bachelor.

“You wanna try the study?” says Mike.

“Through here.” If there is a suicide note, which I very much doubt, the study seems the likely place. And the pink file Mei Tan mentioned, the missing section of Toshio’s report—the study seems the most likely repository for that stuff too. But instead of following me, Mike drops into an armchair. He pulls some mail from his jacket and starts tearing open the envelopes. Then he catches my look.

“Letters for Hatanaka.” Mike runs his eyes over the first one and drops it on the floor. “I picked them up from his mailbox in the lobby. Might be something, who knows?”

“You opened his mailbox?”

“Smallest key in the bunch.”

“Just force of habit?”

Regarding me from beneath his brow, he says levelly, “Sam, you’re standing in a fucking dead guy’s apartment. Unauthorized entry, for starters. You want I don’t tear the envelopes?”

He tears another. I turn on my heel and make my way to the study.

In here there is something of a monastic feel. The walls are white and there’s just the one picture, that iconic photograph of Nagasaki after the bomb, the skeletal frame of a church and its dome the only thing left standing. Positioned alone in the middle of the white wall, it seems almost religiously emblematic; and knowing what I do about Toshio’s past, the sight of the picture so prominently displayed is somewhat disturbing. Both his parents were killed in that blast. Not radiation; their house simply disappeared, taking a generation of Hatanakas with it. I never asked Toshio the details, but the story seems to be that he and his sister Moriko were out of town with the grandparents, who ended up raising them. Toshio never blamed the U.S. The event undoubtedly turned him to pacifism as he grew older, but I had never thought that he blamed any side for the catastrophe. The last few months, however, have proved me wrong; I realize now that he blames the Japanese military. This is the emotional engine powering his opposition to a permanent Japanese seat on the Security Council: He still does not trust the Japanese authorities to act in the best interests of either the world or the people of Japan. And this picture in his study must have been a daily reminder of that. Glancing around, I see a cupboard, built-in, floor to ceiling, but the desk is bare apart from the blotter and a neat line of pens. On the side table, a phone and fax. No suicide note. Through the window behind the desk I can see some kids horsing around with a football on a stretch of municipal grass.

My search of the single desk drawer turns up nothing but stationery, so I wander over to the cupboard. Mainly books, though God knows why he keeps them behind sliding doors, some mania for order maybe. Behind the third door I find what appears to be the mother lode: three bundles of paperwork, a stack of files, and a laptop PC.

“Any luck?” Mike asks, putting his head in.

Hauling the bundles from the cupboard, I dump the lot on Toshio’s desk.

“Guy was neat, I’ll say that,” says Mike, crossing to the window. He stops to watch the kids down below with the football. Unlike me, he seems completely relaxed, as if searching a dead man’s apartment is just part of the daily routine; a dubious legacy, I guess, of his twenty years in the NYPD. He whistles some old Sinatra number and turns to search the cupboards while I flick through Toshio’s papers. The missing report is not among them. No pink file. Just loads of personal accounts; in his methodical way, Toshio appears to have kept every bill and receipt for the past several years. But at the bottom of the bundle I turn up a piece of correspondence that gives me pause: the letter, the one that had Patrick bristling this morning. It is a turgid and uncompromising rebuttal of every argument currently being advanced in favor of a Japanese Security Council seat. And the next page is a surprisingly long list of names, mostly public figures from the U.S. and Japan, to whom Toshio has apparently sent this letter of dissent. The few replies attached are all anodyne one-liners acknowledging receipt.

Finishing his unsuccessful browse through the cupboard, Mike eases into the chair.

“One note, three bills.” He produces the trove he has stolen from the lobby and places the three bills on the desk. “Gas, phone, and AmEx. The note was just slipped in the box, no envelope.”

He turns the note through his fingers. Curiosity roused, I ask him who it’s from.

“Stab in the dark?” He lays it faceup by the bills. “Someone Japanese.”

The note is written in kanji, Japanese script, with purple ink.

“And if you’re thinking suicide note, forget it. You don’t slip a suicide note into your own mailbox.”

“Female,” I declare.

“How do you figure that?”

When I point to the pair of powder-blue butterflies at the top left-hand corner, Mike frowns. “You’re reaching, Sam.”

That I am. But having failed to find any suicide note, this whole expedition is now no better than an extremely hopeful cast of the net. I take a glance at my watch. Twelve-thirty. More than two hours since we found Toshio’s body. The major opening day speeches will have finished by now, the rumor mill will be sliding into action like a well-oiled machine.

“Get the translators to take a look at it,” Mike says, referring to the note. “Phone bill might give us something. I’ll try in the morning. Should get an itemized listing for the last quarter anyway.” He folds it into his pocket along with the note. I decide not to inquire as to how Mike intends to extract this information from the phone company. Picking up the gas bill, Mike makes some ghoulish crack about Toshio putting his head in the oven. Then he takes up the AmEx bill, another single page.

“The guy was no big spender, that’s for sure. Two hundred fifty dollars the whole month. No carryover from the month before. What was he living on, air?”

“Maybe he used cash.”

“Cash,” Mike says as if he finds the notion simply incredible. He inspects the bill a moment more, then hands it to me.

There are only three items: a meal in a restaurant called the White Imperial, presumably Chinese; a thirty-dollar dry cleaner’s bill; and a hundred and eighty bucks to a store called Barney and Hunt’s. When I hand the bill back to Mike, he pockets it.

“What you got?” He indicates the bundles I have retrieved from the cupboard.

I show him Toshio’s letter. When he’s read it, I ask what he thinks.

“I think Hatanaka was playing politics, is what I think.” Mike considers the letter. “I don’t get this guy. Who was he trying to impress? So he fires his letter off to every big wheel he knows, so what? I mean, I’m no politician, but where’s that get him? Twenty-one-gun salute?”

Maybe, I suggest, it was simply an act of conscience, a stand that Toshio believed he had to make.

Mike passes the letter back over the desk. “Guy was puffing himself up, way I see it. Something for his résumé, for when he throws his hat in the ring for the big UNHCR job.”

Way too too cynical, I say. Toshio Hatanaka, I tell Mike, just wasn’t that kind of guy.

“One thing I learned down at City Hall, Sam. When you’re talking politics, ain’t no such thing as too cynical. Hatanaka was up the greasy pole same as everyone else.”

“Ever heard of public service, Mike? Altruism?”

“Ah-ha. Right up there alongside Santa Claus and the tooth fairy.” He goes out, telling me he’s going to take a proper look around.

Deflated somewhat by Mike’s world-weary judgment, I reexamine Toshio’s papers. But there is nothing more of interest, so I switch on his laptop and do a quick search of the files on the loaded disk. Again nothing stands out, so I pop the disk and pocket it, thinking I might have time to go through it more thoroughly later. But I’m not hopeful. Not hopeful at all.

On my way to the living room I pause by the dining table and touch its shiny waxed surface with my fingertips. Mike is wandering around the far end of the room. When I catch the faint smell of wax, the memories rise: memories of this place, where I have spent some of the worst moments of my life.