Diplomatic Immunity (26 page)

“We are leaving,” says Marie. When I look up, she is holding her notepad. Her colleague shoots a cartridge into the tape recorder that hangs like a purse from his shoulder. Outside in the hall I hear other journalists streaming by, smart-aleck remarks and laughter, cursing in a variety of languages. The migration to the General Assembly Hall, the jockeying for prime positions, has begun. Marie nods to the files. “You are finished?”

Not really a question. They want me out. So I shuffle the clippings back into the envelopes and reorder the files. I wait. After half a minute, Marie’s colleague impatiently directs her attention to the clock, and they both look up. At that moment I bring my hands together, sliding the Basel cutting beneath my watchband. I tug at my sleeve. Then I rise from the table calmly, thank Marie for her trouble, and depart.

28

“W
H
O
’
S PLAYING HERE, THE YANKEES?
”
Standing by me at the rear of the General Assembly Hall, Mike runs a laconic eye over the milling delegates. Neither one of us has ever seen the Hall so crowded. And there is no mistaking the sense of occasion. It is like opening day all over again, clouds of exotic national costumes moving like kaleidoscopic whorls through the ocean of dark gray suits. Historic. Today the most abused word in the lexicon of UN grandiloquence is absolutely appropriate. Only the second time in the UN’s history that a proposed change in the Security Council’s composition has made it to the vote, and no one who has any right to be here has stayed away. Committee meetings have been suspended, talks and conferences rescheduled; from every quarter of Turtle Bay the delegates, Secretariat staffers, and NGO observers have massed here on the plenary session, filling the Hall. Down by the podium the Secretary-General and the session president are standing side by side, talking together as they scan the ranks of delegates. From this distance they look like two small boys.

Mike whistles through his teeth and shoulders his way along the aisle, searching for a pair of vacant seats. If he gets us seats, I have told him, he can have a look at the thick bundle I am carrying beneath my arm. And Mike is curious.

After leaving Marie’s office I went directly to the Dag Hammarskjöld Library, where, in the absence of inquiring journalists and delegates who had already departed for the Hall, a holiday air prevailed. Feet up on desks, paper balls lobbing into trash cans, and the female librarians huddled together over the glossies. A young Spaniard, clearly a newcomer to the ways of Turtle Bay, seemed embarrassed by his colleague’s lack of interest in my inquiry. Once I’d traced the source of the Agence France-Presse clipping, he led me down into the section dedicated to UN conferences—a labyrinth of shelves and cabinets and boxes—and loaded my outstretched arms with papers and files. Five minutes’ sifting and I had what I wanted, a manageable bundle that I have brought with me to the Hall.

“Nada,”
Mike reports, coming up the stairs to rejoin me. Turning, he surveys the scene again. Words, talk, diplomacy’s permanently debased currency, jangle loudly through the Hall.

I locate the U.S. delegation off to the left, halfway down the tiered chamber. Ambassador Bruckner is on his feet, glad-handing the neighboring delegates, smiling a smile that you can see from way back here. You would think he hasn’t a care in the world, but his fellow U.S. delegates look distinctly apprehensive. Jennifer has her arms crossed, her back turned to Bruckner as she talks to someone across the aisle. Her body language is defensive and tense.

They don’t know.

After all the arm-twisting, the years of lobbying and backroom deals, in spite of Rachel’s detainment and Asahaki’s recall, they still don’t know. The U.S. has not been able to bed down the result. The upcoming General Assembly vote, for once, is not a foregone conclusion.

“Hey,” says Mike, nodding down toward the front. There are two empty chairs between the podium and the exit. A guard standing nearby.

“Security?” I say.

“Two tickets, ringside.” Mike brushes past me. “Or if you want you can stay up here in the goddamn bleachers.”

The aisles are jammed, so we end up taking the long way, back out to the empty gallery behind the Hall, then around to the stairs. A few late arrivals go hurrying by, determined not to miss the big moment. As we walk, Mike fills me in on his morning.

“Guy comes up to my office, hammering on my door. Haven’t even got my coffee yet. He’s throwing a fit, telling me he’s going to bust, tearing his goddamn hair out. I’m thinking like, Who is this guy? Turns out he’s the caterer.”

“The cafeteria?”

“Right.” In the coolroom of which we have stored Toshio’s body. “This guy,” says Mike, “he’s got the catering franchise down there. Italian. He says we don’t let him open up pronto, he’ll be outa business.”

“Does he know what’s in his coolroom?”

“Public relations ain’t my department.” Mike glances across. “He started about suing someone. I gave him your number.”

Grimacing, I turn for the stairs.

“So how’s the gut?” Mike asks me.

My hand rises to my stomach, the place where Lemtov’s bodyguard connected. Sore, I say, but I’ll live.

Mike gives me some advice on the treatment of internal bruising, cop tradecraft, but as we walk, I get the feeling that he’s got something other than my state of health on his mind. Halfway down the stairs, he finally comes out with it.

“How come you never told me the full story on that Martinez kid, the hippie?” He continues down the steps in front of me. When he gets to the landing, he stops, one hand on the banister, and faces me. “You didn’t hear the question, Sam, or you just thinking?”

“What full story?”

“How the kid’s old man died out in Afghanistan. The kid’s old man, who happened to be leading that medical team that Sarah was in.”

I comment, somewhat ingenuously, that I don’t see the problem.

“Could be a big problem,” Mike tells me. “What if the kid blames Hatanaka for screwing up the hostage rescue that got his old man killed?”

“He doesn’t.”

“You asked him?”

“No.”

He pauses a moment. Sensing the next question, I steel myself. Then it comes.

“You ever asked Rachel?”

I make no reply. Mike fills his cheeks with air, then blows. “I’m gonna bring the Martinez kid in again. And if I’m not satisfied with what he tells me this time, I might have to speak to Rachel too.”

I cannot pretend to be pleased. But given the givens here, Mike has handled this as well as he could have. Straight. Totally up front with me. But now, as we make our way toward the Hall, I feel him glancing at me from the corner of his eye. Not so much mad at me as suddenly, and somewhat to his own surprise, touched by doubt.

Inside the Hall the talk is dying away, delegates who have strayed from their places hurrying to retake their seats. Mike has a word with the guards, who point us to the pair of empty chairs by the NGO observers’ box. Mike unbuttons his jacket as he sits; I catch a glimpse of the leather holster beneath his arm.

“I asked Dieter to check Patrick out,” I whisper, sliding into the chair beside him. “He’s telling me maybe next week.”

“Guy doesn’t have the balls to front O’Conner. Not next week. Not even next year.”

But Mike, I am sure, has got Dieter wrong. On reflection, my encounter earlier with Dieter proves only one thing: that we have no real evidence against Patrick. On reflection, I feel sure that if we had something concrete, Dieter would not hesitate to act.

A gavel bangs down on the podium; it seems we have arrived just in time. The Secretary-General takes the rostrum over to our right, and the noise fades to silence as he looks out across the Hall. Caesar before the Senate. Lincoln at Gettysburg. A born showman, he milks the moment, arms braced and chin thrust forward. Silent strength seems to be the PR pose for the day. Then he begins his address, and right from the outset it is woeful. His voice rises at inappropriate moments. He gesticulates grandly. He expounds on three or four abstract topics without drawing breath, all the time swaying on the balls of his feet. It was Lady Nicola who pointed out to me that since its inception, not one great speech has issued from the main rostrum of the United Nations. We have had Khrushchev banging his shoe on the woodwork, promising to bury the West, and Castro grandstanding up there for hours, but this potentially great forum has yet to find its Pericles, and this speech we’re hearing now from the SG is certainly not going to break the shoddy mold. Leaden platitudes come tumbling out like useless ingots off some haywire production line. It is truly, mind-numbingly, awful.

Mike nudges me, pointing to the bundle in my lap, the paperwork from the library. “Let’s see.”

I glance around. All eyes are on the SG. “Lemtov attended a UN-sponsored conference in Basel three years back,” I whisper, sliding the ribbon from my bundle and passing four folders to Mike. “Somewhere in here we should find out which one. Maybe what else he was doing there.”

“Basel,” says Mike. “Hatanaka’s trip?”

I tap the files. Get started, I say.

Fifteen minutes later the SG’s speech is still going, and Mike and I are still reading. Conferences. Preconference conferences. Postconference conferences. Conferences on climate change. Conferences on aid. I have attended more than a few of these talkfests over the years, but the number and range of the events listed in these files is utterly farcical. Beside me, Mike has been alternately snorting and groaning as he turns each page. Now there is applause and we look up to see the SG stepping back from the rostrum. The applause is sustained; everyone is relieved at the unaccustomed brevity of the address.

“Praise the Lord,” Mike mutters, stretching his back.

Then the president of the session, the guy who will oversee the mechanics of the vote, replaces the Secretary-General at the rostrum. We are not going to be spared. Within moments the president is launched on a speech of his own.

“Anything?” Mike whispers.

I shake my head. “You?”

“Unh-unh.”

The speech continues. We drop our heads into the files again.

Psychoanalyzing the world, that’s how Sarah described the conferences I was sometimes called upon to attend, and over time I came to accept a solid kernel of truth in the phrase. Swarms of highly paid professionals gathering in five-star comfort to discuss the suffering patient’s latest symptoms, the cause of the moment—illiteracy, AIDS, refugees—swapping good intentions before picking up their ample paychecks and flying home. Having had a front row seat at this whole circus for years, I have grown weary of the endless prognostications of disaster, the act-now-or-the-world-ends-tomorrow brigade. But what I told Sarah, and what I still believe to be true, is that not every UN-sponsored conference is the same. Looking through the file spread open in my lap, I can see amid the welter of useless gatherings the occasional shining example of an event that was certainly worthwhile. A conference, for example, to establish the remit of the International Court of Human Rights. It did not, I notice, take place in Basel.

Registering a change in the president’s tone, I lift my head. He is winding down. He concludes with a rousing admonition to the voting delegates, and a ripple of applause runs up through the Hall. And then silence. We have arrived.

“Sam?” Mike whispers.

I lift a hand sharply: wait. The one moment in my career when I will actually see history being made here. My one chance to see the parliament of man rise from its usual mundane and petty squabbles to make a decision that really matters. My gaze is riveted to the huge electronic display board suspended behind the rostrum. When the one hundred and eighty-five ambassadors have finished pressing their vote buttons, that is where the result will appear. Yes, no, or abstain.

The president reads aloud the official proposal for the amendment of the Security Council’s composition, the inclusion of Japan as a permanent member. Then he calls for the vote. A rustle like wind over leaves passes up through the Hall as the ambassadors register their votes. Years of painstaking diplomacy telescoped into moments. Halfway up the Hall, angry voices suddenly rise; one of the African delegations has apparently seen their ambassador capriciously change their nation’s intended vote. From the rostrum the president calls them to order.

“All votes registered,” he intones grandly. Then he turns to look up at the display board. And there the numbers suddenly appear.

Yes—72

No—79

Abstain—34

The Nos have it. The Japanese do not get a permanent Security Council seat.

There is a second of silence.

Then somebody, a lone voice, starts to cheer. Others join in, then there is applause. Half the delegates rise, embracing one another and punching their fists in the air, their faces lit by victory. The entire U.S. delegation remains seated. They are not talking to each other or to anyone else. Bruckner is staring at the voting board as if reading the announcement of his own political demise. Jennifer has her head in her hands. And down near the front, the Japanese have risen as one and are now making for the exit after their leader, Bunzo Asahaki. Unable to endure the public loss of face, he is going to skip the official declaration.

Then my gaze falls on Patrick. Out of my line of sight till this moment, he has appeared from the far side of the podium. His face is set like stone. He stares up at the celebrating delegations as the president announces the official result. Immediately the SG descends from the platform and walks right by Patrick without even a glance in his direction. A snub that Patrick sees. His face glows with embarrassment and anger. He is hurt, I think. Patrick O’Conner is hurting and I am glad.

“Sam,” says Mike, tugging at my sleeve. Then he shows me the stapled pages, what he has found. “This one was in Basel,” he tells me soberly. “And that’s him, yeah?” His finger stabs down on a name. Mr. Y. Lemtov, representative of the Russian Federation.

“That’s him,” I agree.

“And this one?” Mike’s finger moves down the list to another name. Mr. P. O’Conner.

My head snaps back.

“Here’s the good part,” says Mike, flipping to the title page.

When I see it, my mouth opens, slack-jawed. Mike makes some wise-ass crack about thinking global, acting local. Then we sit amid the tumult of the post-vote celebrations and commiserations, two lonely travelers stranded by our own private shipwreck. We both stare at what Mike has found.

Money Laundering, says the title. The International Perspective.

A UN-sponsored conference attended by Yuri Lemtov and Patrick O’Conner.

“Food for thought,” Mike comments dryly.

Before I can even begin to collect my thoughts, Patrick himself appears right in front of us. Mike flips the file closed.

“Happy now?” Patrick asks, leaning over me, his face still rosy with anger.