Diplomatic Immunity (29 page)

I got that help, I did not lose her. Yet here we are, in the UN basement, all this time later, reliving that awful scene. What help is there this time? Who will save her now?

Leaning over her, I stroke Rachel’s hair gently. My words when they come are a whisper.

“Whatever it takes now, Rache. Whatever it takes, I’m going to get you out.”

31

“P
ARK UP HERE,
”
MIKE INSTRUCTS THE CABDRIVER, AND
we slow.

There is no NYPD box. I notice that every time I come here. Nearly all the important UN missions have one of the things planted on the sidewalk outside. Blue booths just big enough to allow a one-hundred-and-ninety-pound cop to slouch over a bench desk while he flips through the
Post.
Officially the boxes are there to ensure good relations between the city of New York and the foreign delegations. Unofficially the New York authorities find most everything connected with the UN a pain in the ass. They keep an eye on the missions to make sure that distant international conflicts don’t spill out onto the fair streets of the city. One call from the police box and the squad cars can descend rapidly and in numbers.

But at the Russian mission there is no need for a police box because the NYPD 16th Precinct is headquartered right across the street. When our cab pulls up by the row of squad cars, we see some uniformed cops goofing off, drinking coffee at the top of the precinct steps. One of them recognizes Mike. He calls Mike’s name and says something I miss. Smiling, Mike tosses an insult up the steps. The cops jeer at him good-naturedly.

But Mike’s smile disappears as we cross the street to the Russian mission. He tells me again that he believes this expedition is not such a great idea.

“Well, I’m all out of great ideas.”

“It ain’t even a good idea. You forgotten last night already?”

The big punch. I shake my head.

“That was just a warning,” Mike says. “You suppose Lemtov’s gonna be happy to see you? You’re just gonna chat like old buddies?”

“Let’s see what he’s got to say about Basel.”

There is an awning leading from the sidewalk to the front door of the mission, and a discreet plaque to the left of the door. There are flagpoles too, but no one has bothered to raise any flags. The gray building rises some fifteen floors; it looks like an aging office building or a crummy hotel.

Beneath the awning Mike touches my arm. “Don’t threaten him,” he warns me for the third time in ten minutes. “Not till we know what’s going on with him and Patrick. Basel and money laundering. All that.”

Inside, the light is dim, the veneer paneling of the low-ceilinged lobby is dark, the carpet a dirty faded green. At the reception window of bulletproof glass we go through the usual theater-of-the-absurd, spelling our names through an intercom that does not actually work. Eventually the receptionist guy wanders off to report our presence to Lemtov.

“Looks like one of those whatsits,” Mike remarks, strolling into the adjoining room to the lobby. “You know. Crematorium or something.” Hands in his pockets, Mike inspects the posters on the wall: poorly printed shots of Russian palaces surrounded by forest. “Did I say about your car?” he asks me. The incident up in Harlem. He tells me he has called some friends in the department but the paperwork is already too far along. “It’s gotta go down the line. Official. Don’t count on getting the car back for a week.”

“Jennifer?”

“I tried,” Mike apologizes. “But that paperwork’s gone too. USUN were notified within an hour. Be on Jennifer’s desk tomorrow.”

I make a face. An incident involving two Secretariat staffers up in Harlem, one of them me. Jennifer is going to flip.

Now Mike sidles over to a rack of pigeonholes in the corner. “Patrick still pissed with how the vote went?”

“Wildly.”

“It occur to you this isn’t the greatest time to be sticking your hand in the cage?”

“What occurs to me is that Rachel should be out of there.”

Mike glances at me, then casually reaches into the pigeonhole marked L, pulls out a handful of envelopes, and flips through them. He could be checking his own mail. When he finds nothing of interest, he shoves them all back.

“Windrush?” an accented voice behind us calls out, and we turn.

The receptionist is standing in the main lobby; he has clearly witnessed Mike’s uninvited perusal of the mail. When I identify myself, the guy nods at me. “You come.” Then he flicks the back of his hand at Mike. “You leave.”

Mike moves toward a chair.

“You leave now,” says the guy forcefully, and he eyeballs Mike from ten paces.

Mike faces me. “Any trouble,” he instructs me quietly, “call me on my cell phone. I’ll be across the street.” Then he drops his hands into his pockets and wanders out past the receptionist without a backward glance.

The funereal atmosphere of the lobby carries to the corridors out back, a warren of passageways hung with faded scenes of palaces and dachas, the Russian dream of the good life before they discovered Miami. We twist and turn till I am totally disoriented, then I am eventually ushered into a white-tiled changing room.

“Towels,” says the receptionist, pointing to a stack of them on a low wooden bench. He indicates the glazed door opposite. The door is fogged, dripping condensation. “Mr. Lemtov is steaming. You go there.”

I look from the towels to the door behind which Mr. Lemtov is steaming. Oh, for crying out loud.

“Would you mind asking Mr. Lemtov to come out?”

The guy waves a hand at the sauna room, then saunters back out to the hall. Alone now, I give the situation a few moments’ thought. Either this is one of those moronic power games, the kind of thing Patrick might dream up, or I have really arrived at an inopportune moment and Lemtov just cannot be bothered dressing to receive me. Either way, I do not much like it. But in the end I cross to the glazed door and push it open and a cloud of steam rolls out. There are two tiers of wooden-slatted benches around the walls, a pile of river stones in the middle of the floor. Next to these, a barrel and a long-handled scoop. On the bench to the right, alone in the small sauna, sits Lemtov. We consider each other a few seconds: me in my suit, Lemtov with his legs splayed in front of him, his loins wrapped in a towel.

“When you’re finished,” I say.

“Here is private.”

“It’s also very hot. And very uncomfortable.”

Lemtov gets to his feet. He reaches up to the control panel and turns down the thermostat. Then he looks at me again. He is not coming out. So finally I reverse into the changing room, peeling off my jacket and my tie, cursing beneath my breath. I remove my shirt. It occurs to me then that there might be another reason he wants to speak to me in there. On a naked torso there is no place to conceal a wire. I am bending to take off my shoes, when the hall door opens and I look up. The Pavlovian twinge in my gut is instant. Him. Sledgehammer. The bodyguard, ex-Spetnatz, from down at Brighton Beach. Now I rise slowly, my cell phone still inside my jacket on the bench. But even if Mike got past the lobby, there is no way he would find his way back here. If this guy wants to hit me now, I am dead meat. So I do the only thing I can do. I stand and wait. After a moment the bodyguard simply nods to me, then he sits down by the towels and folds his arms.

I decide not to remove my shoes. Or my pants. I pick up a towel and enter the sauna.

“Your man just arrived,” I tell Lemtov, sitting myself on the opposite bench.

Lemtov splashes some water onto the hot rocks, a puff of steam hisses upward, then he leans back. His silver hair is plastered to his scalp. Half-naked you can see he has the build of an aging athlete, his body accumulating fat, contentedly going to seed. His skin is a uniform sunlamped tan.

“I apologized,” he says mildly, referring to the hit I took down at Brighton Beach.

“What you said was that it was an accident. That the guy made a mistake.”

“Would you like for him to apologize?”

I wave the offer aside. Not why I came here.

“You believe me now,” he asks, “that they have executed Po Lin?”

“I believe it. But I’m just not sure that’s important right now.”

He warns me, inconsequentially, that my shoes will be ruined.

“Mr. Lemtov, have you spoken to the Tunku about my daughter?”

“Your countrymen were not pleased with you.”

My drubbing in the side chamber. I wave this aside too. “The Tunku and my daughter,” I say.

“O’Conner was working hard for the Japanese,” he says, ignoring my point a second time. “He is not happy with you also?”

“I want to know what the Headquarters Committee’s doing with my daughter.”

“I am not on the Headquarters Committee.”

“The Tunku’s the chairman.”

Lemtov inclines his head and waits. He is not going to make this easy.

“And I hoped,” I say, struggling to keep my suppressed fury from breaking through, “I hoped that you might be in a position to talk to him.”

“Talk?”

“Reason with him.” I gesture vaguely. “Make him understand that it’s not in anyone’s interests to go on with this. Could you do that?”

He considers. “Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why should I do that? Reason with him.”

Wrung out and tense, dead on my feet through lack of sleep, I am in no mood for any kind of head game. I just want him to do what I want him to do. “Listen,” I say, and then I pause.

Lemtov is very still now, his eyes focused on me intently. He is waiting, I suddenly realize, for an answer to his question: Why should he speak to the Tunku? Not a brush-off as I mistakenly thought, but a real question. The opening gambit to a trade.

“Because I believe it would be in your own best interests,” I say, groping for the appropriately nebulous phrasing. In the back of my mind I recall Mike’s warning: Do not threaten this guy.

“My best interests?”

“We’re not going to stop till we nail Hatanaka’s murderer.”

He lifts a shoulder: So?

“Have you considered what that means?”

“It means you will be working hard to clear your daughter.”

I make a face and turn aside.

“You have another—what? Suspect?” he says.

I turn back to him slowly. And I nod.

“But no evidence?”

“It’s building.”

Lemtov carefully ladles more water onto the stones. Another steam cloud hisses upward. The perspiration goes dribbling down my neck, and Lemtov pokes at the stones with his scoop.

Jesus, I think. This man. “On the Special Committee fraud,” I say, looking straight at him, “we’ve got firm proof.”

“Against Asahaki.”

“He’s not the only one.”

He studies me intently. I have him out there now, suddenly doubtful about exactly what I know. So now I push it further than I intended. “And I’m not talking just about the fraud,” I say.

Lemtov does not move a muscle. I have definitely hit something here, but what? Toshio’s murder? Money laundering tied up with Patrick? Lemtov’s stillness after several moments grows unnerving, but I am too far along now to turn back.

“My report’s going to the Secretary-General,” I tell him. “I couldn’t stop it now even if I wanted to. Too many departments are involved, too many people. So it’s going to happen, he’s going to see it, what we’ve found. The only question now is when.”

I have his full attention. Lemtov turns the scoop in his hand with studied casualness. “And you believe I should be concerned.”

“I guess that’s for you to decide.”

“Hmm.” He has not swallowed the whole hook and line.

“But you might want to consider how much you feel like explaining your attendance at a certain conference in Basel three years back. A conference you attended with O’Conner.”

We look at each other. For a moment I think I have pushed him too far, that my bluff is about to be called. Lemtov’s glance wanders to the door behind which his bodyguard is waiting. But at last he faces me again.

“What do you want?”

“You know what I want. I want my daughter. Now, I can sign my report and pass it upstairs immediately, or I might be persuaded to recheck the whole thing. That’s really up to you.”

He does not need the suggestion trailed across his path a second time.

“How long?”

“To recheck it? Maximum, forty-eight hours.”

Lemtov squints. He does not like it.

“Maximum,” I repeat. “After that, Internal Oversight would take it upstairs anyway. I couldn’t stop them. Forty-eight hours I can do. But I’d have to be persuaded first that there was some very good reason for me to recheck it.”

“Your daughter.”

I dip my head. He leans back, chewing the whole thing over. “The Headquarters Committee meets tomorrow morning,” he says, thinking aloud. “They might decide to release her.” Meaning that he can do it: He can pull on the Tunku’s strings and have Rachel set free.

When I suggest that the committee should meet tonight, Lemtov counters that a quorum cannot be raised at such short notice. I suggest that they convene at seven
A.M.
He suggests eleven. Like a couple of barroom lawyers, we bat the thing back and forth. Then he pauses to toss another scoop of water on the stones and I watch the steam rise, momentarily lost in my own cloud of desolate reflection.

I am forty-one years old. Against the advice of many people, I have stuck by the decision I made all that time ago, I have remained with the UN. God knows, it wasn’t for the money. I could have gotten rich in any number of alternate careers doing something the brain trusts like Heritage think is useful: assisting in the dismantlement and reassembly of corporations, advising directors on their share options and figuring out how to lay off employees at zero cost to the boardroom. Most of the old crowd from Columbia are now senior partners in big firms, pulling in a million a year and still wondering who’s getting their share of the cake. I have never envied them.

In truth, I have always regarded myself as lucky. Because even in my most despairing moments about the UN’s well-documented failings I have been secure in the knowledge that I have not had to sacrifice the best part of me, my conscience, just to earn my daily bread. My conscience. My pure and noble conscience. And now here I sit in a sauna at the Russian mission, sweat dribbling down my torso into my pants, bargaining with Lemtov like some unscrupulous D.A. cutting a backroom deal with the local gang boss. Sweet Jesus. What price my conscience now?