Diplomatic Immunity (4 page)

3

“S
UICIDE,
”
PATRICK O
’
CONNER SAYS AS WE STEP OUTSIDE.
“Right?”

The remark is so unexpected that I balk, but Patrick continues on over to the giant metal sculpture of a pistol, its barrel knotted, a gift to the UN from the people of Luxembourg. When I join him by the sculpture, he has both hands braced on the pedestal.

“You heard Mike,” I say.

“I heard him.”

“He thinks it’s murder.”

But Patrick doesn’t seem to hear me, and when I say his name, he simply lifts his head and takes a few deep breaths of air. His jowls hang heavy and there are tension lines across his brow that could signal the onset of a migraine. He stares past me across the North Lawn.

After getting him away from the Assembly Hall I took Patrick down to the basement, where we’ve just spent ten minutes with Mike. Mike told Patrick the same thing he told me. That he thinks it’s murder. That we need a forensics team. Patrick’s response was to ask me to accompany him outside, a request for which I admit I am grateful. Unlike Mike, neither one of us seems to have the kind of cast-iron stomach needed to think straight in the presence of a corpse, but Patrick’s look now, as he stares out over the lawn, is not so much one of shock as dismay. He is pondering the effect of Toshio’s death on the vote. And after reflecting on Patrick’s opening remark, I wonder if perhaps I might be missing something here.

“Why suicide?” I ask.

“Because it fits.”

“That’s not how Mike sees it.”

Patrick looks at me. “What about you? How do you see it?”

I state the obvious, that I’m no expert but that Mike’s judgment seems fair. Toshio was no user, I say.

“User, my ass.” Patrick pushes away from the pedestal and I follow him across the terrace, down the steps and onto the graveled path across the lawn. Usually this area is crawling with tourists. Today, thankfully, they’ve been kept out because of the opening. “Jardine’s just guessing what was in the syringe,” he says, thinking out loud. “He’s guessing some kinda dope. Someone set it up to look like Hatanaka was injecting. Accidental overdose.”

“You don’t buy that?”

“Whoever did it would end up on the tapes. Who’s that stupid?” The security tapes, he means. There are cameras on all the basement corridors; Mike has just gone to check the tapes from last night. “Suicide fits,” Patrick says again. “Coulda been anything in that syringe. Straight in the vein, some poison, be as good a way to do it as any.”

We toss the idea back and forth a minute; Patrick seems absolutely convinced he is right. And the idea is not outrageous, God knows. Toshio spent his career visiting parts of the world most people catch only in glimpses from the safety of their armchairs on the TV nightly news. Sarajevo. Sierra Leone. East Timor. More recently Kabul. Sometimes as a special rapporteur gathering information for the Secretariat, sometimes as a special envoy representing the Secretary-General at cease-fire negotiations, putting the reasonable view to men whose only real interest was in slitting each other’s throats.

And Toshio was never one to confine himself to the boundaries of the inevitable cordon sanitaire decreed by the local authorities. He went out into the field, tried to see firsthand what conditions were really like, what was actually happening to the people whose tragic fate it was to be born into the front lines of hatred. Twenty-five years a Secretariat staffer, he had heard all the lies. He had seen more evil than any man should be asked to see, maimed and suffering humanity in all its wretched forms, and who could blame him if after this he had finally given up on the world? Down in that unlit basement room, surrounded by those posters of starving children, doesn’t that seem possible? That he reached for a peace that life couldn’t offer?

And yet I just don’t see it. Not Toshio.

“How does suicide square with the Council vote?” I ask. “One minute he’s campaigning against the Japanese seat, the next he just offs himself?”

At the end of the path Patrick stops suddenly.

“You don’t see any connection there?” he asks me.

“With the vote?”

But Patrick’s look is suddenly abstracted; a thought has just occurred to him. “You’re sure there was no note?”

“Nothing.”

Patrick ruminates awhile; in the end, I have to ask him what he’s thinking.

“How much would Hatanaka have sacrificed to screw Japan’s chance at a Council seat? That’s what I’m thinking.”

It takes me a moment. Then I get it. “You’re not serious.”

“Why not? Part of Jap tradition, isn’t it? Bushido, whatever they call it. Who was that guy? Mishima? Like a grand protest thing. If Hatanaka did that, then left a note saying what a bad idea he thought a Jap seat was, Christ, can you imagine the headlines?”

“There was no note,” I say firmly.

“Check his office,” he tells me. “And his apartment.”

I suggest that we should first wait and see what Mike finds on the tapes, but Patrick waves that aside as if I am simply being obtuse. He has decided on the answer. The answer is suicide. And this is, frankly, the worst example yet of just how badly Patrick’s judgment is being impaired by his preoccupation with the vote. There is just no way Toshio committed suicide to make a political point, I don’t care how much he might have wanted to derail the upcoming vote. But confronting Patrick head-on, I know, is useless, so I don’t even try. As we turn and head back down the path, I wonder aloud about notifying the Japanese consulate.

“No need,” says Patrick.

I glance at him.

“He’s on a UN passport,” Patrick reminds me.

“He’s a Japanese national.”

“Is this Japan?”

At the top of the terrace steps I touch Patrick’s arm, and we both stop. “Patrick, he’s dead. It doesn’t matter how he died, we have to notify the embassy. His relatives have to be contacted. This isn’t something you can keep under wraps.”

“We just need two days.”

“If you believe you can keep this secret until the vote. If you think you can get Mike to go along with that—”

His fantasy deflated by this quick reality check, he looks down at his feet. What he is thinking about, I suspect, is not Toshio Hatanaka but Patrick O’Conner. How to handle this disastrous situation, how to limit any damage it might do to the campaign for the Japanese seat. How to protect his own career.

“There’s probably no note,” I say. “And I really don’t think it’s suicide anyway.”

“Suicide, murder,” Patrick mutters. “Once the word gets out that the opponent in chief of the Jap seat’s dead in the bloody basement, all fucking hell’s going to break loose. First thing they’ll do is make a play to shuffle the agenda.”

From Patrick’s point of view, a catastrophe. A delay in the vote, the way the momentum is running, would be a certain prelude to defeat for the Japanese. Patrick swears.

Right then Mike emerges from the Assembly building. He sees us immediately and jogs over, one hand resting on the walkie-talkie at his hip. “No tape,” he reports, coming to a halt in front of us. “The camera in the basement corridor was turned off.”

Oh, Jesus, says Patrick.

“Ten last night through to six this morning,” Mike tells us, his voice strained. “Maintenance. Getting ready for today.”

“Maintenance,” Patrick moans, screwing up his face.

But last night there was a reception held in the public concourse, cocktails for the nongovernmental organizations. I ask Mike about that. The concourse is just one floor up from the basement; I can’t believe the NGO event wasn’t taped.

“Sure, we got that. But nothing in the basement. They’re telling me the work on the cameras was scheduled days ago. I got someone chasing up the maintenance crew.”

“Someone could have strolled down from the NGO reception, we wouldn’t know?” says Patrick.

“We’ll check the concourse tapes. See if we can spot anyone disappearing downstairs who shouldn’t be.” From Mike’s tone, a long shot. His face is red now, an equal measure of embarrassment and fury.

I turn to Patrick, expecting some decision, a plan of action. But Patrick seems overwhelmed by the steady escalation of the problem. He stares right past us, lost in some private thought.

“One call,” Mike suggests. “I can have a Homicide forensics team here in twenty minutes.”

Patrick’s head snaps around. “You don’t call anyone. No one. Not Homicide, not NYPD Forensics, no one. This isn’t Harlem, for chrissake. The New York cops come in here, half the bloody delegations will up and walk out. You feel like explaining that upstairs?”

“We need some help here,” Mike protests. “Professionals.”

“No one,” Patrick repeats.

Mike pulls a face, but Patrick is right. The legal fiction that these few acres at Turtle Bay are not part of the U.S. is treated as divine law by most of the delegates. Any intrusion into these grounds by U.S. officialdom, whatever the reason, would set off major diplomatic fireworks.

“Isn’t there a coolroom in back of the basement canteen?” Patrick wonders aloud.

“What about it?” Mike returns, deadpan.

“You could put him in there. Just for now.”

“No forensics?”

Patrick doesn’t reply.

“And then what?” says Mike. “Go home?”

Patrick starts to move off, telling me that he’s going to speak to the SG. But Mike lays a hand on his arm.

“I’m reporting this to Eckhardt as a murder.” Eckhardt, Mike’s boss, the head of UN Security. “And I can tell you now, he’s gonna flip if he finds anything got done without him hearing about it first.”

So tell him, Patrick says.

“And I’ll be telling him that unless we get an investigation started now, we got no chance of nailing this.”

“An investigation?”

“Homicide,” says Mike.

Cornered, Patrick turns right, then left. A full-blown investigation, the kind of unpredictable political currents it might stir up in this place, at this time—it is the very last thing Patrick needs so close to Thursday’s vote. And Mike senses that.

“Put Sam on it with me.” I shoot Mike a look, but he ignores me and continues to press his case with Patrick. “I’ll do what I can with the detective work, let Sam play prosecuting attorney, keep it legal. I mean, look at it. What’s the alternate plan?”

A fair point. Patrick considers. “What are the chances you can actually find out what happened down there last night? Given that you don’t get your NYPD buddies involved.”

“Not great,” Mike tells him. “Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.”

Not great, Patrick echoes. He strokes his throat a moment, then faces me.

What I would like to do, of course, is pass right on by, let the nightmare fall on someone else. And for a moment I consider doing just that. Sorry. Too busy. Try one of the junior legal officers from the department. But even as I consider this polite but firm refusal, I realize that I am not going to get that choice. Because this is not some draft proposal for an obscure UN committee, the kind of thing I delegate daily by the truckload down the line. This is murder at the UN. Toshio Hatanaka, everybody’s favorite special envoy. And Mike wants me on it. And Patrick knows he has to do something. After fourteen years of practice, I can protect my bureaucratic butt as well as the next guy, but this just isn’t one of those things I can safely palm off, watch explode in someone else’s lap. Patrick is nodding to himself now, coming around to Mike’s suggestion. A weight like lead settles in my bones. The legal point guard in the investigation of Toshio Hatanaka’s death has just been selected.

Mike gets a call on his walkie-talkie; apparently Dr. Patel, the resident UNHQ medic, is waiting for Mike down in the basement.

“Patel?” Patrick is appalled.

“If you won’t let a real forensics team in,” says Mike, “Patel’s what you got.” Patel, needless to say, is a guy you wouldn’t trust with any medical instrument more sophisticated than a thermometer. He does the occasional routine medical checkup, hands out aspirin, and spends the rest of his time sleeping in the sanatorium. Moving away from us, Mike calls over his shoulder that Eckhardt should be down in the basement any minute. “If you got a problem treating this as a homicide, come down and tell him.”

The moment Mike is out of earshot, Patrick turns to me. “Check Hatanaka’s office. If there’s a note, bring it straight to me. Don’t show Jardine. Or Eckhardt.”

I repeat my opinion that there will be no note, that like Mike, I do not believe Toshio has committed suicide. But Patrick is not listening.

“If there’s nothing there, go check his apartment. And see if you can’t do something about Jardine. Settle him down. If he thinks he’s going to have no problems running a homicide investigation in this place, he’s just plain wrong. And I don’t want to be picking up the pieces, cleaning up after him just because he’s too bloody gung ho to listen to reason.”

“He’s a professional.”

“He’s your mate,” says Patrick. “And I’m telling you to settle him down.”

Today’s second big edict. Speak to Hatanaka. Settle Mike down. Inside, we part at the escalators, Patrick giving me a few final instructions before heading grim-faced toward the Assembly Hall to inform the Secretary-General of the tragedy. I break into a jog down the corridor, hurrying to Toshio’s office in the Secretariat building, feeling suddenly light-headed and nauseated, but glad to be moving, relieved to have something to do, something to think about other than the shocking sight in the basement. I am going upstairs to carry out my instructions: to look for a note that I do not believe exists. Twenty-nine floors up to Toshio’s office. Thirty floors clear of the corpse.

4

A
F
TER SEARCHING TOSHIO
’
S OFFICE FOR FIVE MINUTES AND
finding nothing that remotely resembles a suicide note, I retreat three doors along and across the passage to my own office and close the door.

The shelves in here are jammed with books and papers and files. At least once a week somebody will come to me checking up on the whys and wherefores of the Headquarters Agreement, generally the maintenance managers, who deal with things like the electricity and water we buy from the State of New York. So that booklet, though I almost know its contents by heart, is close at hand. But the
Geneva Convention on Diplomatic Privileges
is buried deep somewhere among the rest, and I twist my neck to read the vertical labels on the spines.

Gathering information and writing reports, you will learn from the PR handouts, is the work that takes place in the Secretariat building. More than thirty floors of worker ants busy gathering information and writing reports, and though I deal with only the apex of the legal pyramid, that is more than enough to keep me permanently wading through paper. I curse the system as I move along the shelves.

The door opens behind me.

“Elizabeth? I’m looking for Geneva dip rights and privileges, sixty-one. Any clues?” On my knees now, I shuffle along by the bottom shelf. “I thought it was down here.”

No answer. When I look up, it is not Elizabeth, my secretary, peering down at me over my desk.

“Dad?” Rachel smiles and shakes her head, her bob of shiny black hair swaying from side to side. “Get a grip,” she says.

My gut clenches. Quickly turning back to the shelves, I tell my daughter that I thought she had the whole day off from her job as a UN guide.

“What’s lost?” she asks me.

I shoot her a dark look. She pulls a face and crosses to the window, remarking that most of the sightseers have left First Avenue. “How come you’re not down at the opening?” she says, turning back.

“How come you’re up here?”

“I’m a spy.”

“How about you do your spying someplace else.”

“Dad?” She leans right over, watching me through the opening beneath my desk. “What is it, some book?”

Yeah, I say. Some book.

In fact, if I can find the damn thing, it is the only document I can think of that might give us some guidance as to the legal situation arising from Toshio’s death. Not something I want to get into with Rachel. Standing, I brush the dust off my knees. Rachel takes a tub of yogurt and a plastic teaspoon from her purse. She commences to eat, ruminating over each mouthful, her gaze directed to the Tibetan monks across the street. Watching her, I think, What do I tell her? How do I tell her? Remember Toshio Hatanaka, the guy who went to Afghanistan to negotiate your mother’s release and failed? Guess what happened.

“Hello?” Rachel waves her plastic spoon, her singsong voice bringing me back to the present.

I nod to the yogurt. “I hope that’s not lunch.”

“Are you nagging me?”

“That’s what I’m doing.” I move along the shelves.

“And I really look like I’m shrinking away?” She pinches her cheek as she sits down. “Skin and bone?”

But she looks fine, a slimmer-than-average eighteen-year-old kid who probably hasn’t slept as much as she should have since moving out of the family home last week. And I recognize the veiled warning too—what she eats, her weight, are not subjects she likes to discuss. When her mother died, Rachel was your normal, healthy adolescent, no more hang-ups or neuroses than any fifteen-year-old girl. Within a year she was in a special-needs ward at Bellevue, being fed a cocktail of nutrient-enriched liquids through a tube in her nose. Anorexia nervosa. Words that can still fill me with helpless terror.

“So what’s the big deal with this book?”

Just some procedural thing, I tell her, facing the shelves again, wondering how to get rid of her. For one of the committees, I say. No big deal.

“I don’t know why you bother.”

“It’s a job.”

“I mean, why you bother lying, Dad. Really. You are the world’s absolute worst.”

Locating the diplomatic rights and privileges file, I pull it from the stack, then face her. She has her feet apart now, her knees clamped together. She leans forward, trying hard not to drip yogurt onto her blue skirt. Her blue blazer is draped over her purse behind the door.

“This isn’t a good time, Rache.”

“Two minutes,” she says.

Two minutes. I’ve got a dead man in the basement and my daughter needs two minutes to finish her yogurt. I flip open the file and pull up a chair behind my desk.

“I’m a chaperone for the day,” she tells me.

“Good for you.”

“All the guides got landed with different delegations.”

Nodding into the file, I turn a page.

“Guess who I’m doing.”

“Amaze me.”

“The Philippines. Argentina and Spain too, just the junior delegates.”

“Excellent.”

“You’re not interested, are you?”

“Rachel.” Lifting my eyes, I tap the file with a finger. “Won’t the Philippines be missing you by now?”

She informs me that she’s got another fifteen minutes. Then she flips her empty yogurt tub into the trash can, licks the spoon, and flips that too. She slumps back in her chair; she obviously has no intention of leaving.

I could tell her, I think. Maybe I even should tell her. Sooner or later the news about Toshio will get out; sooner or later Rachel will have to know, wouldn’t it be better for her to hear it from me? But just now, as so often with Rachel these past three years, I simply cannot find the words. In the end I bow my head over the file and lose myself in the arcane region of the law that dictates the behavior of nations toward persons of credentialed diplomatic standing. On the page here it is clear as crystalline water. The rights of the individual, the responsibilities of the state. Totally clear. Completely transparent. But what happens, say, if the government of a country falls, revolutionaries seize power, and the U.S. embassy is besieged for over a year? What happens, say, if a diplomat from a rogue regime leans out of an embassy window in London and shoots a local police officer? What happens, say, if a UN special envoy is found murdered in the basement at UN headquarters? What happens, of course, is that politics takes over, and after years in UN Legal Affairs I have learned that politics has a way of turning the crystalline waters of the statute book into mud.

“Juan says the Japanese won’t get onto the Council.”

“Where’d he get that from?”

“Around,” says Rachel.

Around, I tell her, keeping my head down, is not normally considered to be a source of high repute. But it is so much a measure of how deeply this vote is affecting all of us that I find myself making a mental note of Juan’s opinion. Juan is Rachel’s new landlord and roommate, a twenty-four-year-old with a bee in his bonnet about the state of the world. A senior figure at Lighthouse, one of the increasingly numerous NGOs that have UN accreditation, Juan could possibly be picking up signals that we’re missing from some of the smaller delegations.

“He’s not the only one saying it,” she says.

“Mmm?”

“The guys from the
Keisan Shimbun
think Hatanaka’s sunk it too,” Rachel asserts confidently.

A sound rises from deep in my chest. After eighteen years, my daughter still has the most amazing capacity to surprise me. She has been giving Joe Public the tour and PR gloss for barely three months. And she got the job not because she was turned on by politics and diplomacy. Far from it. She got the job because for the first time in my career I stooped to pull a few strings. And here she is, I now discover, shooting the breeze with journalists from the leading Japanese business daily about who’s hot and who’s not in the world of big-time international diplomacy.

“Rachel.” My hand traces a bewildered circle in the air, then I point to the door. “Out.”

“You brought my stuff, yeah?”

Her stuff. A suitcase full of clothes from home. It’s down in the trunk of my car. I told Rachel I’d drop it off at her new apartment tonight, but now I make a face.

“Oh, Dad, you promised.”

“What’s this, blackmail?”

She smiles sweetly. It is not as cute at this moment as she thinks it is.

“Okay, Rache. I’ll try. No promises.”

“Great.”

She goes to pick up her purse and blazer from behind the door. And this is the moment that Mike chooses to arrive. He puts his head in and speaks before I can stop him. “Hatanaka died about eight hours ago, way Patel sees it. I wouldn’t take that for gospel.”

I wave a hand, my look is severe. His voice trails off. Then Rachel steps out from where she has been hidden from view; she has an arm in one sleeve of her blazer.

Mike makes a sound. I drop my head into my hand. Finally Mike nods to her and says “Rache,” then with an apologetic glance in my direction he tells me that he’ll be in Toshio’s office. He quickly withdraws.

Rachel turns to me, her mouth open. “Hatanaka, Dad?”

“You didn’t hear that.”

“Toshio Hatanaka?”

Moving smartly around the desk, I close the door. “Okay, so now you’ve heard. In a couple of hours it’ll be out anyway.” My finger rises in warning. “But I don’t want you telling anyone. Not Juan. Not anyone.”

“How? What did he have, a heart attack?”

“Look, I haven’t got time to discuss it, Rache. And for the time being, you forget that you heard. Okay?”

She glances at the file on my desk. “Is that why you needed the diplomatic rights thing?”

“Rachel,” I say sharply.

Maybe too sharply. Startled, she jerks her head back.

“I’ll bring your stuff tonight, okay? Any questions, ask me then.” I toss my head toward the door. “Now go.”

She sees at once that I am not kidding. She shrugs her shoulders into her blazer, comes around the desk, and pecks me on the cheek. Her look of curious astonishment lingers on me a moment longer, then she leaves without a word. Teenage daughters. Quantum physics could not be more unfathomable.