Diplomatic Immunity (7 page)

It was at this table that Rachel and I heard from Toshio the details of Sarah’s capture. We sat side by side, sick with fear, and listened as he talked us through what had happened to my wife, Rachel’s mother. The whole medical team at the camp in Abatan had been taken, Toshio told us, all six of the UN volunteers who had flown out there just a week before. He mentioned the names of several warring tribes in the area, assured us that he had dealt with the local warlords on other occasions, that he was hopeful of a speedy resolution. We asked him what the Afghan tribesmen wanted. He did not know. He told us that it might be days before any demand was made—probably money—but that he would call us from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border when he arrived there the following night. He promised us that the word he was getting from Kabul was that Sarah and the rest of the medical team had not been harmed. After an hour of this, we rose from the table, numbed; Rachel gripped my arm like a limpet as we walked down to the car.

Then we waited. Endured the silent torture of not knowing, two weeks of it, irrational soaring hopes plunging into moments of total despair, both of us hovering by the phone each evening, waiting for Toshio’s regular nightly call. I wanted to fly out there. Toshio said that it would not help Sarah, that he was doing everything that could be done, that I should stay in New York and look after Rachel. I complied with some reluctance.

The end, when it came, came suddenly. And I knew it was the end, the very worst, the moment the Secretary-General himself appeared for the first time in my career at my office door. I remained in the chair. I have a hazy recollection of a hand on my shoulder, of totally inadequate but well-meaning words.

When Toshio returned to New York, he asked Rachel and me up to his apartment. He rested his elbows on this same waxed table, hung his grief-roughened face over his notes, and tried to explain to us the unexplainable. How the life of the woman we loved had been extinguished for no fathomable reason, how his every effort to save her had failed.

Three years ago. Swaying forward now, I press my fingertips hard against the shiny waxed surface. At this same damn table.

“Sam?”

Stepping back from the table and moving across the room, I find Mike with his finger poised over the answering machine. Two messages, he tells me, then he hits the play button.

“Toshio” is the first and only word we understand of message number one. It’s in Japanese, a woman’s voice, not young.

“The sister?” Mike asks.

I shrug. It could be Moriko, but who knows? There is a beep, then message two begins.

“Hello? Mr. Hatanaka? Lucy Frayn jus’ callin’, let you all know I done that freezer, be right you usin’ it now. But I be needin’ that bucket like I tol’ you.”
Mike grunts. Toshio’s cleaning lady rambles on, outlining her requirements. When she’s done, there’s a double beep and the machine resets. On the display panel there is a number, presumably Lucy Frayn’s.

I suggest that it might be worth our while calling her, but when I reach for the phone, Mike’s hand suddenly shoots out to block me. He turns his head, studying the machine. Then he hits rewind, leans over, and waits for it to finish, then hits play. The message in Japanese begins again. He hits the stop button immediately. Then rewind again.

“What’s up?”

“Shh,” he says. Pressing an ear against the machine, he hits play.

And this time, just before the woman’s voice begins, I hear it: a faint click. Lifting his head, Mike stabs the stop button. He stares at the phone.

“That noise?” I say.

Mike picks up the handpiece, deftly unscrews the mouthpiece cover, then places the handpiece on the bench and peers into the electronic innards. A second later his eyes close, he silently mouths the word
fuck.
Beneath my shirt collar the hair on my neck begins to prickle. Without a word Mike turns the exposed handpiece toward me. He picks up a pencil and points to a little gray silicone square inside.

We look at each other. He does not need to tell me what he has found.

I follow him into the study and he repeats the procedure with the phone in there. Another square of gray silicone identical to the first. Swallowing down the sickening tickle in my throat, I ask quietly, “What the hell’s been going on here?”

Stepping past me, Mike whispers, “Other phones?”

We find a third bug in the kitchen phone. Eventually we end up in Toshio’s bedroom. It’s bare but not quite as bare as his study. Three brightly colored Kabuki prints are hung along one wall. On the bedside table there’s a reading lamp and a book but no phone. While Mike takes a look in the bathroom, I pick up the single slim volume from the bedside table. Bashō.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North,
Japanese with the English translation on the facing pages. On the flyleaf there’s an inscription in kanji. When Mike returns, he quietly asks me what I’ve found.

“Nothing, some poetry.”

Mike raises a finger to his lips. Though we have instinctively been talking in whispers since Mike found the first bug, this is the first concrete indication he has given me that he believes our conversation might be flowing down some hidden wire. Now he sits on Toshio’s bed and opens the nightstand drawer. Finding nothing, he reaches for the lower drawer while I flip through the Bashō. There is more kanji on another page of the book, the corner of which has been turned down. A marker. Possibly the last page Toshio was reading when he put the book aside. In the middle of the page, a short poem.

A clump of leaning grass in the summer wind

Is all that remains of the great schemes and bold strategies

Of departed generals and buried politicians.

“I thought Hatanaka was some kind of a pacifist,” Mike whispers.

When I raise my eyes, Mike crooks a finger, beckoning me over. I move around the bed, then bend and peer into the drawer where Mike points. The thing is just lying there, uncovered. A pistol. I make a sound. Mike gently pulls out the drawer an inch more, and two rounds of ammo in brass casings roll, clinking against the barrel of the gun. We are silent a moment.

“Makes you wonder, don’t it,” Mike says thoughtfully, “what coulda made the man change his mind.”

8

T
URNING IN TO THE UNHQ BASEMENT CORRIDOR, WE SEE
people, a small crowd, milling outside the room where Toshio’s body was found. Word, quite obviously, is out.

“Oh, great,” says Mike through clenched teeth.

A guard stands by the door. Weyland. An old black guy, one of the cops Mike brought with him when he moved from City Hall, someone Mike trusts. Weyland seems unperturbed by the moron in a suit who is jabbing a finger near his face and shouting. Mike breaks into a jog, calling Weyland’s name, and a dozen faces turn in our direction.

“What do these people want?” Mike asks.

From farther back along the corridor I begin to recognize the faces: senior delegates from the Organization for African Unity, the Arab League, ASEAN, people like that, but it’s too late to warn Mike that he is facing what appears to be a handpicked gang from the General Assembly. He goes on pushing his way right through them. Then he addresses Weyland again, asking what this is all about.

“Seem like these people are expecting to get in here,” Weyland replies. “Seem like they think they got a right.”

Mike turns and points to the ringleader. “Okay, let’s hear it, what’s your problem, pal?”

Instantly, silence falls. Nobody can quite believe it. The guy Mike has addressed so curtly is Tunku Rahman Kabir, the Malaysian ambassador. Renowned for his interminable speeches, his ability to get himself onto any committee, and an unbroken twenty-year career of troublemaking at Turtle Bay, the Tunku, as he’s universally known, is a UN institution. A minor member of one of the Malaysian royal families, he has a job here for life. Nearing seventy, about five feet four inches tall, he has an inflated sense of self-importance that is legendary, and the look he gives Mike now is pure acid. When Mike does not flinch, the Tunku finally condescends to explain the situation.

Toshio’s death, it seems, has become public knowledge. The president of the General Assembly session, inspired by the Tunku, has appointed an ad hoc committee to investigate and report the facts of the case to him tomorrow morning. So here they all are, the committee members—some of them from countries where open and impartial justice occurs about as frequently as a four-leaf clover—and they are outraged, positively outraged, the Tunku tells Mike now, at this denial of access to the scene of Toshio’s death.

The Tunku is still talking when Mike casts a despairing glance in my direction. I signal him over; he comes across and we turn our backs to confer.

“Suggestions?” he says.

“Let them in.”

He squints, incredulous.

“Mike, you can’t stop these guys. They can go over your head all the way up to the thirty-eighth floor.”

“I’ll call Eckhardt.” Eckhardt, Mike’s boss, the head of Security.

“Eckhardt can’t help.”

“O’Conner?” Mike wonders aloud.

“When Patrick sees the political firepower lined up here”—I toss my head back behind us—“there’s no way he’ll get himself involved.”

“Backing us right down the line, huh?” Shaking his head, he calls Patrick a name. Then he lifts his eyes. “Way you see it, we got no choice?”

I tell him it hardly matters anyway; if we’ve got no forensics team, there’s not much point keeping these guys out of the room. Mike takes a moment with that, trying to get used to the idea that the Tunku and his ragtag posse will be given the access they demand. He does not like it.

“Shit,” he says finally, and goes back to push a path through the mob.

I drop into a corridor chair, my legs sprawled in front of me, my head resting against the wall. I am drained, the emotional strain of the morning finally catching up with me. I feel heavy and tired, as though I have been battling the consequences of Toshio’s death for weeks instead of hours. Then, from the corner of my eye, I register the familiar purposeful gait of Jennifer Dale; she is heading in my direction. At this moment, the last thing I need.

She takes the chair next to mine. “Quite a surprise,” she remarks at last, an opener to which I can only nod my head in weary acquiescence. “And I presume that when you reported Hatanaka’s death to the U.S. legal counsel, she was quite surprised too?” The U.S. legal counsel, of course, is Jennifer.

“I’ll write you a memo.”

The crack is misjudged; she rounds on me. “You knew about it this morning, for Pete’s sake. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“When we spoke this morning, I didn’t have a clue.”

“You’ve known for hours. And I had to find out about it from a junior member of the Fijian delegation. How do you think that felt?”

I assure her that every perm five ambassador was informed by Patrick. Including the U.S. ambassador, James Bruckner. “If Bruckner didn’t pass it on to you, I’m sorry, Jennifer, but you’ll have to take it up with him.”

“You’re passing the buck.”

“I’m giving you the facts.”

“Finally.” Her fingers work the small pearls of her necklace as if they’re worry beads. Her expression borders on the severe, a look she’d already perfected in those far-off days at Columbia. Even then she seemed to have a direction that so many of us lacked, some sense of purpose about what she was doing at law school beyond the mere acquisition of a degree. Her father was a judge, I guess that was part of it, but there were plenty of others from the same high WASP background who were happy to coast along, collect their pieces of paper, and move straight into lucrative careers as if by right of birth. But Jennifer, somewhat aloof and high-minded, seemed to have her gaze fixed on a more distant prospect, a lone eagle soaring over the valleys of worldly ambition down which the rest of us were inexorably sliding. But now, here we are, twenty years later, sitting in the same corridor, contemplating the same death.

“Where’s the body?” she asks me.

Gesturing toward the room into which Mike and the others have disappeared, I remark that she seems to be missing the show.

“That wasn’t the question, Sam.”

“He died on UN territory. And he wasn’t a U.S. citizen. This whole thing’s an internal affair.”

“Secretariat eyes only?”

“It doesn’t impact on the Host Country Agreement.” The agreement that regulates UN headquarters business with our geographic host, the U.S.

“And you’re sure he died on UN territory?”

Surprised by the question, I hesitate before nodding. It doesn’t get past her.

“Christ.” She rises to her feet. “I want to see the body, Sam. Right now.”

There are, of course, a hundred legal quibbles I could raise to obstruct her, and she knows that. But she also knows that being the host country to UN headquarters and by far the biggest contributor to the UN’s stretched budget, the U.S. has sufficient clout to brush these quibbles aside. And for my part, I am aware that if I make things difficult for her, she will respond in kind, refusing any request I make to carry the investigation of Toshio’s death onto U.S. territory. So we stand here, eyeing each other and doing the calculations, then at last I lead her to the cafeteria.

The guard stationed outside the coolroom is the same kid who found Toshio’s body; when I give him the okay, he tells Jennifer his story while I unpadlock the coolroom door. She doesn’t just listen to him, she grills the kid. Times. Keys. How many doors did he try? It is like a lesson in cross-examination. The kid gets confused, but Jennifer keeps pushing. Who did he call first? Why?

This is just like her law school persona, a facet of her character I haven’t seen much these past six months. Brilliant, certainly, but there can be a harsh lack of proportion to Jennifer’s legal jousting, though it has been, needless to say, no impediment to her career. She made the Law Review and went on from there to clerk for Donald Winslow on the Supreme Court, the kind of high-octane start to a career that every law student dreams of. From there she could have moved on to the fast track to a partnership in any law firm in the country, but what Jennifer did instead was join the Department of State as a junior legal officer for twenty-five thousand bucks a year. A sense of civic duty, I think that was the phrase used by the Columbia alumni magazine. Karl Kampinski, one of the few guys I still stay in touch with from those days, shook his head in disbelief as he showed me the announcement.

Can you believe the waste? he said, stunned that anyone could have passed up the glittering spoils of corporate law because of something so intangible as duty. Do you suppose, he said, she might be nuts?

But now here she is, three-quarters of the way through the career plan she tells me she had mapped out before she was twenty. Jennifer, whatever else she is, is not nuts.

Yanking up the metal bar, I pull. The coolroom door swings open stiffly and the kid, the guard, reaches in past me and flicks on the light. Jennifer steps up by me, we peer in a moment, our breath steaming silver in the refrigerated air. A single bare bulb throws a dim yellow light. Then slowly, gingerly, we step inside to view Toshio’s chilled body.

“Basement, my ass,” says Patrick when I suggest that he make a trip downstairs to speak with Jennifer Dale, the Tunku, and the sundry host of rubberneckers I have left wandering the basement. Tugging at his collar, he barrels past me out of his office, explaining that he has an appointment with the Secretary-General and the Japanese ambassador, Asahaki. “Upstairs,” he adds, pointing to the ceiling. As we walk to the elevators, he asks me again if I’m sure that Toshio left no suicide note.

“I went through his office and his apartment. No note.”

This would be the appropriate moment, of course, to inform him that we have discovered three listening devices in Toshio’s apartment. But I hold off. Because Mike, for some reason, asked me to. He would not tell me why, but Mike is not a guy for unnecessary mystery; if he wants it this way, he has his reasons.

“Mike’s interviewing the maintenance crew,” I tell Patrick. “He’s getting his surveillance people to run through the other tapes from the NGO reception.”

“Anything?”

I explain that Mike has only just started. Then I ask about Asahaki. “If he’s upstairs now, he might be able to help us.”

Patrick looks at me.

“Maybe he can give us some idea what was going on with that private campaign Toshio was running against the Japanese seat,” I say. “Asahaki must have been monitoring it. He’d likely know whose toes Toshio was stepping on.”

“Asahaki’s, for one. You leave Asahaki to me.”

“Mike wants to ask him some questions too.”

“I said, leave Asahaki to me.”

From which I infer that Patrick wants to retain personal control over any part of the investigation that intrudes into the big league, the upper reaches of the UN family. Now I mention Toshio’s missing file; Mike has rechecked Toshio’s briefcase, the basement rooms nearby—the file is definitely not there. The file, I tell Patrick, contains some private report that Toshio was doing, something for the Fifth Committee, Budgetary Affairs, we believe.

“You checked with the committee?” Patrick asks me.

I am seeing the committee chairman in half an hour. Patrick makes a face. He does not hold out much hope of a lead in that direction.

In the elevator I elaborate on my encounter with Jennifer. “Under the Headquarters Agreement she thinks USUN has a right to be kept informed.” USUN, the mission of the U.S. to the United Nations.

“Bullshit,” says Patrick.

“If we don’t meet her halfway, she won’t play ball. If this spills onto U.S. territory, she won’t help. They might even obstruct us.”

“She said that?”

“Implied.”

Patrick considers a moment. “Clear it with me first, anything you tell her. And make sure she understands she doesn’t go poking her nose into this. She’s got the same rights here as any other delegate. Fuck all.”

Once we’ve made our way past the aides and security guards on thirty-eight, it becomes apparent that Patrick has no intention of inviting me into his meeting with the Secretary-General. Secretariat politics is essentially feudal, only one step removed from a medieval baron’s court: Access to the SG is power. Which is why Patrick leaves me in an outer waiting room, cooling my heels, while he disappears into the inner sanctum, the SG’s dining room, for a private conference with the boss. The Japanese, evidently, have yet to arrive, so I sit myself down and while away a few minutes, distractedly turning pages in one of the UNESCO brochures that lie fanned across the table. By the third brochure Patrick has still not reappeared; I get up impatiently and cross to the window.

From here, the view on a good day is grand. But today there is smog; the East River looks gray and sluggish as it ribbons past below. On the far shore you can see the thin line of dead and dying industry near the water, the neighborhoods of Queens up beyond. The southern tip of Roosevelt Island is visible too, its most prominent feature a derelict mental asylum—the uninhabited twin, so the jokers will tell you, of its sister building over here. Leaning forward, I crane my neck a little, but the view up toward Toshio’s apartment is obscured by the Queensboro Bridge. Then a sudden swell of voices rises behind me. I turn to see the Japanese arriving, Ambassador Asahaki himself and three of his minions.

While one of them goes on ahead to announce the ambassador’s arrival, Asahaki and the other two wait. They talk together in Japanese, their tone somber, the name Hatanaka surfacing a few times from the babel. I look over to the SG’s door. No sign of Patrick. I ponder a moment. Nothing to lose. Then I go over to the Japanese and introduce myself as Patrick O’Conner’s deputy.

“We’re doing everything we can,” I answer blandly when one of the minions asks me what’s happening.

They pump me for more details, but I politely turn each question aside. One of them mentions suicide.

“Our security people are treating it as a homicide.”

Blank looks all around.

“Murder,” I say.

Ambassador Asahaki’s head goes back.

“Mr. Ambassador, if you can spare me a few minutes—”

He turns his back on me. Ignoring my presence now, the three of them confer in Japanese. Crass behavior, but then, Bunzo Asahaki has never been on anyone’s list of favorite ambassadors. He isn’t the type to be much concerned with any bruises he raises, and over the past few years he has raised plenty. When the push for a vote on a permanent Japanese presence on the Council was first gaining momentum, Patrick tells me that the SG actually considered asking Asahaki to stand aside temporarily in order to help smooth the way. Nothing came of the idea. And in any event, Bunzo Asahaki has proved to be the major asset of the Yes campaign, a real success, an unstoppable force whose vigor and persistence have easily outweighed his evident lack of subtlety. Too successful for some. Toshio, for one, had a real thing about the man, frequently referring to him as Banzai, the tag first conferred by the peaceniks back home in Japan. Banzai Asahaki. Unfair maybe, but with his silver hair, his haughty manner, and ramrod stance, the Japanese ambassador would not look out of place in a sharply pressed military uniform, definitely something with epaulets.