Diplomatic Immunity Read online

  “We’re already in the goddamn office,” Mike mutters, going to the far side of the desk.

  Mei Tan turns to me. “You must speak with Mr. Hatanaka.”

  “What report?” I ask her.

  “Did he say for you to come in here?”

  “Listen,” Mike breaks in impatiently, but I raise a hand.

  “Mei Tan,” I say evenly, “we’re here because Patrick O’Conner sent us. If you need to call him to confirm that, go right ahead. We’ll wait.”

  She considers that. You can see that the idea of risking Patrick O’Conner’s wrath does not appeal. And when I volunteer to take full responsibility for this, she finally gives up. She shrugs and gestures to Mike.

  “I was telling him that Mr. Hatanaka was working on this report for the General Assembly. Like a five-year review. We’ve been working on it for months now. Is that what you’re looking for?”

  Mike and I exchange a glance. This could be something.

  “Let’s see it,” I say.

  Mei Tan takes down a box from a shelf and places it on the desk. “Officially it’s for the Secretary-General and some of the committees.”

  Which committees? Mike wants to know.

  The Third Committee, she tells him: Human Rights. And the Fifth Committee: UN Administrative and Budgetary Affairs.

  The report, when I open the box, is inches deep. The cover page says Afghanistan, Status Report, then the year and Toshio’s name and rank, special envoy. Turning to the chapter headings, I delve into the body of the thing.

  “How long’s he been on this?” Mike asks Mei Tan.

  “Writing?”

  “Putting the whole thing together.”

  “Since last year.”

  “You were working with him the whole time?”

  Nodding, she asks what it is we’re hoping to find, why we can’t speak to Mr. Hatanaka directly.

  “When was this due to go upstairs?” I ask.

  “Tomorrow.”

  “It’s finished?”

  She nods again, so I pull out the whole wedge of pages and lay them beside the empty box. This time I search the pages more carefully. According to the table of contents, Toshio has broken his report into four sections: the general report, then three detailed sections: one for the Third Committee, one for ECOSOC—the Economic and Social Council—and one for the Fifth Committee. This last section, clearly listed on the contents page, is missing.

  “He must have taken it home,” Mei Tan says when I draw her attention to the omission. She screws up her face. “Actually, you really will have to ask Mr. Hatanaka about that. He was doing that section himself. He hasn’t let anyone else see it yet.”

  I ask her if she has any idea what it might contain. Mei Tan shakes her head.

  “He’s got this pink file he keeps it in,” she remarks, her eyes wandering over the desk, then up along the shelves. Edging past Mike, she checks the desk drawers. “No,” she concludes, completing her unsuccessful search for the missing pink file. “You’ll have to ask Mr. Hatanaka.”

  If only, I think.

  Then Mike casually inquires, “Where is he?”

  There is no sign that Mei Tan finds the question strange. “Down at the opening, I guess. I haven’t seen him this morning.”

  When Mike asks her where we can find Toshio after the opening, Mei Tan goes to fetch the appointment calendar. When she’s gone, we discuss the missing section of the report. Mike agrees that it’s odd but warns me not to get too hopeful. Odd, he tells me, is not the same thing as important, but he assures me that he will be taking another good look in Toshio’s briefcase down in the basement.

  Mei Tan reenters with the calendar, an oversized book with a hard black cover. She flips it open and slides her finger down the page. Apart from three words at the top, “General Assembly opening,” the page is blank.

  “Busy man,” Mike murmurs. Reaching across, he flicks back a few pages before Mei Tan can protest. Then he stabs a finger down. “What happened here?”

  The dates are the first two days of Toshio’s excursion to Geneva. Across both pages the word Canceled has been scrawled over a list of appointments, and when Mike turns to the next page, it’s the same there too.

  “The trip to Geneva a last-minute thing?” he asks her.

  “Geneva?” she says.

  We both look at her, then at each other. Mike picks up the ticket stub and indicates the matching dates and Toshio’s name on the ticket. Mei Tan studies it, becoming perplexed.

  “This isn’t right,” she says finally, her brow puckering as she touches the ticket. “He wasn’t well then. Those three days Mr. Hatanaka stayed at home. He called me. Gastro or something, you ask him.”

  “Who normally makes Mr. Hatanaka’s travel arrangements?”

  “Me,” she says.

  “Always?”

  She nods, but there is a touch of hesitancy now, a flicker of doubt. The ticket. Our presence. These questions.

  “Can’t you come back later and see Mr. Hatanaka?”

  Mike asks her if she has her own key to this office. She shakes her head. Then he flicks forward through the calendar and stops at Monday. Yesterday. Half a dozen appointments. He trails a finger down the page and stops at Toshio’s penultimate appointment of the day: five-thirty P.M. Mike glances up at me to make sure I have registered the name: Patrick O’Conner.

  “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

  THE 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 Mi
ke 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 Hal
l 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.