Diplomatic Immunity

by Grant Sutherland

  “You were not discussing the Japanese vote?” she calls after me.

  I concentrate on the stairs, hoping that I can walk right out of her sphere of curiosity just as easily as I walked into it. On the ground floor I meet Mike coming up from the basement.

  “No pink file in the briefcase,” he tells me.

  “Let’s go.”

  “You don’t wanna see where we got him?”

  “Monsieur Windrush?”

  Mike’s eyes dart upward, my own head lifts slowly. Marie Lefebre is leaning out from the cantilevered balcony above us, looking down at the guards Mike has stationed on the stairs to the basement. “What is so important down there?” she says.

  Mike shoots me a look. He is not pleased with the curiosity I seem to have invited. Taking his arm, I guide him toward the exit while from up on the balcony Marie delivers a short burst of French at our retreating backs. The one word I hear quite distinctly is merde.

  7

  “JESUS, CAN I CHANGE MY MIND?”MIKE SAYS QUIETLY. The subway across to Roosevelt Island is temporarily closed, so we have chosen the fastest alternate route, a choice that Mike seems to be regretting already. When the cable car lurches out from its station into the air, Mike’s grip on the silver railing tightens, his whole body goes stiff. He watches the two uniformed attendants over by the controls as if he expects them to hit a button at any moment and send us plunging earthward.

  When I tell him to relax, his eyes skate past me out the window.

  “This ain’t my best thing, you know.”

  I guess I did know that in the abstract, but this is the first time I have actually seen Mike in thrall to his fear of heights. People are so strange. Mike Jardine would not think twice about taking a bullet for the Secretary-General, yet now, elevated just fifty feet off the ground, perspiration is suddenly beading across his brow. It seems like a valiant effort to distract himself when he picks up our conversation again, telling me about the call he made earlier to an acquaintance from his previous life at City Hall, a pathologist at one of the city morgues.

  “I told him it was some old delegate who croaked. Terminal fossilization or something. I asked him how long we could keep the body in the coolroom, what we needed to do.”

  Mike braves another glance out the window, then turns straight back. It’s not just his knuckles, his whole fist around the bar has gone deathly white. Down below, a surreal landscape of flat building tops doubling as parking lots reveals itself as we climb; the cars look like toys from up here.

  “How long?” I ask.

  “Ten days max, unless we can freeze him. After that we’ll be needing gas masks. Just to get near the body, that’s what he said.”

  The Roosevelt Island cable car shudders as we hit maximum altitude and plane out for the haul across the water. Mike moans and closes his eyes. Across the tram car a young woman, the sole passenger apart from us, rearranges the shopping bags at her feet and regards Mike curiously. When I advise Mike to look at the bridge, he does that for a while; it seems to help.

  “I took a few samples,” he says, glancing back to me. “For Forensics.”

  “Samples?”

  His gaze drops. “Like from the syringe. Like that.”

  I regard him closely. “That’s all?”

  “I figure, how else we gonna know for sure if we don’t get it tested?”

  “Mike.”

  He looks up.

  “Don’t bullshit me,” I say.

  He swipes a finger across his perspiring brow.

  “I took a couple of bloods too,” he concedes. Blood samples, he means, from Toshio Hatanaka’s body. “Who cares what’s in the syringe if it wasn’t injected?”

  I let my look linger, he knows I’m not pleased. Not so much with what he’s done but with his apparent intention to keep it to himself.

  “They’ve gone for analysis?”

  He nods.

  “Patel?” I ask, knowing in my bones that this is not the correct answer.

  “I got a guard on it,” he admits. “He’s taking the samples down to a pathologist on Second, some guy I know. Might even be there by now.” He checks his watch, then notices the look I am giving him. “Listen. If I’d told you, you woulda had no choice, you woulda told Patrick. Once he knew, I’d spend a week filling out forms while he dreamed up a million reasons not to do it.”

  “So you did it anyway.”

  “Give me a break. It had to be done. I did it.”

  I ask Mike when he expects the results back. Tomorrow morning, he says, first thing.

  I guess now that it’s done there isn’t much point in recrimination. And in truth, I am not totally displeased with Mike’s unauthorized action; at least this way we get reliable results from the analysis, not something that could have been guaranteed from Patel’s tiny and ill-equipped lab. Patrick, when I tell him, will be livid.

  “Then I’d like to hear the results,” I say, “first thing.”

  Mike gives a brittle smile. He has just caught a glimpse of a barge passing way, way below us on the gray East River, and for the rest of the journey he sits rigid, staring at his feet.

  Roosevelt Island is a few acres of land located smack in the middle of the East River, its whole southern shore clearly visible from UNHQ over on Manhattan. Alighting from the cable car, Mike and I turn northward, walking up into what you might call Roosevelt Island downtown. There is a post office, a bank, a few restaurants, and even a wine bar, but weirdly, the exteriors all look the same: glass-fronted and signed with standardized lettering. The place is not even pretending to be an organic civic growth, the planner’s fingerprints remain annealed to its entire structure. A toy town. Urban life as every city bureaucrat would like to see it lived. It occurs to me now what this place reminds me of, what I’d never quite pinned down on previous visits here. Toshio Hatanaka, international globetrotter and cosmopolitan twenty-first-century man, when he chose his apartment, instinctively reached for this place, a pale simulacrum of where he came from, the territory in which his roots were inescapably embedded. That’s what this place reminds me of: urban Japan.

  While Mike looks around the lobby of Toshio’s apartment building for the manager or super’s room number, I go on up. Toshio’s door is the last in line down a long corridor on the sixth floor. I’m thinking the place has the feel of a midpriced hotel. Mike joins me with the keys a minute later. He cannot find anyone.

  “Feels real homey, don’t it?” he remarks, gesturing along the corridor.

  I point to Toshio’s door, 612. Mike tries a few keys.

  “You been up here lately?” he asks.

  “About three times this year.”

  “Social?”

  “The last two.”

  “The first time?” he asks idly. When I don’t reply, he glances up.

  “About Sarah,” I say simply. Sarah, my wife. Mike’s face falls, his eyes flicker down, an expression of awkward embarrassment that I have seen on so many faces so many times these past three years. Finally Mike finds the correct key. He pushes the door open and waves me in.

  A regular apartment, much what you would expect from the exterior. Furnished a little on the spartan side, and neat, nothing much in the way of personal touches. It is immediately recognizable as the place of a bachelor.

  “You wanna try the study?” says Mike.

  “Through here.” If there is a suicide note, which I very much doubt, the study seems the likely place. And the pink file Mei Tan mentioned, the missing section of Toshio’s report—the study seems the most likely repository for that stuff too. But instead of following me, Mike drops into an armchair. He pulls some mail from his jacket and starts tearing open the envelopes. Then he catches my look.

  “Letters for Hatanaka.” Mike runs his eyes over the first one and drops it on the floor. “I picked them up from his mailbox in the lobby. Might be something, who knows?”

  “You opened his mailbox?”

  “Smallest key in the bunch.” />
  “Just force of habit?”

  Regarding me from beneath his brow, he says levelly, “Sam, you’re standing in a fucking dead guy’s apartment. Unauthorized entry, for starters. You want I don’t tear the envelopes?”

  He tears another. I turn on my heel and make my way to the study.

  In here there is something of a monastic feel. The walls are white and there’s just the one picture, that iconic photograph of Nagasaki after the bomb, the skeletal frame of a church and its dome the only thing left standing. Positioned alone in the middle of the white wall, it seems almost religiously emblematic; and knowing what I do about Toshio’s past, the sight of the picture so prominently displayed is somewhat disturbing. Both his parents were killed in that blast. Not radiation; their house simply disappeared, taking a generation of Hatanakas with it. I never asked Toshio the details, but the story seems to be that he and his sister Moriko were out of town with the grandparents, who ended up raising them. Toshio never blamed the U.S. The event undoubtedly turned him to pacifism as he grew older, but I had never thought that he blamed any side for the catastrophe. The last few months, however, have proved me wrong; I realize now that he blames the Japanese military. This is the emotional engine powering his opposition to a permanent Japanese seat on the Security Council: He still does not trust the Japanese authorities to act in the best interests of either the world or the people of Japan. And this picture in his study must have been a daily reminder of that. Glancing around, I see a cupboard, built-in, floor to ceiling, but the desk is bare apart from the blotter and a neat line of pens. On the side table, a phone and fax. No suicide note. Through the window behind the desk I can see some kids horsing around with a football on a stretch of municipal grass.

  My search of the single desk drawer turns up nothing but stationery, so I wander over to the cupboard. Mainly books, though God knows why he keeps them behind sliding doors, some mania for order maybe. Behind the third door I find what appears to be the mother lode: three bundles of paperwork, a stack of files, and a laptop PC.

  “Any luck?” Mike asks, putting his head in.

  Hauling the bundles from the cupboard, I dump the lot on Toshio’s desk.

  “Guy was neat, I’ll say that,” says Mike, crossing to the window. He stops to watch the kids down below with the football. Unlike me, he seems completely relaxed, as if searching a dead man’s apartment is just part of the daily routine; a dubious legacy, I guess, of his twenty years in the NYPD. He whistles some old Sinatra number and turns to search the cupboards while I flick through Toshio’s papers. The missing report is not among them. No pink file. Just loads of personal accounts; in his methodical way, Toshio appears to have kept every bill and receipt for the past several years. But at the bottom of the bundle I turn up a piece of correspondence that gives me pause: the letter, the one that had Patrick bristling this morning. It is a turgid and uncompromising rebuttal of every argument currently being advanced in favor of a Japanese Security Council seat. And the next page is a surprisingly long list of names, mostly public figures from the U.S. and Japan, to whom Toshio has apparently sent this letter of dissent. The few replies attached are all anodyne one-liners acknowledging receipt.

  Finishing his unsuccessful browse through the cupboard, Mike eases into the chair.

  “One note, three bills.” He produces the trove he has stolen from the lobby and places the three bills on the desk. “Gas, phone, and AmEx. The note was just slipped in the box, no envelope.”

  He turns the note through his fingers. Curiosity roused, I ask him who it’s from.

  “Stab in the dark?” He lays it faceup by the bills. “Someone Japanese.”

  The note is written in kanji, Japanese script, with purple ink.

  “And if you’re thinking suicide note, forget it. You don’t slip a suicide note into your own mailbox.”

  “Female,” I declare.

  “How do you figure that?”

  When I point to the pair of powder-blue butterflies at the top left-hand corner, Mike frowns. “You’re reaching, Sam.”

  That I am. But having failed to find any suicide note, this whole expedition is now no better than an extremely hopeful cast of the net. I take a glance at my watch. Twelve-thirty. More than two hours since we found Toshio’s body. The major opening day speeches will have finished by now, the rumor mill will be sliding into action like a well-oiled machine.

  “Get the translators to take a look at it,” Mike says, referring to the note. “Phone bill might give us something. I’ll try in the morning. Should get an itemized listing for the last quarter anyway.” He folds it into his pocket along with the note. I decide not to inquire as to how Mike intends to extract this information from the phone company. Picking up the gas bill, Mike makes some ghoulish crack about Toshio putting his head in the oven. Then he takes up the AmEx bill, another single page.

  “The guy was no big spender, that’s for sure. Two hundred fifty dollars the whole month. No carryover from the month before. What was he living on, air?”

  “Maybe he used cash.”

  “Cash,” Mike says as if he finds the notion simply incredible. He inspects the bill a moment more, then hands it to me.

  There are only three items: a meal in a restaurant called the White Imperial, presumably Chinese; a thirty-dollar dry cleaner’s bill; and a hundred and eighty bucks to a store called Barney and Hunt’s. When I hand the bill back to Mike, he pockets it.

  “What you got?” He indicates the bundles I have retrieved from the cupboard.

  I show him Toshio’s letter. When he’s read it, I ask what he thinks.

  “I think Hatanaka was playing politics, is what I think.” Mike considers the letter. “I don’t get this guy. Who was he trying to impress? So he fires his letter off to every big wheel he knows, so what? I mean, I’m no politician, but where’s that get him? Twenty-one-gun salute?”

  Maybe, I suggest, it was simply an act of conscience, a stand that Toshio believed he had to make.

  Mike passes the letter back over the desk. “Guy was puffing himself up, way I see it. Something for his résumé, for when he throws his hat in the ring for the big UNHCR job.”

  Way too too cynical, I say. Toshio Hatanaka, I tell Mike, just wasn’t that kind of guy.

  “One thing I learned down at City Hall, Sam. When you’re talking politics, ain’t no such thing as too cynical. Hatanaka was up the greasy pole same as everyone else.”

  “Ever heard of public service, Mike? Altruism?”

  “Ah-ha. Right up there alongside Santa Claus and the tooth fairy.” He goes out, telling me he’s going to take a proper look around.

  Deflated somewhat by Mike’s world-weary judgment, I reexamine Toshio’s papers. But there is nothing more of interest, so I switch on his laptop and do a quick search of the files on the loaded disk. Again nothing stands out, so I pop the disk and pocket it, thinking I might have time to go through it more thoroughly later. But I’m not hopeful. Not hopeful at all.

  On my way to the living room I pause by the dining table and touch its shiny waxed surface with my fingertips. Mike is wandering around the far end of the room. When I catch the faint smell of wax, the memories rise: memories of this place, where I have spent some of the worst moments of my life.

  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.