Diplomatic Immunity

by Grant Sutherland

  Juan considers the coaster. “Strange, isn’t it. How it’s all worked out like this.” He looks up. “You know, someone even asked me if I was thinking about doing a memorial concert?” He makes a sound and shakes his head. A memorial concert. For one of the chief mourners at the last memorial concert Juan arranged.

  When I glance across at Rachel, her gaze is fixed on the bar. And I decide that this is a conversation that would be best to avoid.

  “Tomorrow morning.” I pistol my fingers at Juan.

  He nods sadly and raises the coaster.

  Rachel walks me out to the car, her hands thrust deep in the pockets of her parka. She is pensive, not unusual for her these days, and when I stop and lean against the car, ask her how she’s doing, she simply smiles awkwardly and dips her head.

  “Is that ‘okay’?” I ask. “Or ‘not okay but I’m not going to tell my old man’?”

  She doesn’t answer.

  “Rache?”

  “People were crying,” she says, lifting her head. “At work. I went to see one of the translators, she was in like floods. Like it was her best friend had died or something.”

  “Toshio was admired by a lot of people.”

  “Yeah, admired, but he wasn’t her best friend, was he? I mean, I’m sorry too, but I’m not going to cry my eyes out.”

  “No one expects you to.”

  Looking down, she scuffs her shoe on the sidewalk. In the past three years her mother has died a violent death, she has been stricken with anorexia, and she passed through late adolescence. Somewhere along that tortuous path her thoughts, the desires and fears that were once so clear to me, have become a closed book. But I am her father. I keep trying to understand.

  “Not everyone’s the same, Rache. Not everyone’s lost someone they love, but you can’t hold that against them.” When she shrugs, I lay a hand on her shoulder. “Let them cry. If you don’t think they have that much to cry about, so what. Maybe one day they’ll see that too. But that’s not for anyone else to judge, we all have to get through these things our own way, the best we can. You know that.”

  No response. I could be talking to myself, to the air.

  “Maybe this is something you might want to talk over with Dr. Covey,” I suggest finally.

  But at the mention of Dr. Covey, the psychiatrist who undoubtedly saved her life, Rachel dips her head again and steps back. My hand slips off her shoulder.

  “Thanks for bringing my stuff.”

  Hands in her pockets, eyes on the ground, she wanders back across the street to the No Name bar. More people are arriving now, young people mostly, converging on this off-off-Broadway venue of the diplomatic circuit. And Rachel disappears into their midst, just one more kid struggling to find her own piece of light in the world.

  11

  NIGHTTIME, THE DAG HAMMARSKJÜLD LIBRARY. THE DESK LAMP casts a white light across the stack of papers spread out in front of me, part of the big report Toshio has been working on. For the past two hours I have been cross-referencing it with the field reports Toshio deposited here in the UN library after various missions abroad this past year. Mike hoped that I might turn up some obvious suspect, someone Toshio riled badly in the course of his work; a long shot, as I told Mike, and I have come up dry. The story of the day.

  Mike has finally spoken to the guys on the maintenance crew. It turns out they were working virtually side by side the whole shift; none of them could have gotten to the basement without being missed. And the camera maintenance, they tell Mike, was simply on their worksheet for last night, just the regular routine.

  Rocking back in my chair, feet up on the trash can, I drum a pencil on the desktop. Whatever other qualities Toshio had, he was certainly no master of the English language; and I would have to say that after forcing myself through page after turgid page, my efforts have been largely a waste of time. I pick up the title page of one field report, the only one of any real interest, and read again the few words that gave me the deepest sense of unease when I first saw them. The Drug Trade in Afghanistan, an Evaluation, the title says.

  The rest of it gives the details of tribal involvement: the Baluchis and the Pathans, primary routes of export, the influence of the Taliban, cooperation or lack thereof from the government of Pakistan. All of this, naturally, has the same effect on me as the probing of an unhealed wound; this whole subject became more familiar to me than I ever wanted it to be at the time of Sarah’s death. But even this field report has offered up no candidate as Toshio’s murderer, so I put it aside, then rise from the desk and move along the aisle of shelves.

  It has been years since I spent any time in the library. In the early part of my career I was down here several times each week, checking wordings on international agreements for which the Dag Hammarskjöld is a primary repository, advising my seniors in Legal Affairs on where to find what in the UN archives. These days I send Elizabeth, my secretary, who loathes the chore. And it isn’t even those early times that are foremost in my mind now as I wander between the shelves, searching. What keeps playing through my mind is that week I spent buried here two months after Sarah’s death.

  By then, of course, I had heard the whispers. Nothing official. Loose remarks in the corridors, awkward silences from the others present when Toshio and I were together in the same room. The word was that Toshio’s handling of the negotiations with Sarah’s kidnappers was not what it might have been. Though I tried to shrug it off, discount the rumors as idle scuttlebutt, the doubts once raised were not easily suppressed. They gnawed at me.

  Finally I did what I had promised myself I would not do. Each evening I left my desk early, came to the library, and ordered up the paperwork on the whole affair. Statements from the UN field-workers at the camp in Abatan. Letters to Toshio from the Pakistani commissioner of police. Other notes from a Pakistani army officer advising on a military-style rescue, and two offers of assistance from the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan. In addition, there was a file full of useless advice from different branches of the Secretariat. Last of all, Toshio’s final report. I buried myself in this paperwork night after night for a week.

  The conclusion I came to was that Toshio had done all he could. There were mistakes, sure, but nothing serious, certainly nothing that led to the slaughter. There was simply no way it was his fault that they died. But the gossip still surfaces from time to time. A month back I heard that Asahaki was raking over these same coals, reminding anyone who would listen that Toshio’s UN record was not unblemished. But for me, that week’s sojourn in the library laid my doubts to rest for good.

  Now I move along those same shelves, pausing by a small line of box files. UNHCR. Refugees. Subheading, Camps. Subheading, Afghanistan.

  “Sam.”

  Startled, I turn. Two guys are moving toward me down the aisle, Dieter Rasmussen and Pascal Nyeri. The odd couple. A pugnacious late-middle-aged German and a quiet-spoken young man from the Cameroon.

  “We have your message,” Dieter says.

  “I didn’t need to see you. Just Pascal.”

  Dieter waves that off. In fact, I left the message hours ago; I’d given up expecting to hear from Pascal tonight. As I lead them back to the table where Toshio’s report is laid out in sections, I apologize for the misunderstanding. I had no intention of wasting Dieter’s time.

  “This past month you were seeing Toshio every few days,” I remark to Pascal, picking up Toshio’s calendar. “And there are quite a few other entries where he’s just written Internal Oversight. Would they be meetings with you too?”

  I locate the most recent entry of this kind and show Pascal. He glances at Dieter, then nods. When I ask Pascal the obvious question—what all these meetings were about—he turns to Dieter again.

  “Is it a secret?” I say jokingly, but neither of them smile.

  I flip the calendar onto the desk. I look at Dieter and wait for some explanation as to why he, the head of Internal Oversight, the UN’s financial police, is here.

&n
bsp; “You are investigating Hatanaka’s death?” he says.

  “That’s right.”

  “And this has been cleared with O’Conner?”

  “Dieter, it’s an investigation into a suspected homicide. What do you mean, cleared?”

  “Has he told you yet why Toshio was working with us?”

  I feel the muscles of my shoulders and neck begin to harden. On more than one occasion I have heard Patrick refer to my own liberal faith in open dealing as flaky; if Patrick had his way, all UN business of substance would take place behind unbreachable walls of silence. But here he seems to have bypassed me, his deputy, entirely. Toshio and Internal Oversight?

  “Let’s assume that he hasn’t. So how about you just tell me, Dieter. I’m all ears.”

  Dieter chews on his lip. Pascal studies the floor.

  “Has Patrick specifically forbidden you to tell me?”

  “No,” says Dieter, but his tone is qualified.

  It takes me no effort to picture the scene. Patrick with all the bluff authority of his position insinuating that the whole matter, whatever it is, should be kept under wraps.

  “When I called him at lunchtime he said it was being looked into,” Pascal volunteers.

  The muscles in my neck are not just hard now, they are suddenly bunched tight. Internal Oversight called Patrick about Toshio several hours ago, and this is the first I have heard of it. The vibe here is way wrong. Leaning forward, I plant my hands on the table.

  “How about you just tell me what you were working on with Toshio. Or if you prefer, we can go upstairs and have this out with Patrick.”

  “Tell him,” Dieter finally tells Pascal.

  Pascal hefts his briefcase onto the table and pops it open. “We were contacted by the Audit Department earlier this year. They thought they had found something. They needed our help.”

  “Nothing new,” Dieter puts in.

  “Found what?” I say, but Dieter just points to Pascal’s briefcase and studiously avoids my gaze. Which unsettles me somewhat. Because though he is probably the most feared man at UNHQ, certainly the most vilified, I have a real regard for Dieter Rasmussen. Blunt in the usual German fashion, he carries on his work, makes his decisions, with a very un-Germanic lack of regard for the bureaucratically stipulated boundaries.

  One time I accompanied him on a trip to Somalia. I was meant to be observing conditions in what is laughably described as that country’s judicial system; Dieter’s task was to discover how ten million dollars’ worth of food aid went missing from the port at Mogadishu. Upon our arrival at the airport, it was immediately apparent that reports of peace breaking out in the area had been greatly exaggerated. Two mechanicals—stripped-down vehicles mounted with artillery—were parked near the runway. They were pumping shells into a nearby warehouse, each explosion greeted with roars of delight from a crowd of weapon-waving Somalis. Dieter took one look at all this and turned me around and walked me back to the plane. He ordered the UN pilot to refuel and fly us straight out. Two nights later the hotel where we were meant to be staying took a direct hit; three of our local people were killed. Dieter is a man whose judgment and character I have good reason to trust, and it is more than a little disconcerting to find now that he cannot look me in the eye.

  Pascal hands me some papers. UNDCP headings. The UN Drug Control Program. I flip through the pages.

  “Minutes from a meeting of the Special Committee,” Pascal tells me.

  “Special Committee for what?”

  “It was overseeing the UNDCP’s activities in the Golden Crescent.” Pascal speaks softly, his voice so mellifluous that the words “Golden Crescent,” the source of an endless supply of heroin and grief, come out sounding like some brand of rich dark chocolate. “The Special Committee was responsible for a substantial budget.”

  “How substantial?”

  “Twenty million, annually.”

  A substantial budget, I think. And Pascal had been called in from Internal Oversight to assist Toshio, special envoy to Afghanistan. Afghanistan, the center of the Golden Crescent.

  “Someone was skimming it?”

  “The auditors could not make the numbers add up,” Dieter interjects. “We were called in.”

  But that does not explain the secrecy in which this has been shrouded. The defrauding of UN budgets by UN appointees is a regrettably frequent occurrence.

  “How much went missing?”

  “Hundreds of thousands.” Pascal lifts a shoulder. “It is possible up to a million.”

  “U.S. dollars?”

  Pascal nods. But again, a million dollars, though a substantial sum, is not earth-shattering in the context of a UN budget that runs into billions. I remain puzzled.

  “So who was on this Special Committee?”

  “Three people.”

  I make a crack about this being the smallest UN committee I’ve ever heard of, but Dieter looks pained.

  “Senior people,” he says.

  “Who?”

  “Wang Po Lin and Lemtov.”

  I make a sound. Two very big names. Wang Po Lin was number two on the Chinese delegation until his recent recall to Beijing. Nobody seems to know if he was recalled to be promoted or kicked in the pants, and the Chinese just aren’t telling. Lemtov is a rising star in the Russian delegation, one of the new breed that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union. A fluent English speaker, he made his reputation as the Russian Central Bank’s front man in numerous crisis negotiations with the International Monetary Fund before making the switch into diplomacy. I am beginning to understand Patrick’s involvement, the veil of secrecy.

  “Number three?” I ask.

  Dieter passes a hand over his mouth. Pascal stares into his briefcase.

  “A three-man committee, right? Po Lin, Lemtov, and who’s number three?”

  “Asahaki,” Dieter says.

  I remain very still. Ambassador Asahaki, Japan’s number-one man here at the UN. The guy who has been leading his country’s charge for a permanent seat on the Security Council.

  “Where does Toshio come in to this?” I ask them.

  “He gave us access to the documents for Afghanistan,” says Pascal. “When we found the defrauded money had been returned to a private account here in New York, he came with me to the bank.”

  “So this wasn’t some arm’s-length thing. He wasn’t just overseeing it. Toshio was actually working with you?”

  Pascal nods.

  “And did those three on the Special Committee know that?”

  Pascal tells me that Toshio spoke to all three of them. Surprised, I turn to Dieter and wait for some explanation as to why in the world a guy as senior as Toshio was doing that kind of donkeywork.

  “O’Conner did not want us calling those three into the Oversight office,” Dieter says. “It would look bad for them. But for Pascal they would make no time to be interviewed. None of them. I agreed with Patrick that someone must speak to them, someone they couldn’t ignore. I was too busy.”

  “Toshio,” I say.

  Dieter opens a hand; it almost seems like an apology.

  So in the last few weeks of his life, Toshio was deeply involved in the investigation of a fraud against the UN. Was actually interviewing suspects. And Patrick was aware of that, yet neglected—even after Toshio’s death—to tell me.

  “So which of the three had his hand in the cookie jar?” I ask.

  “When Pascal told me you had called earlier,” says Dieter, “I called O’Conner. He was in a meeting. He has been in the same meeting for three hours now.”

  Dieter has not answered my question. I keep my gaze fixed on him. At last he lowers his eyes and admits that the culprit really had begun to look like the Japanese ambassador. Bunzo Asahaki.

  “I should have been told, Patrick.”

  “Why?”

  Glancing at the clocks on the wall, he brushes past me down the corridor. I dive out after him.

  “Why? Are you serious? Toshio just p
inned a fraud on Asahaki, for chrissake.”

  “Keep it down,” Patrick mutters.

  “Did that just slip your mind?”

  “You’re getting way ahead of yourself, Sam.” He shoots me a dark look. “Way ahead.”

  “I’m chasing the goddamn game here. We’ve been busting our balls looking for a motive, and you didn’t even mention this.”

  “Wait.” He raises a finger as he turns in to the Operations Room and goes to confer with Dwight Arnold, tonight’s duty officer, a bearded Canadian with the hulking stature of a grizzly bear. While they bend over a PC monitor to examine the latest status report from some UN mission in God knows where, I stand in the doorway, steaming.

  Patrick O’Conner is going to dinner with some very important people. Players, he would call them. Big wheels, guys with clout on the diplomatic scene. He hasn’t told me that, of course, but I’ve been working for him long enough to recognize the signs. Black bow tie, gold cuff links. The single line across his brow that is meant to denote the serious and thoughtful mind beneath. And this, the mere fact of his descent here to Operations, a place referred to with self-mocking despair by those who work here as UN Central, the supposed nerve center of UN peacekeeping operations worldwide. The office is pathetically small. For the night shift, just Dwight Arnold and two assistants. It used to be telexes chattering away in here; now it’s PCs humming and faxes disgorging paper, giving updates on crises, daily accounts of wars and cease-fire violations, and the thousand other infractions of civil order that the UN is obligated by Security Council resolutions to observe and police.

  Folding my arms impatiently, I lean against the door frame and watch Dwight Arnold and Patrick confer. God, I am a fool. Suicide, Patrick’s seemingly inexplicable call this morning; now I have the explanation. And now I also understand the strange crosscurrents at this afternoon’s brief meeting with Asahaki outside the SG’s dining room. Patrick’s anger. Asahaki’s request for the body, then the hurried retreat.

  You would think I might have learned by now. Three years his deputy, you would think I might have learned not to take Patrick’s words or actions at face value, to always look one layer deeper to find his real motives. Like this visit to the Operations Room, for example. He will, without fail, pay the place a visit immediately prior to attending any major social occasion. Then at the ensuing grand dinner he will wait for a pause in the conversation before casually mentioning that there has been a shooting across the UN line in Cyprus. Or a bomb blast in Kinshasa. Or that tonight’s polling in Laos has ended in riots. From these gleamingly fresh scraps of information his fellow guests are tacitly invited to infer Patrick’s high and central place at the table of world affairs. And they do. Depressingly, his ruse invariably works. Patrick is on the A list of every New York hostess who matters.