Diplomatic Immunity

by Grant Sutherland

  “Red?” I say.

  Code, he tells me. Something the security guards don’t want to broadcast. “Basically, a first-class screwup,” he says. Backing away into the crowd, he tells me to enjoy the big party.

  This seems to be my cue to mingle, so I do, drifting through the crowd, nodding pleasantly to the half-remembered faces from some committee meeting last week or last year, talking briefly, moving on. Unlike Patrick, I have none of the politician’s instinct for working a room, so no one I speak to here is a name. English, the Latin of our age, rolls around me in a hundred different accents. Other languages too; my ear tunes in to the Spanish conversations, scraps of French, but I can’t see Toshio anywhere.

  “Mr. Windrush,” says Jennifer Dale, sidestepping a Pacific Islander, planting herself in front of me. “What brings you here?”

  “The food.”

  “You’re too early.”

  “The drink?”

  She holds up her nearly empty plastic cup. “Too late.”

  Glancing over her shoulder, I tell her I seem to remember something about an agreement we had. She looks around.

  “Yeah, well, some places are so public, they’re private.” Then she faces me, smiling now, a professional woman at ease among suits. “Relax, Sam,” she says quietly, “I’m not going to jump you.”

  I take a moment with that. Jennifer Dale and I, as Mike knows and some others have guessed, enjoy a relationship that goes well beyond the professional. But she’s probably right—there is nothing wrong with a senior bureaucrat like me from the Secretariat exchanging pleasantries with the U.S. ambassador’s legal counsel at a gathering such as this. So gesturing around, I ask if she’s made many new friends this morning.

  “Everybody wants to be my friend, Sam. That’s one of the joys of being an American.”

  “I’m an American.”

  “You’re Secretariat,” she reminds me, grinning. “That puts you firmly in the twilight zone.” She waves to someone behind me. “You know, this isn’t as bad as you said it was going to be. I think I might even be liking it.”

  Give it time, I tell her. Wait for the opening General Assembly speeches.

  She nods and sips her drink and looks past me. There is a stir over by the door. The Japanese delegation finally arriving.

  “I guess you heard we got a letter from Mr. Hatanaka.”

  “I heard,” I say.

  “We’re considering a formal protest.”

  “Bruckner not happy?”

  James Bruckner, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, Jennifer’s boss. The U.S. has been lobbying for decades now to get Japan a permanent Security Council seat; Bruckner has been spearheading the campaign all this last year.

  “Ballistic,” Jennifer tells me.

  When I reprise the assurance I gave Patrick, that it won’t affect the vote, she simply raises a brow.

  “Anyway, we’ll know Thursday,” she says, referring to the day scheduled for the vote. “And I tell you, Sam, ballistic’s going to seem mild if the Japanese lose. Bruckner will be out for scalps.”

  Her drift is clear, but I ask anyway. “I’m meant to pass this on to Toshio?”

  “We’d be much obliged.”

  “You think I’m going to?”

  “It was worth a try.”

  She smiles and I smile back. If she wants the message passed, she is going to have to do it herself. Then our conversation slides into a lighter vein. We start comparing notes on the celebrity guests, mine just the usual remarks, so much smaller in the flesh than on TV. But Jennifer has a gift for verbal caricature, which she uses now, skewering several of the big names with words, imagined anecdotes, solely for my entertainment. She is dry and ironic, and really very funny, a quality I completely failed to notice when I knew her the first time around. Which was, incredibly, almost twenty years ago now.

  We went through Columbia Law School together. Correction. We enrolled the same year and joined the same study group our second semester. After that our paths diverged. We’d see each other in class or around the campus, but we weren’t friends, and after graduation we totally lost touch. Yet, when she appeared in the doorway of my office six months ago, I recognized her immediately. Her honey-colored hair is a shade darker—dyed, I have since learned, to disguise the first wisps of gray—and her face, lined at the corners of the eyes, is somewhat fuller, but otherwise the years have treated her well. In many ways she seems to have grown into herself, become the formidable presence she always promised to be. But formidable or not, and despite her nonchalant air, the upcoming vote on a permanent Security Council seat for the Japanese has her worried.

  If the Japanese win, it will be a political coup for Bruckner. Every big hitter in his party from the president on down will be endorsing him for next year’s gubernatorial in New Jersey; and if he makes governor, Jennifer Dale, naturally, will be along for the ride. If the Japanese lose, however, Bruckner’s political star and Jennifer’s prospects will be on the wane. And Jennifer is an ambitious lady. And determined. Which I guess is why she finally cannot resist returning to the subject of the vote.

  “Anyway,” she says, “what are you hearing? Good guys still in front?”

  “Which team’s that?”

  She makes a face, then lowers her voice to tell me how Bruckner’s calling the numbers: one hundred forty for the Japanese seat, twenty against, and twenty-five abstentions. Comfortably more than the two-thirds majority required for the Japanese to get the seat. I keep my expression blank. She is fishing for our numbers; she wants to know how Patrick sees it.

  “No comment?” she says.

  None, I answer, that she would like to hear.

  She smiles into her glass. She tells me that she has a suite at the Waldorf tonight. “Suite Twelve,” she says, lifting her eyes to give me a look that is unnaturally, and very intentionally, direct.

  “Ah,” I say. The only thing I can think of.

  “Eleven-thirty?” she suggests.

  I study her a moment, my heart skipping lightly. And then I hear myself say “Eleven-thirty’s fine” before we immediately turn away from each other. The Pacific Islander who has been hovering nearby quickly closes on Jennifer; as I move off, he starts in lobbying her for U.S. support on some greenhouse-gases resolution his country is pushing this session.

  Elated by the unexpected appointment, I go drifting back through the suits, telling myself that it’s okay, that I still have a handle on it, we are both grown-ups, we both know the rules, a late-night rendezvous at the Waldorf is absolutely fine. A minute later the glass doors swing open and people go pouring out of the lounge toward the General Assembly Hall. Shuffling forward in the crush, I finally detach myself from the crowd outside the Assembly Hall doors. For the next couple of hours we will have to endure welcoming addresses from the SG and the session president, both notorious windbags, so I want to leave it till the last moment before I venture in.

  I take the opportunity to stroll up and down the concourse a few times while everyone else goes filing into the Hall. Suite Twelve, I think. Eleven-thirty. Then, glancing at my watch, I catch myself calculating the hours between now and eleven-thirty tonight. I purse my lips. Not good. The personal will not impinge on the professional: That was the vow we made back when this whole thing started, an honest intention that is proving harder than either of us ever imagined. Folding my arms, I bow my head and keep walking, stretch my legs, try to think of something else.

  By this time all but a handful of the crowd have disappeared inside. The guard at the door signals to me with his hand: in or out?

  I haven’t taken two steps toward him before I’m stopped in my tracks by a cry of “Sam!” Turning, I see Mike Jardine charging over from the escalator.

  “Sam,” he calls again, breathing hard, barely slowing as he nears.

  The guard at the door asks if everything’s okay. Mike seems to remember himself then; he slows to a brisk walk and nods to the guard, gesturing for him to show the last of the
delegates inside. Then Mike takes me by the arm, starts to lead me away.

  “What’s this?” I pull my arm free. “It’s set to start,” I tell him, tossing my head back toward the Hall.

  This time when he grabs me it’s higher up, near the armpit; he almost lifts me off my feet as he marches me toward the escalator.

  “Save your ticket for next year,” he says grimly. His brow is creased, his pale green eyes set straight ahead, unblinking. “We just found a frigging corpse in the basement.”

  2

  IT IS TOSHIO HATANAKA. Mike warned me long before we entered the room, but the shock, when I first see Toshio’s familiar face staring up lifeless at the ceiling, staggers me. My heart thuds, my throat swells, I have to stop halfway across the room and steady myself. I close my eyes, muster myself a few moments, then go on. Mike moves to the far side of the body and we stand silent, looking down. The sight is truly awful. Toshio is on his back on the floor. His legs are twisted, his arms spread wide, splayed open like a crucifix. His tongue lolls loosely over bluing lips, and on the crotch of his pants there is a dark stain, and a smell—the bladder and bowels have clearly opened—but worse than this, far worse, are his eyes. Always dark, they are now simply dull. Always clear, strangely innocent, they now look like two painted marbles of glass. In death they have given Toshio’s face an expression of imbecile vacancy; curiosity stilled, determination and courage both vanished. A peace of total emptiness.

  Putting a hand to my mouth, I choke back a sound. Mike looks at me. Then he crouches and considers Toshio’s jacket, which is draped over the chair by the body. Beside the chair is a tan leather briefcase I recognize as Toshio’s. The shirtsleeve on Toshio’s left arm has been rolled up above the elbow, and on the floor just beside him is an empty syringe, its long silver needle glistening. I have to look away a few seconds. God, I think. Sweet Jesus. When I turn back, Mike speaks.

  “It had to be today,” he says miserably.

  Crouching, I reach for the syringe. Mike’s hand suddenly shoots out and clasps my wrist. When our eyes meet, he shakes his head.

  Standing upright, and trying to affect a normality I most definitely do not feel, I ask, “Overdose?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Self-inflicted?”

  “Ask me another.”

  I lock my hands behind my neck. “God almighty” is the best I can manage as the ramifications begin to sink in.

  “Yeah,” Mike mutters. “Ain’t we just in the tulips.”

  But his wise-ass manner is no cover for his real feelings, Mike is absolutely furious. He calls for the lone guard at the door to come in.

  “Let’s have it again,” Mike tells the young man who enters. “For Mr. Windrush.”

  The young man, Latino by his looks and speech, recites his story over Toshio’s body. It doesn’t take him long. With everything going on upstairs, the guard says he’d been left alone to do a regular patrol down here, a sweep of the corridors at fifteen-minute intervals, a no-brainer that he swears he’s been carrying out diligently for the past two hours. The doors to the rooms here were all locked; as far as he’s aware, they have been since yesterday, and no one could have any real reason to be down here today. He says he got bored. On his final pass, just to keep himself busy, he brought along the ring of keys. He holds them up for me to see.

  “So you opened this one,” I say, indicating the door behind him.

  “Others too.” He nods, his gaze going down to the body. “He is like this. I touch his neck, he is cold. I know he is dead.”

  From his eyes, his whole manner, in fact, there is no sense of the tragedy that has happened here. His prevailing emotion seems to be one of unease, in Mike’s presence, that he might not have handled the situation correctly.

  “Wait outside,” Mike tells him.

  Once the door closes, Mike rests his hands on his hips. “We got lucky.” When I make a sound of disbelief, he jerks his head toward the door. “The kid didn’t panic. Called in the code red. I came.”

  I turn that over. “No one else knows?”

  Mike crouches, inspecting Toshio’s arm without touching it. “Right now it’s just you, me, and the kid.” His head drops. He peers at the arm closely. After studying it awhile, he asks, “What you seeing?”

  Gesturing to the door, I tell Mike that the detective work can wait. Right now this has to be reported. He reaches up, grabs my sleeve, tugging me into a crouch beside him. Then he points to Toshio’s bare arm. “Look like a junkie’s arm to you?”

  Straight out of law school, I did some pro bono work in the projects. The bruised, pulped-up look of a junkie’s arm is one of those things you don’t forget, and now I admit to Mike that no, this does not look like a junkie’s arm at all.

  “See here?” Mike touches the air above the arm three times. “Three stabs. Only one on the target.”

  Tentatively, I lean closer. And I can see that Mike is right. Toshio’s California-tan skin has grayed, but the deeper shadow of the bruise is unmistakable. In the center of the bruise are three puncture marks, one to either side of the vein, one bang on the target.

  “You suppose,” Mike asks, glancing across at me, “he was just practicing?”

  I remark somewhat hopefully that Toshio was under a lot of pressure lately, that people do strange things. Mike pulls a face.

  “Sam. If Hatanaka was a user, I’m a horse’s ass.”

  He reaches, gently pushing back Toshio’s straight fringe of black hair. Finding nothing, he does the same with the hair over both ears.

  “What are you looking for?”

  Ignoring me, Mike continues the careful examination of Toshio’s head. And then his hand pauses. He grunts. “Lump back here size of a goose egg.” He brings his hand up and looks at it. “No blood.”

  “Maybe he fell.”

  “Yeah. And maybe he did a double somersault before he landed just to get the great pile-driver effect.” He looks at me. “This one’s not going away just ’cause we want it gone.”

  Standing, I put my hands over my face. Mike rises beside me.

  “Sam,” he asks, “have you got the first fucking idea what it is we’re meant to do here?” When I drop my hands, he reads the answer in my eyes. “Jesus,” he says. Then, as I go to step past him, he lays a firm hand on my chest. “Unh-unh. You’re the diplomatic rights and privileges man. Do us both a favor. Give this little problem”—he gestures to the body—“a few minutes of your undivided attention.”

  With that, he fetches a black marker from the whiteboard at the rear of the room and begins sketching an outline on the floor around the corpse. Cop instinct. Meanwhile, I attempt to do what Mike has asked me. Toshio Hatanaka, either by his own hand or with assistance, has been killed. Apparently right here at UN headquarters. Think, I tell myself, like a lawyer. But my mind keeps skimming over the scant few legal principles that could possibly have any bearing here and, finding no purchase, returning to the one irreducible fact. Toshio Hatanaka is dead. After a lifetime’s devotion to the cause of peace, after more than ten years hotfooting it around the globe at the behest of two successive Secretaries-General, years in which he has visited some of the worst hellholes on earth and dealt with some of mankind’s worst miscreants, Toshio’s own number has come up, in this shockingly unexpected way.

  Crouching, Mike gingerly touches a finger to Toshio’s face. When he withdraws the finger, a pressure dimple remains on Toshio’s cheek; all pliancy has drained from the body. A sound rises in my throat. Mike glances up.

  “You all right?”

  When I nod, he frowns. Then he indicates that I should turn around, step away. “See what you can see,” he says. “And don’t touch anything.”

  Relieved, I move back, turning my attention to the disposition of the objects in the room. Anything to take my eyes off Toshio.

  There are two rows of chairs, six chairs to a row, each with a small tray-desk attached. The rows aren’t neat, but there’s no sense of any tussle; it l
ooks as if whoever used the chairs last simply left them like this, vaguely askew. At the rear there is a whiteboard. On the whiteboard there are numbers, letters, and arrows, the arrows going left to right, directing the numbers and letters into various boxes, the whole thing done in black marker. By the whiteboard there is a table, Formica-topped, with no drawers; to the left of that, a trash can. The only trash seems to be a few candy wrappers. Lifting my head, I scan the faded, out-of-date UNICEF posters publicizing some god-awful disaster of a decade ago—children with black skin, imploring eyes, and distended bellies, staring up vacantly at whoever shot the picture. Normally, my glance, like the glance of just about everyone else on the planet, skates right over these all-too-familiar scenes, but this morning I am appalled. Death, and the imminence of death, crowd the room.

  Higher up the wall, just past the poster, there is a grille. And immediately below the grille sits the last chair in the back row. I look up from the chair to the grille, gauging the distance, by my guess no more than six or seven feet. From there my gaze drifts back to the corpse.

  Upstairs in the General Assembly the speeches will have started. The hopeful but never fulfilled affirmations of goodwill, the empty blandishments to peace and brotherhood throughout the world, a raging cascade of abstract nouns that will be punctuated by applause from the delegates, more than half of whom come from nations where wrongful imprisonment, confiscation of property, torture, and murder are the common currency of political life. And down here—Toshio Hatanaka.

  “So where are we?” Mike says, turning in my direction. “What’s the procedure?”

  Pointing, I ask if he’s noticed the grille.

  “Ah-ha. You touch it?”

  “No.”

  He steps around the body and comes over. “So what did you figure?” He pulls up a chair and stands on it, rising on tiptoe to look through the plastic grille into the duct behind. After a few seconds he glances back over his shoulder. “Sam?”

  It looks big enough to crawl through, I tell him.