Diplomatic Immunity

by Grant Sutherland

  “Not this.” He screws up his face. “The legal shit. Who gets notified about Hatanaka. What we’re gonna do about an investigation. The stuff you been nuttin’ out.”

  “We’ll have to tell Patrick.”

  “Right,” Mike mutters from the corner of his mouth. Taking some keys from his pocket, he turns back to the grille. He levers a key behind the catch and pops it open. Using the same key, he lifts the grille back and takes a good look inside. “Almost be worth it just to see the smug smile wiped off his face,” he says. Then he lowers the grille and faces me. “Maybe we drop it on him, he has a heart attack, you get to be the new legal counsel.”

  “What’s up there?”

  “Zip.”

  I draw Mike’s attention to the scuff marks on the chair beneath the grille. He snorts.

  “Shoe marks, you’re thinking?” When I nod, Mike shakes his head and gets down. He bends over the chair, inspecting it. “Without forensics, Sam, it’s just scuffing on a goddamn chair.” Then, rearing upright, he turns back to the room’s center of gravity, Toshio Hatanaka’s corpse sprawled on the floor midway between the whiteboard and the chairs. Mike bites his lip. “The only thing we got for sure,” he says, “is a body.”

  Liberally, he swears. Then he goes and kneels by Toshio, searching the pants pockets before turning out the jacket pockets on the chair. A tan leather wallet, a key ring with half a dozen keys attached, and a clean white handkerchief. Mike searches the wallet. I cannot help myself. Slowly, I feel myself drawn across the room till at last I am standing right over the corpse. The initial shock, the wave of nausea, has passed, and now my gaze lingers on the ghastly sight.

  I have seen dead bodies before, usually singly, sometimes in numbers, on one mind-numbing occasion in Rwanda a huge, tangled heap of them piled in a mass grave that no one had bothered to cover. But this is not remotely the same. This is Toshio Hatanaka. I knew him. His office is just down the corridor from mine; it was part of my everyday routine to put my head in, chew the fat, part of his routine to drop in at my office unannounced with some problem of law. Half an hour ago Patrick told me to speak to him. And now here he is, a corpse.

  “He got family here?” Mike asks.

  A sister, I answer readily. Moriko. Occasionally I went to Toshio’s apartment for dinner; Moriko was often there.

  “He wasn’t married?”

  When I shake my head, Mike drops the wallet on the chair, then crouches to close Toshio’s blank eyes. Go get Patrick, he tells me.

  But I linger a moment. And a strange thought comes to me then, quite distinctly. This is how it was, I think. This is just how it was three years ago on a hillside in Afghanistan, with Toshio standing by a corpse. How did he feel? I wonder. The first impact over, the natural revulsion overcome, how was it for Toshio Hatanaka? Was he stunned? Stricken with grief? Or did he feel as I do now, overwhelmingly grateful simply to be standing here, alive? I never asked him. One more piece of the tragedy I will never know or understand: how it touched him. How Toshio felt when he stood there on a barren hillside in Afghanistan, ankle-deep in snow, over the dead and mutilated body of my wife.

  3

  “SUICIDE,”PATRICK O’CONNER SAYS AS WE STEP OUTSIDE. “Right?”

  The remark is so unexpected that I balk, but Patrick continues on over to the giant metal sculpture of a pistol, its barrel knotted, a gift to the UN from the people of Luxembourg. When I join him by the sculpture, he has both hands braced on the pedestal.

  “You heard Mike,” I say.

  “I heard him.”

  “He thinks it’s murder.”

  But Patrick doesn’t seem to hear me, and when I say his name, he simply lifts his head and takes a few deep breaths of air. His jowls hang heavy and there are tension lines across his brow that could signal the onset of a migraine. He stares past me across the North Lawn.

  After getting him away from the Assembly Hall I took Patrick down to the basement, where we’ve just spent ten minutes with Mike. Mike told Patrick the same thing he told me. That he thinks it’s murder. That we need a forensics team. Patrick’s response was to ask me to accompany him outside, a request for which I admit I am grateful. Unlike Mike, neither one of us seems to have the kind of cast-iron stomach needed to think straight in the presence of a corpse, but Patrick’s look now, as he stares out over the lawn, is not so much one of shock as dismay. He is pondering the effect of Toshio’s death on the vote. And after reflecting on Patrick’s opening remark, I wonder if perhaps I might be missing something here.

  “Why suicide?” I ask.

  “Because it fits.”

  “That’s not how Mike sees it.”

  Patrick looks at me. “What about you? How do you see it?”

  I state the obvious, that I’m no expert but that Mike’s judgment seems fair. Toshio was no user, I say.

  “User, my ass.” Patrick pushes away from the pedestal and I follow him across the terrace, down the steps and onto the graveled path across the lawn. Usually this area is crawling with tourists. Today, thankfully, they’ve been kept out because of the opening. “Jardine’s just guessing what was in the syringe,” he says, thinking out loud. “He’s guessing some kinda dope. Someone set it up to look like Hatanaka was injecting. Accidental overdose.”

  “You don’t buy that?”

  “Whoever did it would end up on the tapes. Who’s that stupid?” The security tapes, he means. There are cameras on all the basement corridors; Mike has just gone to check the tapes from last night. “Suicide fits,” Patrick says again. “Coulda been anything in that syringe. Straight in the vein, some poison, be as good a way to do it as any.”

  We toss the idea back and forth a minute; Patrick seems absolutely convinced he is right. And the idea is not outrageous, God knows. Toshio spent his career visiting parts of the world most people catch only in glimpses from the safety of their armchairs on the TV nightly news. Sarajevo. Sierra Leone. East Timor. More recently Kabul. Sometimes as a special rapporteur gathering information for the Secretariat, sometimes as a special envoy representing the Secretary-General at cease-fire negotiations, putting the reasonable view to men whose only real interest was in slitting each other’s throats.

  And Toshio was never one to confine himself to the boundaries of the inevitable cordon sanitaire decreed by the local authorities. He went out into the field, tried to see firsthand what conditions were really like, what was actually happening to the people whose tragic fate it was to be born into the front lines of hatred. Twenty-five years a Secretariat staffer, he had heard all the lies. He had seen more evil than any man should be asked to see, maimed and suffering humanity in all its wretched forms, and who could blame him if after this he had finally given up on the world? Down in that unlit basement room, surrounded by those posters of starving children, doesn’t that seem possible? That he reached for a peace that life couldn’t offer?

  And yet I just don’t see it. Not Toshio.

  “How does suicide square with the Council vote?” I ask. “One minute he’s campaigning against the Japanese seat, the next he just offs himself?”

  At the end of the path Patrick stops suddenly.

  “You don’t see any connection there?” he asks me.

  “With the vote?”

  But Patrick’s look is suddenly abstracted; a thought has just occurred to him. “You’re sure there was no note?”

  “Nothing.”

  Patrick ruminates awhile; in the end, I have to ask him what he’s thinking.

  “How much would Hatanaka have sacrificed to screw Japan’s chance at a Council seat? That’s what I’m thinking.”

  It takes me a moment. Then I get it. “You’re not serious.”

  “Why not? Part of Jap tradition, isn’t it? Bushido, whatever they call it. Who was that guy? Mishima? Like a grand protest thing. If Hatanaka did that, then left a note saying what a bad idea he thought a Jap seat was, Christ, can you imagine the headlines?”

  “There was no note,” I sa
y firmly.

  “Check his office,” he tells me. “And his apartment.”

  I suggest that we should first wait and see what Mike finds on the tapes, but Patrick waves that aside as if I am simply being obtuse. He has decided on the answer. The answer is suicide. And this is, frankly, the worst example yet of just how badly Patrick’s judgment is being impaired by his preoccupation with the vote. There is just no way Toshio committed suicide to make a political point, I don’t care how much he might have wanted to derail the upcoming vote. But confronting Patrick head-on, I know, is useless, so I don’t even try. As we turn and head back down the path, I wonder aloud about notifying the Japanese consulate.

  “No need,” says Patrick.

  I glance at him.

  “He’s on a UN passport,” Patrick reminds me.

  “He’s a Japanese national.”

  “Is this Japan?”

  At the top of the terrace steps I touch Patrick’s arm, and we both stop. “Patrick, he’s dead. It doesn’t matter how he died, we have to notify the embassy. His relatives have to be contacted. This isn’t something you can keep under wraps.”

  “We just need two days.”

  “If you believe you can keep this secret until the vote. If you think you can get Mike to go along with that—”

  His fantasy deflated by this quick reality check, he looks down at his feet. What he is thinking about, I suspect, is not Toshio Hatanaka but Patrick O’Conner. How to handle this disastrous situation, how to limit any damage it might do to the campaign for the Japanese seat. How to protect his own career.

  “There’s probably no note,” I say. “And I really don’t think it’s suicide anyway.”

  “Suicide, murder,” Patrick mutters. “Once the word gets out that the opponent in chief of the Jap seat’s dead in the bloody basement, all fucking hell’s going to break loose. First thing they’ll do is make a play to shuffle the agenda.”

  From Patrick’s point of view, a catastrophe. A delay in the vote, the way the momentum is running, would be a certain prelude to defeat for the Japanese. Patrick swears.

  Right then Mike emerges from the Assembly building. He sees us immediately and jogs over, one hand resting on the walkie-talkie at his hip. “No tape,” he reports, coming to a halt in front of us. “The camera in the basement corridor was turned off.”

  Oh, Jesus, says Patrick.

  “Ten last night through to six this morning,” Mike tells us, his voice strained. “Maintenance. Getting ready for today.”

  “Maintenance,” Patrick moans, screwing up his face.

  But last night there was a reception held in the public concourse, cocktails for the nongovernmental organizations. I ask Mike about that. The concourse is just one floor up from the basement; I can’t believe the NGO event wasn’t taped.

  “Sure, we got that. But nothing in the basement. They’re telling me the work on the cameras was scheduled days ago. I got someone chasing up the maintenance crew.”

  “Someone could have strolled down from the NGO reception, we wouldn’t know?” says Patrick.

  “We’ll check the concourse tapes. See if we can spot anyone disappearing downstairs who shouldn’t be.” From Mike’s tone, a long shot. His face is red now, an equal measure of embarrassment and fury.

  I turn to Patrick, expecting some decision, a plan of action. But Patrick seems overwhelmed by the steady escalation of the problem. He stares right past us, lost in some private thought.

  “One call,” Mike suggests. “I can have a Homicide forensics team here in twenty minutes.”

  Patrick’s head snaps around. “You don’t call anyone. No one. Not Homicide, not NYPD Forensics, no one. This isn’t Harlem, for chrissake. The New York cops come in here, half the bloody delegations will up and walk out. You feel like explaining that upstairs?”

  “We need some help here,” Mike protests. “Professionals.”

  “No one,” Patrick repeats.

  Mike pulls a face, but Patrick is right. The legal fiction that these few acres at Turtle Bay are not part of the U.S. is treated as divine law by most of the delegates. Any intrusion into these grounds by U.S. officialdom, whatever the reason, would set off major diplomatic fireworks.

  “Isn’t there a coolroom in back of the basement canteen?” Patrick wonders aloud.

  “What about it?” Mike returns, deadpan.

  “You could put him in there. Just for now.”

  “No forensics?”

  Patrick doesn’t reply.

  “And then what?” says Mike. “Go home?”

  Patrick starts to move off, telling me that he’s going to speak to the SG. But Mike lays a hand on his arm.

  “I’m reporting this to Eckhardt as a murder.” Eckhardt, Mike’s boss, the head of UN Security. “And I can tell you now, he’s gonna flip if he finds anything got done without him hearing about it first.”

  So tell him, Patrick says.

  “And I’ll be telling him that unless we get an investigation started now, we got no chance of nailing this.”

  “An investigation?”

  “Homicide,” says Mike.

  Cornered, Patrick turns right, then left. A full-blown investigation, the kind of unpredictable political currents it might stir up in this place, at this time—it is the very last thing Patrick needs so close to Thursday’s vote. And Mike senses that.

  “Put Sam on it with me.” I shoot Mike a look, but he ignores me and continues to press his case with Patrick. “I’ll do what I can with the detective work, let Sam play prosecuting attorney, keep it legal. I mean, look at it. What’s the alternate plan?”

  A fair point. Patrick considers. “What are the chances you can actually find out what happened down there last night? Given that you don’t get your NYPD buddies involved.”

  “Not great,” Mike tells him. “Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.”

  Not great, Patrick echoes. He strokes his throat a moment, then faces me.

  What I would like to do, of course, is pass right on by, let the nightmare fall on someone else. And for a moment I consider doing just that. Sorry. Too busy. Try one of the junior legal officers from the department. But even as I consider this polite but firm refusal, I realize that I am not going to get that choice. Because this is not some draft proposal for an obscure UN committee, the kind of thing I delegate daily by the truckload down the line. This is murder at the UN. Toshio Hatanaka, everybody’s favorite special envoy. And Mike wants me on it. And Patrick knows he has to do something. After fourteen years of practice, I can protect my bureaucratic butt as well as the next guy, but this just isn’t one of those things I can safely palm off, watch explode in someone else’s lap. Patrick is nodding to himself now, coming around to Mike’s suggestion. A weight like lead settles in my bones. The legal point guard in the investigation of Toshio Hatanaka’s death has just been selected.

  Mike gets a call on his walkie-talkie; apparently Dr. Patel, the resident UNHQ medic, is waiting for Mike down in the basement.

  “Patel?” Patrick is appalled.

  “If you won’t let a real forensics team in,” says Mike, “Patel’s what you got.” Patel, needless to say, is a guy you wouldn’t trust with any medical instrument more sophisticated than a thermometer. He does the occasional routine medical checkup, hands out aspirin, and spends the rest of his time sleeping in the sanatorium. Moving away from us, Mike calls over his shoulder that Eckhardt should be down in the basement any minute. “If you got a problem treating this as a homicide, come down and tell him.”

  The moment Mike is out of earshot, Patrick turns to me. “Check Hatanaka’s office. If there’s a note, bring it straight to me. Don’t show Jardine. Or Eckhardt.”

  I repeat my opinion that there will be no note, that like Mike, I do not believe Toshio has committed suicide. But Patrick is not listening.

  “If there’s nothing there, go check his apartment. And see if you can’t do something about Jardine. Settle him down. If he thinks he’s goi
ng to have no problems running a homicide investigation in this place, he’s just plain wrong. And I don’t want to be picking up the pieces, cleaning up after him just because he’s too bloody gung ho to listen to reason.”

  “He’s a professional.”

  “He’s your mate,” says Patrick. “And I’m telling you to settle him down.”

  Today’s second big edict. Speak to Hatanaka. Settle Mike down. Inside, we part at the escalators, Patrick giving me a few final instructions before heading grim-faced toward the Assembly Hall to inform the Secretary-General of the tragedy. I break into a jog down the corridor, hurrying to Toshio’s office in the Secretariat building, feeling suddenly light-headed and nauseated, but glad to be moving, relieved to have something to do, something to think about other than the shocking sight in the basement. I am going upstairs to carry out my instructions: to look for a note that I do not believe exists. Twenty-nine floors up to Toshio’s office. Thirty floors clear of the corpse.

  4

  AFTER SEARCHING TOSHIO’S OFFICE FOR FIVE MINUTES AND finding nothing that remotely resembles a suicide note, I retreat three doors along and across the passage to my own office and close the door.

  The shelves in here are jammed with books and papers and files. At least once a week somebody will come to me checking up on the whys and wherefores of the Headquarters Agreement, generally the maintenance managers, who deal with things like the electricity and water we buy from the State of New York. So that booklet, though I almost know its contents by heart, is close at hand. But the Geneva Convention on Diplomatic Privileges is buried deep somewhere among the rest, and I twist my neck to read the vertical labels on the spines.

  Gathering information and writing reports, you will learn from the PR handouts, is the work that takes place in the Secretariat building. More than thirty floors of worker ants busy gathering information and writing reports, and though I deal with only the apex of the legal pyramid, that is more than enough to keep me permanently wading through paper. I curse the system as I move along the shelves.