Diplomatic Immunity

by Grant Sutherland

  The door opens behind me.

  “Elizabeth? I’m looking for Geneva dip rights and privileges, sixty-one. Any clues?” On my knees now, I shuffle along by the bottom shelf. “I thought it was down here.”

  No answer. When I look up, it is not Elizabeth, my secretary, peering down at me over my desk.

  “Dad?” Rachel smiles and shakes her head, her bob of shiny black hair swaying from side to side. “Get a grip,” she says.

  My gut clenches. Quickly turning back to the shelves, I tell my daughter that I thought she had the whole day off from her job as a UN guide.

  “What’s lost?” she asks me.

  I shoot her a dark look. She pulls a face and crosses to the window, remarking that most of the sightseers have left First Avenue. “How come you’re not down at the opening?” she says, turning back.

  “How come you’re up here?”

  “I’m a spy.”

  “How about you do your spying someplace else.”

  “Dad?” She leans right over, watching me through the opening beneath my desk. “What is it, some book?”

  Yeah, I say. Some book.

  In fact, if I can find the damn thing, it is the only document I can think of that might give us some guidance as to the legal situation arising from Toshio’s death. Not something I want to get into with Rachel. Standing, I brush the dust off my knees. Rachel takes a tub of yogurt and a plastic teaspoon from her purse. She commences to eat, ruminating over each mouthful, her gaze directed to the Tibetan monks across the street. Watching her, I think, What do I tell her? How do I tell her? Remember Toshio Hatanaka, the guy who went to Afghanistan to negotiate your mother’s release and failed? Guess what happened.

  “Hello?” Rachel waves her plastic spoon, her singsong voice bringing me back to the present.

  I nod to the yogurt. “I hope that’s not lunch.”

  “Are you nagging me?”

  “That’s what I’m doing.” I move along the shelves.

  “And I really look like I’m shrinking away?” She pinches her cheek as she sits down. “Skin and bone?”

  But she looks fine, a slimmer-than-average eighteen-year-old kid who probably hasn’t slept as much as she should have since moving out of the family home last week. And I recognize the veiled warning too—what she eats, her weight, are not subjects she likes to discuss. When her mother died, Rachel was your normal, healthy adolescent, no more hang-ups or neuroses than any fifteen-year-old girl. Within a year she was in a special-needs ward at Bellevue, being fed a cocktail of nutrient-enriched liquids through a tube in her nose. Anorexia nervosa. Words that can still fill me with helpless terror.

  “So what’s the big deal with this book?”

  Just some procedural thing, I tell her, facing the shelves again, wondering how to get rid of her. For one of the committees, I say. No big deal.

  “I don’t know why you bother.”

  “It’s a job.”

  “I mean, why you bother lying, Dad. Really. You are the world’s absolute worst.”

  Locating the diplomatic rights and privileges file, I pull it from the stack, then face her. She has her feet apart now, her knees clamped together. She leans forward, trying hard not to drip yogurt onto her blue skirt. Her blue blazer is draped over her purse behind the door.

  “This isn’t a good time, Rache.”

  “Two minutes,” she says.

  Two minutes. I’ve got a dead man in the basement and my daughter needs two minutes to finish her yogurt. I flip open the file and pull up a chair behind my desk.

  “I’m a chaperone for the day,” she tells me.

  “Good for you.”

  “All the guides got landed with different delegations.”

  Nodding into the file, I turn a page.

  “Guess who I’m doing.”

  “Amaze me.”

  “The Philippines. Argentina and Spain too, just the junior delegates.”

  “Excellent.”

  “You’re not interested, are you?”

  “Rachel.” Lifting my eyes, I tap the file with a finger. “Won’t the Philippines be missing you by now?”

  She informs me that she’s got another fifteen minutes. Then she flips her empty yogurt tub into the trash can, licks the spoon, and flips that too. She slumps back in her chair; she obviously has no intention of leaving.

  I could tell her, I think. Maybe I even should tell her. Sooner or later the news about Toshio will get out; sooner or later Rachel will have to know, wouldn’t it be better for her to hear it from me? But just now, as so often with Rachel these past three years, I simply cannot find the words. In the end I bow my head over the file and lose myself in the arcane region of the law that dictates the behavior of nations toward persons of credentialed diplomatic standing. On the page here it is clear as crystalline water. The rights of the individual, the responsibilities of the state. Totally clear. Completely transparent. But what happens, say, if the government of a country falls, revolutionaries seize power, and the U.S. embassy is besieged for over a year? What happens, say, if a diplomat from a rogue regime leans out of an embassy window in London and shoots a local police officer? What happens, say, if a UN special envoy is found murdered in the basement at UN headquarters? What happens, of course, is that politics takes over, and after years in UN Legal Affairs I have learned that politics has a way of turning the crystalline waters of the statute book into mud.

  “Juan says the Japanese won’t get onto the Council.”

  “Where’d he get that from?”

  “Around,” says Rachel.

  Around, I tell her, keeping my head down, is not normally considered to be a source of high repute. But it is so much a measure of how deeply this vote is affecting all of us that I find myself making a mental note of Juan’s opinion. Juan is Rachel’s new landlord and roommate, a twenty-four-year-old with a bee in his bonnet about the state of the world. A senior figure at Lighthouse, one of the increasingly numerous NGOs that have UN accreditation, Juan could possibly be picking up signals that we’re missing from some of the smaller delegations.

  “He’s not the only one saying it,” she says.

  “Mmm?”

  “The guys from the Keisan Shimbun think Hatanaka’s sunk it too,” Rachel asserts confidently.

  A sound rises from deep in my chest. After eighteen years, my daughter still has the most amazing capacity to surprise me. She has been giving Joe Public the tour and PR gloss for barely three months. And she got the job not because she was turned on by politics and diplomacy. Far from it. She got the job because for the first time in my career I stooped to pull a few strings. And here she is, I now discover, shooting the breeze with journalists from the leading Japanese business daily about who’s hot and who’s not in the world of big-time international diplomacy.

  “Rachel.” My hand traces a bewildered circle in the air, then I point to the door. “Out.”

  “You brought my stuff, yeah?”

  Her stuff. A suitcase full of clothes from home. It’s down in the trunk of my car. I told Rachel I’d drop it off at her new apartment tonight, but now I make a face.

  “Oh, Dad, you promised.”

  “What’s this, blackmail?”

  She smiles sweetly. It is not as cute at this moment as she thinks it is.

  “Okay, Rache. I’ll try. No promises.”

  “Great.”

  She goes to pick up her purse and blazer from behind the door. And this is the moment that Mike chooses to arrive. He puts his head in and speaks before I can stop him. “Hatanaka died about eight hours ago, way Patel sees it. I wouldn’t take that for gospel.”

  I wave a hand, my look is severe. His voice trails off. Then Rachel steps out from where she has been hidden from view; she has an arm in one sleeve of her blazer.

  Mike makes a sound. I drop my head into my hand. Finally Mike nods to her and says “Rache,” then with an apologetic glance in my direction he tells me that he’ll be in Toshio’s office. He qu
ickly withdraws.

  Rachel turns to me, her mouth open. “Hatanaka, Dad?”

  “You didn’t hear that.”

  “Toshio Hatanaka?”

  Moving smartly around the desk, I close the door. “Okay, so now you’ve heard. In a couple of hours it’ll be out anyway.” My finger rises in warning. “But I don’t want you telling anyone. Not Juan. Not anyone.”

  “How? What did he have, a heart attack?”

  “Look, I haven’t got time to discuss it, Rache. And for the time being, you forget that you heard. Okay?”

  She glances at the file on my desk. “Is that why you needed the diplomatic rights thing?”

  “Rachel,” I say sharply.

  Maybe too sharply. Startled, she jerks her head back.

  “I’ll bring your stuff tonight, okay? Any questions, ask me then.” I toss my head toward the door. “Now go.”

  She sees at once that I am not kidding. She shrugs her shoulders into her blazer, comes around the desk, and pecks me on the cheek. Her look of curious astonishment lingers on me a moment longer, then she leaves without a word. Teenage daughters. Quantum physics could not be more unfathomable.

  5

  “ZERO POINTS FOR FUCKING SECURITY,”MIKE MUTTERS WHEN I join him in Toshio’s office. He gestures to the door behind me. “Wasn’t even locked.”

  “Does Patrick know you’re up here?”

  Mike shrugs; the answer, I presume, is no. Then he starts apologizing for accidentally spilling the beans to Rachel, but I wave that off, explaining that I’ve told her to keep it quiet. Mike accepts that with a rueful nod, then we stand a moment, contemplating our surroundings.

  “I’ve already had a quick look around,” I admit, lifting my chin toward the desk and shelves.

  “Yeah? For what?”

  “Suicide note.”

  “No joy?”

  When I turn my head, Mike’s eyes sweep the room. “Don’t tell me. Suicide’s Patrick’s theory, right?”

  When I concede that it is, Mike grunts. Between him and Patrick the chemistry has always been bad, any contact between them abrasive. And Mike does not seem in the least inclined to put whatever differences they have aside in order to deal more effectively with this disaster.

  “Patrick tell you to leave the door unlocked?”

  “I left it like I found it, Mike. It was unlocked when I came in, I left it like that when I went out. Nothing to do with Patrick.”

  He steps a little farther into the room. In size the office isn’t much different from mine, and the same shelves are stacked with books and files. But there are no family photos on the desk and there isn’t even a poster to break those blank expanses of white wall that aren’t covered by shelving. There are no windows either; that more than anything gives the room a cramped, somewhat claustrophobic feel. This isn’t, frankly, the kind of place in which you would expect a UN special envoy to spend his working day. And in truth, though Toshio has had this office for at least five years, it was never more than a convenient base to him; unlike everyone else on this floor, he has never spent much time at his desk. My own impression of this room when I first saw it some years back was that it was ostentatiously austere for someone so senior. Over the years, however, I have come to see that Toshio’s indifference to the trappings of power was absolutely sincere and not, as more than one resident cynic believed, a calculated front that concealed a vaulting ambition.

  Mike’s eyes run over the piles of paper, the notebooks, and the other everyday jumble on the desktop.

  “So whadda we seeing here?” he asks me.

  Nothing out of the ordinary, I tell him. It looks just like always: Toshio’s innate tidiness and sense of order fighting a losing battle against the workload overflowing his optimistically small in box.

  “Like always?”

  Nodding, I thumb through the tray. Mike asks me how often I come in here.

  “When Toshio’s around? Once or twice a day.”

  “Work?”

  “Mostly.” Toshio, I explain, got VIP treatment from my department. Normally the requests for legal opinions that come to me are matters of no real importance. We have scores of lawyers in UN Legal Affairs, yet I still find myself signing off on proposed wordings of nonbinding agreements that will probably never even make it to the peripheral committee meetings for which they are putatively intended. But the legal problems of UN envoys I have always taken seriously, handled personally whenever I could. Out getting their hands dirty in the world, dealing with intractable problems of large and deadly consequence, they need our help, a need that is often all too real.

  Mike starts rifling through Toshio’s desk drawers. “I took another look at that grille downstairs. No way someone used it. Dust all the way back in the chute, and it’s too small.”

  “So if it’s murder, whoever we’re looking for came through the door?”

  “If?” says Mike.

  I ask him about the security tapes. What are the chances, I wonder, that Toshio’s murderer knew he wasn’t being recorded?

  “I got someone out trying to round up the maintenance crew, three guys. I’ll be interviewing them soon as they come in.”

  “Do we know who had keys to the basement rooms?”

  “Apart from the guards?” Mike shakes his head no. “Any good reason you can think of Hatanaka was down there anyway?”

  I admit that I can’t. Mike goes back to the papers in the drawer.

  “Whoever left the body there locked the door,” he says. “So whoever left him there had a key. If Hatanaka didn’t have regular business down in the basement—”

  “He didn’t.”

  “Okay. So our man didn’t steal the key from Hatanaka.”

  “The guy had his own key?”

  “Seems like.”

  Mike closes the top drawer, crouching to open the next. When I came in here earlier, I checked what I thought were the most likely places for a suicide note: desktop, drawers, the corkboard where a UNESCO calendar hangs askew. I even looked in the trash. Rather than go through all that again, it occurs to me that it might be useful to know what Toshio was working on. Mike nods at my suggestion and points at Toshio’s in box. So I settle myself in the chair and lift the whole pile of paperwork into my lap.

  “What should we be looking for? Anything particular?”

  “Nope,” Mike answers without glancing up.

  We carry on our respective searches in silence.

  Toshio Hatanaka did not have what you would call a regular working day. He was, as much as anyone can be within the confines of this hidebound institution, a free agent, someone to whom many of the usual bureaucratic rules and customs did not strictly apply. The paperwork I am studying now reflects that. There is a stack of memos from UNHCR, the UN High Commission for Refugees, relating to logistical problems in the field: tents that should be in Pakistan currently caught up in a dockers’ dispute in Singapore; field-workers wanting to know if they can still use the rehydration sachets for children with diarrhea, which arrived in Somalia three months late; an ongoing dispute with one of the aid agencies about joint use of telecommunications facilities, this one with an attached note from Toshio suggesting a senior figure in the agency who might be able to help. But free agent or not, Toshio’s official assignment with UNHCR ended over two years ago, and this evidence of just how much time he was devoting to matters beyond his current remit is unexpected. I find myself frowning. I flick through the rest of the memos, most of which, I am relieved to see, concern Afghanistan.

  “Geneva,” Mike says suddenly. He pulls the stub of a plane ticket from the drawer and places it on the desk. He points to the date. “Last week.”

  We study the details. Toshio Hatanaka evidently took a Swissair flight to Geneva at the beginning of last week, spent three days there, then returned.

  Mike remarks that Geneva, as he remembers it, is a hell of a long way from Afghanistan.

  “Could have been a routine meeting,” I suggest.

>   But Toshio, we both know, would have been working his butt off this past month just to prepare for the General Assembly session. Last week was not the time for a three-day meeting on the shores of Lake Geneva.

  Mike pushes the ticket aside. “What have you got?”

  When I show him the memos, he glances through them quickly. “Give it to me again,” he says, puzzled. “Hatanaka was special envoy to Afghanistan, right?”

  “He was with UNHCR till two years back.” That, I explain, was a large part of the reason he ended up as special envoy to Afghanistan: Afghanistan has one of the worst refugee problems in the world.

  “But it wasn’t his job, was it, refugees? Lookit this.” Mike flicks the memos. “Special envoy to Afghanistan? Where’d he find the time? The guy was doing everything but.”

  There was some talk, I remark absently, that Toshio might make a run at the UNHCR’s top job, high commissioner for refugees.

  A cynical weariness spreads over Mike’s face. “Ahh,” he says.

  “Come on. He wasn’t like that, Mike, this was a dedicated guy.” I gesture to the memos. “If he thought he could help, he helped.”

  “Dedicated.”

  “Dedicated,” I say.

  The desk offers up nothing more, so we turn and face the shelves. There are files, hundreds of them, not all of them labeled. Shaking his head, Mike goes out in search of Toshio’s secretary while I prop my ass against the desk and wait.

  The last time I saw Toshio alive was yesterday morning. He was leaning against these same shelves, arms crossed, one shoulder against the files, trying hard to look relaxed. Half a lifetime he’d spent in the U.S., and he still couldn’t manage the trick. The effort it cost him was visible in every stiff angle of his body; I never saw a man look less relaxed or more Japanese. Now my eyes run down the shelves to the tatami on the floor. And I have to blink away a sudden vision of Toshio’s corpse.

  A minute later Mike returns with Toshio’s secretary, Mei Tan, in tow.

  “So where’d he keep this report?” he asks her as they enter.

  Mei Tan looks relieved to see me. A Singaporean, she is something of an institution here on Floor Twenty-nine. She worked with my deputy, Gunther Franks, for years before promotion to Toshio’s office. Now she pushes her horn-rimmed glasses up the bridge of her nose and tells us that she’s not sure about this. She says she would like some formal authority before allowing us into Mr. Hatanaka’s office.