Diplomatic Immunity

by Grant Sutherland

  This lecture, frankly, would be much easier to stomach from any other one of the ambassadors present. The U.S. has never made a secret of its support for a Japanese seat; Kissinger was pushing for it as long ago as the seventies. And though the Russians and Chinese have not been as active as the U.S. in promoting the Japanese cause, both Gradavitch and Chou En have been instrumental in keeping the spoilers back in Moscow and Beijing in check. And Lady Nicola would not think of talking to me in this hectoring tone in the first place.

  But Froissart is a lot like his country: a little dog with a big yap. Until last year, France was adamantly opposed to any change in the Council’s composition. Fearing the inevitable long-term diminution in their own power, they instinctively blocked every recommendation put forward for reform. The old world order, ossified into place by the UN Charter, has always suited France just fine. It was Bruckner who finally managed to convince the French of the necessity for change—a monumental achievement, and part of the reason that Jennifer signed up with him when Bruckner asked her. Anyone who can move the French, she has told me not altogether jokingly, must have more than enough political smarts for a successful gubernatorial campaign. Thankfully Froissart now concludes his harangue before I become riled enough to break in and say something regrettable.

  Then Lady Nicola addresses me.

  “I’d like to inform the Japanese that the Secretariat won’t interfere with Ambassador Asahaki in any way should he wish to return here immediately. Does that seem fair?”

  “Sure.”

  She smiles.

  “Provided,” I say, “he answers the questions we need to ask him.”

  Instantly Lady Nicola’s smile evaporates.

  “Toshio’s been murdered,” I tell them. “The very least he’s owed is a proper investigation. And I mean to give him that.”

  The eyes around the table are all on me now. I hold Lady Nicola’s gaze.

  “Then would it be too much to expect the perm five to be fully informed and consulted on the progress of your investigation?” she asks curtly.

  “No problem,” Patrick assures her.

  My head swivels. No problem? These people have no interest in discovering the truth; it is blindingly obvious that their sole concern is a smooth passage onto the Security Council for the Japanese. Yesterday I flatly refused Lady Nicola’s overture on behalf of the perm five, and now Patrick has committed me to consult with them. No goddamn problem?

  But before I can voice my dissent, Patrick is on his feet, nodding reassurances all around. He looks stoical enough, but I am sure he is raging. Furious at me for not rolling with Lady Nicola and Froissart’s suggestion, for not dropping Asahaki from my investigation. Somewhat frostily Lady Nicola thanks me for my time, then she signals Patrick over to her side for a private word. Conversation and argument break out across the table; they appear to have forgotten my presence already. Now that they’re done with me, I am invisible. But as I move to the door, Jennifer rises, file in hand, and comes over.

  “Ms. Dale?”

  My tone is caustic. I make no attempt to disguise how angry I am. The first time I am called into the side chamber and it is not legal advice they want from me but a whitewash. Their one big hope, it seems, was that I would do the diplomatic thing, roll over and play dead while Asahaki returned unquestioned to secure the Japanese their seat. She doesn’t bat an eye. Opening her file, she invites me to peruse a blank page.

  “Do you expect your investigation might take you outside UNHQ again?” she says, her voice low.

  “Possibly.”

  “Likely, isn’t it?”

  I look up at her and wait.

  “We’re willing to bypass the Headquarters Committee,” she offers. We. The U.S. State Department. Relations between UNHQ and the host nation, the U.S., are overseen by the Headquarters Committee, a notoriously bureaucratic body. One legendary dispute over a parking fine rumbled on in this committee for two years before the malefactor inadvertently cut the Gordian knot by getting himself killed on a peacekeeping mission to Bosnia. There is nothing I would like better than to bypass this committee. “If the Secretariat’s agreeable,” Jennifer adds.

  “What’s the catch?”

  She doesn’t bother to deny that there is one. The Council side chamber is not a place where people do favors from the simple kindness of their hearts.

  “You report your actions direct to my office. To me. If we have any problem with what you’re doing, I’ll take it up direct with you.”

  “No State Department committee? Just you?”

  “Just me.”

  Now I see it. The U.S. jumping on their perm five colleagues. Jennifer would have a feeler extended into any part of the investigation that occurs on U.S. territory. She is pushing against Article 100, my responsibility to remain impartial. Above influence. Then again, I won’t have to deal with that god-awful committee. Glancing over Jennifer’s shoulder, I see Lady Nicola and Patrick deep in discussion. Gradavitch, the Russian ambassador, is jabbing a finger in the air, emphasizing some point to Froissart across the table, while the Chinese are conferring between themselves. Bruckner, who has undoubtedly put Jennifer up to making me this offer, is reexamining the Japanese statement.

  “All right, no committee,” I agree. Then I lean closer. “But this arrangement doesn’t change what I said last night. In fact, it goes double. Okay?”

  “If that’s how you want it.”

  “That’s how I want it.”

  She nods to herself.

  “You knew he was gone last night,” she says then, referring to Asahaki, to our ill-advised rendezvous at the Waldorf.

  “Yeah, I knew he was gone,” I say. “And you lied to me.”

  I close the file in her hand sharply. She studies me a moment before reaching past me to open the side-chamber door. As I exit, she leans toward me.

  “Your choice, Sam. From here on in, you’re on your own.”

  16

  THE GUN FROM TOSHIO’S APARTMENT HAS NO FIRING pin.

  “Kind of restores your faith in human nature,” Mike remarks dryly as he hands the gun across his desk for my inspection. He points out where the missing firing pin should be. “Guy from Barney and Hunt’s, the gun place, he called soon as I got in this morning. He says he remembers the sale. The customer asked for a replica. He says the guy settled for a secondhand real one when they told him the thing couldn’t fire.”

  “The ammo?”

  “Get this. They’re telling me they always throw in a couple of free shells every sale. For luck.”

  I ask him if Toshio told them why he wanted the gun.

  “He wanted a replica,” Mike corrects me. “Guy at the gun shop says he got the idea Hatanaka needed to show someone he wasn’t gonna be messed with. But that was it. Just show.”

  I place the gun on Mike’s desk and we both consider it awhile.

  “The betting’s gotta be someone like Asahaki,” he says. “Or whoever it was bugged Hatanaka’s apartment.”

  “That could have been someone working for Asahaki.”

  “Could have been,” Mike agrees without conviction. He picks up the gun and turns it over in his hand. “What’s for sure is Hatanaka was spooked. Not spooked enough to do something smart like get himself a real gun, maybe telling Security what was going on. But he was worried, all right. Worried enough to go and get himself this useless piece of shit.”

  Mike drops the gun into his desk drawer and shoves the drawer closed. But unlike Mike, I find myself strangely heartened by this turn. I am relieved to have Toshio’s pacifist credentials reestablished: The man I knew is once again the man I knew.

  Going out to the hall, we discuss the bugs, our voices low. Mike has not gotten hold of Eckhardt yet, and he looks pained when I tell him that I have been unable to avoid Patrick. When I mention my visit to the bank with Pascal, and Toshio’s lone inspection of the bank paperwork, Mike asks a few questions, then returns to the subject of Patrick and the bugs. This preoccupa
tion with Patrick is starting to worry me. I wonder if personal antipathy isn’t beginning to distort Mike’s judgment. Besides, I have had time to reconsider Mike’s verdict on the intruder.

  “You said the guy must have seen you going down to my car,” I remind him now. “That the guy must have thought you were me, that’s why he broke in after you drove off.”

  “Okay.”

  “So how does that square with any involvement from Patrick? Anyone working with Extra Security would know what you look like. And someone doing it for Patrick would have a description of me.”

  “Hey, don’t flatter yourself. I ain’t no oil painting, Sam, but from across the street, you and me, we’re just two middle-aged guys in suits. Guy on the stakeout looks away, looks back, Windrush’s car’s moving. What’s he gonna think? Joyrider?”

  “Why would Patrick want to bug my place?”

  Mike smiles to himself. “Funny thing. You never asked that about the bugs at Hatanaka’s.”

  We walk on in silence. At the door of the Surveillance Room I catch Mike’s arm. “I have to tell Patrick sometime.”

  “Sure.” He disengages my hand. “Sometime later,” he says, and turns in to the room. He comes out after a moment with a six-by-nine blowup, the still he has promised me from Monday night’s surveillance tape. “Here’s your girl.” He hands me the picture. As we move down the hall again, I study the black-and-white headshot.

  Suzi Yomoto. She is not a girl but a woman, late twenties, I would guess. The pose is odd, her head tilted back, her mouth open and possibly laughing, but it’s really quite hard to tell. Her black hair is cut into straight bangs and shaped around her elfin face. Her face is colored a ghostly white. Some kind of makeup, maybe powder. Her eyebrows are two slashes of black, more heavy makeup, and her lips are if anything a shade or two darker. A nightclubbing sprite. Not the kind of look you see too often here at UNHQ. I glance up at Mike.

  “Twenty-four-carat fucking kook,” he says. “You wanna go see her, take Weyland.”

  Weyland, the big guard, the ex-cop Mike trusts. I remark that I am probably capable of handling a hundred-pound woman all by myself. Mike takes a folded page from his inner jacket pocket and hands it to me. A long list. I read two lines. Alleged assault. Resisting arrest. Then I look up at Mike curiously.

  “Suzi Yomoto’s rap sheet.” He points at me and veers away toward Eckhardt’s office. “Take Weyland,” he says.

  The protesters have gathered outside the Waldorf-Astoria. They look like the usual cross-section of NGO activists: concerned senior citizens and college students skipping their politics classes for a morning’s entertainment, just regular folk. A cluster of maybe a dozen stand near the entrance, while most of the others loiter back along the sidewalk, gathered in small groups, talking. An old man in a camouflage jacket is moving among them, handing out sandwiches from a box. The demonstration hasn’t started yet; the placards denouncing the U.S. and the Security Council are propped against the hotel wall or lying on the ground.

  “Worse kind,” remarks Weyland, handing me back Suzi Yomoto’s picture and the rap sheet he has been perusing. “But a face like that, one thing for sure, only a blind man gonna miss her.”

  I slide the paperwork into my pocket, then we get out of the cab and walk over toward the Waldorf. I have had time to look through the rap sheet properly and I have come to pretty much the same conclusion as Weyland: Suzi Yomoto is the very worst kind of trouble. In the past five years she has been arrested in five different states, most frequently California, although the Washington, D.C., and New York police holding cells have seen more than their fair share of her too. The pattern of arrests has a certain monotonous regularity. Suzi has what you might call a modus operandi, a firmly established pattern of behavior that is designed to cause maximum inconvenience to everyone else without landing herself in a real jail. You would not find her protesting the closure of a local public library. She goes—as her kind always does—for the big ones. World trade. Defense and armaments. World peace. Her method is to place herself in the front line of any march, the front row of any sit-in, then join in any action short of violence to provoke her own arrest. Nominally she has some connection with Greenpeace, but I would guess she is on some more personal crusade. That would fit with what Juan told me about her last night. A rich lady with time on her hands, searching for a cause.

  Now I wander down the sidewalk with Weyland, scanning the faces. No luck. When we reach the cluster near the door, the ringleaders, I step right up and ask about Suzi Yomoto. Weyland’s uniform draws some attention, but when they see he’s UN and not a cop, they loosen up enough to ask me who’s asking. So I tell them who, the deputy to the Undersecretary-General for Legal Affairs.

  “She’ll be along shortly, five minutes,” some guy tells me. He has wire-rim glasses, a full red beard, and a Greenpeace sticker on the lapel of his coat. “She’s bringing the coffin,” he says. “What’s the problem?”

  Ignoring his question, I ask one of my own: What coffin?

  The guy looks faintly embarrassed as he explains. The coffin is just a prop, a bit of street theater for the TV cameras to focus on. It is meant to symbolize, so he tells us, the death of the new world order. “I mean, that’s what’s happening here, isn’t it?” He waves a hand upward, presumably toward the suite of the U.S. ambassador to the UN.

  But I am not here to debate the rights and wrongs of U.S. policy, so I simply ask him from which direction he expects the coffin to appear. When he nods southward, I set off with Weyland down toward Forty-ninth. Weyland suggests waiting, letting her come to us.

  “She’s coming with a coffin,” I say. “You want to wait till she’s sitting outside the Waldorf with that, the TV cameras all running, before we try to question her?”

  Weyland sticks out his lower lip. He sees my point.

  About a hundred yards down Park Avenue seems far enough; we stop and linger. Weyland goes and gets himself a hot dog from the stand, then comes and rests his back against the wall beside me. He is in his mid-fifties; his tightly matted head of curls is already gray. Like so many older guys in uniform, he has a careworn and sad-eyed look; it’s as if he has seen a little more of the underside of life than he would care to remember. He chews on the hot dog and tilts his head back, enjoying the sun on his face. He is making the most of his unexpected excursion beyond the boundaries of UNHQ.

  “Take you back to the good old days?” I inquire after a minute, just making talk.

  “Not my beat.” Weyland gestures with a finger up and down Park. “My beat, there weren’t no good ol’ days. Just a lot of no-hope gangbangers doing crime.”

  I ask him how long he was a cop.

  “Nigh on fifteen years. Too long. Shoulda stayed in the marines, have my ass retired by now instead of standing here waiting for some freak with a coffin.” He finishes the hot dog and brushes his hands together. “Make any kinda sense to you, that new-world-order blah?”

  I tell him that the NGOs have been pushing their own proposals for a more comprehensive reform of the Security Council. The proposals have never made it to first base in any place that mattered.

  “So they don’t get what they’re crying for, they just spit,” Weyland remarks.

  Not quite how the senior NGO people would see it, but I tell Weyland that he has the general idea. He shakes his head.

  “Makes you kinda wonder how it’s gonna be when they all grow up and take over the zoo.”

  Then his head swings south and I hear the same sound a moment later. A rhythm of voices above the traffic, a faint chant rising. The pedestrians going by us pick it up, heads begin to turn. After a few seconds the words of the chant become audible.

  “Insecurity! Insecurity! Insecurity Council!”

  Weyland turns to me, his eyelids droop.

  The coffin comes bobbing and weaving toward us through the pedestrian traffic, carried by six pallbearers shoulder-high. The pallbearers are wearing black body stockings printed with X-ra
y-type skeletons, the features of their faces obscured by white greasepaint. Ahead of them three guys in long black cloaks carve a path for the coffin. One of them has a bullhorn; he walks by us now, leading the chant. A leaflet is shoved into my hand as I search the faces, afraid that we’ve missed her in the sidewalk crush.

  “Back behind,” says Weyland, nudging me.

  And then I see her, ten yards behind the coffin, forcing leaflets on the indifferent citizens of New York. She is wearing a black cloak that reaches down to her ankles and her face looks just like it does in the still from the surveillance tapes: elfin, powder-white with black trimmings, and a wide-open mouth.

  “Insecurity! Insecurity! Insecurity Council!”

  She thrusts a leaflet into Weyland’s hand as she goes by. I turn to walk beside her. She comes up to my shoulder; I have to stoop as I speak.

  “Miss Yomoto, my name’s Windrush. I’m from UN Legal Affairs. We’ve been trying to get hold of you regarding the NGO reception Monday night.”

  “From where?”

  “UN Legal Affairs. The Secretariat.”

  She carries on handing out the leaflets.

  “Do you mind if we just step aside a minute?”

  “Ah-ha.”

  I turn aside but she does not follow me. When I catch up to her, she continues distributing the damn leaflets. By now there is a snowdrift of the things on the sidewalk; the Park Avenue pedestrians do not seem overly concerned with the proposed change in the Security Council’s composition. I touch Suzi Yomoto’s arm.

  “I said, do you mind stepping aside?”