Diplomatic Immunity

by Grant Sutherland

  Christ.

  By the time I catch up with Marie Lefebre, she is seated by the radio and TV consoles in the press box. The place is empty apart from her, all the screens are switched off. To my right, the long windows of smoked glass let in light from the Security Council main chamber, and glancing down there, I see a lone technician working away at the microphone cables. When I accidentally bump into one of the mounted TV cameras in the cramped space, Marie lifts her eyes from her desk. We look at each other.

  “What fraud?” I say.

  She rolls her eyes. I am going to have to do better than that.

  “I can have Undersecretary-General O’Conner come and see you,” I tell her, a somewhat crass attempt to bludgeon her with rank. “He might be able to clarify your position here for you.”

  “I understand my position.”

  “I’m not sure that you do.”

  She puts down her pen. “If you withdraw my UN accreditation, I will give what I know to a colleague. And because you have withdrawn my accreditation, my colleague will know what I say is the truth. Plus, he will accuse you of interfering with press freedom.” She tilts her head, smiling pleasantly. She has me by the balls.

  “I’d like you to hold your story.”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m telling you to hold it. Whatever you have. Is that possible?” While she considers my request, an unhappy thought strikes me. “Does anyone else have it?”

  “No.” Instantly she corrects herself. “Yes.” Laughing now, she crisscrosses her index fingers in the air. “Question number two, the answer is no. I think no one else has it. Question number one, if you can convince me to hold back the story? Maybe.”

  “You just said yes.”

  “Now I say maybe.” She purses her lips, momentarily lost in a thought of her own. Then she reaches for a magazine at the far side of the console, her skirt riding up her stockinged legs. “This is the question you could ask me, Mr. Windrush—Samuel?”

  I lift a shoulder: What she calls me is hardly the problem here.

  “You could ask me,” she says, “what you can do to help me.”

  “What I can do to help you?” I say.

  Fixing me with a look that is almost feline, she hands me the magazine, the latest issue of Time. The Dalai Lama, robed in orange, is at prayer on the cover.

  In a thoughtless stab at humor, I ask if she wants me to pray for her. Marie is not amused. Her eyes suddenly blaze, Joan of Arc in the twenty-first century. She snatches back the magazine.

  “I have applied for a job there.”

  “Time magazine?”

  “I am fed up with this.” Her hand sweeps over the consoles, she does not have to explain. Radio, the third-class citizen of the media age. Audio journalists like Marie can never get the big interviews; the ambassadors who matter all insist on print or sound-bite TV. The job at Time, so Marie tells me now, is New York–based. She would be doing editorial on the European desk. She clearly covets the prospective job with every fiber of her journalistic being.

  “And how is it I can help you exactly?”

  “Special Envoy Hatanaka.”

  I nod. Still listening, I say.

  “O’Conner’s press release said natural causes,” she goes on. “But he did not mention Hatanaka’s investigation into the Special Committee. O’Conner did not say, I think, the full truth, the misappropriation of the Special Committee funds. I know there is a story here. It could be a big story.”

  “Would it be pointless to ask you how you came by this information? Which I am not, by the way, confirming.”

  “Here is my choice,” says Marie, ignoring my question. “I report it today, what I know already. Then every journalist in New York will come here. I will have one minute of glory, then—poof.” She makes an exploding gesture with her fingers. In that scenario, she means she will be merely one among hundreds, buried, as the UN regulars are always buried, by the big names sent in from outside: The New York Times and The Washington Post. Time magazine.

  “Plan two?” I inquire.

  “I wait for the whole story.”

  My eyes wander down to the copy of Time. I am beginning to get the picture here, what Marie Lefebre wants from me.

  “When you’ve got the whole story, you give it to Time, they run a big splash on it, you’re their new golden girl. They’re so grateful, they offer you this great job you want.” Glancing up, I ask, “Close?”

  “You missed out where someone from Legal Affairs gives me the pieces of the story that I cannot find for myself.”

  “Ah.”

  “And also, if I have information that can help this person from Legal Affairs in his investigation of Hatanaka’s death—”

  “You’d be obliged to hand it over anyway. And who told you I had anything to do with the investigation?”

  “This information I will share with him. But only if”—she raises a finger—“only if he gives me his word that I will have exclusively the full inside story when it is finished. And an interview.”

  “With me?”

  “Of course.”

  “No chance.”

  She frowns in mock bad humor. She knows she can lighten up now; it has become obvious to both of us that I am going to have to agree to some kind of deal. Not just because I want everything I can get on Asahaki from any quarter I can get it. But because she has me over a barrel. I simply cannot risk Marie broadcasting whatever it is she has on the Special Committee. Or on Toshio’s investigation. Or mine.

  “Here’s the offer,” I say after giving it some thought. “You give me whatever you’ve got. You give it to me right now, then you leave this story alone. When this whole thing’s cleared up—and it’s cleared up when I say it is—I’ll give you your exclusive. You can’t quote me. No direct attribution. But you’ll have enough to take your shot at Time. That’s the deal. And it’s nonnegotiable, so don’t even ask.”

  She turns that over, then finally offers me her hand on the deal. But when I take her hand, I hold it firmly and look her dead in the eye.

  “If you back out of this, if you broadcast one word before I give you the okay, I’ll have your accreditation withdrawn. Then I’ll speak to some friends in the State Department and they’ll make sure any application you make for a green card gets turned down. Without that you won’t be working at Time or anywhere else in the U.S. You’ll be kicked out of the country. That’s the deal.”

  She looks at me now as if reappraising what she sees. Her brassy front is shaken somewhat. She extracts her hand from mine. It is clear she did not enjoy my routine.

  At that moment a door to the rear of the press box opens. Someone calls out, asking Marie if she is ready to go to lunch. I glance over. It is Mei Tan, Toshio’s secretary. I look from her to Marie. Right, I think. Okay. Lunch. Just the girls. Marie’s face now is a picture of annoyance and confusion. She tells Mei Tan to go on ahead. Mei Tan disappears. Then, reaching over the console, Marie begins fooling with some switches, unwrapping a large reel of tape.

  “Your informant?” I venture.

  “We have made the deal.”

  “If Mei Tan’s all you’ve got—”

  “She did not give me this.” Touched in a sensitive place, her journalistic pride, Marie pulls a slip from her purse and slaps it down on the desk. A list of company names. Beside each name, a number. Some very large numbers, all with dollar signs in front.

  I look up.

  “American investments,” Marie says, “made with the UN money stolen from the Special Committee.”

  My jaw slackens. I look down again. The numbers range from one hundred thousand dollars on up to a million. And there are more than a dozen companies on the list. Marie turns over the slip of paper. On this side there is just one company name, Jade Moon Enterprises, the number beside it one million dollars. And for Jade Moon, unlike the other companies, there is an address. When I remark on that, Marie tells me that Jade Moon is the sole company on the list that she has so far been
able to trace.

  I lay my finger on the street name. My brow flexes. “Chinatown?”

  “Of course Chinatown. He would have many contacts there.”

  It takes me a few seconds, the meaning of her words creeping over me like a slow sea mist. The air becomes chilled; the light by which I have been guiding the undermanned ship of my investigation suddenly gutters low. There were three people on the UN Drug Control Program Special Committee. One of them was Chinese. I hang my head over the piece of paper. It is not the Japanese ambassador Marie is talking about here. These investments of the misappropriated UN funds were not made by Bunzo Asahaki.

  Marie’s hand brushes against mine. She lays a finger on Jade Moon’s address down in Chinatown.

  “Is there a better place,” she asks simply, “for Wang Po Lin to invest the stolen money?”

  18

  MIKE IS WHISTLING“BLUE MOON”AS WE WALK OUT of the cop station down by Mott Street; he has been whistling it on and off for nearly an hour.

  “It’s jade moon,” I say, finally reaching the end of my rope.

  He stops at the head of the steps. My car, illegally parked, is down by the squad cars.

  “The company,” I tell him, pointing to the papers in his hands, everything we have extracted from the local cops about Jade Moon Enterprises. “The company’s called Jade Moon. Jade’s not blue,” I say. “Jade’s green.”

  Mike looks at me blankly. Then, nodding to himself, he recommences his plaintive whistling and starts down the steps while I put a hand to my eyes and rub gently, taking a quiet moment out.

  Wang Po Lin, it seems, is not a name with which the precinct cops here are at all acquainted. And after Mike’s all-out friendly assault—a quarter hour chewing the fat with the precinct captain about the old days, ten minutes at the coffee machine slapping every uniformed back that came by, and a prairieful of bull dust to the ethnic Chinese cops whom the captain ordered to speak with us—I am pretty sure that these guys are not giving us the brush-off just because they are too lazy to check in their files. The name Wang Po Lin genuinely rings no bells here.

  More surprisingly, the name Jade Moon Enterprises sets no hearts jumping either. From what they tell us, it’s a long-established family concern, a dry goods wholesaler and a movie theater, each place run by one of a pair of twin brothers, the Kwoks, who are near retirement age. Over the years there has been the occasional fracas at the theater, but nothing to bring the SWAT team running, and the cops simply laughed when we raised the question of any Triad connection. So what goes on here? I wonder now. What, precisely, are we chasing?

  When I ask Mike those same questions down in the car, he turns his head.

  “Hey, don’t believe everything you heard back there.”

  “I didn’t. And what was all that crap you told them anyway? Since when did the Hong Kong police start knocking on your door for advice?”

  “They bought it, didn’t they?” he says, referring to how the local cops swallowed his improbable tale.

  “They bought it because they couldn’t believe a guy would be such a jackass that he’d go in there mouthing off like that if it wasn’t true.”

  “Right.” Mike hits the ignition and laughs. “What’s your point?” As we pull out around the squad cars, he expounds on his theory about cops and their mistakes, why I shouldn’t give up on Jade Moon Enterprises just yet. “Every station’s the same. They all think they got their own precinct taped. Out on the street, things look like yesterday? Hey. No problem. We got the drop on it. One place I worked, guys bought their doughnuts from the same old fella every morning. A real character, you know. Black guy. Nobody notices he’s selling more than just doughnuts till some unhappy customer goes in there one day flying and blows this guy’s head clean off. I’m telling you, Sam. Cops are like everyone else. Most of the time they’re just seeing what they saw yesterday.”

  I remark that it seems unlikely the Kwok brothers are masterminding an international criminal conspiracy from the back room of a dry goods wholesaler in Chinatown.

  “Wait,” Mike tells me. He says that we will see what we will see.

  As we drive, he outlines our cover story, that we’re doing a survey for the Bureau of Small Business. Only half listening, I browse through the paperwork the local cops have given us on Jade Moon. There isn’t anything to hold my attention, and after a minute I find myself restudying the single sheet on Wang Po Lin that Mike pulled from the UN Security files.

  There is a photograph, a headshot clipped to the top left-hand corner. Po Lin is an old guy, seventy-one according to the given birth date, and he looks every day of it. His hair is white. The lenses in his horn-rimmed specs are thick. And from the way his frown lines droop down either side of his chin, it is clear that this guy does not regard his passage through the world as a barrel of laughs.

  That squares with his reputation too. The number-three man on the Chinese delegation, he gives the impression at times that he is personally out to right all the wrongs that have been done to his people over the centuries by foreign, primarily Western, aggression. He takes his retribution in the usual diplomatic manner, through the delivery of interminable and rancorous speeches. Whenever the opportunity arises, Po Lin can be relied on for a thirty-minute diatribe on imperialism and the West. The British are a particular target—Hong Kong, the Opium Wars. Rumor has it that Po Lin’s recall last month to Beijing is somehow connected with a verbal attack he made recently on Lady Nicola. Patrick tells me he heard that Lady Nicola delivered a diplomatic counterpunch that caused Po Lin’s recall.

  But Patrick did not know the nature of Lady Nicola’s weapon. And I wonder now if it’s possible she had the same information that Marie has given me. When I run the idea by Mike, he screws up his face.

  “How it sounds to me? Sounds to me like a wild-ass guess,” he says. “How about we do the legwork first, leave the head work till we got a few facts.”

  When he parks the car, I hand him the Po Lin mug shot, then I shove the rest of the paperwork under the seat and get out.

  Chinatown never changes. Though it gets a little bigger and plenty more crowded each year, its essential quality remains what it was when I arrived in New York half a lifetime ago. The restaurants are part of it, the smell of frying pork and vegetables that seem over the years to have impregnated the walls of the buildings; walking down the sidewalk with Mike now, I cannot help sniffing the salty air. And the old ladies loaded down with shopping, green vegetables and bolts of garish fabric sprouting from plastic bags—these could be the same people Sarah and I used to see when we came down here as freshmen, searching for a restaurant that wouldn’t break the bank.

  “Here,” says Mike, turning right.

  We see the signs immediately, twenty yards on down the street. The Jade Moon Theater is on the left, directly across from a shopfront that has the words Jade Moon emblazoned in dark green on its awning. Mike selects the shop as our first destination. Inside, the air is clotted and rich with spices. Cinnamon and nutmeg and God knows what all else. Open burlap bags stand in rows, knee-high along the back wall. A couple of elderly Chinese women are giving the goods a careful inspection, trailing their fingers through a sack of brown seeds.

  “Imported,” Mike says, drawing my attention to the labels on the sacks as we turn down the first aisle.

  Taiwan, it would appear, is the Kwok brothers’ major source. The shelves are loaded with bowls and jugs decorated Taipei style, cheap and shiny.

  I have a question. I gesture along the aisle both ways. “What are we looking for?”

  “A million bucks.”

  I lift a brow.

  “Or something that looks like a million bucks,” Mike tells me from the side of his mouth. “Anything to give us some idea we’re not just down here chasing our asses.”

  He moves up the aisle, and I trail after him, chewing my lip.

  I have an appointment with Jennifer Dale. When I phoned her earlier to let her know that Mike and I
are making a brief excursion beyond the bounds of UNHQ coming down here to Chinatown, she naturally had some questions. When I turned those questions aside, her tone became distinctly frosty; she more or less ordered me to get myself to her office the moment I’m back in Turtle Bay. And Jennifer is not my worst problem. When I gave Pascal Nyeri the list of company names I got from Marie Lefebre, he took one look at them and told me not to hold my breath. The companies, he says, might be registered anywhere in the U.S. from Florida up to Alaska; a proper search of the corporate registers in every state will take him at least a week. He can probably get a good financial picture of Jade Moon Enterprises in four or five days, he tells me, provided I can convince the U.S. corporate affairs authorities to speak to him. I’m going to have to raise the subject with Jennifer when I get back. An unhappy prospect.

  As I pause now by a stack of stainless steel woks, it strikes me that this investigation has wandered into rather strange territory. In truth, Dr. Livingstone himself was never more lost.

  “That Martinez kid came in this morning,” Mike tells me, picking up a box of joss sticks. “With Rachel.”

  “Juan’s okay.”

  “Kid’s got a frigging ponytail. Twenty-first century, we’re still breeding hippies.”

  I ask Mike if he learned anything from the NGO types he has questioned, if their statements brought anything useful to light. He shrugs, replacing the box on the shelf.