Diplomatic Immunity (20 page)

The PC screen finally changes. I am out of UN Travel now and into Accounts; here I will be able to confirm which UN department authorized Toshio’s irregular swing through Geneva and Basel. My money is on Internal Oversight. This I really should have been told. I cannot believe it has been kept from me. What stupid bureaucratic game is Dieter Rasmussen playing here? Clearly he never told Pascal. But Patrick? Thinking about it winds me up further; my fingers pound like hammers on the keys.

“If you want to get out of the system,” Juan calls, “double-click escape.”

Punching the final key, I wait, staring at the screen. Hot fury simmers in my chest. But the moment the screen comes up, my righteous, soaring anger comes crashing violently back to earth. The departmental authorization code for Toshio’s trip, the letters and numbers in the top left-hand corner, they are not the ones I expected to see. Not IO, for Internal Oversight; but LA, for Legal Affairs. And the authorizing name is not Dieter Rasmussen’s.

“Found anything?” Juan calls from the bathroom.

I stare at the screen, rocked into silence.

Then the john flushes, the bathroom door opens, and I reach out and double-click the escape key. Immediately the screen goes blank.

A moment later, Juan rejoins me. “Any use to you?” He nods at the PC.

I nod distractedly, still staring at the point on the screen where the authorizing name appeared. Shock seems to have seared the letters to my retina: S. Windrush.

21

“L
ISTEN UP!
”
MIKE CRIES OVER NOISE IN THE
ROOM.
“Here it is.”

He stands in front of the senior uniformed Security people, clipboard in hand, and talks them through the duty roster for the night. The General Assembly session is the worst time of year for everyone here. Delegates are never where they should be; scores of national secret services endlessly scream for reports on how their people are being protected; belligerent journalists continually breach security at the worst times and in all the worst possible places. And this evening, of course, there is another matter that Mike’s officers want to raise: What progress has been made in the investigation of the death of Toshio Hatanaka?

“Sam’s running it,” Mike answers when the inevitable question finally comes. He gestures over their heads to where he has just caught sight of me by the door. “It’s early days. What I can say is, anybody pointing a finger right now knows diddly-squat. That right, Sam?”

A few of the guards turn around, so I nod as firmly as I can.

But the tired eyes linger; there is an air of weary resignation here. Bitter experience has taught these people not to put much faith in the half-truths that trickle down to them from the upper floors of the Secretariat. What they know for a fact is that the senior Secretariat bureaucrats and the delegates generally treat them like bellhops, not security professionals, and now that these same high-handed pols are pointing the finger at them as responsible for Toshio’s death, their understandable response is an aggrieved closing of ranks.

“Bullshit,” someone mutters.

I pretend not to have heard, but Mike glowers darkly. He consults his clipboard again.

“Anybody hears anything, anything at all might give us a lead on Hatanaka, I wanna hear it. Not tomorrow. Not when-I-get-a-minute.” He levels his pen at them. “You know, I know.”

“Glad someone does,” comes a lone voice. Grim laughter ripples through the room; even Mike manages a tight smile. When he dismisses them, they go filing out the door like a team of NBA rejects about to meet the Lakers.

“Not good?” I say when they’re gone.

Mike comes over to the door. “Morale gets any lower, they’ll be sending someone to the frigging ILO.” The International Labor Organization. I take this as a joke at first, but Mike isn’t smiling. “Some young idiots are actually talking about a strike,” he says.

“How were the Kwoks?”

“Oh, yeah.” Mike nods as we go down the hall. “They sent you a present.”

“A present.”

“Yeah.”

“What kind?”

“Just a second,” he says, turning in to the Surveillance Room.

Banks of screens line one wall, black-and-white pictures from security cameras positioned within the UN buildings and grounds. Two guards are monitoring the monitors, the remains of a family-sized pizza sitting on the desk between them. Beside the pizza lie several empty foam cups; there are candy wrappers on the floor by the trash can. Mike leans on the console, one eye on the monitors, and receives the senior guard’s impromptu report: The General Assembly broke up early, the guard thinks the Assembly president looked badly hungover; the Third and Sixth Committees are still sitting, word from the door guards is they’re expecting a ten
P.M.
finish; the grounds and the Secretariat building are quiet, as they should be, and the dwindling band of Free Tibet protesters across First Avenue has stopped beating the peace drum. Another day winding down.

Mike spends a few moments just shooting the breeze then, making sure these guys feel like they’re part of the team. Appreciated. There isn’t one window in this room; a ten-hour shift here, five days a week, cannot be anybody’s idea of a good time. As Mike pushes off the console to leave, the guard says, “And Weyland had visitors.”

Mike stops.

The guard flicks a switch and points to a monitor. The scene that appears is pre-taped; the time flashing in the bottom right-hand corner is from two hours ago.

Weyland, down in the cafeteria, is approached by two men in suits. He stands, barring their way to the kitchen and the coolroom where Toshio’s body lies. Neither of the two visitors looks pleased. One of them is the Tunku. The other one, Patrick O’Conner. After a brief exchange, Patrick and the Tunku retreat.

The guard flips a switch, the tape freeze-frames.

“Just those two,” the guard tells Mike. “We radioed down to Weyland. He said it wasn’t a problem.” He points to another monitor, the cafeteria again, real time. Weyland sits alone, reading a magazine.

Mike chucks the guard’s shoulder, makes some ribald remark, then under the cover of the guard’s laughter he leads me out to the hall.

“Patrick mention to you he wanted another look at the body?” Mike asks, his brow furrowing as we go down the hall to his office.

I shake my head.

“The Tunku?” he says.

The Tunku, I tell him, hardly needs my approval if he has a direct line open to Patrick. Besides, as chairman of the UNHQ Committee, the Tunku can roam pretty much where he likes. Mike sucks on his teeth. He asks me again about Patrick’s reaction when I mentioned the bugs in Toshio’s apartment. And I give him the same answer. Extreme anger.

“This is Patrick,” I remind Mike. “He can’t help sticking his nose in. If he’s not doing something himself, it’s not being done right.”

“Well, he’s sticking his nose in too damn far. Now I’m hearing he’s been interviewing some of those NGO bozos we had in, like he’s checking up on what I’m doing. He’s screwing around. I don’t like it, I’m telling you.”

He goes in to his office. I go in after him and close the door.

“Toshio didn’t have any business in Geneva,” I say. “He just went through Geneva on his way to Basel.”

Mike stops, one hand on his desk, and looks back at me. “Basel?”

I use his PC to log on to the Secretariat system. Then I take him through the Travel and Accounts files, pointing out everything that Juan showed me. Mike receives all this in silence.

“LA,” I tell him finally, clicking onto the authorization. “Legal Affairs. We authorized Toshio’s trip.”

Mike lays a finger on the screen: S. Windrush.

“You.”

“No, Mike, not me.” I explain the different access levels in the Legal Affairs software, the electronic hierarchy. “And I didn’t put my name in there, so that leaves Patrick.”

“He knew Toshio went to Basel?”

“More than that. Patrick authorized the goddamned trip.”

Mike looks at me. We have discussed Toshio’s supposed journey to Geneva at least twice in Patrick’s presence. And Patrick never said one single word about Basel.

“So what’s in Basel?” Mike asks me.

I have no idea. Every UN agency in Switzerland that I am aware of is based in Geneva.

Mike ponders a moment. “Patrick got any reason he might wanna screw you?”

“I don’t know about screwing me. But he’s desperate for me to issue a clean bill of health on Asahaki. Clear him of any suspicion of involvement in the fraud.”

“Which clears him of any suspicion in the murder.”

“That’s Patrick’s take on it.” I remind Mike of my summons to the Security Council side chamber this morning. “That’s what they all want. The whole perm five. Asahaki back here lobbying for the Japanese seat. But Patrick especially. He needs that Yes vote to save his ass up on thirty-eight.”

“And you told Patrick to go jump.”

“I told him that if Asahaki comes back, I’d question the man.”

Mike studies the PC screen. S. Windrush.

“Patrick’s telling Eckhardt you’re letting personal stuff screw up your judgment.” Eckhardt, Mike’s boss. “Personal stuff, meaning that girlfriend of yours.”

Jennifer. Sighing, I squeeze the bridge of my nose. Patrick, it seems, remains determined to apply pressure on me from every angle possible. I ask Mike what Eckhardt said to Patrick in reply.

“Eckhardt said he’d tell me. So he told me.” Mike shrugs. “Bunch of crap. I wasn’t even gonna mention it.”

He wasn’t going to, but now he has.

“I’ve kept everything with Jennifer strictly on the level, Mike.”

He studies my name on the screen. The authorization. Finally he pushes back from his desk and beckons me into the small side room off his office, where pieces of outdated security equipment are piled untidily on leaning shelves. Walkie-talkies the size of bricks. Ear-phones the size of saucers. The only modern equipment is the video recorder and the TV, and Mike pulls up a chair in front of them.

“We got something from the Kwoks,” he says. “Don’t ask me what, but it’s something.”

“Do you think Patrick’s trying to screw me?”

“One thing at a time, okay? What big palooka was it dragged me down Chinatown anyway?” He pushes a tape into the VCR. “Here’s the story. When you left me, I went back there. Had coffee in a place next to the dry goods shop, thinking it over. While I’m sitting there, I saw maybe five old fellas come and go from the Jade Moon Theater. Not staying long, coupla minutes, then out. They go in with nothing, come out with a bag full of Christ knows what. Spot the clue. Next old guy comes along, he’s about eighty, when he comes out, I follow him.”

I raise a brow. I ask Mike if I really want to hear the rest.

“He volunteered an item from his bag.” Mike points to the VCR. “This tape.”

When he hits the button the screen flickers.

Orchestral music rises, and there’s a shot of footlights and a red-curtained stage. As the music crescendos, the title comes up:
Dance the Dance.
Beneath this, Chinese subtitles. Then the red curtain rises. Mike grunts in disgust; my own instinct, I admit, is to laugh out loud. There are six men onstage, three jock types, big and beefy, and three others as slender as reeds. It is some kind of ballet, the three big guys dressed as men, the other three as women, but not one of them is wearing a stitch from the waist down. The effect as they pirouette and leap around the stage is bizarrely comical; they appear to be taking themselves absolutely seriously, as if they really can dance, which they patently cannot.

“What’s this got to do with Po Lin?”

“Watch.”

A few moments later the dancers are shuffling together, forming a boy-girl-boy line center stage. Each “girl” bends and takes hold of the buttocks of the “boy” in front. Behind each “girl” a “boy” moves into position. The orchestra plays on. We get close-ups now of several well-oiled pink erections.

“Okay, I get the picture.”

“It gets better,” Mike says.

I press the button and the screen goes blank. “Po Lin was investing the stolen money in the gay porn industry?”

Mike flips out the tape and we wander back to his office. “When I found out what kinda stuff old Theater Kwok was selling, I went back to see him. We had a talk. Once he got it through his thick head I wasn’t there to put him outta business but I could if I wanted to, he talked a little. He wouldn’t tell me anything about the business, his investors, where he gets the porn, like that. But he says he never heard of any Wang Po Lin.”

“You bought that?”

Mike flips open his wallet and hands me the mug shot of Po Lin from our Security files. “This guy,” Mike says, tapping the mug shot, “this guy is someone Kwok knows.”

“Po Lin.”

“With Kwok he used an alias. Dong? Pang?” Mike lifts a shoulder. “Something.”

“You said Kwok wouldn’t talk about his investors.”

“Po Lin wasn’t an investor. He was a customer.”

“Wholesaling Kwok’s tapes?”

“No, Jesus. Not some kingpin-type customer. A customer customer. A Joe off the street. Po Lin bought a couple of tapes a week, personal use, that was it.”

Personal use. A seventy-one-year-old anti-imperialist crusader. I take a moment to weigh this totally unexpected connection against what we have learned from Marie Lefebre.

“Either Theater Kwok’s lying or the money went through the dry goods operation.”

“He wasn’t lying,” says Mike.

For a few minutes we discuss the possibilities for recycling stolen money through the import-export business. Despite the down-at-heel look of the Jade Moon store, the dry goods operation seems to me to be where the answer must lie. But the Kwoks will be prepared for us now, another visit down there would be a waste of time. I remark, somewhat hopefully, that Pascal might be able to trace something in the registered accounts. But Mike has serious doubts.

“Can’t you get this journalist to tell you where those numbers came from? The source?”

I make a face: extremely unlikely.

“Try,” Mike says, then he looks down at Po Lin’s mug shot in his hand. “If Po Lin was pumping money through Jade Moon Enterprises anywhere—dry goods, whatever—how come old Theater Kwok identified this? Don’t you think he’d wanna speak to his brother about it first?”

A very good point. And while we’re still trying to puzzle that one out, Mike gets a call. Eckhardt. Mike turns aside and lowers his voice, so to make things easier for him, I step out into the hall where I wander along to the water fountain and fill a plastic cup. My gaze drifts out through the window. There is a clear line of sight to the USUN building across First Avenue. The lemony evening light is fading, and on every one of USUN’s eleven floors the white fluorescents are glowing. Late-night oil starting to burn. The big vote is tomorrow. From now until then the USUN phones will be running hot, faxes flying, e-mails zipping through the ether. Last-minute arm-twisting. Hourly updates to the Secretary of State down in Washington.

Resting one hand against the windowpane, I sip my water. I count up eight floors in the USUN building, then across two banks of windows. Jennifer’s office. The lights, of course, are on.

And I am standing like that, pondering the strained state of my relationship with the woman I am seriously considering asking to be my wife, the heated words we exchanged down there on the sidewalk this afternoon, when Mike shouts my name from his office. Dropping my cup in the trash, I head back.

“Get upstairs,” he says as I go in. “Go see Patrick right now. I have to wait here for Eckhardt.”

He is standing behind his desk. He evades my eyes by staring down at the phone.