Diplomatic Immunity (39 page)

“Toshio figured it out, didn’t he? That you’d rigged some numbers, pointed him at Asahaki and away from Lemtov. But this is Toshio. He didn’t just run upstairs and report you. Not his style. Not Toshio. He knew how the game was played, he’d been dealing with guys like Lemtov most of his career. You were just a pawn. He knew that. So what did Toshio do? I mean, you’d been working with him on the Special Committee thing for a while, he knew you, maybe he even thought of you as a friend. Maybe he’d even been to your apartment, saw how you were living. He knew if he reported you, you were gone. Everything you had, your career, prospects, everything destroyed. Was Toshio the kind of guy to do that to you?”

This touches a nerve. Pascal blinks a few times, then presses a thumb and forefinger on his closed eyelids.

“He confronted you, didn’t he? He told you he knew what you’d done.”

From Pascal, silence. Down on the FDR Drive the cars rumble on while the recorder in my pocket whirs quietly. I need Pascal to speak. Looking back to the guardhouse, I see Jennifer spread her hands to me, a questioning gesture: Where’s Rachel? What the hell’s going on? Behind Pascal’s back I gesture to her: Wait.

“Maybe Toshio even asked you to turn again, help him nail Lemtov,” I suggest. “Whatever. That’s how things stood Monday night. That’s why Toshio was over at the Japan Society, that’s why he copied out that poem for Asahaki. Some kind of reconciliation, Japanese style. He knew by then that Asahaki wasn’t guilty of the fraud.”

Pascal stands, I jump up and grab his arm.

“And by then you were afraid. Afraid of what Toshio knew, what it could do to you. And more than that, you were afraid of Lemtov.”

Pascal jerks his arm free; we stand facing each other. The recorder in my pocket seems to be searing my chest. Speak, I think. For chrissake, Pascal, speak. But Pascal Nyeri maintains his stubborn silence. So I do the only thing I can. I raise my hand and point. My final shot.

“Lemtov gave you the heroin, that syringe. Matate shut down the security camera for you. And you, Pascal, you killed Toshio.”

Pascal stares straight through me. Not stunned, not even thoughtful, more like he is somewhere else, reliving some scene in his mind. Then slowly his expression changes. His shoulders bow and his eyes cloud with tears. And at that moment I see Pascal just as he feels, alone now in all the world. Then he speaks, not to me but to himself.

“Le plus beau moment de l’amour c’est quand on monte l’escalier.”

And then from behind me there comes a wail of real terror.

“Mama!”

My heart seizes. Rachel. Crying as she cried as a child, screaming for her mother.

I swing around. She is up on the terrace, a guard at either side of her holding her arms, leading her toward the guardhouse, where Jennifer and the Homicide guys are waiting.

“Rachel!” I shout.

Up there, they all turn. And Pascal seizes his moment; he runs. Caught flatfooted, I lift a hand helplessly after him and he goes left, sees the guards stepping from behind the trees, then breaks right along the walkway toward the conference rooms. But now guards seem to be coming from everywhere. Three of them go sprinting past me after him and three more appear on the walkway up ahead of Pascal. He is surrounded; he will not escape.

As I move toward the terrace, Mike comes running from the building. He shouts at the guards holding Rachel. Bemused, they release her and she comes stumbling down the steps and across the lawn where I gather her in my arms. She clings to me, pressing her face into my chest while I stroke her hair and kiss her head. I keep telling her that it’s over. Up on the terrace, Jennifer confers with Mike.

Then a guard behind us on the walkway shouts, “Move in now. Grab him!”

Still holding Rachel, I turn.

Pascal has been corralled. A semicircle of guards has trapped him against the low wall of the walkway. He can’t escape but he is clambering onto the low wall. Below him, a clear fifty-foot drop, is the FDR Drive. Beyond that, way too far to jump, the East River. Crouching, he holds on with both hands, and there is nothing distant about his look now. He is simply terrified, a guilty man at the mercy of fear. And what he fears is not the drop but capture. One guard, caught up in the moment, has drawn a gun.

On the terrace Mike shouts, “Back off! Don’t shoot, for chrissake. Back off!”

But the guards, totally focused on Pascal, don’t seem to hear.

Clamping a hand to the back of Rachel’s head, I keep her face pressed against my chest. But I can’t take my own eyes off the scene. It is the awful inevitability, the dreadful certainty of what is about to happen that is so sickeningly mesmerizing. As if the moves are somehow preordained.

The guard with the drawn gun takes one step forward. And Pascal rears back. Rears back and overbalances. His hands are suddenly clutching air, his arms flailing skyward. The other guards seem to freeze. Pascal’s head swivels. Wild-eyed, he looks down, sees the FDR Drive, instinctively straightens one leg and reaches back for the wall, and then he is suspended a moment, poised against gravity, against time. Suddenly he twists in the air, his body jackknifing, falling, his arms reaching skyward again as he disappears soundlessly behind the wall.

The silence seems to go on forever.

And then down on the FDR Drive there is the scream of braking tires, the sudden blare of a horn, and the bang and the long, slow crunch of crumpling metal.

42

P
ANDEMONIUM. A WOMAN, SOME TOURIST UP ON THE
terrace, begins to scream. The guards rush to the walkway wall and look over, shouting at one another, shouting down to the Drive, where a whole chorus of horns is suddenly blaring. Then Mike goes running past me to the walkway, calling back over his shoulder to Jennifer, telling her to get an ambulance down there fast.

Rachel lifts her face from my chest and looks around, startled as a deer.

More tourists emerge onto the terrace, drawn by the screaming woman. One guy tries to calm her; another is pointing to the walkway, shouting in Spanish as a crowd gathers.

Rachel looks up at me, says “Dad?” and I quickly wrap an arm around her shoulders and steer her across the North Lawn, away from the commotion, the raised voices, and the gathering rush of people. I keep telling her that it’s all right, that everything’s okay, but my legs seem to be moving of their own volition. The picture of Pascal momentarily suspended in the air is seared like a lightning flash onto my mind’s eye. When we reach the tree-screened privacy of the Eleanor Roosevelt Memorial, I ease Rachel onto the bench. Then I sit down beside her. My legs are trembling. The voices over on the walkway are distant now, Mike’s bawling voice the only one I can really make out. Close the area, he cries. He shouts for the guards to get the tourists out.

“What happened?” says Rachel.

I draw her to me. She hunkers down close. I stroke her hair, and after a moment she lies down on the bench and rests her head on my thigh. A squirrel forages through the ground ivy, rustling the fallen leaves near my feet. And though I watch the squirrel, it is Pascal I still see. His final words that I hear.

What happened? I think.

And the alarming truth is that I am suddenly not sure I know.

Pascal Nyeri has been killed. By the fall, by the first or second car that went careering over his body. It hardly matters. Fifteen minutes after the event you can still hear the sirens down there on the Drive, police and ambulance men sorting out the wreckage. The North Lawn and the whole terrace area have been cleared of tourists; there is a line of UN guards ushering the last sightseers from the concourse straight out to First Avenue. The tourists crane their necks to where some guards and gawking delegates lean against the low wall, looking down ghoulishly to the mayhem on the Drive. Two TV news choppers are buzzing like dragonflies out over the East River, filming the chaos, something dramatic to lead tonight’s broadcast. Just near the bench Mike and Jennifer are standing together with the attorney from the D.A.’s office, three heads bowed over the tape recorder I have given them, listening to the final scene of Pascal’s short life. The sound quality is surprisingly good; I can hear my own voice quite clearly.

Matate, so Mike has told me, was caught over at the East Forty-third Street exit. Apparently he could not wait to relate his side of the story. And everything Matate has confessed squares with what Pascal told me, right down to the payment of five hundred dollars. Matate denies any part in Toshio’s murder. He says he told Pascal about the scheduled security camera shutdown in the basement Monday night. Pascal talked to him about it several times that weekend, confirmed that it was definitely happening, but beyond that Matate claims to know nothing.

Matate’s admission, coupled with the tape and with Pascal’s reaction when I accused him outright, should be enough. Rachel, God willing, should walk away free. And yet my relief in the aftermath is not exultant. The last minute of Pascal’s life, my accusation, his attempted escape, the silent fall—all of it keeps playing over in my mind. Shock has printed it there indelibly. Could I have handled it differently? Better? Did he really have to die?

“Sam,” Mike says now, and I touch Rachel’s shoulder as I rise from the bench. Mike and Jennifer have finished listening to the tape. When I join them, Mike is speaking into his two-way.

“I’ll have to take a copy later,” Jennifer tells me, tapping the recorder. “Keep Rachel on the grounds here while we straighten it out with the D.A.’s office.”

“No arrest?”

She turns to the attorney, the Homicide cops’ legal escort. He looks down at Rachel on the bench and shakes his head. No arrest, he says. Once the D.A. is informed, the guy says he is sure that Rachel will be free. The guy bobs his head at me and Jennifer, then walks back toward the guardhouse.

I look at Jennifer. I cannot quite believe that the ordeal is over. She places the recorder in my hand, then squeezes my arm.

“I’m glad for you,” she says, glancing at Rachel. “For both of you.” She seems about to say more, but the attorney calls to her and she goes to join him. They head toward the guardhouse together.

“Eckhardt’s bringing Patrick down,” Mike tells me, sliding the two-way onto his belt.

“Lemtov?”

“Still in the Council Chamber.”

“He hasn’t run?”

Mike drops his voice. “Lemtov’s a thirty-eighth-floor problem now. Leave it alone. You got Rachel outa this. Be happy.”

Weyland comes ambling down the path, and when he reaches the bench, Rachel gets up and embraces him. She clasps his shoulder and he turns aside gingerly. It seems he has really done some damage there.

I turn the tape recorder over in my hands. Then I give it to Mike. “Make some copies once you’ve played it for Patrick and Eckhardt.”

“You’re not staying?”

“Can you call your people in Surveillance, let them know I’m coming up there to review the tapes?”

He nods, looking straight at me. He repeats his warning for me to leave it alone.

I go have a quick word with Rachel, warning her not to leave the UN grounds till I say so. I thank Weyland and shake his hand. And as I move away across the lawn, Mike calls after me, “You wanna tell me what you gotta review?”

I keep right on walking.

After all the grief I have caused them today, the surveillance guards are understandably not pleased to find that they are now expected to assist me. But Mike has given them their orders, so I am allocated a screen at the far end of the room while they track down the sections of the security tapes that I want to see. Video cartridges come sliding along the floor to me every few minutes. As I review each tape, I jot down the times from the bottom right-hand corner. I note the places where the events are occurring, carefully putting everything in sequence.

It is an hour before I am done. Then I play it through tape by tape before kicking back and staring at the blank screen in front of me. I am silent. Numbed. The senior guard calls over to me from his console, asking what I want to see now.

I shake my head. Nothing, I say.

He gives some button a savage punch and a picture appears on the blank screen I am staring at. The Security Council Chamber. A live transmission.

There they all are, the big guns of international diplomacy, the enforcers of the new world order, the self-selected elite. Only Bruckner, reading from a prepared statement, shows any sign of animation. Lemtov, Froissart, and Chou En, each wearing headphones, look bored, half asleep. Lady Nicola glances at her watch, then puts her hands to the small of her back and stretches. They will have heard by now that Pascal Nyeri is dead. Maybe they have already taken a second brief adjournment to the side chamber, which seems likely, but from their faces you would never know that anything untoward has occurred to disturb the morning’s deliberations.

The presiding body of international affairs doing what it does best. Looking banal. Inviting the curious viewer to switch channels, to turn that curiosity someplace else.

Then I hear Mike passing along the hall outside. He is talking to a guard, debating what to do with Matate. But for a while longer I sit thinking, staring at the screen. Finally I rise and go down to Mike’s office, where I find him alone, one phone to his ear, another ringing on his desk. He sees me and throws up a hand in despair as he carries on his conversation. With the local NYPD precinct captain, it seems, a man on the warpath about the disaster he is blaming Mike for causing down on the FDR Drive. I signal to Mike. He rolls his eyes and covers the mouthpiece with his hand.

“If he wants,” I say, pointing to the phone, “I’ll go down and identify Nyeri’s body.”

Mike nods, grateful right now for any help he can get. He scribbles an address on his memo pad, at the same time confirming with the precinct captain that he has the right morgue, that the place has not moved.

“Yeah, yeah,” Mike tells the precinct captain. “I’m sending someone down there now.”

Mike rolls his eyes again and cradles the phone beneath his chin as he tears the page from his memo pad. He gives me the address and carries on his conversation as I reverse out the door.