Diplomatic Immunity (21 page)

“What’s up?”

“Patrick’s detained a suspect for Hatanaka’s murder. Get yourself up there fast, Sam.”

“Who?”

Mike finally lifts his eyes. His look is strained.

It’s Rachel, he says.

22

I
DO NOT KNOCK. I SHOVE THE DOOR OPEN
AND BARREL
straight in. There is a crash behind me as the door swings back, slamming into the wall. My right arm is extended before I am two paces into the room. On the way up I have rehearsed a hundred possibilities, but now that I see Patrick’s obvious alarm, register that he is unprepared for any act of violence, it crosses my mind for one wild moment that I should actually do what he clearly fears I am about to do and leap across his desk and pound him into the floor. But the moment passes and I am left standing on one side of his desk, arm still extended, finger pointing, trembling with rage. The words when they come are not those I have rehearsed but ones altogether simpler, the hard and essential core of what I intended to say.

“Let her go.” Release her. Let my daughter go free.

The fear in Patrick’s eyes slowly recedes when he understands that he is not about to be struck. “That’s what I want, Sam,” he says in a placatory tone. “That’s what we all want.”

“You’ve detained her, for chrissake!” My glance flickers around. “Where is she?”

Patrick opens his hands, inviting me back into the land of sweet reason. “You think I wanted this? You don’t think I was surprised when I saw the evidence?”

“Evidence?”

“That’s right.”

“Patrick.” I place my index finger in the middle of his desk and lean forward. “Tell me where my daughter is, or I swear to God I will take your fucking head off.”

So speaks Samuel Windrush, man of peace, lapsed member of the Society of Friends. Fear rekindles in Patrick’s eyes.

“There’s a case to answer here,” he tells me lamely, but I stare straight at him until he cracks. “Room Seven,” he says finally. “And there’s a guard in there.”

Room Seven is a general purpose conference room for the thirty-fifth floor, the place where Patrick schmoozes the other Undersecretaries-General, bending them to his point of view on such globally vital concerns as who gets to shake the hand of the U.S. president when he visits and who gets to carry the Secretary-General’s bags on the next fact-finding mission to the Middle East. I barge straight in and find Rachel and the guard sitting at one end of the conference table. They are, somewhat to my surprise, playing cards. Even more incongruously, Rachel looks up at me and smiles.

“Hi, Dad.”

I point to the guard. I inform him that I wish to speak with my daughter alone.

The guard isn’t much older than Rachel; he clearly hasn’t got the least idea how to deal with this situation. He begins to ask me if I have Mr. O’Conner’s permission, but then Patrick himself arrives and the kid looks as if someone has just saved his life.

“Out,” Patrick tells him, leaning in through the doorway. The kid lays down his cards and goes. Fast.

Rachel looks from me to Patrick as though she has suddenly lost the drift of what is going on. When I ask her if she’s okay, she seems baffled by the question.

“Sam,” says Patrick behind me. “If you step outside here, stand still for five seconds, you might learn something.”

“Dad?” Rachel lays down her cards and gets to her feet.

I signal for her to stay where she is. “Don’t say another word to anyone,” I warn her. “Not till we’ve talked.”

She makes a face.

Stay, I tell her, raising a finger. Then I back out of Room Seven, close the door, and turn to face Patrick. “You haven’t told her she’s been detained.”

“That decision’s just been made,” he says.

Moving away from the door, I keep my voice low. “Well, unmake it, Patrick. Unmake it fast. Because how I see this, you’ve infringed on so many of Rachel’s civil liberties already, she’s got about twenty grounds to sue.”

“Oh? And which court would that be?”

“She’s a U.S. citizen.”

“She’s a Secretariat employee. And she’s on UN territory. If you want to get legalistic, the only court that could hear her is the ICJ.” The International Court of Justice, he means, in The Hague. This court’s fifteen judges bear the imprimatur of the UN General Assembly, and notwithstanding their protestations to the contrary, each judge is subject to all the usual political pressures from Turtle Bay. Patrick, a grand master of these games, asks me, “Fancy your chances?”

I should have hit him. Earlier there, in his office. I have not the slightest doubt, of course, that he would do what he is implicitly threatening to do and pull every invisible string radiating out from the General Assembly in order to suborn the judgment of the International Court. My blood boils. But I have worked for this man for three years, I cannot pretend that I do not know what he is like. I have slaved too often into the early-morning hours preparing position papers at his request only to see the fruits of my labors discarded without proper consideration or even acknowledgment. I have watched him bury my work, then resurrect it at an opportune later date, claiming it as his own. I have heard him chorus praise to the faces of his fellow Undersecretaries-General, then subtly erode the Secretary-General’s confidence in every one of them. And I have borne all of that because Patrick O’Conner—despite his arrogance and his addiction to political games—is the finest legal mind I am ever likely to work with, a bright shining star in the firmament of international law. Years from now lawyers will still be referring to his commentaries on the law of the sea, trade disputes will still be settled through mechanisms for whose wording and forms Patrick is primarily responsible. Though daily working contact has abraded my initial starstruck rapture with the man, I have never doubted that he is one of the finest lawyers of his generation. And that has sustained me.

But now I look him dead in the eye. And I muster every ounce of suppressed contempt I have ever felt for him.

“Patrick. You’re a prick.”

He does not flinch. But even Patrick’s eyes cannot lie. From me, his lieutenant of three years, the judgment stings.

I toss my head toward Room Seven. “This is about Asahaki. It’s got nothing to do with Rachel.”

“She’s got a case to answer.”

“Let her go.”

He assures me, absurdly, that Rachel was treated the same as the other guides.

“You’ve detained her. You haven’t detained anyone else, have you?”

“Listen. Your daughter went down to the basement Monday night. She says to pick up her coat. Got that? Monday night. And now I hear she was in the library last week requesting the paperwork on a hostage rescue attempt that went wrong three years back in Abatan.” When he sees my surprise, he nods. “That’s right. UN volunteers. Your wife. Hatanaka’s big mission.”

I stare at him warily. What in hell was Rachel doing?

“Surprised me too,” he says levelly. “Now your professional opinion, Sam. Personal involvement aside. What do you think I should do? Let her walk?”

Son of a bitch. But I have the presence of mind to swallow back my anger.

Patrick toys with a button on his jacket sleeve. “Ambassador Asahaki’s back in New York in an hour. I’ve assured him that he can expect every courtesy from us. No half-assed allegations. And no more bloody questions till after the vote.”

There it is. Out in the open. The real reason for this charade.

“Asahaki’ll bolt back to Tokyo the second the vote’s over,” I say. “And you know that.”

Patrick doesn’t answer. He keeps his expression blank.

“I’m going to speak to my daughter,” I tell him, moving toward the door. “Alone.”

“This isn’t bullshit.”

“Sure it isn’t.”

“Hey!” When I turn, Patrick looks at me searchingly. And I am momentarily shaken by what I see there in his eyes. Real doubt. He really is not sure I should be allowed to see Rachel. But then he seems to realize that only force will stop me. He lifts an arm and touches his gold-plated Rolex. “You’ve got five minutes,” he says.

Five minutes. Turning, I shove the door. Five minutes to explain to my daughter that on the thirty-fifth floor of the UN Secretariat building she has just been taken hostage by the Undersecretary-General for Legal Affairs.

“Dad?” Rachel is on her feet, her arms folded in an instinctive pose of self-defense. “What’s wrong?”

I take her by the shoulders and sit her down next to me. We are half turned to each other, my left knee touching her right. She is wearing her UN guide uniform; now she straightens the skirt apprehensively.

“It’s okay,” I tell her. “Some people have some off-beam ideas. I’m trying to figure it out.”

“Why were you so angry?”

I touch a hand to my forehead. If there were any way to avoid this, I would. Gladly. But Rachel is eighteen years old, and suddenly, astoundingly, she is in this thing way too deep. I cannot treat her like a child.

“The investigation I’m running into Hatanaka’s murder. Patrick doesn’t like which way it’s going. He wants me off it.”

“Why?”

“What’s he asked you, Rache? What have you told him?”

“Nothing.”

“Juan said all the guides got called back.”

“Ah-ha,” she says. Then, seeing that I want something more, she tells me that most of the guides left after giving Patrick’s secretary brief descriptions of their work Tuesday morning. Only those who attended the NGO reception were requested to remain. “Three of us.” Rachel gestures to the closed door. “Mr. O’Conner wanted to talk to us separately so we didn’t like start talking it over, imagining we saw what someone else saw.” She mentions the names of the other two guides. “Did you see them yet?”

“They’ve gone home.”

Rachel drops her head to one side. “Already?”

And then I just cannot help myself. I ask her straight out what she was searching for down in the Dag Hammarskjöld Library.

“How come they’ve gone home?” Standing now, she folds her arms and turns her back on me. “He hasn’t even seen me yet.”

I study her as she retreats along the length of the conference table. Trust, Dr. Covey told me, was essential. If I was not to lose my daughter to a lurching relapse into anorexia, I had to trust her and she had to trust me. For all the physical devastation wreaked by the condition, it was, in the end, Dr. Covey said, a disease of the mind. And lack of trust, he warned me, could eventually be fatal. So in the past two years I have made it a habit not to pry where Rachel does not want me. And now I tell myself that that is the reason I let my question about the library slide by.

“Patrick hasn’t been in here to question you?”

“No. He said he was going to be along in a while; he had to speak to the others first.”

Reaching the far end of the table, she turns, regarding me in a puzzled kind of way. Now I rise.

“Patrick’s using you to get at me, Rache. I don’t want you answering his questions. I don’t want you even talking to him. Anything you’ve got to say, you say to me. Not to Patrick. Not to the guards. Just to me.”

By now she has gotten the idea that this thing is way out of whack. The corners of her mouth turn down. She shakes her head, the shiny black bob of her hair goes swaying. Then she picks up her purse, slinging it over her shoulder.

“Can you take me home now, Dad?” As if I am being called to fetch her from some party that she’s decided isn’t much fun.

My hands rise helplessly. Christ, how do I say this? “You’re going to have to stay here tonight, Rache. I’ll bring you some clothes.”

“Here?”

“You’re being detained.”

She stares at me, not quite comprehending. “Who’s detaining me? Detained for what?”

“It’s Patrick. And don’t worry, it’s not about you, it’s about me. Patrick doesn’t want me nailing an inconvenient suspect for Toshio’s murder. He believes he might stop me if he lines up a suspect of his own first. One he can use to twist my tail.”

She peers at me a moment. And then understands. “Me?”

“I’m trying to figure it out.”

“I don’t believe it.” Aghast, she runs a hand through her hair, the sequence of events that brought her here suddenly falling into place. Her voice is choked with outrage. “He’s detaining me to stop you? He can’t do that.”

“As soon as the vote’s over tomorrow, there’ll be no reason for him to hold you. You’ll be out.”

“Tomorrow?”

“At worst, Rache. I’ll keep trying, all right? But that’s the worst that can happen.”

A sound of frustrated fury rises in her throat. As she turns away from me, I seem to glimpse the girl beneath the woman, the adolescent whose emotions I know from painful experience can so easily sweep her past the point of reason, beyond the well-delineated boundaries of my own emotional terrain. At eighteen years of age she has visited darker psychological regions than most of us will ever see. And now she hangs her head over the far end of the table, holding herself very still. She is furious. Absolutely burning inside.

After four months of hell while Rachel was at Bellevue, I got a call from Dr. Covey telling me that my daughter had requested that her feeding tube be removed.

Oh, God, I said. No.

Silence from the other end of the line, then an appalled and hurried elaboration. No, not that. I had misunderstood. The reason Rachel wanted the tube removed, he said, was so that she might eat something properly. As I drove to the hospital, I kept hearing Dr. Covey say it: She wants to eat. In the average life, a banality, an unregistered part of the humdrum daily round. And yet for me the words were more like the “Hallelujah Chorus,” sweeping me upward. My daughter wanted to eat. Elation. Relief. And when I got to the hospital, it was true—a nurse sat by this frail skeletal figure, my daughter, feeding her some glutinous yellow liquid with a spoon. I stepped out into the hall with Dr. Covey and pumped his hand, babbling my gratitude.

He warned me immediately that this was only the hint of a possible recovery. I nodded politely. For the present, I did not care what it was. Rachel was eating. From a spoon.

Dr. Covey explained how he intended to proceed with Rachel’s treatment. Slowly. Increasing the intake at Rachel’s own pace.

I finally dared to ask if I could hope for a full recovery.

The pathology of eating disorders, he told me, as he had told me so many times before, was unpredictable, too deeply connected to the patient’s mind for any crude reductive analysis. But he saw immediately that I wanted something more from him at that moment than the standard textbook opinion. We seated ourselves in two molded plastic chairs at the end of the hall.