“But you guessed he was looking into a fraud.”
“It was not so hard. Always he had someone from Internal Oversight with him. A black,” he says dismissively.
Pascal. When I ask him if Toshio’s assistant from Oversight was down here last Monday for lunch, Lemtov shakes his head. He looks somewhat surprised. He does not have to say it. He can socialize with the likes of Bepe and the Tunku, but he draws the line at insignificant black men like Pascal Nyeri.
“So Monday you discussed the fraud with Toshio.”
“He needed some confirmations,” Lemtov tells me. “What Asahaki agreed to. Papers he signed.”
“Was that the last time you spoke with him?”
“Yes.”
“Did he ask about Po Lin too, or just Asahaki?”
Lemtov studies the boardwalk at his feet. For the first time, some hesitation.
“Toshio was murdered, Mr. Lemtov. And if there’s something you know, anything that might throw some light on that, I’d like to hear it.”
Lemtov lowers his head. We walk a good ten yards before he speaks.
“Tonight we had a report from our people in Beijing.”
I nod and wait. It is another ten yards again before he slows, then stops.
“Po Lin has been executed,” he says.
Struck speechless, I stare at him.
“Unconfirmed,” he warns, raising a hand.
“Executed for what, the fraud?”
“Ah, that you will have to ask Chou En.” The Chinese ambassador. Lemtov thrusts his hands deep in his jacket pockets, the jacket pulled tight around him against the cold sea wind. “I do not know what happened with Po Lin. But on Monday I could see how Hatanaka was thinking. He was thinking Asahaki was guilty of the fraud.”
“Toshio definitely wasn’t asking about Po Lin last Monday?”
“No.”
“Did he say what he was going to do about Asahaki?”
Lemtov turns his head. Hardball negotiator though he is, I can see that he is not telling me the whole truth. But the whole truth about what, I’m not sure. One thing for certain, like Patrick, he knew the full nature of what was going on between Toshio and Asahaki; he knew it yet he said absolutely nothing when Toshio’s body was found. Not only that, he was prepared to sit on this unconfirmed report of Po Lin’s execution.
“It would have helped if I’d heard all this a little sooner,” I tell him, my tone sharp.
Lemtov lifts a shoulder. Not his problem. Then, wandering to the edge of the boardwalk, he looks out over the dark water. His bodyguard suddenly speaks. Lemtov answers
nyet
over his shoulder. I go and join Lemtov at the edge of the boardwalk. Staring into the night, I consider the whole business awhile.
“Or am I just being dumb?” I say finally. “Tuesday, when Toshio’s body was found, you never told anyone what you just told me?”
“Who would I tell?”
“You never told Patrick?”
“Ask him.”
“I will. But right now I’m asking you.”
He does not speak. Or move.
“I could take this up with your perm five colleagues,” I say. A feeble threat. On this matter his perm five colleagues are unlikely to line up against him.
“Kuratz,”
Lemtov responds calmly.
I seem to have reached a dead end here. Lemtov’s diplomatic shutters are firmly up, secured against any further questions. So I take a last shot.
“You have discussed this with Patrick, haven’t you? The whole thing. Toshio and Asahaki, the fact that you thought Toshio was about to pin the fraud on the Japanese ambassador. You and Patrick.”
Lemtov turns to me slowly. “If my daughter was where your daughter is, I would take more care.”
I stand transfixed a moment. Then he turns away, starts to walk, and I reach and grab his arm.
“My daughter—” I say, and then my stomach suddenly implodes. My feet leave the boardwalk, my internal organs driving hard up beneath my rib cage. The air rushes from my mouth; I land on my knees and keel over, clutching my stomach. The pain is like fire. I can’t breathe. My cheek pressed against the wet boardwalk, I open my mouth and try to suck in air. Nothing. Nothing. Then finally it comes, a few strangled gulps, then I moan and roll over and cough a trickle of vomit onto the boards.
Next I feel a hand under my arm, trying to raise me. It is Lemtov, he is kneeling beside me. I become aware of the situation slowly, of Lemtov trying to help me to my feet while he hurls abuse at his bodyguard in Russian. The bodyguard, it seems, has struck me in error. And now someone, somewhere, is crying out, “Sam!”
Shaking off Lemtov’s hand, I kneel, hands braced on the boardwalk. And I breathe. The shock of the blow is passing but the pain is not. Lemtov continues cussing out his bodyguard as someone comes jogging toward us down the boardwalk. When the footsteps stop some way off, I lift my head. Mike. He crouches now, peering into the darkness.
“Sam?” he calls.
I raise myself, holding one hand to my stomach. I try to speak, but nothing comes, so I lift a hand weakly and signal Mike over. Lemtov reaches down, apologizing for his bodyguard. This time I let him help me to my feet. When Mike arrives, I rest a hand on his shoulder, leaning in to him. My other hand stays on my gut. Mike frowns.
“You okay?”
I manage a nod. When Lemtov explains that my injury is the result of the bodyguard’s misplaced zeal, Mike turns to the bodyguard and swears.
I squeeze Mike’s shoulder. Just a stupid mistake, I tell him. Let it lie.
“Feel like anything broken?” he asks me.
I shake my head. Then Mike rounds on Lemtov.
“No fucking thanks to you. Where do you get these guys?” He waves a hand at the bodyguard.
“We have made our apologies,” says Lemtov.
“Fuck off,” says Mike.
Lemtov appraises Mike coolly; I feel too weak to intervene. But finally Lemtov decides not to push it. He dips his head at me with a last word of apology, then turns and heads back toward the White Imperial. His bodyguard, who has not said one word throughout, goes with him.
When they’re out of earshot, Mike says quietly, “What’s the big idea? What the fuck you doing walking off in the dark with those two?”
“We were talking.”
“No, Sam.
You
were talking.
They
were hitting you.”
I take my hand off his shoulder, straightening gingerly.
“Teach you a lesson,” Mike says, satisfied now that I have suffered no permanent injury.
“The guy made a mistake.”
“That guy?” Mike points after the retreating figure of the bodyguard. “Sam, that guy is ex-Spetnatz. When the Russian president comes to New York, that’s the guy they get to protect him. He don’t make mistakes. He watches you. He watches his boss. He gets the signal, he pops you.” Mike faces me. “You made the mistake. Coming out here.”
Turning aside, I hack bile up from my throat onto the boardwalk.
“So what got Lemtov so mad with you?” Mike asks.
I lift my head and look down the boardwalk to where Lemtov and the bodyguard with the sledgehammer fist are walking side by side. “That guy hit me deliberately?”
Mike rolls his eyes at my naïveté. I have a sudden giddy vision of an infinite recursion of Russian dolls, faces behind faces, deeply entangled mystery.
“We were talking about Asahaki. The Special Committee.”
“And Lemtov didn’t like it?”
“He didn’t seem too bothered.”
“You didn’t get socked for no reason, Sam, I’m telling you.”
“He says Po Lin’s been executed.”
Mike’s reaction to the news is the same as mine was. Struck silent, he stares. I take a moment to try to recall the entire conversation with Lemtov. There was, I remember, a distinct change in his tone right before the implosion of my solar plexus. I bend, then come slowly upright. The bruising will be deep but nothing seems torn.
“Executed,” says Mike.
“Unconfirmed. And that’s not when the guy hit me.” I look back along the boardwalk; Lemtov and the bodyguard disappear now through the rear door to the White Imperial. “Lemtov knows Rachel’s been detained. The guy hit me when I suggested a tie-up between Lemtov and Patrick.”
Mike looks at me a moment. “Don’t tell me,” he says. “No big thing, right?” And then he swears.
24
“M
R. NYERI?
”
“Who is it?”
“Sam Windrush.”
Silence then, and I stand with one hand resting against the intercom, my back against the wall, and wait. It is not just lack of sleep that has made me edgy; this part of Harlem is not a safe neighborhood for a lone white man at any time. Back in my college days I would come here sometimes with the regular gang and descend into the Bebop Shop basement and drink beer and listen to black men play jazz. The familiar contribution of our wised-up, post-sixties generation to the problem of race relations in America: Treat the problem like it wasn’t there and hope that might somehow help it go away. Nowadays we all live in the suburbs or gentrified urban areas like Park Slope, while Harlem, this part of it at least, is territory we warn our children to stay clear of. But I need to see Pascal, so I stand here, trying to look relaxed even as I gauge the distance from here on the doorstep to the safety of my car at the curb. And though no one is moving around the street at this hour, the buzzer when it comes is a welcome sound.
The face that finally greets me when I have climbed the three flights of stairs and stepped over and around the bags of trash left out in the hall is not that of the confident young man I have grown used to. Pascal Nyeri, wearing only pants, looks tired, and, it has to be said, somewhat annoyed at this unexpected seven
A.M.
intrusion. Behind this is a certain wariness too; he would like to know but is too worried to ask what further escalation of our problem has brought me to his home at this early hour.
He ushers me into the living room, where an ironing board is set up in front of the TV. He gestures to the kitchen with a halfhearted offer of coffee.
“Pascal,” I say quietly, hearing voices in the kitchen, “I need the financial background on Lemtov.”
He blinks; his eyes are still rheumy with sleep.
“The Russian,” I say.
He pulls a face. As if Lemtov is a name he is likely to forget.
“I need whatever you can get on him.”
“I haven’t finished with Po Lin.”
“Po Lin’s on the back burner.”
“Why?”
“Because Po Lin wasn’t having a private talk with Hatanaka last week down at Brighton Beach. And because this is what I’m asking you to do.”
The voices in the kitchen rise, and two guys emerge, each carrying a bowl of cereal. Their gray flannel suits have the same hand-me-down look as Pascal’s pants, the telltale sign that marks these guys even in Harlem as born and bred Africans. They stop when they see me. Pascal speaks to them in French, and they immediately retreat into the kitchen.
“When you were working with Hatanaka,” I ask Pascal when we’re alone again, “did much come up on Lemtov? Anything dubious about his work on the Special Committee?”
“No.”
“Nothing down at the Portland Trust Bank?”
Shaking his head, Pascal crosses to the ironing board to finish the task that my arrival has apparently interrupted. The wrinkled white shirt has the sheen of cheap rayon. Pascal concentrates hard on the creases; he is plainly uncomfortable with my presence. Glancing around, it’s not hard to see why. There are no pictures on the brown walls and the furniture looks secondhand. Through the open doors off the living room, bunk beds are visible, three and four to a room. Clothes and towels hang over the open doors. Not squalid, but there is an unmistakable air of poverty in the place, overcrowding caused by necessity, the same kind of thing I saw on several trips to mining camps in South Africa back when that nation was the international community’s number-one pariah. Immigrant labor huddled together in prefabricated huts between shifts, young men in temporary occupation while their hearts were someplace else. When I turn back to Pascal, he pulls on his shirt. A proud man, he has probably never invited any of his professional colleagues back here. He is embarrassed by what I am seeing.
“Toshio never said he was seeing Lemtov last week.” Pascal buttons his shirt. “What is this beach?”
Brighton Beach, I tell him again. Center of the Russian émigré community. “Lemtov says they discussed Asahaki,” I add.
Pascal catches my tone. “You do not believe him?”
“Let’s say I’m not too sure what they were discussing.”
Another of Pascal’s roommates wanders out from the kitchen, cereal bowl in hand. This guy, another African, is in his pjs. Less accommodating than the previous pair, he ignores what Pascal tells him and sits down and proceeds to eat his breakfast as he watches TV. Grimacing, Pascal nods me toward one of the bedrooms.
“Who are all these guys?” I ask quietly as he closes the bedroom door behind us.
Pascal digs beneath one of the three beds. “UN people.”
“From Turtle Bay?”
Pulling his briefcase from beneath the bed, he tells me that they are mainly clerks and technicians. I tilt my head, curious.
“We live together to save money,” he admits reluctantly. “To send to our families back home.”
I feel a disconcerting stab of first world guilt. Fortunately Pascal is even keener than I am to drop the subject. He flips his briefcase open and hands me a folder.
“Po Lin,” he says.
The folder is thick. When I remark on that, Pascal says that he was up half the night preparing this for me, the implication being that the least I can do is look at it. I guess he is right. So I sit myself down on his bed and spread the folder open in my lap. I want to get through this fast, but Pascal talks me through it in his customary thorough manner. After ten minutes I have the gist of it. Pascal isn’t expecting anything back on the interstate company searches for days, maybe weeks; but for one of the companies from Marie Lefebre’s list he already has the names of the directors and major shareholders.
“There is no Po Lin,” he says.
“So?”
He touches the page. “This company is capitalized at twenty million dollars. But only shareholders who own more than five percent of the company must declare their names. So if Po Lin has invested less than one million dollars, his name will not appear on the register.” He draws my attention to the number for this company, the one I gave him from Marie’s list: seven hundred thousand dollars.
“You can’t trace him?”
“Not possible. And if he did that in every company on your list, there would be no trace anywhere.”
I flip through the pages wearily. If Po Lin was involved with Asahaki in the fraud, he appears to have hit on a simple and foolproof way of closing down his side of the paper trail. And if Lemtov’s story is correct, if Po Lin really has been executed, we will never get to the truth here. Everything we reach for down this Po Lin road seems to dissolve when we get near. Things of substance suddenly turn to smoke.
Pascal has a suggestion. “If I had dates for those transactions, that might help.”
I promise to see what I can do. But when he offers to go to my source directly, I instantly wave the offer aside. I doubt that Marie Lefebre would appreciate a knock on the door from Internal Oversight. I hand back the Po Lin folder.
“I want you to turn your attention to Lemtov,” I say. “Take a look at the UN committees he’s sitting on. See if any of those have had problems with you guys at Oversight or Audit.” I give him the book of matches I swiped from the White Imperial. He studies the picture of the palace on the front, then the name and address on the back. “You don’t have to go down there,” I tell him. “In fact, don’t go down there, all right? But see what you can find out about the place. Owners. What references they gave to get their liquor license. Whatever you can get.”
He asks me if the place is a bar.
“Nightclub. And Lemtov seems to treat it like some kind of home away from home. Mike’s got a feeling Lemtov might be tied in to the place financially. I want you to find out.”
Pascal slips the matches into his pocket, then, standing, he drops the Po Lin folder into his briefcase. “What else?” he says.
“Mmm?”
“You did not come here to give me matches.”
I don’t answer immediately and Pascal turns and reaches for a tie in the minuscule closet. He flips up his collar and commences knotting his tie in the mirror. My glance wanders to his bedside table, an upturned crate. Pascal’s small collection of books is lined up meticulously. Montaigne. Balzac. Several volumes by Voltaire. Probably the most civilized reading matter for fifty blocks.
“I want you to take a look at O’Conner.”
No answer. When I look up, his hands have paused; he is studying me in the mirror.
“Undersecretary-General O’Conner,” he says, and I nod. His eyes return to the tie and he finishes the knot. “I cannot do that,” he says.
“I’ll take responsibility.”
“I cannot,” he repeats, reaching for his jacket. Then he faces me, turning his head. “No.”
A firm refusal, even firmer than I feared. I guess it always was a long shot. Delegates, even most ambassadors, Pascal knows he can deal with and still receive Dieter’s full support; but an Undersecretary-General? Pascal’s manner now, the way he looks at me, everything tells me that argument or further attempts at persuasion would be a waste of breath. Before he agrees to go poking into Patrick’s private affairs, Pascal Nyeri will require more from me than a polite, unmemoed request.
“What if I ask Dieter?” I ask him.
“He will not agree to it.”
“If he does, would you do it?”
Pascal weighs that. “If he instructed me, I would have no choice.”
“Set up a meeting,” I tell him, rising from the bed. “Me, Dieter, and you. Soon as you get into work.”
Pascal’s shoulders droop.
By way of encouragement, and apology for my unwelcome intrusion here, I tell him that I really do appreciate his work on Po Lin. Pascal is still young enough to look vaguely embarrassed by the compliment.
Then, out in the living room, someone calls Pascal’s name. Before Pascal can get to the door, it opens. A guy is standing there, dripping, a towel wrapped around his waist. The tight black curls on his head and his chest are matted and wet.
“The Chinaman’s back,” the guy says, laughing, then he sees me and his laughter dies.
Colleague, I say, flicking a finger between Pascal and me.
The guy smiles uncertainly; there is a quarter-inch gap between his front teeth. He turns to Pascal. “He’s parked in that same place. You want to go down, tell them who you are?”
“Not now,” says Pascal, attempting to steer his friend back out the door.
Who you are? I ask Pascal curiously.
Pascal gives his roommate a fierce look. The guy grabs another towel from the door and starts drying his hair.
“Somebody from the Immigration Department came here,” Pascal explains finally. “I was at work, he asked some questions about me. Now when he comes he just parks and watches the apartment.”
“Chinese?”
“Asian-American,” Pascal tells me.
“He parks by the alley,” Pascal’s dripping roommate volunteers. “He doesn’t know we can see him from the back bathroom. He sits in his car, playing with his ponytail, like he’s too smart.”
Pascal turns the guy toward the door, tries to bundle him out. But when Pascal leans against the door, I suddenly reach and hold it open. Water drips from the guy onto the linoleum.
“Where’s the bathroom?” I say.
Pascal leads me there, stands in the empty tub, and points through the open window. The car is a white Ford. You can see the driver’s arm crooked out the car window, but you can’t see a face.
“I called Immigration last week,” Pascal tells me, apprehensive about my sudden interest in his minor tangle with the U.S. authorities. “I told them I was at the UN. That I was not illegal.”
“What did they say?”
“They never called back.” Shrugging, he looks out the window again.
“Have you ever gotten a good look at this guy?”
“Only from up here.”
“Could you take a guess at his age?”
“Thirty-five?” Pascal ventures.
Asian, with a ponytail. Mid-thirties. Jesus, I think. Then I face Pascal. “Where’s your phone?”
He leads me to the hall outside the living room. A phone is fixed to the wall with three thick metal plates. Under Pascal’s curious gaze, I unscrew the mouthpiece.
“Is the apartment ever empty? Is there ever a time when all of you are usually out?”
Pascal shakes his head. Days off, technicians working irregular shifts, somebody recently fired, one way or another, he says, there is always someone here. He lifts his chin toward the phone, more than a little curious about what I am doing.
I peer into the mouthpiece innards. Zip. No silicone square.
Rescrewing the mouthpiece, I keep my voice low. “Somebody bugged the phones in Toshio’s apartment before he died. Yesterday an Asian guy, mid-thirties with a ponytail, tried to bug my phone. This isn’t an Immigration problem you’ve got here, Pascal.”
The skin bunches between his eyebrows. His lower lip probes forward, a flash of pink.
Hanging up the phone, I rest a hand against the peeling wall. And I try to think this through. I could call Mike, but it would take him at least an hour to get up here; the guy in the Ford might be long gone by then. If I called the police, what exactly would I say to them? Jennifer, I think, then dismiss the thought immediately. Too many complications. Pascal’s roommates would probably be only too pleased to help, but the idea of involving guys who cannot afford to lose their jobs does not appeal. Which leaves me, finally, with a guy who cannot afford to lose his job but who is already involved anyway.
“Come on,” I tell Pascal, moving down the hall. He moans and shakes his head. But when I pause in the doorway and look back, he is right there on my heels.
There is no rear exit.
“Fuck,” I say when Pascal tells me. We stand together in the main hall downstairs, a cloying smell of disinfectant in the air, while an argument rages in the ground floor apartment. Two women, cussing.
Going to the main door to the street, I stick my eye up to the peephole. My own car is right out front. “How far away is the Ford?”
Just past the alley, Pascal tells me. Thirty or forty yards to my right.