The rumble of traffic passing below us along the FDR Drive is a useful background hum; even I can’t hear the recorder. I fix my gaze on the old Pepsi-Cola sign across the East River, its color faded; the clouds above scud low and gray. I gather myself a moment. This is it, I think, my last chance. When I face Pascal, he is not looking at me but out over the river. I lean toward him and I ask my question.
“So just how long have you been working for Yuri Lemtov?”
41
F
OR A LONG WHILE PASCAL IS SILENT. NO
ANGRY
denial,
no exclamation of surprise, nothing. He just sits there, staring at me, as if my question has tipped him into a sudden catatonia, as if he is too shocked to reply or move.
“What was it,” I ask, “the money?”
More silence. Then at last he looks at me, his brow furrowed with a single deep line. “Lemtov?” he says.
“Okay, try this.” I jerk my thumb over my shoulder toward the Secretariat building. “Fifteen minutes ago your roommate Matate shut down the security cameras up on twenty-nine. Ten minutes ago you arrived there with Toshio’s missing file. The one on the Special Committee investigation. And you deposited it in Toshio’s in box. Would you care to tell me why?”
“I did not.”
“You were up there.”
Looking me straight in the eye, Pascal denies being anywhere near Toshio’s office today.
“What have you got, an identical twin? Listen, I saw you, Pascal. I saw you come out of Toshio’s office. When I went and checked in there, the damn file was on his desk. In his in box, for Pete’s sake. And it wasn’t there when the office was locked by Security. I know that because I was there Tuesday morning. And that file was not there.”
Caught in the lie, Pascal drops his gaze. He rests his forearms on his knees and studies the concrete slab beneath his feet.
“You’re in serious trouble here, Pascal. You know that.”
He doesn’t say anything. Then a movement catches my eye to the left; when I turn I see two guards closing in. I flick my hand, warning them off. One consults his walkie-talkie, and they retreat to the cover of the trees. Pascal, head down, sees none of this.
“When this gets out,” I tell him, “Lemtov’s going to deny it. He’ll deny he ever asked you to put that file there. You know that too, don’t you? He’s not going to stick by you, he’s got no reason to. All he has to do is deny it. And that’s what he’ll do. If you point the finger at him, say he was behind it, he’ll deny it flat out. And who’s going to believe you? Dieter?”
Pascal lifts his eyes and stares at nothing.
“Dieter’s going to be after your head,” I say. “You’ll be on your own. You’ll take the fall. And Lemtov, he’ll just walk away from you.”
No response. Impossible for me to even guess what he is thinking.
“Now do you want to tell me what happened?”
“Nothing happened,” he says quietly. A young man a long way from home, and though he hides it well, afraid.
“I can’t make you talk to me, Pascal. But if I get up from here and walk, you’re on your own. There won’t be a single person in the Secretariat wanting to hear your side of it. Not one who’s going to listen when you finally decide that talking might not be such a bad idea. So if you want to put in your side of the story, this is it, your last opportunity. I can’t make you. But if you think Lemtov’s going to protect you now, you’re a fool.”
Elbows on his knees, he leans forward but remains silent.
“How about Matate?” I ask, changing tack. “Was that how Lemtov approached you?”
Pascal gives a brief shake of his head.
“But Matate turned off the security cameras for you, right?”
No reply. I glance back to the Secretariat building; it looms up behind the Assembly Hall away to our right. Up there on twenty-nine they will have found Rachel by now.
“Pascal, you just came down from Toshio’s office, you went straight to the Maintenance Room, you spent five minutes with Matate, then you both ran. You can’t tell me Matate wasn’t involved in this.”
Pascal shoots me a look from the corner of his eye; he is obviously startled by how closely his movements have been monitored. And in the next moment the realization of what this means seems to reach him. Matate has probably been caught just as he has. Someone from Security is probably questioning Matate right now. Pascal’s eyes close fractionally, his shoulders droop.
“Matate turned off the cameras so that you could get into Toshio’s office unnoticed. Yes or no?”
“He was not involved.”
“Matate turned off the cameras.”
“He didn’t know the reason.”
“A favor?”
Pascal nods.
“And some kind of payment?”
“No.”
That simply isn’t plausible, and I say so. Crap. A lie. I remind Pascal that if he is not straight with me, I will get up and walk, and he will have to face the music alone.
“Five hundred dollars,” he admits finally.
“Did he know what you were doing?”
“No.”
I don’t know if I buy that or not. But I sense that this is one part of his story he won’t be changing, and as it’s not really what matters anyway, I don’t push it.
“The money came from Lemtov?” I ask, turning a little on the bench, the recorder whirring quietly. I pray for Pascal to answer my question with something more than a nod.
The prayer goes unanswered. He simply inclines his head.
“Yes?” I prompt.
“Yes,” Pascal says and adds, to my considerable satisfaction, “The money came from Lemtov.”
“And how much did he pay you?”
Pascal seems to weigh where this is taking him. “Two thousand,” he says.
“Dollars?”
Dollars, he agrees, darting a glance past me. I have the distinct impression that he is gauging some distance, setting himself to run. So I place a finger firmly on his knee.
“We haven’t finished.”
His eyes come back to mine and then down. His hands are braced on the bench now, on either side of his thighs.
“What exactly did Lemtov get for his money?”
“He gave me the file. I put it in Hatanaka’s office.”
“That’s all?”
Another nod.
“Why do you think he wanted you to do that?”
Pascal shrugs. But by now there is a light sheen of perspiration on his face, and I can see the carotid artery pulsing in his neck. I need to be careful here. If I push him too hard, too fast, I’ll get nothing. Too soft, too slow, the same.
“You told me back on the day this all started that the evidence you had on the fraud pointed just one way. To Bunzo Asahaki.”
“It did,” says Pascal.
“Then maybe you can tell me why Toshio’s file on the investigation, the file that you just put there in his office, maybe you can tell me why it has a whole stack of paperwork that implicates Po Lin in the fraud. Had all that just slipped your mind?”
Pascal reminds me of Toshio’s final visit to the Portland Trust Bank. Toshio, he says, did not show him everything.
“Maybe not. But that paperwork on Po Lin, it’s basically numbers. Accountancy. And you’re expecting me to believe that Toshio put that together by himself? He didn’t even consult you? You, the accountant who was working with him on this?”
Pascal shifts his weight uncomfortably on the bench.
“I don’t believe that it just slipped your mind, Pascal. That stuff wasn’t there. It’s been put there sometime between when the file disappeared and now. And it’s been put there by someone who understands numbers. Someone who knows his way around this investigation. And there’s only one person who fits that bill.”
Pascal’s eyes stay down and I cheat a glance over my shoulder. Half a dozen guards have emerged onto the terrace; a few more are loitering on the North Lawn behind us.
“Lemtov didn’t just get you to put the file back. He got you to tamper with it first. He got you to point a lot of fake evidence at Po Lin.”
No response.
“Who actually paid you the money?” I ask.
“Lemtov.”
I lift my head in surprise. “Himself?”
Pascal nods.
“Where?”
“The Russian mission,” he says.
I consider that. “There’s no way he did that just to get you to put the file back. If it was just that, he would have used an intermediary. He wouldn’t have gotten involved himself. Not from the mission. He must have had some other reason for wanting to deal with you directly.”
Pascal tilts his head back and gazes at the sky. “How can you help me?”
“You doctored the file.”
A moment’s hesitation, then Pascal crosses the Rubicon. “Yes,” he says.
“For the money?”
“Yes.”
“That’s all?”
He lowers his head, nodding. Though clearly frightened, he is not about to break, to get down on his knees and confess all. He is a much tougher man than that. As a man who has dragged himself up so far from his birth must be.
“I don’t believe you, Pascal.”
His tongue passes over his lower lip.
“I don’t believe you did it for two thousand bucks.”
But Pascal hardly seems to be listening to me now. His hands ball into fists on his knees and he stares out to the faded Pepsi-Cola sign across the river. He has said all that he is going to say.
On the tape in my pocket I have Pascal’s confession, his testimony that Lemtov has screwed around with the fraud investigation, but I have nothing that implicates anyone directly in Toshio’s murder. And I don’t know if what I have is going to be enough to stop Rachel’s handover to the New York authorities.
Which is why, finally, I do what I never intended to do. One last shake of the tree to see what falls. I bend forward, hands joined, elbows resting on my knees. My gaze follows Pascal’s across the river.
“I see this young guy,” I say evenly. “He’s come a long way from where he started, but now he’s turned thirty and he’s looking around and he’s not quite satisfied with what he finds. He’s hit a ceiling in his career. Until his boss and a dozen more senior guys retire or die, he’s going nowhere. He’s making maybe thirty-five grand a year. Not great, but back home his family thinks that’s a lot of money, millionaire class, and they’ve probably made a lot of sacrifices to help get him to where he is, so he’s got obligations. And he pays them. Remits what he can to his family, but he’s living in New York, he’s got his own problems, rent to pay, taxes, other expenses his family can’t even imagine. In the richest country in the world, thirty-five grand a year, and this guy is poor.” Pascal darts me a glance. I continue. “He just doesn’t see any way out of that. He can’t quit his UN job because he hasn’t got a green card; he’d have to leave the country. And he can’t go home because the shame would kill him. Besides, his family needs the money coming in. And they simply wouldn’t understand it either, why anyone would give up the good life in America to return to some dirt-poor village in the Cameroon.”
Pascal makes a sound.
“It’s not the life he dreamed of,” I say. “It’s not nights at the opera, discussing Voltaire, none of that. It’s waking up in a crummy tenement in Harlem, standing in line for the shower, trudging into work, getting shouted at by Dieter Rasmussen, then going home to decide whether he should dry-clean his suit or send the twenty bucks back home, where his family needs it for food. That’s the picture. A young guy trapped by his situation, no fault of his own, looking for some way out. You recognize it, Pascal?”
Hands on the bench to either side of his thighs, he bows his head. Against my chest the recorder hisses faintly.
Over my shoulder I glimpse Jennifer standing with the guards and the Homicide guys at the guardhouse, watching us. “And then,” I say, “Lemtov appears. Somehow he’s found out that the Special Committee is under investigation. He knows that sooner or later the paper trail is going to be traced back to him. He can’t let that happen. But he can’t stop the investigation either, so he does the next best thing.”
Pascal rises. I grab his arm and drag him back down to the bench.
“Lemtov turned the investigation. And he used you to turn it, Pascal.”
“No.” Vehemently.
“You didn’t just replace that file for Lemtov. You’ve been working for him longer than that, haven’t you?”
“No.”
“You tampered with the evidence. Toshio didn’t know how to read the paper trail, all the numbers, but you did. And he relied on you, didn’t he? Down at the Portland Bank it would have been just the same as with me. You sifting through the paperwork first, picking out anything that might be construed as pointing to Asahaki, passing that up the table. Anything that pointed to Lemtov, you buried. Those papers you showed me that nailed Asahaki, they were copies, remember?”
Pausing now, I recall what Patrick told me this morning. Toshio wanted it to be Asahaki. If Asahaki was implicated, Toshio guessed that Japan’s run at a Council seat would fail. And Toshio wanted that. If Pascal kept pushing “evidence” against Asahaki at Toshio, was Toshio likely to question it? Wouldn’t he have done what Patrick said he did, used the evidence to try to bring Asahaki down? In truth it probably wasn’t so difficult for Pascal to turn the investigation. Toshio, initially at least, would have been an unwitting but willing accomplice.
“Are you going to deny that?” I ask Pascal.
His mouth hangs slightly open; his gaze is fixed on his feet.
“You didn’t do that for a lousy two thousand dollars, Pascal. Two thousand dollars isn’t going to change your life. And that kind of fooling around, what you were doing for Lemtov, that was a big risk. If someone figured it, you’d be out of a job, on the next flight home to the Cameroon, no second chances. Lemtov must have offered you plenty. Enough to make a real difference in your life.”
“You don’t know that,” he says suddenly. His neck muscles are bunched like thick cords of wire. “You don’t know me, my life. Nothing.”
“I know what you did.”
His eyes meet mine, then immediately slide away. By now Rachel must have been caught, I think. By now the guards will be bringing her down.
“A couple of weeks ago something went wrong, didn’t it? Suddenly Toshio wasn’t so eager to swallow everything you gave him on Asahaki. Suddenly he was asking you some difficult questions about Lemtov. Yes?”
Pascal’s face hardens. He seems determined now not to speak.
My guess now is Toshio never breathed a word to Pascal about the FBI report on Lemtov. But the moment Patrick showed the report to Toshio, Toshio’s suspicions must have been aroused. So Toshio shut Pascal out, went and did some investigating on his own. The unaccompanied trip to Basel. The private visit to the Portland Trust Bank. He wasn’t just doing what Patrick assumed, checking out the FBI report. He was also discovering how badly Pascal had misled him.