Mike’s hand drops. He looks at me.
“That’s the key,” I tell him, unfolding my arms, bracing them on the desk. “Our man from Internal Oversight was conducting an affair with Marie Lefebre, a French journalist. Only she wasn’t just a journalist. She was also an agent of the French Foreign Ministry.”
“She was screwing Nyeri?”
I bow my head. She was screwing Pascal Nyeri, I agree.
“And somehow,” I say, “she got to know what Pascal was working on, his investigation with Hatanaka. Or maybe that’s why she moved in on him in the first place. Anyway, somewhere along the way she makes her big suggestion to Pascal. Point the evidence of the Special Committee fraud at Asahaki.”
“Why?” says Mike. But in the next moment he gets it. “The Council seat?”
“Right. The Council seat. Blacken Asahaki’s name, screw Japan’s chances at the vote, and no change on the Council. What France always wanted, despite public statements to the contrary.”
Mike shakes his head in disgust at the intrigue. “Jesus.”
“My guess is that’s all they planned. A dirty trick, Asahaki’s reputation destroyed, roughhouse politics, but everyone still walking at the end of it. Only something happened they hadn’t figured on. The FBI report. Toshio suddenly had a whole pile of dirt on Lemtov. And Patrick was pushing him to confirm it, at least take another look at Lemtov. Toshio must have wondered, naturally, why Pascal hadn’t found anything like that earlier. So Toshio went back and checked Pascal’s work, everything that Pascal had been feeding him. And he would have found that Pascal had been feeding him some lies.”
“He confronted Nyeri?”
“He must have. Only Toshio would have thought the same as I did, that Pascal was covering for Lemtov. He wouldn’t have seen that Lemtov’s crime, the fraud, was being used by a third party to frame Asahaki. And Pascal would have told Marie that Toshio was onto him. After that, what choice did the French have? They couldn’t afford to have it come out, what dirty game they’d been playing. So they dug themselves in deeper. The French government supplied the heroin, that’s why it was so pure. It wasn’t from the street. And having Pascal murder Toshio didn’t just get Toshio out of the picture. It gave them another crime to pin on Asahaki.”
Mike looks at me sideways.
“That’s where we came in,” I say. “Pascal called Legal Affairs within hours of our finding the body. He wasn’t just being helpful. He wanted to make sure we had Asahaki right there at the top of our list of suspects. As long as we kept the pressure on Asahaki, we were doing what the French wanted. Keeping him out of Turtle Bay while they undermined the pro-Japanese vote.”
“You’ve really nutted this out, haven’t you?”
The evidence was all there, I tell him. I tell him it wasn’t so hard to figure out once Marie Lefebre’s role became clear.
“So it’s pretty much how you called it yesterday,” Mike says. “Only with Nyeri working for the French, not Lemtov.”
Pretty much, I agree sadly. But the reason for Toshio’s murder, Pascal’s motive, I was way out there too. Not even close. When I say so, Mike brushes the remark aside.
“Nyeri did it for what he could get out of it. Money. Passport. Comes to the same thing, don’t it? A new life? Like you said.”
But Mike’s world-weary assessment, I am sure, is way off beam here. He did not know Pascal as I knew him; or Marie Lefebre, if it comes to that.
“I don’t think Pascal committed a murder just for a French passport.”
“For the woman?”
“Not for the woman either.” Moving away from my desk, I wander over to the bookshelves, the wall of documents, and trail a finger idly across the spines.
Law of the Sea. The Protection of Intellectual Copyright. Security Council Resolutions.
Nothing, frankly, that a truly civilized man would want to waste his time reading. Nothing, for example, by Voltaire. “I think they must have threatened him.”
Mike scoffs.
“Not at first,” I say. “The woman, the promise of a passport, that was probably enough to get Pascal to fool around with the numbers. But once he’d done that, the French had him. One call to Patrick—hey, look what this Nyeri’s been up to—Pascal would have been out. Fired. A one-way ticket back to the Cameroon, maybe even prosecuted and into the slammer. Not so much a new life, more like a disastrous end to the one he already had.”
“You’re justifying the guy? He killed Hatanaka, for chrissake, we’re meant to feel sorry for him?”
I turn and focus on the USUN building across the street. Justifying, is that what I’m doing? Pascal, whatever his motives, murdered Toshio Hatanaka. But does that fact stand alone? To what degree do a man’s circumstances mitigate his crime? Isn’t that one of the oldest and deepest questions of jurisprudence? To discover what moral difference lies between the man who steals to feed his family and the man who simply steals. Never forgive, or always. Isn’t it between these two extremes that the fraternity of lawyers does daily courtroom battle? Now I ask myself if I would really wish to plant my feet beneath the defendant’s table on this case, to rise and claim extenuation for my client. Pascal Nyeri was tricked. He was threatened, Judge. Consider his life. He really had no choice.
Mike does not believe that. And in my heart of hearts, I guess, neither do I.
Though I cannot defend what Pascal did, I can still feel for him. I can understand the ardor of his desire, not just for Marie but for his own dreams, and I can see the web in which he was trapped, in the end fatally. I can see all that, empathize deeply, because I, too, passed through Marie Lefebre’s bed. I, too, committed a crime, one for which no court will ever condemn me. An inexpungible crime of the heart.
In truth, maybe that is what I am trying to justify here. The unjustifiable. Not Pascal Nyeri’s actions but my own.
“Not to feel sorry for him.” I face Mike again, raising a hand vaguely. My voice trails off. “Understanding?”
“Like all the great understanding he gave Hatanaka? Come on. He got what he deserved. Eye for an eye. Right there in the good book.”
But in the good book there are other lessons too, like forgiveness and mercy. Now, however, does not seem the appropriate moment for me to be quoting Scripture, so I let it pass. I glance at my watch. I tell Mike that I’m due downstairs in five minutes. Rachel has come in to return her UN uniform; her brief career as a guide at Turtle Bay is over. But Mike isn’t done yet.
“Lemtov wasn’t involved in the murder, but you’re letting him take the fall for it?”
“That’s right,” I admit.
“All that ‘he should never have been here’ crap. That’s what you meant, yeah? Lemtov should never have been here, so you’re helping him leave.” He thinks a moment. “You were worried that Bureau report wasn’t gonna be enough. Worried the SG might just tick Lemtov off, tell him to change his ways, let him stay. But this way, implicated in Toshio’s murder, he’s out for sure.”
“Lemtov’s not even going to be charged, Mike. But with his diplomatic cover removed, the Bureau can take a real shot at him. He’ll be dodging extradition orders for the rest of his life. For the Special Committee fraud he gets nothing. He won’t be jailed. He’s just out.”
“For a crime he didn’t commit.”
“You’re justifying the man?”
Mike doesn’t smile. He says, “That’s not you, Sam. Me? Sure. I don’t care too much how a guy like Lemtov gets nailed so long as it happens. But you?” He pauses, then alights more quickly than I would have hoped on the answer. “Payback, right? For what he put Rachel through.”
I bow my head, then raise my eyes. I ask Mike if he has any other questions.
“The Lefebre woman. Where can I find her?”
“She’s gone.”
“Address?”
“Gone gone. Back to Paris.”
Consulting my calendar, I find the number, the same one I tried earlier this morning, then I dial Marie’s apartment. I put her answering machine message on the speaker for Mike. Marie’s voice is calm and businesslike. She says that she has been temporarily reassigned to the Agence France-Presse head office in Paris, that she can be contacted there. She gives a number and then the same message is repeated in French. After that there is a long beep. When I hang up, Mike stares at the phone a long while.
“It wouldn’t have made any difference if she’d stayed, Mike. With Pascal dead, there’s no way we could have proven anything. The most we could have done was withdraw her press accreditation. Now we don’t even have to bother.” Opening my arms, I attempt a smile. “At last,” I say, “someone ran.”
But Mike’s face does not move. Letting Lemtov take the fall for a crime of which he is innocent, that Mike can live with. But this evasion of retribution by Marie Lefebre strikes at Mike’s deep sense of justice. He was assigned to bring Toshio’s murderer to book, and he has failed.
“Cunt,” he says at last.
I pocket my pen. I take my jacket from the back of the chair. And while he is still trying to digest what he has learned, trying to reconcile himself to the highly unsatisfactory outcome, I make a few consolatory suggestions. The French Foreign Ministry, I say, has lost a key intelligence asset here at UNHQ, there is absolutely no chance Marie Lefebre will risk coming back. And though Ambassador Froissart cannot be touched with what we have—that apparently innocent meeting with Marie by the side chamber—I tell Mike that over the coming weeks the two of us can figure some way to let Froissart know what we know. Maybe we can make him jumpy enough to follow Marie Lefebre’s example and beat a voluntary withdrawal back to Paris.
In response to these somewhat hopeful remarks, Mike simply pulls a face. He doesn’t swallow one word of it.
“At least we can try.”
“So when was I gonna hear about this?” He gestures to the VCR, then the phone on my desk. “Sometime soon?” He raises a brow. “Sometime never?”
“I didn’t think it would help. I wasn’t sure you would have wanted to know.”
“Wrong. Both counts.”
Unable to hold his gaze, I pull on my jacket and I ask him what he intends to do now.
“You mean about Lemtov?”
About all of it, I say.
He takes a few seconds with himself, then faces me squarely. “You’ve told me everything, right? No more rabbits outa goddamn hats. No more French passports in dead guys’ pockets.”
I shake my head.
“If that’s everything,” he says reluctantly, “I don’t see that we have a choice. We just let it play out. Lemtov takes the fall, the woman stays gone.” Then his look becomes penetrating, unwavering, as if some deep instinct for suspicion has been stirred. “That
is
everything?” he says levelly.
If there was ever a moment to confess all, to wipe the slate clean, this is it. But what price a clean slate, an unsullied conscience? If I told Mike, as a friend, what really happened between Marie Lefebre and me, how could Mike Jardine, deputy head of Security, ignore that information? Me, a senior figure from UN Legal, wrapped in the amorous embrace of a French spy, my one-night stand with her sandwiched between the deaths of Toshio Hatanaka and Pascal Nyeri. Maybe I could convince him that I was the innocent dupe, but even if I could, where would that leave Mike? How exactly would my confession assist the cause of truth? Mike would be left wrestling with his own conscience, wondering whether he should do his duty and report me to Eckhardt and Patrick. And all the while, of course, cursing me for putting him in such an impossible position, for not keeping my mouth shut. But here in my office, his eyes narrowing, he sees none of that.
So whose slate stays clean? Do I shrug the burden onto his shoulders, or do I lie and carry the burden alone?
Sensing my hesitation, he tilts back his head. Finally I nod.
“That’s everything.”
He looks at me a moment longer. “No,” he decides with a sad kind of ruefulness. “That’s just everything you’re gonna tell me. But, hey, you owe me nothing, right?”
We look at each other, my lie hanging between us like poisonous vapor. Later I might find the strength to tell him the truth, but not now. For now it is all I can do to hold myself steady, to meet his unflinching gaze without wilting.
“I expected better,” he says at last. He does not wait for a response. He leans toward me, chucks my shoulder a little too hard, then he goes.
45
W
HEN I FIND RACHEL, SHE IS SITTING WITH
THREE
other guides in the room behind the UN Public Information Office in the basement, drinking Coke. Unlike her uniformed friends, Rachel is dressed in jeans and a sweater; she has her own UN guide’s uniform draped over the chair beside her. The talk dies when I put my head in, so I keep it brief. Is she ready to go? Not yet, she’s waiting for her boss, she says. There are some more forms she has to sign. How long? She shrugs and tells me maybe fifteen minutes. Then I hesitate in the doorway.
“Did you see Jennifer?” Rachel asks me, and a gentle heat immediately moves up from my neck, suffusing my cheeks. I shake my head. Two of Rachel’s friends exchange a look; one of them rolls her eyes. “She was down here,” Rachel goes on. “She just came in and asked me like, if I was okay. She said she might see you. I think she went back to her office.”
I tap my hand against the door frame, casting around for some dignified way to make my exit. At last it is Rachel who speaks. She says that if she finishes up here soon, she’ll come looking for me across the street, then she smiles and sips her Coke through a straw.
When the marine guard overhears the USUN receptionist tell me that Ms. Dale is not in the building, he steps forward to inform me that Jennifer has just gone around the corner to see her son. So a minute later I find myself standing on the sidewalk outside the kindergarten where Jennifer’s son, Ben, spends five mornings a week. On the far side of the glass wall there are balloons and a low table bearing a large cake decorated with white icing and four stubby red candles. The teacher appears to have opened this place on a Saturday morning so that some four-year-old kid whose parents are busy saving the world across the street at the UN can celebrate his birthday. But with so few kids in attendance, the place looks empty, and despite the cake and the balloons, not festive but sad. Jennifer, somewhat incongruously, is wearing a green paper party hat and a sober gray business suit. Crouching by Ben near the cake, she glances up now and sees me looking in from the street.
“Hi,” she says, coming out to join me on the sidewalk a few moments later. Then she gestures past me. “I saw Rachel. She’s quitting?”
“Only her job.”
Jennifer considers my remark. Then, hearing music start up behind her, she glances back over her shoulder. She stays like that, apparently unwilling to face me directly.
“Jennifer.”
“Mmm?”
When I touch her arm, she faces me again.
“You wanted to see me,” I tell her. At this, Jennifer looks momentarily puzzled. “You told Rachel?”
“Oh, that.” When her hand wafts up in airy dismissal, a heavy weight settles in my gut. Her words to Rachel were no more than a parting aside. Jennifer was not, as I thought, hoping to see me. In fact, judging by her demeanor, her apparent unwillingness even to look me in the eye, it seems that my unexpected arrival is far from welcome. For a moment I actually consider leaving this for another time, but that thought quickly passes. Time is not going to make this any easier.
I nod down the street. I ask if she minds if we walk.
Dead leaves, the first of fall, go scudding past our ankles, driven by a sudden gust of wind. Overhead the sky is a brilliant cloudless blue. Walking beside me, Jennifer reaches up to sweep the green paper hat off her head.
“So Lemtov’s out,” she says, pushing the hat into her jacket.
UN tom-toms, I think. Patrick has passed the word to Bruckner, and Bruckner has told Jennifer. Probably a few more of the U.S. delegation. By Monday morning the entire General Assembly will have the news. But Jennifer’s tone is surprisingly downbeat.
“Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“Hatanaka and Nyeri are dead, Sam. And the Japanese lost the vote. If the Secretariat had acted on the Bureau’s report when we gave it to you—”
I raise a hand, cutting off the retrospective apportionment of blame. She draws her jacket tight around her waist.
“We’ve all made mistakes on this,” I tell her meaningfully. “All of us.”
She contemplates her feet as she walks. Then, scuffing her shoes over the fallen leaves, she offers a few remarks about Bruckner’s reaction to the whole sorry episode. Apparently he has decided that the Secretariat had some hidden agenda all along, that we were working to block the Japanese ascension to the Council from the start. I absorb these remarks in silence. I do not, of course, tell Jennifer that the hidden agenda belonged to one of the U.S.A.’s fellow perm five members, France; that dirty political battle has been waged, won, and lost, and a public revelation of the truth now would simply introduce an element into the Security Council, into the whole UN system, as corrosive as acid. It is not lost on me either how easily my own role in the affair could be magnified and distorted by the French into villainous caricature. So I just walk, keeping my gaze straight ahead now and nodding from time to time.
Then I hear her say, “So how’s O’Conner seeing it?”
I stop. A few more steps, then she stops and faces me.
“How’s O’Conner seeing it?” I repeat.
Surprised by my reaction, she cocks her head. But after a few seconds it registers, and she raises a slender finger and points. “I asked you that before.”
“Right.”
“Tuesday morning. The opening.”
“And do you remember what I told you then?”
She ruminates a moment, gives a wry smile. I told her, as she now remembers, nothing at all.
“Jennifer—” My throat is suddenly dry. “Jennifer, I didn’t come over here to discuss O’Conner’s political opinions on the state of the world. It wasn’t the USUN legal counsel that I wanted to see. It was you.”
“Same thing.”
“You know it’s not.”
We study each other awhile.
“Look, if you can put your hand on your heart, tell me you don’t care if you never see me again, I won’t make this worse.”
She doesn’t reply.
“Can you tell me that?” I ask her. “Honestly?”
“It isn’t that easy.”
“Hand on heart?”
“Don’t push me, Sam,” she says quietly, walking on.
After a while, tentatively, I lay a hand on her arm. She makes no move to pull away.
“I’m sorry, Jennifer. Is that what you want to hear from me? I made a mistake. A big one, and I’m so goddamn sorry, I just can’t tell you—”
Her eyes, when she lifts them, are clouded. “I can’t do it, Sam. I can’t go through it all, not a second time.”
“Jennifer—”
“Please.” Her face goes tight. She turns suddenly and heads back toward the kindergarten. I go after her, then fall in step beside her. She presses the heels of her hands into her eyes, then shakes her head. “I guess if this is apology time, I really wasn’t too understanding either.”
“You?”
She pulls a face. “About Rachel, I mean. What you were going through.”
I wave a hand, dismissing her apology.
“No, really,” she says.
But in truth my own behavior and language were nothing to be proud of, and I tell her that now. It is her turn. She waves my apology aside.
“So we’re agreed. We’re both total lowlifes, scum of the earth.” A corner of her mouth rises. We stop by the sandbox outside the kindergarten. She looks in through the window to where the birthday candles on the cake have been lit. Ben is staring at the candles wide-eyed, he has not seen her yet. In a few moments she will be going in to join him.
And what is left now for Jennifer and me to say to each other? So long? It’s been a fine few months, pity how it ended, but good luck with the rest of your life?
“I slept with her once, Jennifer.”
Her gaze stays fixed on her son.
“I’m not excusing myself here, but that’s the truth. It wasn’t some ongoing thing. She was chasing a story. You were breaking my balls. I slept with her. If it’s any consolation, she’s gone back to Paris.”
“It isn’t.”
“Okay.” I take a breath. “I just wanted you to know that.”
“Can you imagine how I feel right now, Sam?”
When I don’t answer her, she turns. “I feel,” she says, looking straight at me, “like I really could murder you.”
She does not look like she could murder me. The look in her eyes is not fierce or wild, but wretched. Totally spent.
“Only that’s not what I’m thinking,” she says. “What I’m thinking is that you made a mistake, like you said, and that you’re sorry. And I think you are. In my head, Sam, I believe you, I really think you are. But in the end, you know, that just doesn’t help. Because what I feel, how I feel, that wins every time. You’re standing there saying sorry, and I’m so mad at you I’m having visions of meat cleavers and knives.” She smiles crookedly. “A pretty shaky foundation for a relationship, don’t you think?”
“We could work it out.”
“No.”
“You don’t want to try?”
“Trying has nothing to do with it.” Her expression and her voice are now strained. “That’s what I’m saying. I have tried. And what I’ve found is that I can’t do it. This thing.” She lifts a hand; she cannot even bring herself to say the words. Betrayal? Adultery? Finally she gives up, facing the kindergarten window again. “I really am so goddamn angry with you,” she says, folding her arms, hugging them close.
For a moment my heart beats erratically, painfully. When I open my mouth to speak, she cuts me off.
“Don’t,” she says.
“Can’t we just give it some time?”
She shakes her head, a short, sharp movement. She is hating every second of this, but she has steeled herself against persuasion. And this is Jennifer. She is unlikely to weaken.
And me? By now I am dying inside.
“I have to go,” Jennifer says.
When I lift my eyes I see that she has offered me her hand. And after a moment I take it. But when she attempts to withdraw, to retreat to the refuge of the kindergarten, the solace of Ben’s loving embrace, I hold her hand firm. I fix my eyes on hers as I speak.
“If I thought you had something better lined up, someone better than me, I wouldn’t stand in your way. I wouldn’t make it this hard. You know that. If you had a better life to go to, if I honestly thought you had, I’d stand aside. I’d even wish you luck. But that’s just not the way I see it, where you go from here.”
She pulls her hand free.
“The way I see it, if I just step aside now, you’ll retreat into your career. And maybe a year or two from now you’ll figure having a great career isn’t the same as having a great life. And you’ll look around then, Jennifer. Maybe you’ll find someone. But that guy, Mr. X, he won’t be perfect. Because that’s not the way we are. None of us. And so what are you going to do when Mr. X screws up? Or the next guy?”
She drops her head but says nothing.
“We can have a future together. A good life. And I don’t pretend to know what you want, but I know what I want.” Reaching, I touch her arm. At last I speak the words that I know she has been waiting to hear from me for months now; I hope is still waiting to hear. The only words that will prove to her that I am ready to take another shot. At love. At some kind of life that is deeper and more complete and true than the life I have. “I want you, Jennifer. I want you.”
For a long while she is still. Then she moves close to me, rises on tiptoe, and clasps my arm as she presses her cheek hard against mine.
It’s too late, she whispers.
Then she turns and bows her head and walks away. My heart, for a moment, ceases beating. I look up at the sky. And I know then, beyond hope, that it is over.