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and two female journalists, so I called the whole thing off. One of those last two, the stayers, wasn’t one of them French?
    Memory triggered, I point. “Radio France.”
    Smiling, she reintroduces herself. Marie Lefebre. As we near the stairs, she takes the opportunity to remind me of just what I said in those high-minded seminars, my earnest endorsement of the journalists’ right to question and the Secretariat’s responsibility to respond.
    I pull a face. “You were listening?”
    “
Oui.
I have notes.”
    “Well, maybe you could show your notes to Ambassador Froissart,” I suggest. “He seems a reasonable man.”
    At the head of the stairs a security guard steps aside to let me pass, but when Marie Lefebre tries to join me, he plants himself in front of her. He puts out his arm, telling her that the concourse and basement are temporarily off limits. I give her a curt parting nod as I descend.
    “You were not discussing the Japanese vote?” she calls after me.
    I concentrate on the stairs, hoping that I can walk right out of her sphere of curiosity just as easily as I walked into it. On the ground floor I meet Mike coming up from the basement.
    “No pink file in the briefcase,” he tells me.
    “Let’s go.”
    “You don’t wanna see where we got him?”
    “Monsieur Windrush?”
    Mike’s eyes dart upward, my own head lifts slowly. Marie Lefebre is leaning out from the cantilevered balcony above us, looking down at the guards Mike has stationed on the stairs to the basement. “What is so important down there?” she says.
    Mike shoots me a look. He is not pleased with the curiosity I seem to have invited. Taking his arm, I guide him toward the exit while from up on the balcony Marie delivers a short burst of French at our retreating backs. The one word I hear quite distinctly is
merde.

7
    “J ESUS, CAN I CHANGE MY MIND? ” MIKE SAYS QUIETLY .
The subway across to Roosevelt Island is temporarily closed, so we have chosen the fastest alternate route, a choice that Mike seems to be regretting already. When the cable car lurches out from its station into the air, Mike’s grip on the silver railing tightens, his whole body goes stiff. He watches the two uniformed attendants over by the controls as if he expects them to hit a button at any moment and send us plunging earthward.
    When I tell him to relax, his eyes skate past me out the window.
    “This ain’t my best thing, you know.”
    I guess I did know that in the abstract, but this is the first time I have actually seen Mike in thrall to his fear of heights. People are so strange. Mike Jardine would not think twice about taking a bullet for the Secretary-General, yet now, elevated just fifty feet off the ground, perspiration is suddenly beading across his brow. It seems like a valiant effort to distract himself when he picks up our conversation again, telling me about the call he made earlier to an acquaintance from his previous life at City Hall, a pathologist at one of the city morgues.
    “I told him it was some old delegate who croaked. Terminal fossilization or something. I asked him how long we could keep the body in the coolroom, what we needed to do.”
    Mike braves another glance out the window, then turns straight back. It’s not just his knuckles, his whole fist around the bar has gone deathly white. Down below, a surreal landscape of flat building tops doubling as parking lots reveals itself as we climb; the cars look like toys from up here.
    “How long?” I ask.
    “Ten days max, unless we can freeze him. After that we’ll be needing gas masks. Just to get near the body, that’s what he said.”
    The Roosevelt Island cable car shudders as we hit maximum altitude and plane out for the haul across the water. Mike moans and closes his eyes. Across the tram car a young woman, the sole passenger apart from us, rearranges the shopping bags at her feet and regards Mike curiously. When I advise Mike to look at the bridge, he does that for a