Read Online Diplomatic Immunity by Grant Sutherland - Free Book Online Page B

while; it seems to help.
    “I took a few samples,” he says, glancing back to me. “For Forensics.”
    “Samples?”
    His gaze drops. “Like from the syringe. Like that.”
    I regard him closely. “That’s all?”
    “I figure, how else we gonna know for sure if we don’t get it tested?”
    “Mike.”
    He looks up.
    “Don’t bullshit me,” I say.
    He swipes a finger across his perspiring brow.
    “I took a couple of bloods too,” he concedes. Blood samples, he means, from Toshio Hatanaka’s body. “Who cares what’s in the syringe if it wasn’t injected?”
    I let my look linger, he knows I’m not pleased. Not so much with what he’s done but with his apparent intention to keep it to himself.
    “They’ve gone for analysis?”
    He nods.
    “Patel?” I ask, knowing in my bones that this is not the correct answer.
    “I got a guard on it,” he admits. “He’s taking the samples down to a pathologist on Second, some guy I know. Might even be there by now.” He checks his watch, then notices the look I am giving him. “Listen. If I’d told you, you woulda had no choice, you woulda told Patrick. Once he knew, I’d spend a week filling out forms while he dreamed up a million reasons not to do it.”
    “So you did it anyway.”
    “Give me a break. It had to be done. I did it.”
    I ask Mike when he expects the results back. Tomorrow morning, he says, first thing.
    I guess now that it’s done there isn’t much point in recrimination. And in truth, I am not totally displeased with Mike’s unauthorized action; at least this way we get reliable results from the analysis, not something that could have been guaranteed from Patel’s tiny and ill-equipped lab. Patrick, when I tell him, will be livid.
    “Then I’d like to hear the results,” I say, “first thing.”
    Mike gives a brittle smile. He has just caught a glimpse of a barge passing way, way below us on the gray East River, and for the rest of the journey he sits rigid, staring at his feet.
     
    Roosevelt Island is a few acres of land located smack in the middle of the East River, its whole southern shore clearly visible from UNHQ over on Manhattan. Alighting from the cable car, Mike and I turn northward, walking up into what you might call Roosevelt Island downtown. There is a post office, a bank, a few restaurants, and even a wine bar, but weirdly, the exteriors all look the same: glass-fronted and signed with standardized lettering. The place is not even pretending to be an organic civic growth, the planner’s fingerprints remain annealed to its entire structure. A toy town. Urban life as every city bureaucrat would like to see it lived. It occurs to me now what this place reminds me of, what I’d never quite pinned down on previous visits here. Toshio Hatanaka, international globetrotter and cosmopolitan twenty-first-century man, when he chose his apartment, instinctively reached for this place, a pale simulacrum of where he came from, the territory in which his roots were inescapably embedded. That’s what this place reminds me of: urban Japan.
    While Mike looks around the lobby of Toshio’s apartment building for the manager or super’s room number, I go on up. Toshio’s door is the last in line down a long corridor on the sixth floor. I’m thinking the place has the feel of a midpriced hotel. Mike joins me with the keys a minute later. He cannot find anyone.
    “Feels real homey, don’t it?” he remarks, gesturing along the corridor.
    I point to Toshio’s door, 612. Mike tries a few keys.
    “You been up here lately?” he asks.
    “About three times this year.”
    “Social?”
    “The last two.”
    “The first time?” he asks idly. When I don’t reply, he glances up.
    “About Sarah,” I say simply. Sarah, my wife. Mike’s face falls, his eyes flicker down, an expression of awkward embarrassment that I have seen on so many faces so many times these past three years. Finally Mike finds the correct key. He pushes the door