Free Diplomatic Immunity by Grant Sutherland

open and waves me in.
    A regular apartment, much what you would expect from the exterior. Furnished a little on the spartan side, and neat, nothing much in the way of personal touches. It is immediately recognizable as the place of a bachelor.
    “You wanna try the study?” says Mike.
    “Through here.” If there is a suicide note, which I very much doubt, the study seems the likely place. And the pink file Mei Tan mentioned, the missing section of Toshio’s report—the study seems the most likely repository for that stuff too. But instead of following me, Mike drops into an armchair. He pulls some mail from his jacket and starts tearing open the envelopes. Then he catches my look.
    “Letters for Hatanaka.” Mike runs his eyes over the first one and drops it on the floor. “I picked them up from his mailbox in the lobby. Might be something, who knows?”
    “You opened his mailbox?”
    “Smallest key in the bunch.”
    “Just force of habit?”
    Regarding me from beneath his brow, he says levelly, “Sam, you’re standing in a fucking dead guy’s apartment. Unauthorized entry, for starters. You want I don’t tear the envelopes?”
    He tears another. I turn on my heel and make my way to the study.
    In here there is something of a monastic feel. The walls are white and there’s just the one picture, that iconic photograph of Nagasaki after the bomb, the skeletal frame of a church and its dome the only thing left standing. Positioned alone in the middle of the white wall, it seems almost religiously emblematic; and knowing what I do about Toshio’s past, the sight of the picture so prominently displayed is somewhat disturbing. Both his parents were killed in that blast. Not radiation; their house simply disappeared, taking a generation of Hatanakas with it. I never asked Toshio the details, but the story seems to be that he and his sister Moriko were out of town with the grandparents, who ended up raising them. Toshio never blamed the U.S. The event undoubtedly turned him to pacifism as he grew older, but I had never thought that he blamed any side for the catastrophe. The last few months, however, have proved me wrong; I realize now that he blames the Japanese military. This is the emotional engine powering his opposition to a permanent Japanese seat on the Security Council: He still does not trust the Japanese authorities to act in the best interests of either the world or the people of Japan. And this picture in his study must have been a daily reminder of that. Glancing around, I see a cupboard, built-in, floor to ceiling, but the desk is bare apart from the blotter and a neat line of pens. On the side table, a phone and fax. No suicide note. Through the window behind the desk I can see some kids horsing around with a football on a stretch of municipal grass.
    My search of the single desk drawer turns up nothing but stationery, so I wander over to the cupboard. Mainly books, though God knows why he keeps them behind sliding doors, some mania for order maybe. Behind the third door I find what appears to be the mother lode: three bundles of paperwork, a stack of files, and a laptop PC.
    “Any luck?” Mike asks, putting his head in.
    Hauling the bundles from the cupboard, I dump the lot on Toshio’s desk.
    “Guy was neat, I’ll say that,” says Mike, crossing to the window. He stops to watch the kids down below with the football. Unlike me, he seems completely relaxed, as if searching a dead man’s apartment is just part of the daily routine; a dubious legacy, I guess, of his twenty years in the NYPD. He whistles some old Sinatra number and turns to search the cupboards while I flick through Toshio’s papers. The missing report is not among them. No pink file. Just loads of personal accounts; in his methodical way, Toshio appears to have kept every bill and receipt for the past several years. But at the bottom of the bundle I turn up a piece of correspondence that gives me pause: the letter, the one that had