Free Diplomatic Immunity by Grant Sutherland Page A

Patrick bristling this morning. It is a turgid and uncompromising rebuttal of every argument currently being advanced in favor of a Japanese Security Council seat. And the next page is a surprisingly long list of names, mostly public figures from the U.S. and Japan, to whom Toshio has apparently sent this letter of dissent. The few replies attached are all anodyne one-liners acknowledging receipt.
    Finishing his unsuccessful browse through the cupboard, Mike eases into the chair.
    “One note, three bills.” He produces the trove he has stolen from the lobby and places the three bills on the desk. “Gas, phone, and AmEx. The note was just slipped in the box, no envelope.”
    He turns the note through his fingers. Curiosity roused, I ask him who it’s from.
    “Stab in the dark?” He lays it faceup by the bills. “Someone Japanese.”
    The note is written in kanji, Japanese script, with purple ink.
    “And if you’re thinking suicide note, forget it. You don’t slip a suicide note into your own mailbox.”
    “Female,” I declare.
    “How do you figure that?”
    When I point to the pair of powder-blue butterflies at the top left-hand corner, Mike frowns. “You’re reaching, Sam.”
    That I am. But having failed to find any suicide note, this whole expedition is now no better than an extremely hopeful cast of the net. I take a glance at my watch. Twelve-thirty. More than two hours since we found Toshio’s body. The major opening day speeches will have finished by now, the rumor mill will be sliding into action like a well-oiled machine.
    “Get the translators to take a look at it,” Mike says, referring to the note. “Phone bill might give us something. I’ll try in the morning. Should get an itemized listing for the last quarter anyway.” He folds it into his pocket along with the note. I decide not to inquire as to how Mike intends to extract this information from the phone company. Picking up the gas bill, Mike makes some ghoulish crack about Toshio putting his head in the oven. Then he takes up the AmEx bill, another single page.
    “The guy was no big spender, that’s for sure. Two hundred fifty dollars the whole month. No carryover from the month before. What was he living on, air?”
    “Maybe he used cash.”
    “Cash,” Mike says as if he finds the notion simply incredible. He inspects the bill a moment more, then hands it to me.
    There are only three items: a meal in a restaurant called the White Imperial, presumably Chinese; a thirty-dollar dry cleaner’s bill; and a hundred and eighty bucks to a store called Barney and Hunt’s. When I hand the bill back to Mike, he pockets it.
    “What you got?” He indicates the bundles I have retrieved from the cupboard.
    I show him Toshio’s letter. When he’s read it, I ask what he thinks.
    “I think Hatanaka was playing politics, is what I think.” Mike considers the letter. “I don’t get this guy. Who was he trying to impress? So he fires his letter off to every big wheel he knows, so what? I mean, I’m no politician, but where’s that get him? Twenty-one-gun salute?”
    Maybe, I suggest, it was simply an act of conscience, a stand that Toshio believed he had to make.
    Mike passes the letter back over the desk. “Guy was puffing himself up, way I see it. Something for his résumé, for when he throws his hat in the ring for the big UNHCR job.”
    Way too too cynical, I say. Toshio Hatanaka, I tell Mike, just wasn’t that kind of guy.
    “One thing I learned down at City Hall, Sam. When you’re talking politics, ain’t no such thing as too cynical. Hatanaka was up the greasy pole same as everyone else.”
    “Ever heard of public service, Mike? Altruism?”
    “Ah-ha. Right up there alongside Santa Claus and the tooth fairy.” He goes out, telling me he’s going to take a proper look around.
    Deflated somewhat by Mike’s world-weary judgment, I reexamine Toshio’s papers. But there is nothing more of interest, so I switch on his laptop and