01.27.2003
I'd like to say that people evolve into more mature and respectful creatures after grade school, but I simply can't. There is far too much evidence to the contrary, even in as noble an institution as where I work: the United Nations.
People who visit New York from around the country always seem to skip the UN, forgetting or maybe not caring that the first step towards a world government has it's headquarters on the island of Manhattan and a short walk from Times Square, a place that everyone makes sure to see. The closest most people get to it is by watching the opening credits in North By Northwest when Hitchcock misses his bus. Frankly, I wouldn't ever see it if I didn't work there.
I started my career as a low level bureaucrat in the State Department, but somehow got transferred to the United States Permanent Mission to the United Nations. My boss, the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, John Negroponte, was my only task. Through a stroke of luck – or misfortune, depending on how one looks at it – I became his personal assistant, organizing various files in his briefcase and giving him cliff notes on the latest in world affairs so he could speak on them with authority. Mr. Ambassador – as he has the staff call him – read through a list of print outs made on my computer every morning and would decide, based on directives from Washington, what to address, what to ignore, and what to put aside for a later time. I've accompanied him to every meeting except the classified Security Council briefings and continued my feeding of information to him so that he could understand the finer points of nuclear weapons technology. I was one of the people who would stand behind him, in a suit just slightly less expensive than his, and nod my head at his points for televised effect. He only ever gave one directive. He was never to be caught unprepared.
There were armies of sycophants like me that inhabited the grounds of the UN. For every ambassador there were at least three of us. When the UN allocated funding to renovate the dining hall, it wasn't for the ambassadors, who wouldn't be caught dead in it, but for the personal assistants to the Ambassador from Chad, Zaire, Belgium, or France. And like a high school cafeteria, it was split up into social groups that could, at best, be described as cliques. The English speaking countries occupied one corner, the French another – depending on whether they're on good terms with France or their continental neighbors – and so on. My best friend at the UN, Robert Young, was the personal attaché to the British Ambassador to the United Nations. Sometimes we were friends with Canada, depending on whether the ambassador was English or French speaking and therefore his aides. Sometimes we'd let the Australians sit with us, sometimes we wouldn't, but we would always ask them to come out for drinks as they usually started paying for all the rounds after the fourth.
Robert, unlike myself, set out on the foreign service track. Educated at Oxford, he was the son of a diplomat who was the son of a diplomat. He's never known, nor ever dreamed of another life, which might be why we get along so well. He knew that I didn't really care either way.
In the Security Council chamber, a drab modern auditorium built in the sixties and not unlike the one in my public high school, the United States and United Kingdom representatives were seated next to each other in plush leather chairs as two of the five permanent members of the Security Council. The aides to each sat behind their charges in hard metal folding seats and feed them information from portable filing cabinets like children do seals at a zoo. Robert and I arranged it so that we sat next to each other, which was convenient during particularly long and tedious meetings.
On an amazingly cold Monday morning, the UN Weapons Inspection team held a briefing for the Security Council so that it could decide whether some country or another should be invaded for their lack of compliance. Robert and I were unimpressed.
"This country appears not to have come into genuine acceptance, not even today, of the disarmament that was demanded of it," mumbled Hans Blix from the podium in front of us. He spoke much like any high school vice-principal would. A very slow, very tedious drone.
"I'll tell you who hasn't come into genuine acceptance," Robert whispered, leaning over to me. I scratched my chin with my pen, not taking my eyes off of Blix. "Helga Whur. She hasn't accepted yet that she's madly in love with me." Helga was a low level assistant to the German Ambassador, and had a marvelous penchant for turning men into teenage boys by doing no more than walking past. We didn't know what process she used to fit certain elements into her clothes, but we wanted to find out.
"That's one nation I'd like to see disarmed," I whispered back. Robert cackled hoarsely, trying to keep the news microphones from picking any of it. It was rumored that, before we came to work at the UN, the aide to the Egyptian Ambassador had once been caught and translated saying unkind words about the former Secretary General Buotros Boutros-Ghali, one of his own countrymen. He was on a plane back home before the ink had finished drying on the newspaper. No one ever heard what happened to him after that. It was a cautionary tale passed on from staff to staff, no doubt an urban legend perpetuated by the Ambassadors to keep their staffs in line.
"It ought to be declared a bloody war crime," Robert said quietly. I couldn't suppress my grin as I passed on a file about prior weapons inspections to my boss.
"What's so funny," Negroponte asked, hand over his mouth.
"Nothing, Mr. Ambassador," I whispered. "This is a file on United Nations inspections in South Africa."
"It would appear from our experience so far that they have decided in principle to provide cooperation on process, notably access," Blix said dryly. "A similar decision is indispensable to provide cooperation on substance in order to bring the disarmament task to completion."
"Speaking of completion," I whispered to Robert. "Did I tell you about Sarah Anderson?"
"The Aussie?"
"The same."
"Don't tell me that you..."
"No, no, no," I said, recoiling slightly. "I wouldn't touch her with a ten foot pole, but you know who did?"
"I give up."
"That guy from the Irish Mission. What's his name?"
"Ryan?"
"No," I said with a little laugh. "But that would be funny." I looked over at the President of the Security Council, Irish Ambassador Richard Ryan and thought about him and Sarah dealing with their mutual problem. He was old enough to be her father.
"Not him," Robert hissed. "Ryan O'Connor."
Ryan O'Connor was a real possibility at only thirty, but that wasn't him either. I sat back against the metal chair that was cold enough for me to feel it through my shirt and undershirt. I jerked forward quickly. Negroponte looked back at me to see if there was something he should pay attention to. I nodded in the negative but the name suddenly came to me.
"John Cork," I said. "That's his name."
"Oh," Robert grinned. "He's a bastard of a man. What happened?"
"It turns out that Sarah had a little surprise for him."
The entire auditorium unexpectedly lit up with applause and Blix, like a true statesman, nodded before slowly stepping down from the podium, the small spotlights in the ceiling changing the features of his face from angelic to demonic in random turn. In his place, Mohamed ElBaradei began to arrange the notes for his statement on nuclear capabilities.
"She's not pregnant, is she," Robert cackled quietly.
"No," I said. "It's worse than that. Have you ever heard of fungus being transmitted?"
"I've never even heard that it existed like that. He's growing bloody mushrooms down there," He asked incredulously, scratching himself there from a vicarious itch. "That's vicious, even for someone like him."
Robert didn't like John, and for good reason. Beyond the Irish-British dislike, which is mostly the Irish disliking the British, John and Robert had actually come to blows a couple of times before. It was usually a case of drunkenness whose flames were fanned by competition for women, but it was always John who threw the first punch and Robert who would be kicked out. If there's one thing he and I could agree on, it was that there were too many Irish bars surrounding the United Nations and within walking distance. John was a major reason why we didn't eat lunch often with the Irish contingent.
"I can only assume that it's not the kind of thing you find in the store," I said quietly. "But yeah, still pretty gruesome."
"Well," said Robert, looking up at ElBaradei behind the dais and marking down something on his notepad. "I don't know about all of this, but I can think of someone who needs a weapons inspection."
"Sarah Anderson," we said smiling at the same time. Upon turning around, neither Ambassador looked pleased.