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building. More than thirty floors of worker ants busy gathering information and writing reports, and though I deal with only the apex of the legal pyramid, that is more than enough to keep me permanently wading through paper. I curse the system as I move along the shelves.
    The door opens behind me.
    “Elizabeth? I’m looking for Geneva dip rights and privileges, sixty-one. Any clues?” On my knees now, I shuffle along by the bottom shelf. “I thought it was down here.”
    No answer. When I look up, it is not Elizabeth, my secretary, peering down at me over my desk.
    “Dad?” Rachel smiles and shakes her head, her bob of shiny black hair swaying from side to side. “Get a grip,” she says.
    My gut clenches. Quickly turning back to the shelves, I tell my daughter that I thought she had the whole day off from her job as a UN guide.
    “What’s lost?” she asks me.
    I shoot her a dark look. She pulls a face and crosses to the window, remarking that most of the sightseers have left First Avenue. “How come you’re not down at the opening?” she says, turning back.
    “How come you’re up here?”
    “I’m a spy.”
    “How about you do your spying someplace else.”
    “Dad?” She leans right over, watching me through the opening beneath my desk. “What is it, some book?”
    Yeah, I say. Some book.
    In fact, if I can find the damn thing, it is the only document I can think of that might give us some guidance as to the legal situation arising from Toshio’s death. Not something I want to get into with Rachel. Standing, I brush the dust off my knees. Rachel takes a tub of yogurt and a plastic teaspoon from her purse. She commences to eat, ruminating over each mouthful, her gaze directed to the Tibetan monks across the street. Watching her, I think, What do I tell her? How do I tell her? Remember Toshio Hatanaka, the guy who went to Afghanistan to negotiate your mother’s release and failed? Guess what happened.
    “Hello?” Rachel waves her plastic spoon, her singsong voice bringing me back to the present.
    I nod to the yogurt. “I hope that’s not lunch.”
    “Are you nagging me?”
    “That’s what I’m doing.” I move along the shelves.
    “And I really look like I’m shrinking away?” She pinches her cheek as she sits down. “Skin and bone?”
    But she looks fine, a slimmer-than-average eighteen-year-old kid who probably hasn’t slept as much as she should have since moving out of the family home last week. And I recognize the veiled warning too—what she eats, her weight, are not subjects she likes to discuss. When her mother died, Rachel was your normal, healthy adolescent, no more hang-ups or neuroses than any fifteen-year-old girl. Within a year she was in a special-needs ward at Bellevue, being fed a cocktail of nutrient-enriched liquids through a tube in her nose. Anorexia nervosa. Words that can still fill me with helpless terror.
    “So what’s the big deal with this book?”
    Just some procedural thing, I tell her, facing the shelves again, wondering how to get rid of her. For one of the committees, I say. No big deal.
    “I don’t know why you bother.”
    “It’s a job.”
    “I mean, why you bother lying, Dad. Really. You are the world’s absolute worst.”
    Locating the diplomatic rights and privileges file, I pull it from the stack, then face her. She has her feet apart now, her knees clamped together. She leans forward, trying hard not to drip yogurt onto her blue skirt. Her blue blazer is draped over her purse behind the door.
    “This isn’t a good time, Rache.”
    “Two minutes,” she says.
    Two minutes. I’ve got a dead man in the basement and my daughter needs two minutes to finish her yogurt. I flip open the file and pull up a chair behind my desk.
    “I’m a chaperone for the day,” she tells me.
    “Good for you.”
    “All the guides got landed with different delegations.”
    Nodding into the file, I turn a page.
    “Guess who I’m doing.”
    “Amaze