He picked up the water bucket and poured from it into four of the water glasses. Then he picked up one of the water-filled glasses and moved it down the tile coping.
"This one goes to the UN official who happened to be looking the other way when the tanker was overloaded," he said.
He picked up a second of the water-filled glasses, moved it down the tile coping, and explained, "And this one goes to the UN official who sees nothing suspicious about five-dollar-a-pill aspirin, or twenty-dollar-a-kilo flour, and authorizes the bill therefore to be paid."
He picked up the two remaining water-filled glasses and moved them to a narrow shelf on the pool side of the tile coping. "And these two, now converted to packages of crisp one-hundred-dollar bills, go back across the border to Saddam, where they are thus available to build palaces for his sons and to bribe other people.
"You will notice, again, that filling the glasses did not appreciably lower the level of water in the bucket."
He paused, looked at everybody for a moment, and then filled the remaining water glasses.
"There are many refineries in Iraq," Kocian went on, "capable of producing far more gasoline, for example, than Iraq needs. What to do with this?"
He picked up two of the glasses and leaned forward to where Torine was lying on the tiles, and set them down by one of Torine's elbows.
"You are now Jordan," Kocian said. "Jordanians don't hate Americans as much as most other Arab countries,possibly because the widow of the late king was the daughter of an American general. And America tends to look less critically at Jordan than it does at other Arab countries. In any event, Jordan has a need for gasoline. There is no pipeline or port, but Iraq has many twenty-thousand-gallon tanker trucks. How to get it across the border? Bribe somebody."
He slid the water glasses from Torine's elbow to his waist, and picked up one of them. He moved it inside the tile coping. "This one, now miraculously converted to dollars, goes back to Iraq."
"Jesus!" Castillo said.
"Now, there were certain logistical problems to be solved, as well," Kocian went on. "Saddam wanted certain things-his sons, for example, liked Mercedes sports cars and Hustler magazine-which he could not legally import into Iraq. You may notice I am not even talking about war materiel, aircraft parts, etcetera, which is another story in itself. So, how to do this?
"Bribe a UN inspector into finding nothing suspicious, say, that an X-ray machine intended for an Iraqi hospital came from the Mercedes-Benz plant in Stuttgart. Or that a crate labeled 'Medical Publications' actually was full of pornographic videotapes.
"Saddam Hussein International Airport in Baghdad saw a lot of cargo airplanes-many of them owned by a Russian by the name of Aleksandr Pevsner-flying in things like hospital X-ray machines from the Mercedes-Benz plant-"
"Tell me about Pevsner, please, Herr Kocian," Castillo said.
"Tell you what about him?"
"How deep was he in the oil-for-food business?"
"He made a lot of money."
"He was one of those bribed?"
"We're playing semantic games here," Kocian said. "Did somebody hand him some money and say, 'Please defy the UN sanctions and airlift this Mercedes in an X-ray crate to Baghdad?' No. Did he carry an X-ray machine to Baghdad without looking to see what the crate really held? Yes. Did he charge twice or three times-five times-the standard rate for flying X-ray machines to Baghdad? Yes. Did he look to see if a case of ten million aspirin pills really contained aspirin instead of, for example, ten million dollars in U.S. currency? No. Was he bribed? That would be an opinion. Was he paid in cash? Yes. Was the cash he got from Saddam Hussein cash that had come into Saddam's hands for oil that he exported that he wasn't supposed to export? Almost certainly; where else would Saddam have gotten it? Can I prove any of this? No."
"Interesting," Torine said.
"What's your interest in Aleksandr Pevsner, Karl?" Kocian asked.
"The name has come up in conversation," Castillo said. "How were all these bribes paid, Herr Kocian, do you know?"
"In oil or cash, I told you."
"No. I mean, for example, you mentioned that a party or parties unknown would hand somebody's grandmother a stack of cash. Who was that party unknown? Who actually made the payoffs?"
"There was an elaborate system set up to do that," Kocian said. "What's your American name, Karl? 'Charles'?"
"Carlos," Castillo said. "That's Spanish for Karl and Charles."
"Yes, of course. Well, you're going to love this, Carlos."
"Love what?"
"When this business began to grow, and it became inconvenient to pass money through banks, laundering it, etcetera, Saddam began looking around for a paymaster. He needed someone, preferably an official of some sort, ideally a diplomat, who traveled around the area, and whose baggage would not be subject to search. The only people who did that routinely were members of the UN. So they started looking around the UN people they already had on the payroll, and they weren't very impressed. Finally they found their man in Paris, working for the UN. He was a UN bureaucrat, not a bona fide diplomat. He worked for-"
"The European Directorate of InterAgency Coordination, something like that?" Castillo interrupted.
"He was the chief of the European Directorate of InterAgency Coordination," Kocian said, looking at him strangely. "Which entitled him to a UN diplomatic passport. The passport-which, in addition to getting you through customs and immigration without getting your bags searched, exempts you from both local taxes and taxes in your homeland-is a prize passed out to deserving middle-level UN bureaucrats."
"What does the European Directorate of InterAgency Coordination do, Herr Kocian?" Castillo asked. "I've always wondered."
"I don't really know," Kocian said. "From what I have seen of the UN, probably nothing useful. But this fellow had for ten, fifteen years been running all over Europe and the Near East and the United States, doing his interagency coordination, whatever that might be.
"He had other things going for him. He wasn't married, so there would be no wife boasting about what her husband was doing; and he wasn't homosexual, so there would be no boyfriend doing the same. And he wasn't very well paid. Even tax exempt, and taking into consideration his travel and representation allowances, his salary wasn't very much.
"But most important, he was not only American, which would keep the Americans off his scent, but he was an anti-American American. Possibly because he was black. Maybe not. But his being black was something else that would keep the Americans from looking too closely at him."
"And his name is Jean-Paul Lorimer," Castillo said. "And I want to know where he is."
"Just to satisfy an old man's curiosity, Karl, how long have you Americans known about Lorimer?"
"Not long. Where is he, Herr Kocian?"
"Possibly out there," Kocian said, gesturing toward the stained-glass windows lining two walls of the baths.
"You mean in Budapest?"
"I meant in the Danube," Kocian said. "Or possibly in the Seine."
"What makes you so sure he's dead?"
"Or possibly in a cell somewhere, where they are asking him for names, so there will be fewer witnesses around. But if I had to bet, I'd bet on one of the two rivers."
"What was his connection with Henri Douchon?"
"Ah, now I know why you came to see me. Otto told you about him."
"That's part of it. What about Douchon?"
"He was one of Lorimer's assistant paymasters," Kocian said. "He handled Lebanon, Egypt, Cyprus, and Turkey… maybe some other places, but that's all I've been able to confirm."