It was the hour of the day when he could see the furnishings of his own office reflected in the vast window. The decor had changed little over the years; it would have been sacrilege to replace the modernist furniture custom-designed for the building by the Finnish architect Eero Saarinen. Zinsou had added a few hangings of traditional textiles from his native country of Benin, for a slight flavor of individuality. In addition, gifts from various emissaries were stationed at strategic perches, and there were others, in storage, that could be brought out when representatives of the nation in question came to visit. If the finance minister of Indonesia were keeping an appointment, a Javanese mask might appear on the wall where, earlier in the day, a row of Edo netsuke had greeted the foreign secretary of Japan. Decoration as diplomacy, as Helga Lundgren liked to call it.

The office was positioned outward and away from the bustle of Manhattan. Indeed, when he peered through the ghostly reflections on the glass, he saw straight across the East River to the desolate industrial wasteland that was West Queens: the barnlike brick factory of the Schwartz Chemical Company with its four immense smokestacks, evidently long unused. The yellow-brick remains of an anonymous-looking warehouse. A few wisps of fog rolled over Hunter’s Point, the nearest part of West Queens, where an ancient Pepsi-Cola neon sign still blazed, as it had since 1936, atop a now closed bottling plant, like an amulet warding off enemy incursions, or real-estate developers, and notably failing.

The view was not beautiful, but there were times when Secretary-General Zinsou found it oddly mesmerizing. An antique brass telescope was angled from an oak stand on the floor, facing the window, but he rarely used it; the unaided eye sufficed to see what was to be seen. A petrified forest of former manufacturing concerns. Fossils of industry. An archaeology of modernity, half buried, half excavated. The waning sun glittered off the East River, flashed from the chrome of disused signage. Such were the unloved remnants of bygone industrial empires. And what about his own empire, on the banks of Manhattan? Was it, too, destined for the scrap heap of history?

The sun had lowered farther in the horizon, giving the East River a rosy tinge, when the secretary-general’s assistant notified him that Peter Novak was on the phone. He picked up at once.

“Mon cher Mathieu,” the voice said. It had the crystalline clarity of something heavily processed by digital telephony—undoubtedly he was speaking on a top-of-the-line satellite phone. The secretary-general had requested that he and Novak speak on encrypted phones only, and the additional security probably increased the eerily noiseless quality of the signal. After a few pleasantries, Mathieu Zinsou began to hint at what he had on his mind.