The Last Compromise

Carl Reevik

The Last Compromise

A Novel

The Last Compromise. Copyright
© 2015 by Carl Reevik. All rights reserved.
This book is a work of fiction. Names,
characters and events are fictional; institutions and places are fictionalised.
Feedback and queries may be addressed to [email protected]. Cover design:
Datawyse Maastricht. Cover image: VanBeekImages.com.

To H., N. and D.

1

Pavel
pushed against the heavy wooden door with the glass windows, and the cold dry
air hit his face. The sun was blinding him. It was early April, the snow was
already gone but the air was still cold. He crossed the little square outside the
metro station, turned right and, without slowing down, immersed himself in the brightness
and the smells and the sounds of the crowded street, the noise of the traffic,
the sun in the clear blue sky, the fumes of the car engines. He now was one of the
many dark-haired men in their thirties wearing a black leather jacket, except
that he was looking a lot more focused than most.

He
continued down Chernyshevski Prospekt, a street typical of Saint Petersburg’s
monumental city centre. It was lined with the heavy façades of
eighteenth-century apartment buildings, their rendering painted yellow on the
walls and white around the windows. All was covered by a grey layer of street
dirt. Pavel’s lips were pressed firmly together as he walked in the stream of
pedestrians, keeping pace with the crowd, passing people who were standing
around smoking or handing out leaflets or playing with their mobile phones.

The
concentration in Pavel’s face was real. Four days ago the local police in a
village in southern Romania had recovered human remains from the mud of the
river Danube. It was the body of a man, initially spotted during routine
excavation works along the stream banks. The body was almost completely
decomposed. The head was missing. The hands had been cut off. But it was still
an identifiable body; forensic technology had significantly improved in that
part of Europe. Five years earlier, at the time of the man’s death, it wouldn’t
have been a problem, yet now his identification was only a matter of time.
Pavel had understood that the moment he’d received the news. It was now or
never.

He
reached the intersection and turned right into a boulevard. The pavement was
narrower but there were also fewer people. The façades to his right were still
of the same type, though, with shop displays and cafés squeezed into low
windows at leg level or into generous windows above people’s heads.

He
crossed a side street and looked up ahead without stopping. There it was,
suspended from one of the next buildings on the right-hand side of the street.
Strong colours, heavy fabric, a golden shield with a stern black eagle in the
middle. Red beak, red claws. The flag marking the German consulate.

Pavel
kept on walking. These were the final one hundred metres. He was almost there.

Brussels, Belgium

‘The
statistical guy is here,’ Hans said, leaning into his boss’s office.

‘Coming,’
Tienhoven said. He looked into one corner of his computer screen, clicked on
his mouse button and got up from behind his desk. He was a tall skinny Dutchman
with short grey hair, maybe fifty years old. Hans had never asked him how old
he was exactly. Tienhoven had been director already when Hans had got hired
here three years ago, but never had the boss’s age come up. In fact barely
anything had ever come up, except work. Of course Tienhoven had never asked
Hans about his age either. He didn’t need to, because everything was in his
file. His age was thirty-one. And his file had been checked before he got
hired. It had been checked several times, presumably. Actually Hans knew it had
been; he did part of the checking for new recruits himself these days.

His
boss’s office could be reached directly from the corridor, which is why Hans
could lean into it. The secretary’s office was next door. At his hierarchical
level, Tienhoven could have asked that this direct access be locked for good.
Then visitors would have to come in through the secretary’s office, which would
become an antechamber rather than the adjacent room it now was. But he hadn’t
asked for it.

He
came out and together he and Hans walked down the corridor. Hans stayed half a pace
behind his boss’s right. They walked past a number of closed doors, past the
open door to Hans’s own office and past a few more open doors of other people’s
offices until they reached the half-open door to a small meeting room. Tienhoven
pushed it open and entered, with Hans following.

The
meeting room was the size of two merged standard offices, which was precisely
how they’d built it. They’d left out one interior wall and voilà, here is your
conference centre to receive visitors and take decisions in. There was an oval
conference table filling almost the entire room. Nine chairs positioned around
it, a blank flipchart squeezed into the corner. The Brussels traffic outside
was muffled by the closed windows. It was early April, not rainy but overcast. Since
they were on one of the top floors they could see the main building of the
European Commission stand tall and broad and metallic in the distance. The
steady noise outside and below was no longer commuter traffic, it was just
normal late morning traffic.

A
man about Hans’s age got up as they entered the room. He had black hair and
wore little round glasses. He was cleanly shaven, but he didn’t seem to need to
shave a lot anyway. He wore beige trousers and a light blue shirt with no tie.
None of them wore ties, just the usual smart-casual shirts. Tienhoven was the
most formally dressed of the three because he was wearing his grey jacket over a
white shirt.

Tienhoven
and the visitor shook hands.

‘Willem
Tienhoven, pleased to meet you,’ Tienhoven said. The visitor smiled but didn’t
say anything.

The
guy’s name was Viktor. Since Hans knew him anyway, and since he’d already said
hello to him a minute ago, he just closed the door and sat down right away, on
the far side of the table, with his back to the windows. The other two sat down
as well. The three of them formed the points of a triangle across the table,
each of them having two empty chairs on either side. Hans himself would
probably have kept talking right now, just to compensate for the fact that
Viktor still hadn’t opened his mouth. But his boss didn’t say anything either. He
just sat there and waited.

Hans
broke the silence. ‘Viktor just told me the train from Luxembourg was on time,’
he said, half to Tienhoven, half to Viktor. ‘No Belgian railways strike today,
and Luxembourgish railways never strike.’

Viktor
was sitting there, smiling. A black laptop was resting on the table in front of
him. It was closed. Hans had met with Viktor a few times face to face in the
course of their project. It had been mostly here in Brussels, and a few times
in Luxembourg, the seat of the European Commission’s statistics department and
of a few other offices. As a result of their cooperation Hans knew what Viktor
was like in person. Otherwise all this might have unnerved him even more right
now. But his boss was completely calm.

‘Tell
me,’ Tienhoven said to Viktor. And Viktor started telling him.

Luxembourg,
Luxembourg

Zayek
was waiting in the queue at the newsagent’s shop across the street from his
office to buy one pack of cigarettes. He had taken an early lunch break, he had
come here specifically for this purpose, and he was already holding his wallet
in his right hand. The shop occupied a small part of the ground floor of a
glass cube that looked very much like his own office building. Two people were
waiting in front of him, including the person who was already being served.

Only
one pack of cigarettes. Not more for the moment, Zayek thought, because he wasn’t
going to smoke a lot. In fact he wasn’t a smoker at all, and never really had
been. But he had thought about it thoroughly, and had decided that it was time
to pick it up. He was nearly forty. And he figured that a man who was nearly
forty, and who was in his situation, might as well smoke. He even should. Or at
least carry a pack of cigarettes in his pocket. He wouldn’t pick up smoking
like some teenager, who checked in a bathroom mirror how cool he looked with a
cigarette in his mouth. No, Zayek would not look into any mirrors. He would be
smoking because it was the appropriate thing to do. It would even give him a
pleasant dizziness after the first draw of smoke every time he would light up,
this much he remembered from previous times.

All
right, his turn. ‘Bonjour Monsieur,’ the shop assistant said to him, a friendly
smile in her young face. Like most shop assistants in Luxembourg she would
speak only French. Commuters from Belgium or France next door. Good luck trying
German or English with these people. Zayek looked at her face, then at her
breasts, then at his wallet, trying to remember the French phrase he had
prepared back in the office.

‘Des
cigarettes mentholées, s’il vous plaît’, he said, pointing at a green pack of
menthol cigarettes behind the assistant’s back. ‘No, the other one. Yes, that
one.’ He remembered that the ones with menthol tasted slightly less awful than the
normal ones.

‘Ça
sera tout?’ Yes, that would be all, thank you.

He
paid in euro coins, put his wallet into the left pocket of his jacket, picked
up the green cigarette pack, put it into the right pocket, said au revoir,
smiled, stepped aside and turned around. A queue of three people had formed
behind him, and it was now shifting forward as he cleared the space in front of
the counter.

Zayek
thought for a moment. Now the chewing gum. He had promised Anneli from the
office to fetch some sugar-free chewing gum for her. Not for her, in fact, but
for her children. He had asked whether he could get her anything, and he had smiled,
and she had smiled back and had said, yes, in fact, chewing gum would be great.
Then she’d added that she usually gave the kids chewing gum when she picked
them up from school. She had said it with the same smile, in the same friendly
voice. Clearly she would never have an affair with him. Zayek was sure about
that. Anneli smiled a lot with him, but she was also a serious, organised
woman. She was from Finland, married to a Frenchman, two kids, no nonsense.
Civil servants at the European Commission were almost all in mixed marriages.
It didn’t matter whether they worked in Brussels or here, at the outpost in
Luxembourg. In his own unit there was only one Spanish guy married to a woman
from Spain, and there was Zayek himself, who wasn’t married to anyone. But for
the rest it was all cross-border coupling. Anneli often flirted with him in the
office, at least Zayek thought she did. Married women, or at least some of
them, would just love to have an affair to get out of their domestic lives,
with a man like, for example, himself. At least he thought they would, at least
some of them. But Anneli was all smiles, and flirts, and nothing else. Happily
married. Earlier he had thought that, if he started smoking, the cigarette
smell on him would repel her if she ever wanted to kiss him. But she would
never want to kiss him, so he might as well smoke. He already got the
cigarettes. Now he just needed to get back to the end of the queue, and buy
some chewing gum for Anneli’s children. No, there would be no kiss, not even a
hug, there never had been any of that. Just a smile: thank you Boris, that’s so
sweet of you.

Brussels

‘Hans
and I are conducting a project in forensic statistics,’ Viktor explained,
looking only at Tienhoven. He hadn’t stood up. He and Tienhoven and Hans were
still sitting around the oval conference table that barely fit into the room.

Viktor
had a calm voice. Hans knew he was Hungarian, but he had no particular accent.
Clearly English was not his native language, but his accent was impossible to
pinpoint. Not Slavic, not Scandinavian, not Hungarian. A steady, generic,
unobtrusive European voice. Viktor continued, ‘Forensic statistics means to run
different types of analysis over sets of data to look for patterns, and for
anomalies in the patterns, which can then reveal criminal activity.’

He
turned around in his seat to the flipchart behind him. It was close enough for him
to draw on it without getting up.

‘For
example, this is how we detected irregularities in the award of government
contracts in three European countries.’ Viktor drew a vertical line to the
left, and a horizontal line at the bottom of the sheet. Two axes waiting for a
curve.

‘Say
a city administration wants to build a bridge. It needs a contractor, and there
are many companies that want that government contract. When the estimated value
of the project is below five million euros, the mayor has a lot of freedom to
choose the company he likes. But above five million he has to apply stricter
European rules, so that qualified companies from other European countries have
a chance to make a bid, too.’ Viktor drew a horizontal line running just above the
horizontal axis, a flat curve. ‘Normally you would expect that the probability
of a government contract having any particular estimated value is more or less evenly
spread, except that there are more small contracts than there are big
contracts. What we found, however, is a spike in probability just below five
million euros.’ He drew a steep and narrow stalagmite with its base in the
middle of the horizontal curve, pointing upwards into the sky. ‘It means that,
unusually often, city authorities estimated the value of their contracts as
just below the threshold. It turned out that they deliberately and
systematically underestimated the value in order to avoid the application of
stricter rules.’

‘So
they could give the contracts to their friends,’ Hans added. ‘Which only becomes
visible when you crunch the numbers. If you audit the files themselves, and go
through the contracts one by one, you will not notice it. The files themselves
are clean.’