The Last Compromise (11 page)

Zayek
took his jacket off the hook and started putting it on as he walked outside.
Tienhoven and Hans followed him.

***

‘Can
you tell me now what this is about?’, Zayek asked as soon as they’d left the
building, heading across the parking lot towards the street.

Hans
took over from Tienhoven, assuming that Tienhoven would do the talking again
once they’d arrive at the hotel. ‘We’re looking into people’s property, like
where they own a holiday home,’ he said. ‘But let’s do this quietly. We cannot
just ask you questions about your boss, you have certain rights.’

Together
they crossed the street and turned left at the newsagent’s shop to walk to the
hotel.

‘It’s
pretty far away from the city centre, no?’, Hans inquired. ‘I thought this
would be on Kirchberg.’

Zayek
nodded. ‘Most of the offices are there.’

‘At
least you have a modern building,’ Hans said, encouragingly.

Finally
they reached the entrance to the hotel. Tienhoven hadn’t said a word.

The hotel lobby
was identical to hundreds of other hotel lobbies, just like the hotel itself
was identical to hundreds of other hotels in the chain. And in other chains,
for that matter. The colours were an inoffensive mix of beige and brass,
soothing the senses of anyone entering. A marble path led from the sliding
glass doors past a round column in the middle of the room and straight to a
reception counter at the far end of the lobby. The rest of the floor was
carpeted. To the right of the counter there was a door to a staircase. At the
counter itself a lone receptionist was talking to a guest. Hans could only see
the guest’s back, but that was more than enough. It was an American army officer
in a dark blue uniform with light blue trousers, a little black suitcase on
rolls with a telescopically extended handle standing right next to him on the
floor. The man was at least thirty centimetres taller than the receptionist,
who himself was of ordinary height. Also, his shoulders seemed thirty
centimetres broader. Above them both, the hotel chain’s logo on the wall constituted
the only brightly colourful spot in the room.

To
the left of the counter there was an opening in the wall leading to a hallway.
A pictogram on the wall, showing a man and a woman, indicated that this was the
way to the restrooms. The rest of the lobby was filled with arrangements of
round little tables and several low armchairs placed around each of them. In
the windowless left-hand half of the room, a group of three young men in suits
occupied one of the arrangements. These weren’t established bankers, they
rather looked like junior consultants on their way up the corporate ladder. So
far they weren’t high enough on that ladder to meet at a truly chic hotel.

On
the right-hand side, which was somewhat brighter because it featured a row of
windows, their light dulled by beige net curtains, two of the armchair arrangements
were taken. At the far end, closer to the staircase and the reception counter,
two women were sitting opposite each other. Both had black hair, both wore
black business suits. Both were silently swiping their thumbs over the screens
of their phones. Nearer, and closer to the entrance, was the arrangement where
Hans, Tienhoven and their guest of honour Mister Zayek needed to be. Frank Hoffmann
was sitting in one of the armchairs, greeting them with a brief neutral smile.

They
sat down around the table, Zayek between Hans and Tienhoven, facing Hoffmann. A
waitress arrived and brought them four cups of coffee, which Hoffmann must have
ordered earlier, and which he now took and placed on the table. Hans put
creamer and sugar in his. They all took their first sip.

All
four of them had serious faces as they sat in their armchairs, but the setup was
almost comical. Hans had seen the movies, and surely Zayek had seen the movies
as well. The same movies, with the same setup. He wondered how he himself would
react, though, in Zayek’s position, in such a situation, having seen the same
movies.

‘So,
let’s start again,’ Tienhoven said. ‘My name is Willem Tienhoven, I am from
here, from the Commission. That is Mister Hoffmann from the German BND.’ He let
it sink in. Zayek looked at him, then at Hoffmann, then at Hans, then he looked
down at his coffee cup and took another sip. Hans took a second sip, too. The
coffee was nicely hot and fresh.

Tienhoven
continued. ‘Let me first tell you that you’re not a suspect, Mister Zayek. I
consider you a witness. I was hoping you could help me understand something.’
Smart move, Hans thought. It sounded sympathetic, like he was doing him a
favour. In fact a suspect had a lot more rights than a witness had. The right
to have another person of his choice present at the questioning, for example.

‘There
are all kinds of theories about how you got here, Mister Zayek,’ Tienhoven continued.
‘I think that there was nothing really serious. Probably some papers got mixed
up somewhere. But you need to tell me, so that I can be sure.’

***

Zayek
placed his cup back on the saucer. He was nervous. He wasn’t sweating or
trembling, but his heart was racing. He kept silent, not just because of the
nerves. He was angry, and he wanted the skinny anti-fraud guy to wait for his
answer. He would not give him any answers right away. Not with the smooth
talking, and not with the yelling and threatening that they would surely start
in a few moments. And anyway Zayek was afraid his voice would be shaking if he were
to say anything. He didn’t want to drink the rest of his coffee either, because
he was afraid the cup would tremble against the saucer.

‘Tell
me,’ the Tienhoven guy repeated. ‘How did you come to the Commission?’

Zayek
still said nothing, just stared at the carpeted floor, his heart still racing.
He was still angry. He wanted to shout something back, but he didn’t know what
to say. He was waiting for the guy to say something to which he could say
something defiant, something that would throw him off balance.

‘There
is a police car waiting at the German side of the border,’ the man from the BND
said. He was not shouting. He was informing Zayek about a fact. ‘We will arrest
you. Not for fraud, but for espionage.’

Zayek
listened to him, and he suddenly felt happy, his nervousness receding for a
moment, because now he could say something back. ‘The BND cannot torture me.’

‘Fuck
the BND,’ the man said, right into Zayek’s face. Zayek reeled back in his
armchair, his mouth still open.

The
man continued in a vicious hiss. ‘We’ll arrest you, and we will take you
straight to Ramstein airbase and give you to the Americans. And they will put
you sorry fucker on one of their planes to God knows where.’

***

Hans
was somewhat taken aback by Hoffmann’s sudden aggression, even though he hadn’t
yelled. But Tienhoven had stayed calm. Zayek was trembling now. He stammered,
in a weak voice, ‘But Germany cannot extradite a German citizen.’ It was more a
question than a statement.

‘You
are no German citizen, you’re a Bulgarian,’ Hoffmann whispered. ‘You accepted a
foreign passport.’

‘Look,’
Tienhoven said calmly. All this time he had kept looking at Zayek. ‘No-one is
taking you anywhere as long as you are here. Just tell me what happened to you.’

Zayek
jerked forward, his cheeks swelling. He covered his mouth with both hands,
vomit oozing out between his fingers. He got up and stumbled past the column
and the reception counter towards the restrooms. The junior consultants looked
over to him. The American soldier at the counter turned around and watched him
as he passed him. The two women with the phones didn’t react at all. Hoffmann
got up from his armchair and followed Zayek, hurrying to catch up with him, presumably
to make sure he was all right. Or that he didn’t do anything stupid.

Hans
looked at Tienhoven. They must have been thinking the same thing. Hans nodded,
got up and followed Hoffmann.
Nobody
should be doing anything stupid
today.

Zayek
and Hoffmann disappeared around the corner, Hans followed. He had already reached
the reception counter. What a bizarre scene, he thought. The questioning had
only just started, and already Zayek was falling apart. Hans took out his phone
and held it out in front of him to check the time. It couldn’t have been more
than one or two minutes.

He
felt a sudden pain in his fingers as someone grabbed them and made him drop his
phone on the floor. Hans looked down, then up at the man who was continuing to forcefully
crush the fingers of his right hand like a tuft of rigid straws. A man he
didn’t know. Dark hair, blue eyes, an incredibly tense expression in his face.
The man’s lips were tightly pressed together. The pain got worse, Hans opened
his mouth in a mute scream, trying to free his right hand with his left.

Hans
jerked back as the man suddenly turned around, releasing his grip. The giant
American had turned away from the reception counter and had forcefully grabbed the
attacker by the shoulder. ‘Is there a problem, sir?’, the soldier said in American
English. He had a deep and determined voice. It was an order, not a question.

As
Hans was wagging his hurt hand, thinking what to say to the man who’d just made
him drop his phone, he heard a sudden loud bang, a shot or explosion, somewhere
behind a wall to his left. It had come from the bathrooms. Glass shattered,
some people in the lobby shrieked, coffee cups fell on the carpeted floor
without breaking. Hans had no time to decide what to do, whether to run towards
or away from the blast or to stay put, because the giant American jumped on him
and the man with the tight lips. He felled them both, Hans fell on his elbow
and his head hit the marble floor. The soldier pressed both their heads firmly to
the ground, Hans felt the cold stone against his cheek. Hans had been in the
Estonian army for a year as a conscript, they had mostly been hiking through the
woods carrying heavy equipment, and he hadn’t developed any lasting soldier’s
reflexes. This American was clearly a professional military man, though. Hans
lay on the floor, facing the tight-lipped blue-eyed man whose tense face was
also pressed against the marble, the American lying on top of them both.

As
soon as the soldier relaxed his pressure the man jumped up, scanning the floor
for a moment, and made a stunning dash towards the front exit. He was gone
within two seconds. Hans still lay on the floor. He watched as the attacker
left, then saw Tienhoven stare blankly into the distance. He hadn’t left his
armchair near the entrance. The three consultants from the other arrangement
had gotten up and looked like they were undecided where to go now. The two
women who were sitting just a few metres away looked at Hans, their phones
still held in their hands.

‘You
okay, buddy?’, the American asked Hans, kneeling right next to him. Hans turned
around and saw his square-jawed face. This time it had been a genuine question,
not an order. Above the American’s face, leaning over the counter, he saw the
receptionist look down on him.

Hans
put his head back on the floor. His fingers hurt, and he had hurt his elbow and
his head when the American had tackled him. He scanned the floor around him from
his horizontal viewpoint and saw two objects under an empty armchair two metres
away. One was his phone, the other a small black box about the same size as the
phone. The box wasn’t his, so it had been either lying there before or the tight-lipped
assailant had dropped it. Or the American had. Hans crawled over to the
armchair and picked up both items. He showed the American the box, a question
in his eyes, but the American shook his head and got up. Not his, either. Hans put
the phone and the box in the right pocket of his dark grey jacket and zipped it
close.

Then
he got up, too, and, without answering the American whether he was okay, started
walking towards the bathrooms. The three consultants had already come closer,
having evidently decided not to flee the scene but to see what the blast had
been. Hans went ahead, leaving the others behind him. He may have been somewhat
disoriented, very much so even, but he clearly remembered that he had
originally set out to follow and check on Zayek. Hans entered the gloomy
hallway he had wanted to reach. To the right it continued as a long corridor,
an emergency exit at the far end. To the left there were two doors, the ladies’
to the left and the gents’ to the right.

Hans
opened the gents’ room door and stepped inside. Then he bent over forward, his
face red, his heart racing, and threw up on the floor. His stomach hurt, he
couldn’t breathe. The floor was covered in vomit, and blood, and teeth, and shards
of skull, and chunks of brain, and shreds of flesh. A green pack of menthol
cigarettes was half submerged in it. It was still sealed. The walls and the
sinks and the broken mirrors and the ceiling were sprayed with dark red blood.
In front of him, leaning awkwardly against a cubicle door, sat Zayek’s body. It
had no head.

Hans
tried to breathe, but the stench of the vomit was making him feel sick again.
He coughed, spit, and left the room. In the hallway he took a deep breath. Then
another one. Where was Hoffmann? Then another one. The American came around the
corner, squeezed past him, opened the door, looked inside, closed it again, and
asked Hans a direct question. ‘Did you see anybody who’s still here?’

Hans
shook his head. The American took a step back and told the receptionist to call
the police, there’s a dead man in the restroom. The consultants, who were
already crowding the entrance to the hallway, looked at each other in
discomfort and disbelief, again undecided about what to do and where to go. Hans
stood there for another moment, and then slowly turned around the corner back into
the lobby, squeezing past the consultants. The receptionist was quietly but
urgently talking on the phone. The two women were still sitting in their armchairs.
They had pocketed their phones and were staring at Hans, who must have looked
very bleak. Now the receptionist was squeezing past Hans to take a look at the
scene in the men’s room himself. Hans looked over to where his own group had
sat. Tienhoven was the only one sitting in the far half of the room near the
entrance. Hans saw him and frowned. His boss was staring into the distance as
he had done before. Then his body started tilting to the side, and the man fell
off his chair.

At
the same moment Hans heard the receptionist shout just behind him, ‘Everybody,
get out of the hotel now!’ The man had seen enough to decide to evacuate the
guests from the lobby.