The Last Compromise (13 page)

Becker
nodded.

‘You
can move around freely,’ he said. ‘I have your phone numbers, the mobile one
and the office one, and you have my numbers. We are done here for the moment.
But please stay in Luxembourg for a little while.’

Hans
got up and left in the direction of the staircase. From the door he saw Becker take
out his pen and start writing. Hans glanced in the direction of the bathrooms.
He saw the white backs of two crime scene people in the hallway, cameras
flashing in the gloom.

***

On
the second floor Hans found a sign on the wall that pointed to toilets at the
other end of a long, dimly lit corridor. There were lots of identical doors to
both sides. He was halfway through the corridor when he heard a voice behind
him.

‘Hello
Hans, what a mess. Are you okay?’

Hans
turned around. Hoffmann came closer.

Steady
breath. This was a hotel, a public place. Except it was the middle of the afternoon,
all the rooms behind the doors would be empty now. They were completely alone
in the dark, narrow corridor. The lobby was full of police, yes, but that was
downstairs, not here.

Hans
asked, ‘Why did you leave?’

‘This
is supposed to be at least a tiny bit low-profile.’ Hoffmann smiled. ‘Getting
held up by the police of a foreign country about Russian spies with exploding
heads is the opposite of a low profile.’

Hans
waited. Hoffmann hadn’t left the building. He had stayed and approached him, so
he needed something. From him.

Yes,
the speed of Hans’s thinking had picked up considerably since the little break
in the armchair.

‘I
saw you bumped into a man in the lobby before it happened,’ Hoffmann said.

Hans
nodded slowly, tentatively.

‘Did
you take his picture with your phone?’

Not
the phone itself, what was inside the phone.

‘Yes,’
he lied. Let’s see.

‘Excellent.
You should give the phone to me,’ Hoffmann said. ‘We’ll do a picture analysis.’

The
attacker had thought that Hans had taken a picture of him. That’s why he had
wanted his phone. The American soldier had stopped him. And the explosion had,
too.

‘Why
the whole phone?’, Hans said. ‘I can just send you the picture.’

‘We
can use more powerful technology if we have the phone itself.’

A
digital picture was a coded sequence of pixels.

‘That’s
bullshit,’ Hans replied.

‘Have
you sent the picture to anyone?’

Hans
paused to think for a second.

‘That
means no, you haven’t.’

Hans
found himself falling to the floor. The air in his lungs got compressed. Hoffmann
had punched him in the face so hard that he’d lost his balance. His head
knocked against the wall, then against the carpeted floor. It wasn’t very
painful, and the initial punch had been strangely painless, too. Hans was just perplexed
by the thought of being hit in the face with a clenched fist. Perplexed, then
insulted. The last time he had experienced something like that, he must have
been a teenager. He felt insulted, then angry. Angry about his helplessness. He
was lying on his back and his face was starting to ache. His left eyebrow, in
particular. He touched it and looked at his wet fingers. Blood was running down
his hand. Now it was also running from his split eyebrow into his eye.

Then
he couldn’t see anything at all. Everything was black. He felt a strong,
acutely painful pressure against his nose, his whole face. An aggressively
biting chemical stench filled his nostrils, his mouth, and his brain. Propelled
by anger and hatred he fought back with his arms and legs.

Inspector Becker
got up from his armchair after finishing his notes and went to look for the
receptionist who’d been on duty when it’d happened. It was the man who’d called
the police. He wasn’t at his workstation right now, the lone gentleman was
still waiting at the counter.

Becker
asked one of the crime scene people in white whether they’d seen the
receptionist, but the man was preoccupied with other things and couldn’t help.
Then he asked one of the uniformed policemen, who duly pointed to the hallway
where the toilets were. Becker entered the hallway, briefly glanced at the
crime scene to his left and then turned right. On the right-hand side, several
doors were set in the wall. The first was a utility room that would have been
just behind the reception, the second was a glass door leading to a restaurant
area. Becker stepped inside. All the tables were immaculately set, but only one
of them was occupied. A lone young man in a black suit and a tie the colour of
the hotel chain logo was sitting in a chair and drank sparkling water from a
wine glass.

‘You
saw it?’, Becker asked as he approached him.

The
man nodded. Okay good, they’d speak Luxembourgish.

Then
the man shook his head, though. ‘I don’t know what I saw.’

Becker
took a chair and sat next to him.

‘My
name is Inspector Becker,’ he said. ‘Forget what you saw, for the moment. Just
tell me what happened
before
.’

The
man didn’t look at Becker, he kept staring at the bubbles that were clinging to
the inside of the glass before being lifted up to the water surface.

He
said, ‘I was doing the checking-out of a guest at the reception.’

His
voice was melancholic. Probably he’d kept the place running in the minutes
after the event, and was now coming to realise what exactly had happened.

Becker
asked, ‘Who was the guest?’

‘An
American officer, in uniform. Lawrence something. The name is in the computer.’

Becker
took out his notepad, but didn’t start writing yet. ‘Why was he here?’

‘He
didn’t tell, and I didn’t ask.’

Three
probable reasons, Becker thought. He was visiting the American embassy. Or he
was visiting the American military cemetery, a large and well-kept final
resting place for soldiers who had died in the Battle of the Bulge which had
swept through the woods of northern Luxembourg in 1944. Their legendary General
Patton lay buried there, too. Or he was here for some NATO consultations. Three
reasons, but not mutually exclusive reasons. He could have come to the embassy,
visited Patton’s grave, and talked to some NATO people. And killed a Commission
employee in a hotel toilet on his way out.

‘Where
was he when it happened?’, Becker asked.

‘Right
in front of me,’ the receptionist said. ‘There was some… confusion.’

‘Officer
Lawrence was confused?’ Becker had long developed a habit of making a
proposition in order to ask when something wasn’t clear, a proposition which was
harmless and which he knew wasn’t correct. It prompted people to correct him,
no no, that’s not what I mean, and then both would smile. It worked almost
every time. Becker preferred this to sitting there, being all mutely
sympathetic like a psychiatrist. Although maybe psychiatrists were using his
technique, too.

‘No,
not him,’ the receptionist corrected Becker. ‘A confusing situation I mean.’

‘What
happened?’

The
receptionist looked at Becker. It was the first time in the whole conversation
he’d done it. He said, ‘Two men behind the officer had some kind of a fight.’

‘Did
they shout at each other?’

‘No,
they just struggled, I guess. The American turned around and stopped one of the
men.’

Okay
Mister European-Commission I-was-just-sitting-there-and-nothing-happened, Becker
thought. There’s a few more questions for you right there. Why hadn’t he seen
two men having a fight in the middle of the lobby?

‘And
then?’, Becker asked the receptionist. He wanted to hear it all for the first
time, and only then to start writing it down. That way the witness could go
through it all twice. So far Becker hadn’t written down a single word.

‘Then
there was the… gunshot, or the explosion, in the men’s room,’ the receptionist
said and started staring at his glass again. There weren’t many bubbles left on
the inside of the glass.

Before
Becker could ask his next question, a man in shirtsleeves and a pink tie came
marching into the restaurant, huffing and puffing. His face was red.

‘There’s
no-one at the reception,’ he said, angrily, both to the receptionist and to Becker.

‘We
are talking,’ Becker said.

‘There
are guests waiting,’ the man insisted. ‘This is still a business, I’m the hotel
manager here.’

‘Then
go manage your hotel,’ Becker replied. ‘Once the police are done questioning
the witness in a potential murder case I will tell you, and then I will talk to
you, sir.’

The
man held his tongue, turned on his heels and strode back out into the hallway,
turning left towards the lobby.

‘What
happened when you heard the blast?’, Becker asked the receptionist, as if
nothing had happened.

‘I
was startled. When I looked the American wasn’t there anymore. The three of
them were lying on the floor in front of the counter.’

‘Had
they been injured?’

‘No,
I don’t think so. The American was lying on top of the other two.’

This
just keeps getting better and better, Becker thought. He’d almost forgotten
about his e-cigarette, but first he wanted to hear the rest of the story. ‘And
then?’

The
receptionist looked at Becker again.

‘And
then they all got up. One of the men ran out through the front door, the other
one and the American went to check the bathroom. The American came out and told
me to call the police, there’s a dead man in the toilet.’

He
looked back at the glass. His sparkling water had almost turned into still
water.

‘Okay,’
Becker said. ‘Who was the man who left through the front door?’

‘I
don’t know.’

‘A
guest?’

‘Don’t
think so, no.’

‘What
did he look like?’

‘He
was wearing a black leather jacket, I think. Dark hair.’

‘Anything
else?’

The
receptionist shook his head.

‘And
the American, where did he go?’

‘He
had just checked out and called a taxi when it all happened. He went to help
the man with the heart attack, and then he left as well.’

‘And
the other man, the one who went to check the bathroom?’

The
receptionist looked at Becker and pointed at the wall behind which lay the
lobby. ‘He didn’t leave. He kept sitting there until the police arrived. I
think you just talked to him.’

Now,
Mister Commission. You forgot a fight that you had been in yourself.

‘Were
there any other people in the lobby?’

The
receptionist shook his head. ‘A few, but I don’t remember. People from the
consultancy across the street. I told them all to leave when I saw the dead
body, I thought it was dangerous to stay. Terrorism, whatever.’

‘You
did the right thing. Do you have the consultants’ names?’

The
receptionist shook his head again. ‘No, but I know they work across the street.
They often come here to have coffee.’

‘Why?’

‘We
don’t know.’ The receptionist smiled faintly, for the first time since they’d
started talking. ‘We think it makes them feel like they’re on a business trip.’

Becker
smiled, too. He took out his e-cigarette and took a few puffs. Then he swapped
it for his phone and made a call.

‘Felten,
it’s me,’ he said. ‘Where are you now? Do you see the guy I talked to in the
lobby? Okay, I guess he left. No, it’s fine. Listen, please go to Kirchberg
hospital and check on the man with the heart attack, see if you can get a
statement from him. And check out the office building across the street, there
are more witnesses and some of them work there. Yes, thank you.’

Becker
hung up, swapped his phone for a pen and said to the receptionist, ‘Okay, let’s
go through this again. First question: what is your name?’

***

When
Hans woke up he couldn’t tell where he was. When he could, he couldn’t tell
what time it was, because he was still lying in the narrow, gloomy, windowless
corridor. Maybe it was already dark outside.

He
tried to get up. His face hurt. A crust of blood had formed around his eyes. He
had a headache. He felt a rest of pain in the elbow from the fall, and the
ligaments and joints in his fingers still hurt from the grip of the assailant
in the lobby.

He
lifted himself up a little on his hands, then forced his upper body upright.
Then, with great physical effort, he got up on his feet.

He
still hadn’t gone to the bathroom, and he was glad to notice that he hadn’t wet
himself while lying there unconscious. Maybe it hadn’t been very long after all.
He started to walk down the corridor to his original destination, the toilets
at the end. He felt dizzy and pressed his hand against the wall to his right.
Then he continued walking. He needed to take a piss, and he needed to check his
face in a mirror and wash the blood off. He didn’t want to tell the police
downstairs that he had tripped and fallen against a closed door, if that was in
any way avoidable.

In
the toilet he first went for the bathroom break. He flushed the urinal and went
to the sink. The cold water felt good on most of his face, and it hurt his
eyebrow. He rubbed the skin where a crust had formed. With the crust and the
stains removed, his face looked much better. He still looked like a wet corpse,
but at least the mess was gone.

The
water from the tap stopped flowing automatically. Hans turned to check the wall
for a drying mechanism. There was a plastic box with a fabric towel that you
could pull out and that would get sucked up after use and, below it, an
airblade that blew a cold but concentrated air current against wet skin. Both
devices were good for drying hands, neither was good for drying the face. Hans
went to a toilet cubicle and pulled out a length of toilet paper to softly dry
his face and his eyebrow.

He
threw the paper into the toilet and checked the pockets of his winter jacket.
His keys were still there, the printouts of Viktor’s Excel sheets and the
anti-fraud identification card were still there. The wallet, too, with the plastic
cards and the money. His normal Commission badge was there. The little box that
did or didn’t belong to the assailant was there. His phone was gone.

He
didn’t want to keep thinking about the phone, and preferred considering the box
in his hands. It was made of a hard type of black plastic, and it felt empty.
There were two plastic locks on the front side. They had to be slid apart to
open the lid. Hans tried. They didn’t move, but there was no keyhole or number
lock anywhere either. He tried again, pressing his fingernails against the
locks. The locks slowly moved, and after another push the lid opened.

The
box was indeed empty. Its only content was a white label with a combination of
numbers that was glued to the inside of the lid. Hans recognised neither the
combination itself nor the pattern. It was probably the serial number of the
box, or rather of what had been inside the box. Hans closed it, put it back
into his pocket and zipped it shut.

Then
he left the bathroom and started walking down the corridor again. This time he
didn’t have to push against any walls. He reached the other end of it, opened
the door to the staircase and went downstairs to the lobby.

There
were only four uniformed policemen there. They were doing nothing at all. Inspector
Becker had left his armchair and was nowhere to be seen.

Hans
walked over to the short side of the counter. The receptionist who had brought
him the water earlier was gone. There was a female receptionist now, she was
talking to one of the crime scene people in white overalls.

Hans
gestured to her whether he could use the phone. She nodded, and turned back to
the crime scene person.

‘Excuse
me,’ Hans said, interrupting the new receptionist once again. ‘Do you know
where they have taken Mister Tienhoven, the man with the heart attack?’

‘Kirchberg
hospital,’ she said.

‘Do
you maybe have their number?’

The
woman hesitated, then typed something on her keyboard and told him the number,
figure by figure, as Hans pressed the buttons.

‘Thanks,’
he whispered to her. She turned around to continue her conversation with the
man in white.

‘Centre Hospitalier Kirchberg moïen?’

‘Hello,’ Hans said.
‘I’m
looking for my friend, he had a heart attack at the hotel in Gasperich today
and was taken to your hospital.’