The Last Compromise (25 page)

‘Please,
let’s sit down,’ Majerus said as Becker came closer. The master of the house
was wearing a suit and tie. Maybe it was still from the dinner he’d just had,
which no doubt had been a business dinner with some fellow semi-politician or
better. It fit the interior of the room, which reminded Becker a lot of the
interior of the American embassy. It was very cosy, especially now that it was
dark outside while the room was pleasantly lit by discreetly positioned lamps
emitting a warm light. But it was artificial, like a picture from an upmarket
furniture catalogue. No doubt Christine had hired an interior decorator, or a
whole team.

Becker
sat down on a couch, Majerus took an armchair and poured the dark sweet liquid
into the glasses.

‘I
like the port,’ Majerus said as he put the bottle upright on the glass coffee
table between them. ‘But I don’t get to drink it a lot. I’m expected to be seen
drinking Luxembourgish sparkling wine.’ He grimaced and grinned. ‘Cheers!’

Becker
picked up his glass, lifted it looking into Majerus’s eyes, and took a sip. It
felt sweet on his tongue and warm in his throat. He put his glass back down.

‘So
tell me,’ Majerus said, keeping his own glass in his hand. ‘How far are we on
the Zayek case?’

‘You
think this is about Zayek?’, Becker asked, not really knowing why. No, actually
he did know why.

Majerus
looked somewhat puzzled. ‘What else could it be?’

‘Of
course it’s Zayek,’ Becker said. Now he was ready to tell him. ‘And I’ll be
completely honest with you.’

Becker
made himself comfortable on the sofa. Majerus took another sip and listened,
choosing not to say anything.

‘This
is what I have,’ Becker said. ‘The victim’s identity is not the problem. We
matched the body’s DNA to a sample from where he lived. The quick test came
back positive, which means the thorough test is unlikely to be negative. The
fingerprints from his workplace were also a match. It’s him. So what I do know
is that Boris Zayek exploded in the toilet.’

Majerus
waited and said, ‘And the rest is shrouded in mystery and contradictions, I
assume.’

‘Exactly,
Jacques. It is. Right before the explosion the hotel receptionist sees some
kind of brawl between three men: Hans Tamberg from the Commission, an unknown
man in a black leather jacket who may or may not have had dark hair, and an
American officer. Nobody’s on camera because the footage was swept clean, our
technical people confirmed it. In the explosion itself a symbol that looks like
a Russian letter got imprinted into the inside of the victim’s skull. Offerbrück
from forensics says it’s part of the fuse.’

Majerus
put his glass down and rested his hands on the sides of his armchair. He was
still listening.

Becker
continued, ‘We know nothing about the man in the black jacket. About the
American we know what the American embassy wants us to know, which is that he
was just visiting and has nothing to say. We only know a little something about
Hans Tamberg.’

Becker
didn’t want to start smoking in here, even if it was odourless, so he took
another sip of port.

Then
he carried on. ‘Tamberg says he was part of an internal anti-fraud
investigation at the Commission. There were four people in his party, he said
it himself and it’s confirmed by other witnesses from the lobby. There is
Tamberg himself, plus an older man named Tienhoven who is his boss, then Zayek
the victim, and a fourth man who Tamberg said is an outsider.’

‘What
do you think the sequence of events was?’, Majerus asked. He picked up his
glass, finished it and poured himself another one.

‘I’ll
start with the end,’ Becker said. ‘The easiest theory is that Boris Zayek went
to the toilet and committed suicide. But what came before that is dubious as
hell. Four men go into a hotel with a convenient security camera malfunction
which we know is a hack. One of the men runs to the toilet and explodes. The
second is the outsider. He follows Zayek right before the explosion and disappears.
The third is Tienhoven. He has a heart attack, leaves the hospital against
medical advice, returns to work the next day, won’t answer any calls and then
becomes generally unavailable. The fourth one is Tamberg. He follows Zayek,
too, and then has a fight with two more men who then also disappear, one to America
and the other to I don’t know where. Tamberg himself stays behind, bullshits
the police, leaves the country and won’t answer any calls either.’

Becker
leaned forward and came to the point he’d been approaching all along. ‘As far
as I am concerned, the whole lobby was full of suspects on that day. But as it
happens, Hans Tamberg from the European Commission is the only one who is on
record as having lied to the police.’

Now
Becker didn’t care anymore about whether it would be appropriate to smoke, and
took out his e-cigarette, inhaled, exhaled, and put it away. Majerus didn’t
react.

‘Tamberg
said he was investigating something, but didn’t want to say what,’ Becker
continued. ‘He said one of them was an outsider, but didn’t say who he was or
where he was from. He said Zayek got sick and ran to the toilet, but he also said
that the rest of them stayed behind in the lobby. In fact a witness saw the
outsider get up and follow Zayek, which Tamberg said didn’t happen. We know
Tamberg got up and followed the outsider, and that he got into a fight at the
reception, two events Tamberg said didn’t happen either. Then the explosion occurred.’

‘Which
brings you to the reason you are here,’ Majerus said.

‘I
need Hans Tamberg from the Commission, Jacques,’ Becker said. ‘At this point he’s
no longer a witness. He is my main suspect. He’s not the only one, to be sure,
but he’s the only one who is clearly identifiable, and who clearly lied to hide
something. And your cooperation request to the Commission obviously isn’t working.
So the reason I’m here is that I need you to issue a Europe-wide arrest warrant
for Hans Tamberg.’

Hans had slept
awfully in the prison cell. Not that it had been uncomfortable. Visser had been
right, it had basically been a simple hotel room. Not a holding pen for drunks,
rather a place to stay for witnesses awaiting a hearing, with decent individual
shower cubicles and even a vending machine with disposable toothbrush kits.
Maybe it had been the mere concept of sleeping in a prison that had disturbed
him. He had visited prisons during his time at the chief prosecutor’s office in
Tallinn, and he usually had no inclination to be anywhere near one if that was
in any way avoidable. Or maybe it had been what Tienhoven had said on the
phone, about the Luxembourgish police looking for him. In their position he’d
probably be looking for himself, too, he thought. Or it had been his state of
mind in general.

He
had tried to catch some sleep during the ride from the Rotterdam police station
to Amsterdam airport, but that hadn’t worked either. The Dutch cop driving the
car had been very talkative. Hans had wished they’d sent the mute bald guy from
the SS again. See, now he was thinking it himself. Damn Visser. His head ached.

Airport
departures had been the usual routine of checkin, security, passport, waiting
around. He hadn’t wanted to sleep there because he’d been afraid he’d miss the
boarding call. Instead he’d used the opportunity to buy himself a new t-shirt,
socks and underpants in a store at the departures gate. He’d been wearing his
old underwear since Thursday, and had slept in it for two nights in a row. He’d
changed in a toilet cubicle and thrown away the old underwear. He’d used soap instead
of deodorant to rub his armpits, then he’d stuffed his shirt into his trousers.
He’d thought of buying a fresh shirt, too, but the price of the shirt-plus-tie
combinations on sale had been demoralising. His old shirt still smelled
acceptable enough.

Now
Hans was sitting in a fairly comfortable business class chair on the scheduled
Saturday morning flight from Amsterdam to Tallinn, and was hoping he’d get some
proper sleep. Business class came with bonuses, like the leg room, and the
sparkling wine, and the newspaper, and the better food. The biggest bonus was
probably the malicious pleasure of hearing the announcements, whereby the whole
plane was informed of the delights that would now be brought on in business
class. On another day, Hans would have positively gloated. Now he was tired,
and, he felt, generally not interested. He wished he’d sleep and not hear any
of it.

The
dreams he was having on this plane so far didn’t help much, either. It was
mostly his brother Lennart, and Siim, knocking on small white tiles on the
toilet floor with little hammers. Lennart told him they could insulate the body
if they removed all the tiles, except those on which the dead man was lying. So
Hans picked up a hammer of his own and started carefully knocking on the tiles,
making them crumble one by one.

At
least this was just harmlessly strange. At least he wasn’t dreaming about munching
on a mouthful of his own teeth. He hated that one.

‘Some
more sparkling wine, sir?’, the stewardess asked him.

Hans
thought for a moment, then shook his head. It hurt, he should just have said
no. But it was no. He had the whole day ahead of him, and he didn’t want to get
sleepy later, or have an alcoholic breath during the morning. He’d have work to
do.

It
had turned out that he was going to Estonia after all, not for Easter but even
earlier. He wasn’t very hopeful about seeing any of the people he would
normally see, though. His parents lived in Tartu, so that was very probably a
no. That was not where he was going. The same held true for Margus, whom he
also wouldn’t see even if he wanted to, which he didn’t. Lennart was
travelling, dad had said, and there was no particular reason he should go to
the village where Lennart normally lived. His girlfriend and daughters would be
there, no doubt, but Hans wasn’t very good at being an uncle to the kids. And
matters with the girlfriend were a bit complex. He liked her and she liked him,
which he believed wasn’t surprising since she loved a man who’d had the same
parents and upbringing as Hans, and since Lennart had fallen in love with her
while, again, being Hans’s slightly older brother. But beyond liking each
other, and beyond a certain attraction that Hans felt to her and that was
probably not felt back in the same way, there was simply very little they had
to say to each other.

His
former classmates had mostly left the country to pursue international careers;
some had returned, some had made careers in Estonia itself. Perhaps he might
visit one or two of them, like in the old days. Drive out to Lake Peipus, have
a beer. Except they all had small children by now and couldn’t just leave. Lake
Peipus was slipping away from the present into the past, to the point where it
would become a pleasant memory and otherwise a blue blot on the map. Maybe it
would return in a few years. Maybe Hans himself would return to the lake, and
build a simple house from scratch there, like he was doing on his father’s
construction site. The hare-brained idea of his had actually turned into a
project worth putting real effort into. It was physically straining, of course,
digging trenches to accommodate the lowest layer of tree trunks that would form
the walls of the house. Good thing Margus was there to help, he could do some
impressive digging, even though he was sweating under his beard. And then Hans
had to ram the axe that Margus had brought into the top sides of those trunks,
to form hollows for the next layer of horizontal trunks from the other walls.
It was just a pity that it was only Hans and Margus, more helpers would have
been very welcome now.

‘I’m
sorry Hans,’ Margus said. ‘It’s all a bit much now.’

‘It’s
okay,’ Hans replied. ‘I’ll finish here, and then we’ll all go for a swim.’

Except
there was no water to swim in. They had built the foundations on a clearing in
the middle of a forest, at least two hours away from Lake Peipus. They had
chosen a completely wrong spot. How will he drag those heavy tree trunks to the
shore now, all by himself? He didn’t even have any ropes.

‘Your
seatbelts.’

What?

‘Please
fasten your seatbelts, sir, we are landing in a few minutes.’

Hans
looked at the stewardess and slowly faced the reality that he was on a business
trip. Not a trip that had been in any way officially endorsed by his employer;
he was paying for all this out of his own pocket. But it was still a business
trip. No pleasure there. Except the type of pleasure that was inherent to
business trips themselves. That had to be enough.

***

‘To
the harbour, please.’

‘No
problem. The ferries?’

‘The
freight harbour.’

The
taxi driver turned the steering wheel to leave the row of taxis outside the
glass doors of the airport exit, and accelerated towards the main road into Tallinn’s
city centre past Lake Ülemiste. Hans had sat down in the passenger’s seat, not
in the back. It was a chilly morning, overcast but not rainy. Hans had lost a
few hours due to the flight and the different time zone, meaning it was an
additional hour later than it normally would have been. But it was still
morning nonetheless.

‘Do
you live here, or are you visiting someone?’, the driver asked. He had a red,
meaty face with a cheerful look in his eyes. Dark hair growing grey in places. His
Estonian was decent, but he had a heavy Russian accent. Hans rubbed his eyes
and read the name on the license that was glued to the dashboard. Stepan
Rumyanov.

‘You
can speak Russian if you like,’ Hans said.

‘No
way,’ the driver laughed. ‘For forty years we had to listen how you speak
Russian, now you listen how we speak Estonian. Haha! Sorry, do you know the
joke?’

Hans
carefully touched his eyebrow, it still hurt a little, but only if he pressed
it.

‘I
haven’t been to Estonia in a while,’ Hans said in a tired voice, still in
Estonian. ‘How is life?’

‘Difficult,
of course,’ the driver answered, still with a cheer. ‘You have to run and run
to earn your money.’

He
slowed down at a red traffic light. There were large billboards on both sides
of the road, advertising meat and mobile phone contracts and a new movie. The
movie was American. The phone company was a Swedish-Estonian joint venture. The
meat was Estonian.

‘What
do you think about Russia?’, Hans asked.

‘Ah,
but that’s the problem,’ the driver said. ‘People think too much about Russia.
The Russian-speakers here I mean. They should think about Estonia.’

The
lights turned green, the traffic resumed, and the driver carried on.

‘They
live in a European country now, with the euro and everything. They didn’t even
have to move, Europe came to them. And what do they do? They think about the
Soviet Union. Have they completely forgotten?’

The
driver turned right on a giant intersection to Proksi avenue and accelerated.
Had he gone straight ahead, it would have been the way to Hans’s old workplace,
the chief prosecutor’s office. His old colleagues here would have been happy to
see him if he had shown up, but not enough to mobilise their resources for an
investigation that didn’t exist. Already the Rotterdam cooperation had been
near the limit of lawfulness.

‘Maybe
they remember something else,’ Hans said.

‘Exactly
right,’ the driver nodded energetically, happy to have an ally. ‘They remember
the times when they were young, and fell in love, and made a career, and had a
picnic in the forest. But they forget the rest. Standing in a queue for hours
after work to buy butter or toilet paper.’

They
raced past traffic lights that had just turned yellow.

‘Young
people can’t imagine,’ he continued. ‘We went to the store, stand in a queue,
and then buy what they were selling. If they were selling sausage, we bought
sausage. If they were selling cheese, we bought cheese. You know the joke? Now
you have fifty sorts of cheese in the supermarket. In the Soviet days there was
only one sort of cheese: cheese.’

Hans
looked to the left, past the driver’s amused face. He saw the high, pointy
church spires of the old town rise into the grey sky. When he looked to his
right, through his own window, he saw the shiny new high-rise office buildings.

‘But
that’s the old ones,’ the driver said, more calmly. ‘The young ones don’t care.
They want to work and be happy now, in Estonia and in Europe. They speak the
language better, too.’

‘What
if Ukraine happens here?’

The
driver replied without a pause. He wasn’t angry but the kindness in his voice
was gone.

‘What
always happens,’ he said. ‘There will be shooting, and dying, and lying.’

‘Who
will lie?’

‘All
of them. Russia will say that Estonia oppresses its minorities, whether it’s
true or not. The West will say that Russia is sending weapons, and that it
shoots down passenger airplanes. Also whether that’s true or not.’

There
it was. Hans had ruined the mood. But the driver continued talking.

‘You
see, America has interests, too. They need Estonia to put their spy planes and
their radars and their anti-ship missiles here. Plus America sells them
weapons.’

Estonia
had become ‘them’.

‘They’re
in NATO, so now their weapons need to be compatible with American weapons,’ he continued.
‘The Americans give them the guns for free, and then they make them buy their
bullets. The angrier they make Russia, the more weapons they can sell, the more
NATO members they can collect. It only takes a little provocation. The CIA has
been doing these things for a very long time. They know how to play the game.’

Hans
looked ahead through the windshield. He could see the cranes of the port in the
distance, slowly coming closer.

***

Hans
paid the driver. The taxi took off.

Now
Hans was standing in front of an office building housing the Tallinn port
authority. It wasn’t very large, nor was it very high. But it was very modern.
Blue and white colours, lots of glass. It shone brightly in spite of the overcast
sky. Maybe because of it.

All
right, Hans thought, rubbing his eyes one last time. Nothing matters. Charge.

He
strode into the reception hall and asked for the office of Mister Saar. He got
his answer and took the elevator up to the third floor. He didn’t want to take
the stairs. He didn’t want to arrive even slightly breathless.

He
stepped out of the elevator and checked the numbers on the walls next to the
office doors. He took a right and marched to the end of the corridor.
Everything was bright inside. Saar’s office had an antechamber that would
normally have been staffed by a secretary. Her coat was hanging on a hook on
the wall, a large purse was sitting on the floor next to the chair. She had
gone out for lunch or coffee. Hans strode past the secretary’s deserted desk,
opened the next door without knocking and walked right into Saar’s office. He closed
the door behind him, without trying to dampen the noise.

Saar
was talking to someone on the phone. He was in the middle of a sentence when
Hans announced, in Estonian, with a slightly strengthened volume, ‘European
Commission, anti-fraud. We need to talk about the Vanabalt contracts. Do you
have a moment?’