The Last Compromise (29 page)

‘Stop
it,’ Krohn whispered. ‘Stop.’

Hans
said quietly, ‘I will take you to Mäkinen’s home now.’

A
pause, a breath. ‘What?’

‘Repeat
it, you idiot. I will take you to Mäkinen’s home now.’

Hans’s
self-provoked rage subsided, he felt his inhibitions return. But he had to keep
the pressure up. So he continued breathing heavily, even though his lungs
didn’t strictly need it.

Krohn
stammered, ‘I will… I will take you to Mäkinen. Now.’

‘To
Mäkinen’s home.’

‘I
will take you to Mäkinen’s home.’

‘Now.’

‘Now.’

‘Is
he at home now?’

Krohn
nodded with his blood-smeared face. ‘Yes.’

His
voice sounded nasal because blood was still coming out of both nostrils.

Hans
got up. Later he’ll remember it for what it was, he thought. He’d beaten an
unsuspecting skinny academic, and he’d done it in a pretty girly way, too. He
understood that he had been ill-trained in the delivery of pain to fellow human
beings. The grenade-lobbing in the army had been a joke. But today had been a
start, and for now he needed to keep the momentum.

‘Get
up,’ he said to Krohn. ‘Sit down. Is Mäkinen’s address in the phone book?’

Krohn
nodded. He was still lying on the floor.

‘I
said get up and sit down.’ Hans kicked Krohn in the ribs, and he grunted.
Strangely Hans’s use of his legs to administer pain was much less restrained
than the use of his fists had been. He could have kicked him in the face, too.

Krohn
slowly moved, sat up, then pulled himself up on the chair and sat down.

‘Open
it.’

Krohn
started typing carefully. His two twisted fingers were swollen red. Blood was
dripping onto the keyboard from his nose, he used his free hand to hold it
against his nostrils. He moved the mouse around and made some clicks, then
typed again.

The
screen showed a name and address.

‘Do
you have a satnav in your car?’

Krohn
nodded, but said, ‘I know where he lives.’

‘I
want to see where you’re taking me. Where is your car?’

‘In
the underground garage,’ Krohn said quietly, nasally.

‘Do
you have a first-aid kit here?’

Krohn
nodded and pointed at the closed door, meaning a room opposite his own.

‘Go
get it,’ he told Krohn. ‘And wash your face with cold water against the burns.
I’ll come with you.’

Krohn
got up and stumbled over to the other room which turned out to be a small
kitchen. Hans always remained one step behind him, saw that the corridor was
still empty, and entered the kitchen as well. Hans opened one of the drawers,
then the next one. Bingo. The drawer was full of cutlery, including one
robust-looking steak knife. Hans took it out and kept holding it in his hand as
he closed the two drawers.

Meanwhile
Krohn carefully moistened his face above the sink, opened a first-aid kit on
the wall, and took out a few rolls of dressing material.

‘Bring
the whole kit back to the office,’ Hans said.

Krohn
complied. He walked back and put the rolls and the kit down on his desk. Hans
followed and closed the door behind him.

‘Sit
down,’ he said. He gave Krohn a piece of cloth from the kit to hold against his
nostrils and walked over to him. Krohn had already sat down in his own chair.
Hans put the knife on the window-sill behind him and opened the plastic sealing
of one of the dressing rolls. Then he started wrapping the white material
horizontally around his victim’s face so that it covered his nose and the
cloth. He unrolled it very carefully around his skull and just above his ears, with
great dedication, trying not to bandage his nose too tightly. Krohn sat completely
still. Perhaps he had closed his eyes. Hans lightly covered Krohn’s ear with
his cupped hand, almost sensing the pain that had to be pulsing underneath the
reddened skin. He gently touched Krohn’s left temple with the tip of his ring
finger. He held it there for a few quiet moments.

Then,
since he didn’t know how to fix the end of the bandage correctly, Hans just
shoved it into one of the folds.

‘All
right, let’s go,’ he said to Krohn, picking up the knife and pointing to the
car key on the desk with it. ‘You take us to your car, you put in the address I
just saw, and you take me there. Anyone asks on our way, you keep your mouth
shut. Any attempt to escape or to draw attention, and I will kill you with my
knife. Repeat.’

Krohn
stammered, ‘What do you… any attempt, and you’ll kill me.’

‘Attempt
to escape or to draw attention.’

‘Attempt…
to escape or to draw attention.’

‘I
will kill you with my knife.’

‘You
will kill me with your knife.’

‘I’m
not really going to kill you, Krohn,’ Hans said. ‘I’m a policeman.’

Clearly
Krohn didn’t know exactly what to think now. Hans had to remember that, he
thought. A lie tied to a truth. Now Krohn was free to either believe that Hans
was a policeman, so it was okay to follow him, or to assume that he wasn’t a
policeman at all, in which case he could well end up being stabbed. Not bad.

Hans
added, ‘So you take me to Mäkinen, and everything’s going to be fine.’

Krohn
took the keys; Hans pulled him out of his chair and pushed him forward so that
he’d lead the way to the elevator and the underground parking garage. It seemed
that they had settled into a stable mode of cooperation that would safely take
them from A to B together. All Hans had to do was keep his mouth shut and not
ruin it.

***

They
didn’t encounter anyone on their way downstairs. The building really was empty.
In the underground parking garage itself they saw an elderly couple in the
distance. They glanced at them, but, as Hans had expected or at least hoped,
they went their own way. It wouldn’t have been unusual to see two young men
with injured faces near a university hospital. One of them had a swollen face,
like he had been in a fight, the other one had a red face and even a bandaged
nose. Nothing out of the ordinary, Hans thought. It’s all in the context.

Krohn
opened his car with the remote. The car wasn’t new but it was clean. They both
got in, Krohn started the engine.

He
said, in a voice that was already considerably less nasal, ‘There’s no
satellite link in here, I’ll type in the address outside.’ He didn’t add
‘okay?’ but his look did. Hans nodded. He was still holding the knife in his
hand. Krohn reversed out of his spot and took the ramp back up to street level
where the sunlight hit their battered faces. He gently stopped the car and
activated the satnav. It was a loose device on a cord, not part of the console.
He typed in Mäkinen’s address. It was indeed the same address Hans had seen on
the computer screen inside. The electronic voice started giving them
instructions in Finnish, an arrow on the screen pointing where they had to
turn.

Krohn
took off his bandages, his nosebleed had stopped. He pushed the white and dark
red material into the narrow door pocket. He made several turns within the
hospital campus, exited it and drove down a street between the campus to the
right and some parkland to the left. They were driving on the rightmost of
three lanes as they approached a red traffic light at an intersection. In fact
it was their street joining a broad avenue at the outside of a bend. Going straight
ahead meant crossing the avenue, slightly turning left and following it. Going
right meant taking a sharp turn and following the avenue in the opposite
direction. Theirs was the first car at the white line. They could either go
straight ahead or turn right. The white arrows that were painted on the asphalt
of the other two lanes only allowed going straight ahead. The arrow on the
satnav screen, and the Finnish voice as far as Hans understood it, both told
them to keep going straight, too.

Hans
looked over to Krohn’s profile next to him. Beyond him was the window on the
driver’s side. Beyond that was the window of another car that had just stopped
next to theirs, with the apparent intention of continuing the same way as them.
Behind that window sat the older of the two policemen who had picked Hans up at
the ferry dock.

‘Krohn,
look at me,’ Hans whispered. Krohn turned his head towards Hans, away from the
police. ‘Look at me, smile at me, don’t turn around.’

Hans
smiled himself, he wanted to be smiling the moment the fucking cop would turn
to take a peek into their car, to see who the driver was, to see whether maybe
the driver had also been coincidentally beaten up and was refusing to press
charges, like that strange Estonian on the ferry. Krohn kept looking at Hans.
Hans hadn’t even pressed his knife against his driver’s right kidney.

Now
Krohn smiled, too. ‘I know it’s the police standing next to us,’ he said. ‘You
want to stab me in front of them?’

‘I
told you I won’t stab you.’ Hans was talking smilingly to Krohn’s window.

‘So
what happens if I do turn around?’

There,
the cop looked at Hans. He looked, and he recognised him. Hans opened his mouth
in an even more cheerful smile and nodded slowly.

‘Then
you will never find out about Mäkinen’s uranium fraud,’ he said quietly to Krohn
while waving to the policeman. ‘When the lights turn green on my side turn
right, don’t go straight.’ Hans gave the policeman a thumbs-up, a slightly
silly but heartfelt gesture of gratitude and camaraderie and confirmation that
everything had turned out all right after all. Well, not heartfelt, when would
it turn green at last?

The
policeman nodded to him, without smiling though.

The
sound of the engine picked up, Krohn released the clutch, turned on the right
indicator and the car slowly turned right into the avenue at a sharp angle. They
drove on. No siren behind them. No pursuit as far as Hans could tell without
turning around. The satnav noticed the deviation and started computing a new
route for them. Krohn didn’t say anything. He must have concluded, through all
the lies and truths and violence and talk, that the local police were not on
Hans’s side, but that Krohn himself actually was. Hans made a point of putting
the knife in the glove compartment.

‘My
name is Hans,’ he said, and closed the compartment.

Two
more minutes were added to the estimated time of arrival because of the detour.
Krohn followed the satnav and turned around at the next opportunity. They drove
back the same avenue, past the intersection and the traffic lights to their
left, and continued on the way they would have taken originally.

The avenue took
them to the onramp of a motorway with woods to both sides. After a few
kilometres Hans saw that, like the satnav was showing, they were in fact
driving along the coast: the woods ended to give way to a lake to the right and
a shallow part of the blue sea to the left. Then more woods followed. They
didn’t speak, which suited Hans very well, not only because he was thinking and
looking out the window and feeling tired again, but also because he didn’t want
to ruin whatever psychological balance was finally making Krohn drive him to
his boss.

Krohn
turned right at a cloverleaf and drove off the motorway, entering a town that
was called Leppävaara. Hans had been right to assume that Mäkinen didn’t
necessarily live in Helsinki, since this town was already part of the next city
on the coast. Hans looked around as they drove in. At such a distance to
Helsinki proper he would have expected rows of suburban single houses, but this
town, too, was packed with modern apartment buildings. Obviously the Finns had
to live somewhere. The country was vast, but nearly all the cities were on the
southern coast.

Yet
after a few turns the surroundings did first turn truly suburban, with rows of
family homes, and then rural, with wooden houses painted yellow and surrounded
by trees. It reminded Hans very much of the Estonian countryside. Following the
arrow on the screen and the Finnish voice explaining it, they turned into a
narrow dirt road through a small forest and stopped outside a garden gate. Hans
saw a single white two-storey house behind the trees. There were no curtains on
the windows next to the door, but he still couldn’t see who or what was inside.
The house itself was made of plastered stone, not of wood. This was not one of
the modern, sterile black-and-white boxes they built all over Europe, though.
It was something from the fifties perhaps. Simple, modest and timeless.

Hans
said to Krohn, ‘You can leave now if you like. I only need to talk to Mäkinen.’

Krohn
shook his head. ‘I’m not leaving. For many reasons.’

‘Are
you involved in the fraud?’

‘There
is no fraud. I told you.’

Hans
nodded. They got out, closed the doors and walked to the entrance of the house.
There was a garden patch but it wasn’t taken care of very well.

Hans
said to Krohn, ‘You tell him I’m your friend from Estonia, it’s a long story,
can we have a glass of water. I want to explain it quietly inside, okay?’

Krohn
would have had little to fear at this stage. If it had been Hans’s intention to
threaten Mäkinen with a weapon or kidnap him, he would have used that weapon on
Krohn already, instead of borrowing a steak knife. It would have been the
logistically worst-planned kidnap ever. And the knife was out of view anyway.
There was no more coercion.

‘Okay,’
Krohn said and rang the bell.

After
a while a friendly gentleman of about sixty opened the door. He wasn’t taller
than Hans, he had white hair and a carefully tended white stubble on the
cheeks. He wore a dark grey woollen cardigan, which underlined his overall
appearance as a nice uncle.

He
looked immediately worried about Krohn and didn’t recognise Hans. Perhaps he
thought that Krohn had gotten into a fistfight with Hans, judging by the shape
of both their faces.

‘This
is my friend Hans from Estonia,’ Krohn said, in English. ‘We just had an
accident, can we maybe have a glass of water, please, before we call the
insurance?’

Krohn
was also getting into it, it seemed.

‘Please,
come in,’ the friendly uncle said. He was standing in a small hallway with
bright wooden panels on the walls. There was a kitchen door to the left and
another door to the right, through which they all went. It led to a large
living room with a wooden floor. There was a wooden table right at the near end
of it, and a coffee table and a bright sofa at the far end which was the rear
side of the house. Some small black-and-white portraits were hanging on the
white walls; there were no paintings. In the middle of the long wall there was a
fireplace but no fire; antlers and, beneath them, a historical hunting rifle.
The windows at the far end of the room, behind the coffee table, were actually
sliding doors that led to a back garden. In the whole room the dominating
colours were white and pinewood. Very Nordic and bright and clean. A bit
artificially clean.

Hans
sat down on one of the chairs at the wooden table, with his face to the room
and his back to the house’s front window. He looked at the papers that were
lying on the table. They were exams. The sheets in the pile on the left had
comments in red ink written over some parts, the ones on the right were still
untouched. Krohn remained standing at the door.

‘Just
wait here, I’ll get you your water,’ the uncle said to both Hans and Krohn.

‘No
thanks, please stay,’ Hans said. ‘You are Professor Mäkinen, am I right?’

The
uncle became even less sure of what precisely was going on, and nodded.

Hans
continued, ‘My name is Hans Tamberg. I’m working for the European Commission,
anti-fraud department.’ He showed him his identification with the stars. ‘I
apologise for the way I look. I am investigating a case, and I would like to
interview you as a suspect. I am empowered to call in the assistance of local
police, but normally we don’t need to do that. You have the right not to
incriminate yourself. Mister Krohn will be assisting you as your witness to the
interview. Do you understand this?’

Mäkinen
looked over to Krohn, who looked less surprised than his boss did.

‘Please,
Professor, sit down,’ Hans said.

Mäkinen
hesitated for a second, then he took a chair and sat down opposite Hans. It
must have been the place he’d been occupying while grading exams.

There
was no wedding band on his finger.

Krohn
was still standing at the door.

Hans
suddenly felt an immense freedom, as if he was levitating in the expanding
space of his possibilities. It was as if he’d achieved what he’d come to
achieve.

Which
wasn’t true, Hans forced himself to remember. It could well be that he was at a
dead end, or merely at the beginning. Or ten minutes away from being arrested
himself, and for a whole number of very good reasons, too.

Hans
addressed Mäkinen. ‘The investigation of my unit has covered several countries,
including the Netherlands with the reactor in Petten and the port of Rotterdam,
plus Tallinn where the freighter Karelia had its stopover before coming here.
All this led me to you, Professor. It led me here today, to ask you one final
question. Why has A&C never noticed that you are stealing their precious
uranium?’

Mäkinen
looked at Hans for ten long seconds, breathing calmly. Then he blinked. Then he
waited, and thought, and decided, and breathed, and waited for another ten long
seconds.

Krohn,
who was still standing at the door, said, ‘I told him it’s not stolen.’

Mäkinen
shook his head, still looking at Hans, and said, ‘We do not steal from A&C.
They are a donor.’

Now
Hans needed to take his time, too.

Then
he said, as if to confirm, ‘They divert their shipments themselves.’

‘Yes.’

Another
pause.

‘Why?’

‘I
don’t know,’ Mäkinen said. ‘One of the owners is an old man who grew
fantastically rich in this business. Not all of his customers were democracies.
Many of them were appalling dictators.’

Hans
glanced at Krohn. The young man with the battered face concentrated on
listening to his boss.

Mäkinen
spread out his arms and continued, ‘Probably he has a guilty conscience.
Probably he’s trying to pay back for all the compromises he’s had to reach in the
course of his professional life. Besides, it’s not that precious. It’s a tiny
percentage of his turnover.’

Even
as they kept talking, Hans kept his chair away from the desk, and his legs bent
at a sharp angle, ready to jump up. He regretted having left the knife in
Krohn’s car.

Hans
asked Mäkinen, ‘The owner has a moral debt, and he pays it back to you?’

‘Not
to me, Mister Tamberg. To the patients.’

Hans
sat and waited for Mäkinen to elaborate. It seemed the man had finally received
an external audience. It consisted of Hans himself and Krohn, who was
apparently hearing interesting news from his superior. Mäkinen seemed liberated
as he kept talking. He could not possibly have believed that Hans, who had come
to his house all by himself looking the way he did, had the authority to
question him in the way proper police had. Even Saar at the Tallinn harbour,
who was a much smaller crook than Mäkinen, had called Brussels to verify Hans’s
identity. Mäkinen had done no such thing. Perhaps it was a good thing Hans
wasn’t the police, that he worked for an institution that looked much more
harmless from a law-enforcement point of view. His suspect might have been much
more hostile when questioned by proper police, insisting on a lawyer for
instance. No, Mäkinen talked because he wanted to. If the statistics were right,
the fraud had been going on for at least two years. Now the young generation,
personified by Hans and maybe Krohn, were ready to receive a share of his accumulated
wisdom.

Mäkinen
continued. ‘When I say patients I am not speaking about the rich world. You
see, there are countries where high-quality medical services are taken for
granted. Universal healthcare, including nuclear medicine. Radioactive diagnostic
markers, cancer treatment. Not all countries, not all patients are that
fortunate.’

Hans
kept listening.

‘And
when I say less fortunate countries, I am not talking about poor countries
where people are either herding goats or starving to death,’ Mäkinen explained.
‘I mean emerging economies. Countries that are developed enough to have
radiology in their hospitals, but not yet equal enough to make it affordable to
the wider population. The rich do not care, because they can afford it. The
super-rich do not care either, because they fly for their cancer treatment to
Europe or America. The donor makes life-saving nuclear medicine available to
those who are not rich or super-rich. He makes it available to ordinary people,
through us.’

Krohn
clearly wanted to finally sit down, but he either couldn’t or wouldn’t move. Probably
he didn’t want to interrupt what he was hearing.

Hans
asked, ‘If your donor wants to give uranium to charity, why does he hide it?
Why doesn’t he just donate it legally?’

‘He
has shareholders,’ Mäkinen said. ‘People have invested in his company so that
profits would be paid out to them, not to others. They do not like charity.’ Mäkinen
took a breath and added, ‘But he does. He believes that we owe it to our fellow
human beings. He believes that we are fortunate because we happen to have been
born on the rich side of the planet. The side that became rich before the other
one did. He believes we should share resources. Because people on the other
side did nothing to deserve their scarcity of resources. Just like we did
nothing to deserve our own wealth, simply by being born here and not there. And
you know what, Mister Tamberg? I think he’s right. You found out what we do,
but I have no reason to be ashamed of it. And I believe that in my position, if
I judge you rightly, you would not be ashamed of anything either.’

Mäkinen
said it and smiled. It wasn’t a self-righteous grin. It was the genuine,
satisfied smile of a man who was at peace with himself.

Luxembourg

‘I
can’t talk right now, I’m at the palace,’ Majerus said. ‘Let’s meet outside in
an hour. The café facing the guard.’

One
hour later Becker was sitting outside the café the chief prosecutor had
specified. A group of women about Becker’s age was sitting to his right. It was
a warm afternoon, the sun had been shining all day, and it was warming up the
air and the pavement and the faces of the locals and tourists who were now
taking a stroll in the city centre, with their overcoats open and their scarves
suspended from their shoulders rather than wrapped around their necks.

The
grand ducal palace was actually a whole complex of government buildings. It was
not just the residence of the Grand Duke but also home to the parliament and
several government services. The sand-coloured façade facing the pedestrian
zone provided the backdrop for the post of the ceremonial guard. Becker watched
the soldier in his greenish brown uniform stamp his foot as he did one of his
rounds. Becker’s country found it appropriate to stress its sovereignty by
placing a guard to protect the palace, the monarchy, the self-determination of
the nation. But it was all within reason. There was one soldier, not two. The
soldiers looked on stoically on their post, but they didn’t have the completely
frozen expressions other countries’ equivalent guards had. And they marched up
and down a granite path to stretch their legs every now and then, but there was
no extravagant goose-stepping. It was earnest but not exaggerated.

Becker
ordered a coffee, and took a sip when it arrived. The guard resumed his post
and stood still, a black automatic rifle held across his chest. Jacques Majerus
emerged from the palace, coming out of the door of the parliament on the far
right of the building. Majerus saw Becker, approached and sat down next to him.
The waiter came out of the café’s interior again and took his order. Majerus
ordered an espresso. This put a limit on how much time he was able or willing
to spend on this, Becker thought.