The Last Compromise

by Reevik, Carl

  ‘We didn’t want to confront him in front of his colleagues.’

  Inhalation, exhalation. Clear mist.

  ‘And during your conversation the Commission employee became sick?’

  The consultants. Camera footage. The body in the men’s room.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The name of the Commission employee?’

  People saw them leave.

  ‘Boris Zayek.’

  ‘That was the man who died?’

  Truth.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You are sure it’s him?’

  A pause.

  ‘I saw him getting sick and going in the direction of the men’s room. And the body I saw there was wearing the same clothes. And I didn’t see it, but I guess he still has his Commission badge somewhere in his pocket.’

  Becker took another draw and put his e-cigarette back into his breast pocket. Then he took out his crumpled notepad from a different pocket and looked at it again. He nodded.

  ‘So Boris Zayek leaves, in the middle of an interview about confidential things for an anti-fraud investigation. An interview for which you came all the way from Brussels, and for which you brought your boss and one outside person whose name you cannot tell me. Boris Zayek leaves, and you all stay behind? You keep sitting here in your chairs?’

  Zayek leaving. Hoffmann following. Hans following. Tienhoven staying. The man with the tight lips attacking Hans. The American intervening, then tackling them both. The man running away. Hans pocketing two objects.

  And now there was no American in the lobby, and no attacker either. And no Hoffmann. And no Tienhoven.

  ‘Yes,’ Hans said. ‘And I didn’t see any problem, Inspector. You see, this was not the questioning of a murder suspect. There was nothing urgent or dangerous here. My department does not deal with that type of crime. We are not a police force like you are. It’s a bureaucracy. People don’t kill themselves because of us, and we don’t kill anyone either.’

  Becker didn’t react. He didn’t frown, nor did he raise his eyebrows.

  Maybe there was camera footage, maybe there wasn’t. If there was, Hans could remember the details later. How could he reach Tienhoven? He didn’t have his mobile phone number, he’d never called him. Was his boss even ready to take decisions, even if he could be reached?

  ‘I’m sorry, I need to go to the bathroom,’ Hans said. After a moment he pointed to the ceiling, upstairs. The men’s room next to the lobby was certainly still inaccessible.

  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.

  10

  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?’