The Last Compromise

by Reevik, Carl

  The phone. There was the phone, and there was the box. Not what Hans knew, but what he had. Except he no longer had the phone, Hoffmann had stolen it. If it was Hoffmann who was following him, it couldn’t be about the phone. So if it was Hoffmann who was worried about an object, it had to be the box, although he could have taken it already at the hotel. If it was the attacker, assuming he wasn’t simply Hoffmann’s associate, it could be about both. If it was about the phone, the man didn’t know that Hans no longer had it. If it was about the box, then Hans needed to think right now what he should do with it.

  Yesterday’s storm on the sea outside Petten had gotten stronger. The rain now fell heavier on the grating and the windshield. The bald cop switched the wipers from interval to continuous. The blue flashlights on the roof of the car in front of them were reflected on the wet asphalt, and in the drops and streams of water on the glass that was visible under the metal grille.

  Clearly it wasn’t the box itself, but something about it. The code on the inside, particles like Clarissa had suggested. Something that could give the man away. Fingerprints Hans had more or less ruled out because the man would have worn gloves. Gloves to hold it, gloves to open it.

  Hans remembered opening the box in the upstairs bathroom in the hotel and again in the lobby, to copy the number. It had taken him a big effort both times. It had nearly broken his fingernails.

  The man had had to take his gloves off to open the lid.

  He may not have had enough time to wipe it.

  There could be prints on the box.

  A loud swoosh interrupted his thoughts. They overtook a lorry right as both cars were driving through a large puddle.

  Whatever it was, Hans needed to decide. He could keep the box on him. If he got attacked, they’d just take it from him, and that would be it. Maybe that would be best, too, because then they would be more certain that Hans hadn’t yet had an opportunity to take any fingerprints off it or send it to a lab. So they would have it. Maybe they’d kill him afterwards. They had already killed someone, probably.

  The second option would be to deliberately place the box outside his control. Send it to anti-fraud by mail, for example. There it would be received and archived as evidence.

  But that would mean it would no longer be retrievable. He couldn’t make any deal to obtain something in return for the box. They could kill him just out of sheer frustration. Or to remove a witness who wasn’t even able to recover what they wanted.

  So he could send it to someone for safekeeping. To Caitlin from money-laundering, for instance. Or to his brother Lennart. Or to Viktor. But that didn’t seem right. Caitlin had a son, Lennart had two daughters, Viktor had a wife and kids, too. He didn’t want to endanger Siim and Clarissa, so he shouldn’t be endangering anybody else either.

  The decision was taken. As soon as he got the chance, Hans would mail the box to himself, to his Brussels office. He wasn’t going to ask the bald cop to please stop at the next post office, so he’d do it in Rotterdam. And he’d be in Rotterdam as soon as they’d get through the rain, which was spending its water so generously now that it looked like the top five centimetres of the North Atlantic Ocean were being sprayed over the Dutch coastline.

  The American.

  He’d been lying on the floor, too. He’d just been checking out. As it happened, he’d been standing there right when it’d happened. He’d pressed Hans to the floor.

  You okay buddy?

  And then he’d picked up his suitcase and left the jurisdiction.

  He could have taken the box right there, though, Hans had even offered it to him. And he had helped take care of Tienhoven after the heart attack. Had he changed his mind afterwards? Or was it not about the damn box at all? Was it about the investigation in general? In that case at least Tienhoven and director-general Clarke and Nathalie Bresson from legal knew just as much, maybe less. Maybe more.

  Hans exhaled, inflating his cheeks. The driver glanced at him disapprovingly.

  Hans didn’t care about the American, because it didn’t change his approach. Whoever had dropped the little black box, and whoever was after him now because of it, the solution stayed the same. Keep it at arm’s length. Away, but not away forever. If it wasn’t about the box, he couldn’t do anything anyway.

  17

  Becker was back from his little trip with the chief prosecutor. He tried the Commission numbers again just in case, but there was no answer. Tamberg wasn’t answering his phone at all, his boss Tienhoven was in meetings, apparently, working away right after his recovery.

  At least crime scene had taken fingerprints at the victim’s office, and Felten had retrieved some fibre or tissue samples from the man’s apartment that morning; cooperation with the police of Rhineland-Palatinate had been smooth as usual, although, as expected, they hadn’t allowed him to take fingerprints. Felten had also asked around a little. According to him, the landlady had referred to Zayek as the lonely man with the funny name; the other neighbour had said that Zayek worked in Luxembourg somewhere. None of them had mentioned any family or friends, not even visitors. The living room, according to Felten, was creepy: no books, no pictures, just a TV, a table, and a cupboard with spare cutlery.

  The desktop phone rang, Becker picked it up.

  ‘Moïen, this is Doctor Offerbrück from forensics. I have the first autopsy results.’

  ‘What, the DNA test, already?’

  ‘No, I said autopsy.’

  Becker sighed.

  ‘Should I come over to the lab to have a look?’

  ‘Why? It’s the naked body of a man with no head. The pieces of his head lie on a tray next to him. What are you hoping to see?’

  ‘Are the pieces good enough for facial reconstruction?’

  ‘First things first, Inspector. I can tell you already now that the prints do match the victim’s fingers. The DNA testing takes longer, but if that’s positive, too, you won’t need any facial reconstruction, will you? Which is good, because it’s pretty expensive.’

  Another sigh. Doctor Offerbrück had again managed to make Becker look stupid, and he did it almost every time. It had become a deeply unpleasant routine.

  Becker said, ‘Just in case his identity is called into question at some point. Toxicology results?’

  ‘Nothing unusual. Slightly elevated levels of a toxin that could have induced acute nausea, but it could also be that the victim ate too much liverwurst.’

  ‘General impression?’

  ‘An ordinary man around forty with an office job. He didn’t smoke, and if he drank it wasn’t much. He was not overweight, but some exercise would have done him good.’

  Yes, Doctor. Happy birthday to you, too.

  ‘And the cause of death for the moment is simple, I’m afraid,’ Offerbrück concluded. ‘Ceased functioning of the brain due to its abrupt disconnection from the body. There are burns and explosive residue on what used to be the inside of his mouth and nose and throat. He wasn’t shot in the head, as your colleagues from crime scene have remarked as well. There has been an explosion. And I confirm that it has gone off inside the victim’s mouth.’

  Becker’s computer made a sound, announcing the arrival of an e-mail.

  ‘Thank you, Doctor’, he said. ‘I will call you if I have something relevant for you, please do the same.’

  ‘You are welcome. I will now continue on what is left of his skull, and I will tell you once the DNA test is done. Goodbye, Inspector.’

  Becker hung up.

  He took out his e-cigarette and looked at his screen. When he saw what the e-mail was about he put the cigarette back. It was the mother of the woman whose son had gone missing.

  Becker read through the first lines of text. He relaxed. Of course, he hadn’t been missing. The boy was with his mother and grandmother. It wasn’t a big surprise, but it was nevertheless a relief. Child abductions by strangers existed mostly in the fantasy of people who didn’t know the crime statistics. But even those who knew them
probably felt uncomfortable all the same about the topic. Becker had read somewhere that statistically, if you deliberately wanted to let your child be abducted, you’d have to let it stand on a street corner day and night for three hundred thousand years before the first kidnapper would show up to offer candy. The cases he’d had were all teenagers running away from home, or divorcees leaving and taking their children with them. Still, Becker couldn’t blame people for feeling uncomfortable. He’d felt so, too, when his own son had still been living with him.

  He typed a brief answer to the grandmother. Thank you, Madame, you did the right thing. My colleague will come to you right away, and together we will find a solution. Please stay where you are. All the best, Didier Becker.

  He sent it off, then he picked up the phone and dialled the number he’d been waiting to dial ever since he’d talked to the boy’s father. ‘This is Becker, please put me through to Inspector Lambertz from domestic violence.’

  Rotterdam, the Netherlands

  The bald gendarme delivered Hans to the front entrance of the main building of the Rotterdam police, a low but extended wedge-shaped construction with a shiny façade covering the lower floors.

  During the last minutes of the ride Hans had been listlessly staring out of the window. The architecture was that of a post-war city, all grey asphalt and concrete in the grey rain. Caitlin from money-laundering liked to refer to well-preserved historical town centres as ‘sloppily bombed’, one of the very few quips of hers that Hans actually found a bit tasteless. In any case Rotterdam clearly was the opposite of sloppily bombed. It was a stark contrast to Tallinn’s medieval and renaissance core, which had been largely spared in the war. Hans thought of one ugly brown block of cement with windows in the old town, though. It had been constructed to replace a building that, as far as Hans knew, had been bombed, during the German occupation, by a Soviet women aviators’ squadron to celebrate international women’s day on 8 March 1944.

  Hans said goodbye to the bald driver, neither expecting nor receiving an answer, got a little wet in the rain before reaching the door, and entered the building as the van and the escort drove off. The guard in the crowded entrance hall promptly told him the office number. They had been expecting him.

  Hans started looking for the right place. Visser’s office had to be at the far end of a large open office space on the ground floor. There were dozens of desks staffed by men and women in uniform, with cops and visitors and witnesses and suspects and complainants walking and chattering all around them. He crossed the space, found the door, knocked and, since among all the chatter he wouldn’t have heard any reply through the door anyway, carefully opened the door.

  There was only one man inside, and he was just putting down the receiver of his desktop phone.

  ‘Good morning. Mister Visser? I am Hans Tamberg from the Commission,’ Hans said. ‘Thank you for organising the ride.’

  Visser got up and shook Hans’s hand, then mutely offered his visitor a chair across his desk. Hans closed the door and sat down. Visser sat down as well, in his own chair, and waited. He was about Tienhoven’s age, but he wasn’t as skinny as his boss. And his hair wasn’t grey but a slightly reddish blond.

  The office was relatively quiet with the door closed, although Hans could still hear the noise outside.

  ‘Willem Tienhoven and you know each other, I guess?’, Hans said. He’d said it slowly because he didn’t know yet how good Visser’s English would be.

  ‘We haven’t talked in a long time,’ Visser answered, in perfectly fine English. ‘Not since the divorce. His call came as a surprise.’

  Tienhoven had had a divorce? ‘Whose divorce?’

  ‘His and mine.’

  Tienhoven?

  ‘He divorced his wife at the same time I divorced my wife,’ Visser explained. ‘His first wife is my second wife. You understand that it wasn’t easy, yes?’

  Hans took a moment to consider this. What a mess. But difficult or not, his boss had recommended this man Visser as a contact person. So there they were.

  Hans cleared his throat. ‘We are investigating an illegal operation that is making uranium disappear in several European countries, and that covers its traces in Commission reports.’

  Visser kept listening.

  ‘I believe there is a shipment that should have arrived very recently at the port of Rotterdam, or that did arrive and then got diverted. It would be a container for radioactive material, sent by an Austrian company called A&C and intended for the research reactor in Petten.’

  Visser looked into Hans’s eyes for another moment, and asked, ‘If we go and ask the people at the port, what are you hoping to find?’

  Answers, of course, but that would have been a stupid thing to say. ‘If a shipment was cancelled, and if shipments have been cancelled before, on exactly the moments when we think the illegal activity took place, then it would confirm our assumptions. Then we could go directly after A&C in Vienna. If the shipments did arrive and got diverted, we could follow the cargo and find out who else is involved.’

  Visser waited for another moment, and said, ‘Okay, we go and ask the port.’

  That was quick.

  ‘Before we leave, I have two more requests,’ Hans said. ‘Both are part of the case.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  That’s what Tienhoven often said, too. It fact Hans recognised quite a few behavioural traits.

  ‘I would like to post something,’ he said. ‘Can I please have an envelope, a large one with padding inside, and can you put it in your outgoing mail, as an overnight delivery to Brussels?’

  ‘Yes, we can do that. What’s the second thing?’

  ‘The second thing is to check whether there is a missing person in Bulgaria. The name is Boris Zayek. He probably disappeared five years ago.’

  All the information he had got about Zayek being a spy had come from Hoffmann and the BND. Even if Hoffmann had told him the truth, which wasn’t certain, all his information had come, at least initially, from a Russian defector. Maybe there was a real Zayek, maybe there wasn’t.

  Visser replied in an almost joyful spirit. ‘Yes, we can do that, too. Since Bulgaria joined the European Union they’ve been connecting them to all kinds of information-sharing technology. They didn’t really trust the police over there, in the beginning. Corruption and mafia and so on. But they’re investing heavily. Forensics, databases, everything.’ Visser got up and added, ‘And they’re right. You don’t catch criminals by stopping everybody at the border and checking their stupid passports, like in the old days. You do it by sharing police information. Borders are open, travellers are happy, we are happy, everybody’s happy. But not the gangsters. Come on, let’s go. Here’s your envelope.’

  He handed Hans a padded brown envelope from a drawer and picked up the phone to talk to someone in Dutch while standing up. In the stream of words Hans understood the word ‘container’. As he was talking, Visser took out a pack of chewing gum and offered Hans a strip. Hans gladly accepted. He still hadn’t brushed his teeth.

  ***

  ‘How’s Willem’s daughter?’, Visser asked, turning back to Hans.

  Visser was sitting in the passenger’s seat of a police car driven by a uniformed cop. It was still raining. They had nearly reached the port, Hans could already see the cranes during the short flashes of clear glass between the turns of the windshield wiper.

  ‘I never met her,’ he answered. ‘Just know her from a picture on his desk, if it’s her. And he never talks about her.’

  Visser turned around to face the rain-whipped windshield again.

  Hans felt he should ask something, too. He said, ‘The car that picked me up in Petten, was that normal police?’

  ‘No, that was the royal marechaussee.’

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘They’re part of the military,’ Visser said, cheerfully. ‘They’re also border guards, special police. If we’re the Wehrmacht, they are the SS.’

  Ha
ns frowned. What an idiotic thing to say. Why had Tienhoven’s wife swapped her husband for this arsehole? Hans’s boss would never say a thing like that. Maybe that’s why he was fighting fraud for the Commission, while his rival was chasing junkies on the rainy streets of Rotterdam.

  But Hans depended on this man’s cooperation. His help, in fact, in a case that wasn’t too solid, and that could well expire within an hour. So he shut his mouth. And he kept it that way until they arrived at a large glass-and-concrete building. Beyond it lay the industrial vastness of the port reaching into the grey water that was incessantly lashed by the heavy rain.

  ***

  Visser, Hans and the uniformed policeman who had been driving the car reached the third floor and entered the room.

  The guard at the entrance had clearly been used to the police visiting, he’d let them through without asking any questions. Maybe he’d even recognised Visser.

  It was a large rectangular control room, like a control tower at an airport, with a long row of screens and buttons and lights along the length of the large windows. The windows even had windshield wipers. They were positioned vertically, like on a ship, and they were working away to wipe the water off the glass, and to keep open the view of an enormous cityscape of cranes, cargo ships, oil drums and densely stacked containers. There were nine or ten people sitting on chairs along the whole row of control panels, their backs turned to them. They were all wearing white shirts.