The Last Compromise

by Reevik, Carl

  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 collec
t. 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?’

  Saar was at least thirty years older than Hans. He had a thin pale face, droopy eyes, narrow teeth. He was balding but kept a thick white beard which was shaved clean on the cheeks. An undernourished Santa Claus with a goatee, and without the friendly face.

  ‘Please excuse me, I will call you back,’ he said quietly into the receiver and put it down. ‘What was that?’, he asked Hans. ‘I didn’t understand you, I was on the phone.’

  ‘You heard me,’ Hans said, sitting down in one of the two visitor’s chairs. He made himself comfortable. ‘Do you mind if I sit down? I usually prefer doing this sitting down.’

  ‘Commission, you said?’

  Hans took out his identification card with the shiny stars, leaned forward and held it in front of Saar’s face. ‘Hans Tamberg, anti-fraud.’

  Saar grinned. His teeth looked long and thin because the gums had receded.

  ‘Why is your face swollen, Hans Tamberg, anti-fraud? When have you last shaved?’

  ‘You will understand that in a minute, I promise you.’

  ‘So if I open the Commission’s website, and look up the number, and call, they will tell me that you work there, and that you’re here right now?’

  Hans was still leaning forward towards Saar. He took the receiver of Saar’s phone with his left hand and offered it to him. Saar looked at Hans for a moment. Without accepting the receiver, he turned to his computer screen, opened his browser and found the anti-fraud department’s central switchboard number. Hans put the receiver down next to the phone. He assumed it would revert to the sound of a busy line in a few seconds, so if Saar wanted to make a call, he would have to press the receiver down again to get a free line. Saar looked again at Hans, picked up the receiver and held it to his ear. Pressed the cradle button on the phone to clear the line, and dialled the number he had found. He switched to English.

  ‘Good morning, I have an appointment with Mister Hans Tamberg now, but he hasn’t arrived yet. Is he at the office?’ Saar watched Hans’s eyes while he waited. Hans watched his. ‘Okay, thank you.’ Saar hung up.

  ‘You are not in the office, apparently,’ he said to Hans, switching back to Estonian.

  ‘That’s because I’m here,’ Hans replied, leaning back into his visitor’s chair. ‘Now listen very carefully, Mister Saar. You are a suspect in a European anti-fraud investigation into irregularities in the award of construction works contracts to Vanabalt, in the context of the harbour extension which is co-financed by the European Union. You have the right not to incriminate yourself, do you understand this.’

  Saar listened. It wasn’t really a question, and he was receptive to information. More curious than frightened, but that was enough.

  ‘I don’t need to tell you what we found,’ Hans continued. ‘In one case you required all potential bidders to have a certificate which only Vanabalt had, and which had nothing to do with the works. In another you decided that bidders had made an error when quoting their prices, and recalculated them yourself, so that Vanabalt ended up as the lowest bidder. In another case the price offers of the other companies were more or less the same, but Vanabalt’s offer was thirty percent cheaper. Unrealistically cheap. There were cost overruns, of course, but by that time Vanabalt already had the contract, and they could invoice you whatever they wanted. Which they did. I have to say it’s all very disturbing, Mister Saar.’

  Saar waited for a moment. ‘You don’t know any of that. You still need some answers, or you wouldn’t be here.’

  Good, Hans thought. The bits he had found out and remembered from the file were more or less correct. ‘If I still needed answers I would not be talking to you, my friend,’ Hans continued without slowing down. ‘I would be reading documents and talking to other witnesses right now. I have all the answers I need regarding you. At this stage it doesn’t even matter if you get convicted in the end or not. Because the end is very far from here. For the next two years you will be running in a hamster’s wheel denying the corruption charges. To investigators, the press, your relatives back in Pärnu.’

  Saar kept listening without saying a word. Yes, Hans had remembered correctly, the man was from Pärnu. Hans took a breath to stress the pause.

  ‘This conversation can have two different outcomes,’ Hans said. He leaned forward across his host’s desk again, and lowered his voice. ‘Either you and your fucking harbour drown in all this shit.’ He gestured to the ships and port cranes outside the window.

  Saar did not ask the next question, he waited for the answer.

  Hans gave it. ‘Or I can make it all go away.’

  He paused to let Saar think about it, and leaned back into his visitor’s chair.

  Saar took his time. The computer on the desk made a sound, telling Saar that an e-mail had arrived. He didn’t look at the screen, he kept looking at Hans. Finally he said, slowly, ‘I am not commenting on any of this. I am only curious about what you suggest.’

  Now Hans took his time. ‘I am not suggesting,’ he said, pronouncing clearly every single word, ‘I am offering that we help each other out. I just told you how I can help you. If you are interested, I will now tell you how you can help me. Are you interested in hearing it?’

  Saar didn’t say a word.

  ‘Are you interested in hearing it, Mister Saar?’

  Saar took a breath. ‘Yes, I am interested in hearing it.’

  ‘Good. There is a container that arrived on a ship from Rotterdam earlier this morning. I will give you the name of the ship and the container identification number right after I finish talking. You can return my favour by telling me where that container is, who the addressee is, and who came to pick it up. Do you think you could do that?’

  Saar nodded slowly.

  ‘I am finished talking,’ Hans said, and passed Saar the piece of paper with the information Bas the young port controller had printed out in Rotterdam. ‘Now it’s your turn to do something for me.’

  Saar slowly took the paper, looked at it, and put it back on the desk.

  ‘How exactly will it go away?’, he asked.

  ‘I will conclude that there are insufficient reasons to make a formal accusation. And you try and give some of your contracts to some other companies in the future. Not just Vanabalt, okay?’

  Saar showed a little smile. He turned to his screen
and started clicking and typing.

  Hans was waiting patiently in his chair. He looked around the man’s office. It was neat because it was fairly new. There was a painting on the wall, an idyllic seashore landscape with Estonian peasants in white folk costumes sitting in a pine forest right above the water’s edge. The scene was absurd. Maybe Saar had painted it himself.

  ‘Here it is,’ Saar said. ‘The container arrived from Rotterdam this morning, on a ship called Karelia. It contains dangerous goods marked “ionising radiation”, so we reported it to the health and safety inspectorate.’

  ‘Where is it now?’

  ‘The container? We no longer have it.’

  ‘Someone picked it up?’

  ‘Either that, or it was put on another ship.’

  The secretary came back from her coffee break and peered into Saar’s office. Then she closed the door again. Saar made some more mouse clicks.

  ‘The container left the port this morning on another cargo ship called Bogatyr.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Saint Petersburg, Russia.’

  ***

  Saar frowned, his dark eyebrows squeezing his droopy eyes. He looked out the window, then back at his screen, then at the tasteless painting on his wall.

  ‘Mister Tamberg,’ he said, and finally turned to face Hans. ‘Can I please know why you are asking me these questions.’

  ‘I just told you that, Mister Saar.’

  ‘No, that’s why I’m helping you. But I am asking what exactly you are looking for.’

  ‘What is your problem?’ Hans was getting annoyed.

  ‘My problem is that the container was supposedly shipped to Russia, but it’s still here. It’s still on the same ship that it arrived on.’

  Now Hans frowned. ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Because I can see it from here.’

  Saar got up and pointed at a ship with a red hull and white superstructures and a collection of containers looking like colourful lego bricks in the distance of the dock. It was the fourth of five ships moored one behind the other, parallel to the leftmost dock, like a row of oversized lorries outside a car wash. Hans stood next to Saar and saw it, too. Karelia.