by Reevik, Carl
‘I no longer have the phone,’ Hans said, in worse but acceptable Russian. ‘The German took it.’
Would he know whom he meant? Would he tell? Would he reveal something?
‘The box,’ the Russian said.
No he wouldn’t.
‘I no longer have that, either.’
‘Really?’, the man said, almost genuine curiosity in his eyes under his raised eyebrows. ‘When did you get rid of it?’
Before Hans could say anything, the man took a phone from his breast pocket, tapped on the screen and showed it to Hans. ‘Was it here?’
The picture showed a woman with short blonde hair. The skin of her face tightly enveloped her cheekbones. She was sitting in a chair that had been put in the middle of a hallway. There were children’s toys lying on the floor.
‘You know her?’, the Russian asked. ‘This is the wife of Viktor Takacs in Luxembourg. Viktor with the red car. She and I, we tried to reach him on his phone, to ask him to turn around and bring you back. But his phone was dead. At least she knew where you were going.’
Her skinny face was glowing red, there were tears in her face. There was fear in her eyes.
‘Or was it here?’ He put the phone back in his pocket and took out a digital camera from another pocket. He turned on the little screen on its back side and showed it to Hans. The picture showed Hans and Siim getting out of Siim’s car inside the Petten reactor compound. All the colours were green and grey. It had been dark outside. Clarissa was shown approaching to meet them. The picture must have been taken from outside the fence, with an extremely powerful telescopic lens and night vision. Possibly from a remote-controlled mini-drone to take pictures over the dunes.
‘Or maybe it was here?’
He pressed a button next to the screen. The new picture showed Siim and Clarissa kissing, Hans standing aside.
‘Or here?’
The next picture showed a close-up of Clarissa’s face. The image was no longer green. It had normal colours, and it had been taken from a position right in front of her. A portrait in daylight. Clarissa’s dark eyes were wide open, there was no smile on her face.
‘Or here?’
The next picture showed Clarissa completely naked. She was standing in an alley in front of a brick wall, next to a rubbish container. She was covering herself with her hands, her dark hair partly obscuring her face. Her eyes showed not so much panic as an extreme degree of concentration.
The next one showed her again in the same position, but this time her hair had been smoothed back, it was no longer covering her face.
‘She’s not a virgin,’ the man said.
Now it was important for Hans to keep his shit together. He looked into the Russian’s eyes. The man’s mouth was firmly shut, just like it had been in the hotel lobby. Hans’s breathing rate increased, his heart was pounding. He forced himself to think about something else. Something futile, something even more ridiculous, even more depressing. The first thing that came to his mind was Prince Ivan on the horse. The crossroads, the stone. The inscription. The prince dies, the horse dies, both die in the end. Everybody dies. Where’s the problem? Hans felt it was helping, but only a little. What’s wrong with your lips? The Russian’s problem was not his lips, though. It was that during Hans’s overnight stay in Petten he had been inside a secure location, and the Russian hadn’t been able to get to him. And Hans had left the compound in a police convoy.
He felt his control over his lot party return, even as the Russian was staring into his eyes, the camera and the picture still held in his hand. Hans realised that he had in fact been continuously either in transit or under police protection. The hotel in Luxembourg had been full of policemen; then he’d left in Viktor’s car; then he’d swapped cars in Brussels, with Siim driving him straight to the reactor, with the exception of one lengthy stop at a petrol station. That’s when the Russian may have very nearly gotten him. After Petten it had been the special police van and Rotterdam police headquarters, with a ride in a police car to the seaport and then, earlier this morning, the ride to Amsterdam airport, also in a police car. Back in Petten the Russian had decided to collect some means to pressure and intimidate Hans later, instead of pursuing police convoys, so he’d gotten to Clarissa outside the compound. Then he must have found out about Hans’s flight to Tallinn, either because someone in Rotterdam had told him or because he’d had access to online booking information. And now the poor Russian had finally caught up with him here on the ferry.
Hans almost felt sorry for the man, even though his heart was still pounding. Forget the heart, he thought. Reduce the breath rate. Time to answer.
Hans said, slowly and quietly, ‘You followed me all the way here, and now you are showing me pictures of women I don’t know, and pictures of other people’s girlfriends?’
‘I know this is not your girlfriend, Hans Tamberg from Tartu,’ the man said. He let it sink in, grinning. ‘She told me that herself. And she told me where you’re from.’
Hans held the man’s gaze. This wasn’t over yet. Keep your shit together. They all die.
‘There is someone older than you, a Margus Tamberg from Tartu,’ the man said. ‘At the water utility. Is that your boyfriend?’
Christ. But soon it would be over. Come on, what next?
‘Or Lennart Tamberg? He also has an address in Tartu. Is it him? You want to see him naked? Or their children, you like that sort of thing?’
Hans wanted to scream. But what he wanted even more was to see this through. Withstand. Keep the ability to offer a coherent reply afterwards.
‘Or Mister and Misses Tamberg, of course. Hendrik and Lydia. She can’t be a virgin, though, right Hans?’
Next? A pause. Oddly, the mention of his parents hadn’t been very frightening because he had anticipated it; it had been the next logical step after his brothers. But would there be more? Okay, this was probably it for the moment.
Hans asked, ‘Is it the fingerprints, or the crumbs of the explosive that was inside, or the serial number inside the box?’
The man was pressing his lips together even more tightly. His grin was gone. Hans saw fury build up inside him. Why was Hans provoking him? Ah, but he knew why. The man had shown him all the pictures he had, mentioned all the names he knew. The same reason Saar had gotten cheeky again after a while. The old man had half forgotten about the danger he’d been in, the danger that Hans had posed to his precious contracts, to his career, to his regular life. Threats and intimidation had a momentum which had to be sustained or it would be lost. Or was there more to come?
Hans didn’t want to take the risk, and said, ‘I posted the box to my Brussels office.’ He pronounced every single word as slowly and quietly as before. ‘Only I can pick it up. If I want to have it, or if I want to get rid of it, I have to go back to Brussels and do it.’
The man was still holding the digital camera with the last picture in his hand. His lips relaxed somewhat. His eyes did not.
‘So we get off this ferry,’ the man replied. ‘And we will go back together, and there you will do it.’
‘Frankly, I prefer going alone,’ Hans said, without changing the speed of his speech or the volume of his voice. ‘I will bring it to the Russian embassy in Brussels. Is that okay for you?’
‘If we get separated, yes. But I don’t think we should get separated.’
Hans leaned forward, and said, ‘But I think we should.’
Hans jerked forward and pressed with both palms against the man’s chest, nearly pushing him off his chair, and started yelling at him in loud, vulgar Russian. ‘Ty suka blyad ya te sha vyebanu!’ Hans rose from his chair and tried to hit the man in the face with his fist. People started craning their necks, half annoyed by the drunk Russian brawl, half curious about how it would end.
The Russian rose to his feet and punched Hans in the side of his nose with the lower edge of his palm. Hans stumbled backwards, sharp pain hitting the bones of his skull near his nose and around his eye. Then the man u
sed his left to clench a fist and punched Hans in the stomach. Hans hadn’t had any time to tense his stomach muscles. The strike burrowed into his gut. He felt immense pain and nausea rising from the stomach to the throat as he bent over and fell on the floor, his coffee cup falling onto his back. He felt warm coffee running on the back of his neck and in his hair, he was retching from the sickness.
Voices from some of the other guests at the cafeteria reached him through the fog, a garbled mix of languages. ‘Lopeta! Stop! Da ostavte yevo v pokoye, leave him alone.’
The Russian knelt above him, jerked him over by the shoulder so he lay on his back, and rammed his elbow vertically into his chest. Hans exhaled painfully and couldn’t take any breath while the man quickly went through his pockets.
More voices. ‘Call someone from the crew! What are you doing?’
The Russian leaned over Hans’s ear and whispered, ‘Budu zhdat, no nedolgo.’
Hans could finally breathe in, at least partly. He managed only a shallow breath. The words had meant I will wait, but not for long. Reassuring, Hans thought. It was the last thought he had before the Russian kicked him in the face with his shoe. First he saw nothing at all. Then he saw the man leave the cafeteria through an upside down fog of dizziness, nausea, pain in his stomach and chest and face that was getting more agonising with every breath he took, and through blood that was running from his nose across his cheeks and into his eyes. He closed his eyes to protect them from the blood, then he carefully turned his head to the side so the blood would flow onto the floor.
More voices, but they were calm and low and distant. ‘You okay?’ He wanted to get some rest. His grandmother would have been proud, not of the beating but of the swearing. Almost without an accent. He would think of that later, though. Thinking cost him too much energy now. The pain cost him too much energy. Hans was alone on the floor. On the boat. On the sea. The voices in the distance weren’t real. The pain wasn’t real. He felt he needed to finally rest. Just for a little while.
Helsinki, Finland
The sky over Helsinki had almost cleared. Individual rays of sunlight breached the clouds and shone down on the sea, like in a painting depicting a divine intervention.
The two policemen were sitting in their patrol car and waited. They had parked right in front of the dock of the passenger ferry from Tallinn. The blue light bar was flashing in silence. They had taken a length of plastic tape with red and white stripes, and closed the off-ramp of the ferry dock. Then they had returned to their car and sat down to wait, the younger one behind the wheel, the older one in the passenger’s seat next to him.
They watched the ferry as it carefully but routinely approached the dock. Tows were thrown and fastened. Commands were shouted. Then the doors opened, and a trickle of passengers started to emerge from the ship, into the open air, and onto the solid ground. The people slowed down and stopped as they saw that the ramp had been closed off by the police.
‘There he is,’ the younger one said to his colleague. ‘This is him.’
They left the car, closed the doors and approached Hans in a broad stride.
‘Helsinki police, good afternoon.’
Hans stopped in front of them. He tried to make a neutral expression with his swollen, bloody, hurting face. ‘Good afternoon. Can I help you?’
The gathering crowd around them stepped back, to respect an invisible perimeter of discretion or wariness.
‘We were asked to meet you here,’ the younger of the two policemen said. ‘I think you know why.’
Hans didn’t reply.
Hans wasn’t in a good shape at all. But he was the only person from their group who had neither died nor disappeared nor completely passed out.
And now there was no American in the lobby, and no attacker either. And no Hoffmann. And no Tienhoven.
Luxembourg police want to talk to you, they keep calling.
‘Do you have anything to say?’, the older policeman asked.
Hans cleared his throat. His chest still hurt.
‘It was just a misunderstanding,’ Hans said. ‘The man on the ferry here had confused me with someone else. He was very angry, maybe he had drunk a little too much, but it had nothing to do with me.’
‘We were called to check on this situation,’ the younger one said. ‘There has been a fight on a Finnish ferry, after all.’
The older one took over. ‘The man must still be on board. Do you wish to press charges against him for physical assault?’
‘I don’t even know who he was,’ Hans said. The relief made breathing a little easier. ‘And I think he was Russian.’
The two policemen looked at each other.
‘I’ll be fine,’ Hans continued. ‘It’s nothing. Thank you. I think you can let everybody go. But could you perhaps tell me where I can find a Professor Mäkinen from the University of Helsinki.’
The policemen looked at each other again.
‘It’s okay. We’ll take you there,’ the older one said, and led the way to the police car. The younger one hurried back to remove the tape and to release the waiting crowd into freedom.
***
The three of them sat in the police car, the two policemen in the front seats waiting for Hans to say where he needed to go so they could start the engine and take him there.
It was a Saturday, but that didn’t mean much to the research staff at the University of Helsinki, Hans hoped. His hope was based on what Julia had told him about the lab sciences. Weekends and nights didn’t really exist as concepts to these people. To the contrary, it was the prime time for not-so-senior staff to use lab facilities.
Professor Mäkinen, the addressee of the shipment from Tallinn to Helsinki, was unlikely to be junior staff, but there could be junior collaborators who’d be at work now. An assistant professor, for example. That would be more a professor than an assistant; they weren’t actually assisting anyone, they were just doing their research. Either on their own or, more probably, in a team with others, hoping to become second rather than third author, or first rather than second. And that meant they needed lab time. And such a person could lead Hans to Mäkinen.
Hans would have loved to approach all this in a more systematic fashion, so that he could go after the recipient directly. But he didn’t even know Mäkinen’s first name, and in Finland half the population was called Mäkinen. It could be a man or a woman, living in Helsinki or in any commuter town along the coast. It could be a fake recipient who didn’t exist at all, or a real person who had no idea that his or her name was being used to divert uranium from one port to another. Or it could be a real professor who was somehow involved in the whole scheme, either in league with the Russians or in league with those who had siphoned off the material while it was in transit to Saint Petersburg.
The main constraint was time. Hans simply wasn’t sure how much time the Russian had given him back on the ferry to return the box. And he wasn’t sure whether perhaps he really was a fugitive sought by the Luxembourgish police with a Europe-wide arrest warrant. He had booked his flight online under his own name, after all, and he had paid for the ferry with his normal debit card. For the police in Luxembourg requesting local assistance in Helsinki wasn’t harder than it was for the Commission. It was probably even easier.
So he leaned forward, sitting in the same position in the back of a parked car that he’d assumed when talking to Tienhoven and Hoffmann in the picnic area on their way to Luxembourg. He addressed both policemen at the same time.
‘I’m sorry, do you have an internet phone? I think I lost my phone on the ferry. I just need to find Professor Mäkinen’s office address, that’s all.’
They were still speaking English. Finnish and Estonian were relatively close, but not too much. During the Soviet days, Estonians would watch Finnish television, and the languages were related enough for them to get the gist of the world news from the West. But there were limits to mutual comprehension in a normal conversation, especially when the interlocutor
s weren’t even facing one another while talking.
The older policeman, sitting in the passenger’s seat, made a sound with his mouth or his throat, took out his phone and tapped on the screen. ‘Where?’
‘Just the university. Maybe there is a search function to look for staff members.’
The man tapped and waited. ‘Okay, I have the website. There’s a telephone directory.’
‘Mäkinen.’
The driver tapped, then said, ‘There are more than twenty Mäkinens. Which one?’
‘Does it show where they work?’, Hans asked.
‘Yeah.’
‘Just the professors then, please.’
The policeman started reading out the names of the faculties or institutes. ‘Behavioural sciences, chemistry, medical sciences, agricultural sciences, mathematics.’
If it’s a university, and if it’s even vaguely legitimate, it would have to be about medical isotopes. That was more likely than chemistry. Hans said, ‘Medical. If it shows an address, it would be really great if you could drop me off there.’
The man checked his phone. His throat stayed silent. He showed the screen to the younger policeman at the steering wheel, who promptly nodded and started the engine. They left the ferry dock, heading presumably to the seat of the local university’s medical school.
***
They left the port area and drove in silence through the peninsula that was Helsinki’s city centre. Neither of them spoke, and there wasn’t even any police radio chatter Hans would have expected to hear.
The container had ended up here and not in Saint Petersburg, but the two cities looked somewhat similar. Hans didn’t need to look around to know it, he was staring straight ahead. He had been to Helsinki a dozen times, and he had visited Saint Petersburg twice. Helsinki’s streets were much narrower, but the old pre-war apartment buildings nevertheless had something imperially classical and above all distinctly Eastern European about them. The same went for the Art Nouveau flats with their high windows and decorative masonry. It was a bit like Vienna which he’d seen once, only much smaller. Hans closed his eyes. He had barely slept in two days. His face hurt. His stomach hurt. He could faintly smell his shirt; he should have bought a new one in Amsterdam after all. Right now a few minutes of stupor were needed.