The Last Compromise

by Reevik, Carl

  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.

  24

  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 d
o 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.