by Reevik, Carl
Hans dialled the number. He heard a female voice answer the call.
‘Rossiyskoye konsulstvo.’
‘This is Hans Tamberg. I have something that belongs to you.’
The woman replied immediately, ‘There is a car waiting outside your office building. Give it to the passenger.’
A pause.
Hans asked, ‘How will I know he’s with you?’
‘The car has diplomatic license plates.’
‘I need to be sure, I don’t want to give it to the wrong person,’ Hans said. ‘What’s the passenger’s name?’
‘Anatoly.’
‘Are you kidding me? His last name.’
‘Slavkin. He will say to you what you said on the ferry.’
Another pause.
‘Okay,’ Hans said and hung up.
He couldn’t see the street outside the building’s entrance from his office window, but there was no doubt that the Russians had been aware of his arrival and had moved into position to intercept him on his way out of the building. And Hans even preferred this to going to the embassy himself, or to risking sending it by mail, or to waiting any longer in general.
The calculation was simple. They wanted the box, Hans needed to give it to them as quickly as possible to protect his blood relatives, and that was it. There would be no more games or brilliant moves. No appeal to the police, no e-mails to the media, no attempt to blackmail the Russians into anything, or to play them off against some other country. The authorities involved had already reached a mutual agreement about the incident in Luxembourg. And the Russians weren’t hiding the fact that they had a stake, they had even sent an official embassy car. There was no way of knowing whether the transfer of the box truly ended the matter between Hans and the Russian on the ferry, if only because, for all the Russians knew, the box could have undergone extensive analysis in a lab in the meantime. But the Russian on the ferry hadn’t seemed worried about that.
Hans put the black box inside the second blank envelope and sealed it, too. Then he hid the envelope inside his jacket, shut down his computer, turned off the lights and left his office as deserted as all the others on his floor.
***
The elevator doors opened and Hans stepped outside, walked past the guard and left the building. As promised, a black Mercedes with diplomatic licence plates was parked beneath a street lamp across the street, its front lights pointing to the left. As Hans approached it, the rear window behind the driver’s seat was lowered, and a pale young man peered outside.
‘Do you have it?’, he said to Hans in Russian.
Hans asked, ‘What’s your name?’
‘Give me the box, that’s my name.’
‘My instructions about verification are clear,’ Hans said, turned left, stepped on the pavement on the car’s side of the street and started walking away from the car, in the direction it would also have been heading.
‘Stop, wait!’
Hans stopped and turned around. He waited for the man to come out. The man was waiting for Hans to come back.
When neither thing happened, Hans turned around again and continued walking. He heard the engine start and the car slowly follow him.
The car came to a stop next to him. Now the rear window behind the passenger’s seat opened. The Russian had needed to move over.
He said, ‘Anatoly Slavkin.’
Hans asked, ‘Why are you here?’
‘To receive the black box.’
‘What did I say to him?’
Without grinning Slavkin said a few vulgar but correct words.
Hans opened his jacket, took out the envelope with the box and gave it to him. He took it, opened the envelope, almost broke off his fingernails trying to open the box, checked the serial number and nodded.
‘Proshay,’ he said to Hans.
As he raised the window he said to the driver, ‘Davay, poyekhali.’
The driver complied and the car drove off.
Proshay meant goodbye, in the definitive sense of farewell rather in the sense of a temporary separation until the next encounter. A mildly comforting nuance, but better than nothing. As for the box, the transaction was complete. Time to go home.
***
Hans didn’t feel like taking any form of public transport. He’d spent a lot of time sitting around on the airplane from Helsinki and on the bus from Brussels airport to the anti-fraud building. The night was pleasantly chilly; no wind, no rain, no frost. Fresh air filled his nostrils and lungs. He kept his jacket open to let the air cool and freshen his shirt. His face still hurt a little but it was bearable. The walk home, through the yellow glow of street lanterns beneath the clear black sky, would take him forty minutes.
What had he gone through? What had he achieved? There wasn’t much to be ashamed of, and not much to be proud of. He was alert, and he was numb at the same time. And for what?
He knew now that he was willing to take risks in the interest of worthy objectives. He knew that he could have made a difference for the security of his home country, or for the well-being of the continent that his country was part of. But he hadn’t made any difference, because he had stumbled into a situation and pursued the wrong end of events. He had uncovered a criminal operation that would surely be rebuilt, and that would then continue with or without him, through the same channels or through different channels, and to the benefit of the same people or of different people. He hadn’t even disrupted it, because it had already been unravelling on its own. He had put his family in danger, and there was nothing to show for it. Just a banal object which he had pocketed and then given back, without knowing what it was. Next time he wouldn’t pay the price.
Not unless it was for something more meaningful.
Hans smirked at the thought. There would be no next time. Monday meant reporting for duty and introducing himself to whatever boss they’d appoint to replace Tienhoven. Willem. Poor man.
Hans walked through the streets of the city area adjacent to the European quarter. As usual it was dirty. On hot days it always was organically smelly from various sorts of food. As usual, heaps of cardboard boxes were lying outside closed shops on the pavement. Brussels featured the glitziest hotels on the filthiest of squares, and serious jewellery shops on decrepit narrow streets. The dilapidation was the most authentic aspect of this urban world that for the rest featured so many things that looked artificial. The glitzy hotels, for example. Or the transplanted European institutions with their transplanted staff, which included himself.
Hans allowed the emptiness in the streets to clear out his mind, giving it some time to rest. His brain received the supply of fresh air that it deserved.
He crossed a wide avenue; it was empty enough to cross irrespective of the traffic lights. Again he saw relatively chic stores a few hundred metres from some of the dodgiest bars in town. He continued down the avenue he’d just crossed and turned right into a side street. He was almost there, in the quarter near the Brussels Midi railway station at the southern end of the city centre where he lived. Again he crossed a small intersection and, after another one hundred metres, turned left into his narrow street following the direction of the one-way traffic.
His destination was fifty metres away. His own building to the left, and the little café across the street to the right. It was still open, the lights were on. He’d never sat in that café, not once in the three years he’d been living here. There’d been no point going downstairs to pay for beer which he could just as well buy in the little grocery shop on the corner at the far end of the street.
He reached the door of his building, glanced across the narrow street, and decided that tonight would be the night he’d try out the café for the first time in his life. It wasn’t that he particularly needed a drink. He was fine. The reason was that the man sitting all alone at one of the two metallic tables out on the pavement was Frank Hoffmann. He and Hans were the only people in the whole street.
***
Hans joined
him without asking. They both sat with their backs to the café, Hoffmann to Hans’s left with a table between them, both facing the narrow street and the door to Hans’s apartment building.
‘I knew you booked the evening flight from Helsinki,’ Hoffmann said. ‘I hope this answers your first question. So all I had to do is sit here, drink Belgian beer all evening, and wait for you to show up.’
There was a full glass of dark beer on the table. It hadn’t been touched, the froth was entirely gone. Hoffmann saw that Hans noticed, and nodded approvingly.
Hoffmann said, ‘I see Pavel slapped you around a little while getting back his little box. And you should shave, and put on a fresh shirt.’
A delivery van with a noisy exhaust drove from left to right past the café. The sound was amplified by the buildings on both sides of the narrow street. Even without them it would have been noisy, since the car had passed just one metre in front of their faces.
‘You found out where the missing uranium went?’, Hoffmann asked when the van had disappeared from view and its noise had subsided.
Hans didn’t reply. He just looked at the entrance to his house.
Hoffmann continued, ‘The Commission is happy to blame the Russian spy and forget about it. Case closed. But not for you. You found out.’
‘Who was Zayek?’, Hans asked.
‘Zayek was a nobody. You know how the Russians recruited him to begin with? He recruited himself. During his military service he photocopied a ton of useless shit and mailed it to the Russian embassy.’
Hans looked at Hoffmann. ‘How do you know?’
‘Pavel told me. All these years at the Commission the guy Zayek has been sitting around doing absolutely nothing. Thinking he was some kind of sleeper maybe.’
‘So why did you kill him?’
‘I didn’t kill him. Pavel did. You saw him, in the lobby.’
‘You poisoned Zayek’s coffee to make him run to the toilet, into Pavel’s arms.’
‘Maybe I did. Or maybe the guy just got very nervous. Or maybe he preferred to explode in the toilet, instead of messing up the lobby.’
‘Did your poison cause Tienhoven’s heart attack?’
‘It was only in one cup, Hans. In Zayek’s. No need for all of you to go puke together.’
Another noisy engine, but at a higher pitch. A Vespa, a young man with his girlfriend, buzzing past from right to left against the one-way traffic direction.
Hans asked, ‘If you helped this Pavel, why did you bother to contact the Commission to begin with?’
‘At the time we really wanted to check out Zayek, and then expose him together with you guys as a spy inside the Commission. I only saw and recognised Pavel in Luxembourg, before you came back with Zayek.’
‘And so you helped the Russian.’
Hoffmann shrugged. ‘Look, we didn’t have much of a plan for Zayek. The so-called defector in the consulate wasn’t really a defector, as I guess you figured out yourself. But we were going there no matter what, orders were to meet with you and to confront him. Zayek was a suspicious character with or without the defector, and our respective bosses wanted a big bust of a Russian agent. They had fallen in love with the idea, they could barely wait. So there I am, and I see Pavel hanging around the Commission building, on a mission to shut him up. But Zayek hadn’t said anything yet, we’d just arrived. Pavel hadn’t expected us to take so long. So we made a deal. First Zayek says at least a few words, then Pavel finishes his job. Both missions complete, everybody goes home.’
Mission complete. Zayek had been worth more dead than alive.
Hans said, ‘And you took my phone.’
‘It had Pavel’s picture on it. At least I thought it did. You liar.’
Hoffmann put Hans’s phone on the table and shoved it over to him.
Hans was starting to feel cold. The walking had kept him warm, but now he was sitting outside on the street. The waiter hadn’t come out to take any last orders. But Hans wouldn’t have ordered anything anyway. There were still only Hoffmann’s stale beer and Hans’s old phone on the table between them.
Hoffmann found it necessary to elaborate. ‘I prefer working with a Russian I can recognise’, he said. ‘If his picture’s in the open because someone puts it on the social media, they will replace him with someone I don’t know at all.’
‘His face must have shown up on the hotel’s security camera tapes.’
‘It’s all digital, and they hacked into it. There’s no footage. That way they protected their man Pavel, plus I think they wanted to show off.’
A pause.
Hans asked, ‘Did you help Pavel chase me?’
Hoffmann shook his head. ‘No. His box, his problem.’
‘Was it the fingerprints?’
‘Forget fingerprints, you can scan and manufacture and plant them wherever you want.’
‘So what’s so special about the box?’
‘It’s the box itself,’ Hoffmann said. ‘It fools both the latest and the upcoming generation of explosives detectors at airports. We don’t need Pavel’s box, we have three of them ourselves. But I can understand his anxiety. If I lost one I’d be in very big trouble, too.’
Another silence. People put in danger, and nothing to show for it. A price paid for nothing.
Hans asked, ‘Who was the American?’
‘Yes, I saw him, too. He was an American. A man from America. That’s it.’
Hans watched a passing ambulance car, going in the correct direction, from left to right. Its blue lights were turned off; it just drove by, without any urgency. It made very little noise for a car of its size. Maybe the absence of sirens made it appear more silent than it really was.
Hans turned back to Hoffmann. ‘Why are you telling me all this, Frank?’
‘Because I want to ask you: do you want to work for us.’
Hans kept breathing as calmly as he had before.
It was a Saturday night, there were clubs in this town that were just opening. But this here was a residential street, only apartments except for the little grocery shop that was closed, and the café in which Hans and Hoffmann were the only two customers. It was very quiet.
Hans asked, ‘Why for you? I’m not German. I don’t even speak the language.’
‘So what?’, Hoffmann said. ‘We’re a European agency, one of the major European agencies. What matters to Europe matters to us, by definition. I told you that in Maastricht.’
There were no more cars passing. The whole street was deserted.
‘We’ll give you some training, obviously,’ Hoffmann added. ‘How to spot whether you’re being followed, how not to get kicked around by Russian agents, that sort of thing. And it wouldn’t be instead of your Commission job. It would be on top of it. For now.’
Hans smiled. ‘So I can end up like the poor fucker Zayek?’
Hoffmann gave him a mischievous grin. ‘What, Hans, you want to grow old chasing bureaucrats who lie about their expense claims?’
The waiter came out from the café and cleared his throat. ‘Excuse me gentlemen, we are closing in five minutes.’
Thionville, France
Anneli had been almost asleep when she heard the footsteps. She opened her eyes and saw the outlines of her younger son in the doorway of the dark, quiet bedroom.
‘Mama, I’ve had a bad dream.’
Anneli extended her arm and moved over a little, away from the bed’s edge and closer to her husband. ‘Come here, Matti,’ she whispered. The boy came closer and crawled in, cuddling up to her. Soon he would grow taller and skinnier, like his older brother Eric, so Anneli enjoyed it while the cuddly phase lasted. Her husband was already asleep, and hadn’t woken up from the boy’s crawling into their bed.
What a day, Anneli thought. For such a long time she had been solving other people’s problems. Her boss’s problems at work. Her father’s problems in Finland. And now all of a sudden they were gone. Even now she barely dared believe that both burdens had been lifted
at almost the same time. And even more burdens than just those two, in fact.
Yesterday, on Friday afternoon, Viktor had called her at the office.
She’d picked up the phone and said, ‘Hello, what is it?’
‘Anneli it’s me.’
She hadn’t replied. Viktor hadn’t continued. It had been a long silence. She’d quietly hoped that Viktor had come to the same conclusion as she’d had.
Finally Viktor had asked, ‘Do you think we should end it?’
It had been odd. It had seemed that making this proposal had cost him much greater courage than entering into their affair to begin with. And Anneli had felt happier hearing it than she had been even at the start of their romance.
‘Yes Viktor,’ she’d said. ‘We should.’
There’d been another silence.
‘Goodbye Viktor,’ she’d said. ‘I’ll bring the boys to school on Monday, so I’ll see you there. I will say hello to you, and you will say hello to me, okay?’
There’d been another pause, then a sigh from Viktor’s end of the line. ‘Yes, okay. You’re right. Goodbye Anneli.’
She had hung up, happy like a schoolgirl. She had erased the phone’s call history and gone to help Ilona move into Boris’s old office. There’d been no need for her to sit at the very end of the corridor with two empty rooms between her and the entrance. Ilona hadn’t minded moving into a dead man’s office at all, she wasn’t like that. They had all misjudged Boris, whatever he’d really been up to after work. But the puzzlement and discomfort had quickly passed. It was as if he’d never even worked there at all.
That was yesterday. A world away. Right now it was dark and quiet, only her son was wriggling a little in Anneli’s embrace. Soon he’d fall asleep.
And then earlier tonight there’d been some more uplifting news. Not a phone call, only an e-mail. The boys had already been fast asleep. Anneli had been checking her private e-mails on the laptop on the kitchen table while brushing her teeth. Her husband had been under the shower, not something he normally did in the evening but something he had felt like doing tonight. And something they had felt like sharing tonight, in fact. So any checking of e-mails had needed to be quick.