Death of a Nightingale

by Lene Kaaberbøl

  Veng poured coffee on automatic pilot, but before Søren had a chance to drink it, his cell phone rang. It was Susse.

  “Are you busy?” she asked. Her voice was so stressed that it sounded like a stranger’s.

  “What’s wrong?”

  There was silence for a short moment. Then she began to cry. In the background he could hear unfamiliar sounds of steps in long corridors, mumbled voices, metallic clicks and a sort of hydraulic hissing.

  “Susse … What’s wrong?”

  “Ben,” she managed to say between muffled sobs. “Sorry. There’s no reason to cry now. It’s just … he felt ill. We’re at Herlev Hospital. They say it’s a little blood clot in the heart.”

  “Do you want me to come?”

  “No, no. It’s okay now. But … if you have time. The dogs.”

  “Of course I have time.”

  “Thea is on a ski trip with some kids from her class. And the neighbors are on Fuerteventura. They’ll be home tomorrow, and Barbara is on her way home too, but she’s stuck in the snow somewhere outside Fredericia. So … so you’re the only one here who has a key.”

  Barbara, Susse’s oldest, was at the School of Design in Kolding. A long trip when the snow made train travel irregular.

  “Susse. Stop. Of course I have time. Are you okay?”

  “I was okay until I heard your voice. Then it all came crashing back again. Sorry. I was so afraid. He was in such pain, and I could see in his eyes that he thought that … Damn it, Søren. He’s fifty-three. He can’t be turning into a heart patient.”

  Ben had lived the hard life of a touring musician and had smoked twenty cigarettes a day for most of his life, although now he had quit. In Søren’s opinion, this placed him dead in the center of the target group for a heart attack, but there was no reason to say that out loud.

  “I’ll take care of the dogs,” he said. “Call if there’s anything else I can do. Any time.”

  “Thank you.”

  He stood for a moment, thinking. Babko’s restless energy had worn off, and he was sitting in a slump.

  I could get a patrol car to drive him back to headquarters, thought Søren. But on the other hand …

  On the other hand, he was convinced that Babko could tell him more if he could just poke a hole in the Ukrainian’s jovial but uninformative façade. Perhaps it would help to get away from the uniforms and the coffee-and-adrenaline atmosphere. “Do you feel like helping me feed my ex-wife’s dogs?” he asked.

  THERE WAS A string of belated Christmas lights along the white fence. There were birdseed balls on branches of the pear tree and dog tracks in the snow. Susse’s two cocker spaniels were barking eagerly, and even through the door you could hear the soft slaps of wagging tails hitting walls and furniture.

  Søren unlocked the front door, and the dogs came leaping. They needed to pee so badly that they barely took the time to say hello.

  “You meant it,” said Babko.

  “Yes, of course. What did you think?”

  Babko just shook his head. “Your ex-wife?”

  “Yes. Her husband ended up in the hospital with a heart attack.” Common-law husband, actually, but Babko probably didn’t need those kinds of nuances. “Come on in. We might as well have a decent meal. You must be getting tired of cafeteria food.”

  He could see that Babko was … shocked was probably too strong a word, but thrown off-balance, at least. This was unexpected for him. He looked around at the white hallway, the rows of shoes and coats, a couple of Barbara’s watercolors, the old school photos of Thea and her that hung on the wall facing the living room. Ben’s African-American genes revealed themselves in the form of dark, bright eyes and a warm skin tone. They were attractive children.

  “They aren’t yours?” said Babko and pointed.

  “No,” said Søren. “But I’m the godfather of the youngest one.”

  Søren saw that the information was received and stored in the Babko computer, but what the Ukrainian thought about it, he couldn’t tell. Suddenly he himself grew uncertain about whether this was a good idea. Handcuffs and beatings with filled plastic water bottles. Fingers crushed in car doors. If Babko was one of the nasty boys, it wasn’t a good idea to show him a vulnerable point. Susse and her family might not be Søren’s family in a conventional way, but they were definitely a vulnerable point.

  Trust. To earn it, you have to give it.

  The dogs came racing in with snow pillows under their paws and snow in their fur. Søren gave them what he thought was a reasonable amount of dry food in the ceramic bowls in the kitchen. Then he opened the refrigerator. There was a pot with some kind of chicken stew, smelling of curry and onions—and a couple of good Belgian beers.

  Might that not be enough to build a relationship of mutual trust?

  BABKO PUSHED HIS empty plate away, stretched and yawned deeply and sincerely.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t really get any sleep last night.”

  “Didn’t they offer you a bed?”

  “Yes, but … I hoped Colonel Savchuk would return.”

  It was the first time Babko had voluntarily mentioned the SBU colonel—a breakthrough for bicultural understanding? Søren decided to consider it a step forward.

  “Why is it that both SBU and GUBOZ are so interested in the Doroshenko family?” he asked and took a modest sip of his beer.

  Babko looked around the kitchen. Susse and Ben had combined the old kitchen with the dining room, so they sat at a large flea-market find of a table, surrounded by plants, IKEA shelves with books, records and CDs behind shiny glass doors and with a view of the bird feeder in the garden through a blue terrace door.

  “It’s nice here,” he said.

  Søren didn’t answer. He let the question stand.

  Babko smiled crookedly. “You’re a patient man,” he said.

  Søren continued to wait. Babko took a swallow of the Belgian beer. He sighed, an unusually deep sigh that would have seemed overly dramatic coming from a Dane. But it wasn’t. The sigh came from the same place as the laugh—from the bottom of his chest and possibly also from the bottom of Babko’s Ukrainian soul.

  “Once,” he said, “I must have been eight or nine years old, it was a few years before the Independence … once we were going on a school trip, and the bus that came to pick us up was so dirty, you could barely look out the windows. My teacher asked the driver if he could at least wash the windshield so he could see safely. The driver just pointed to a certificate that indicated that the bus had been washed that morning, less than an hour ago. It clearly hadn’t been, but it didn’t matter; the certificate, with signature and stamp and everything, said it was clean, and so it was clean. My friend, do you understand what I am saying?”

  “I’m not sure.” Søren was having a lot of trouble seeing the connection to Natasha Doroshenko, but he was willing to listen.

  “The truth. The truth is what it says on the certificate. It’s completely beside the point if the window is covered in dirt and crap, as long as you have the paper saying it’s clean. That’s the way it was in Ukraine. That’s the way it still is, except that the people writing the certificates are replaced once in a while. And when you meet a man who actually looks at the window and not at the certificate, at the truth and not at the most convenient version of it—a man who wants to change Ukraine if he can—then you don’t believe it at first. You look for the hidden motives. You look at the money and wonder where it comes from. You wonder how he has gotten so far if he is really so clean.”

  Søren sat completely still. He didn’t fidget with his utensils; he didn’t touch his beer. He didn’t want to risk interrupting Babko’s monologue. For the first time, he felt he was getting some insight into what went on behind the jovial mask.

  “During the Orange Revolution, we thought there would be a new day,” Babko continued with a sudden hand gesture as if he were cutting something away. “We thought that corruption and the misuse of power would disappear or at
least shrink, but nothing happened. There was just a new group of people writing the certificates. So you don’t believe it. For a long, long time you don’t believe it.”

  Søren waited, but this time it seemed as if Babko had come to a halt again. “But then you become convinced?” Søren attempted to prompt him, not too lightly, not too hard, just the right amount of pressure.

  “Little by little,” said Babko. “Little by little. When you have kept this man, this very clean man, under observation for more than two years on the orders of his opponents. After two years, you are convinced and deeply depressed.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he doesn’t stand a chance. We’ve been ordered to find something on him. We don’t find anything. Suddenly there is nonetheless a file of well-documented accusations, of corruption, witness statements, confessions and an arrest order. Fabricated from beginning to end, but it doesn’t matter. There are stamps and signatures and certificates, pages and pages of them.”

  “Is he arrested?”

  “Not right away. The folder … is lost. But a new one quickly appears. And then he is arrested. Detained. And in Ukraine, that is … no fun.”

  “No. I know.” Plastic bottles and handcuffs. But Babko wasn’t one of the torturers. Søren believed that now. He was a person who longed for decency and integrity, the way a man longs for a woman he can’t have.

  “I thought, he’s done for. That was that. They got him. But that’s not how it goes. Suddenly he is released again. The prosecutor has to apologize and say that the evidence was flawed.”

  “It was.”

  “Yes, but that doesn’t usually mean anything. It didn’t mean anything this time either. That’s not why. Someone made the accusation go away, as it so often happens, even in the cases where you’ve seen the proof yourself before it disappeared.”

  “So your clean man isn’t so clean, after all?”

  “That’s the odd thing. I think he is. Why else would he want to investigate who made the accusations disappear?”

  “And that’s what he did?”

  “Yes. Most people would have thanked their lucky stars for the unexpected justice and let it go at that. Not him. He discovered that I was the one who had made the original file disappear.”

  “Did you get an appropriate thank-you?” Søren couldn’t quite keep the irony out of his voice.

  Babko laughed—a somewhat quieter version of the volcano laughter that could make people turn around to look at him. “That depends on what you mean by ‘appropriate.’ He grilled me several times to find out if I knew anything about the prosecutor’s sudden change of heart. That’s gratitude for you …” But the thought seemed to cheer him up. Cheer him up immensely, in fact.

  Søren thought about his own boss. A career man, true, fixated on competition, but basically decent. He backed up his people, he followed most of the written and unwritten rules, and it was absurd to imagine that he would consciously hang someone on trumped-up evidence. That was not how he played the game.

  Babko came from a country where that pretty much was the game. Søren tried to imagine what it would be like never to know if you’d been bought or sold, who was the buyer and who was the seller, and what version of the “evidence” you were using any given week. Of course the Danish system had its flaws. There were omissions, excuses and lies; there were favors and nepotism, of course there were. It happened from time to time that loyalty to the team degenerated into cover-ups—yes, it happened, but it was the exception, not the rule. It was a rare Dane who believed he could avoid a ticket by adding a bill when he handed his driver’s license to the officer. Søren didn’t feel amazed gratitude for having a boss who had reached his position with his personal integrity more or less intact. He took it as a given.

  Babko did not have that luxury.

  “Who is he, then—your clean man?”

  “Filipenko. Nikolaij Filipenko. Have you heard of him?”

  Søren thought. “I don’t think so,” he had to admit.

  “He was an amazing soccer player, had twenty-one games for the national team before he was injured. That’s why almost everyone in Ukraine knows him. That’s probably also why he was elected to Verkhovna Rada the first time, because people knew and liked him. Otherwise it can be expensive to run an election campaign in Ukraine. And though he has money, he doesn’t have that much money.”

  “So he’s a member of Parliament?” The way Babko had discussed Filipenko, Søren had gotten the impression that he was a superior within the police.

  “Yes. For Ukrainska Justytsiya, a small centrist party. They probably didn’t believe their own luck when he wanted to run on their platform; otherwise they would never have gotten a foot in the door. He’s on the parliamentary committee for the Eradication of Organized Crime and Corruption. Many hope he’ll be our next minister of the interior. And Colonel Savchuk is his brother.”

  At last. The connection.

  “So you’re saying that the man we have …” Søren was about to say “lost,” but the colonel wasn’t a missing wallet, after all. “… lost contact with … that he may be the brother of the future Ukrainian minister of the interior?”

  “Half-brother. And not many people know. They didn’t grow up together. Savchuk is twenty-six years older. An entirely different generation.”

  “Same father or same mother?”

  “Mother. Tetjana Filipenko. She owns U-card.” Babko must have seen that it didn’t mean anything to Søren and explained briefly, “It’s a Ukrainian credit card. Like Visa or American Express.”

  “It sounds as if she’s fairly wealthy.”

  “Extremely. U-card let the average Ukrainian acquire all the consumer goods we felt we had to have after the old regime fell. Who do you call when you need a bit of cash? U-card, U-card, U-card …” The last was offered in a mellifluous falsetto that made both dogs lift their heads.

  “So there’s nothing odd about her son being able to afford to run a Ukrainian electoral campaign?”

  “U-card has supported the campaign with exactly 30,000 hryvnia. No more, no less. They’ve made a big deal out of that, and it’s true. I’ve spent over two years checking. Nikolaij Filipenko is not a man who built his career on his mother’s money.”

  “He sounds … remarkable.”

  “He is.”

  “And you still haven’t answered my question. Why are you here? You and Savchuk? Why the two of you specifically?”

  Babko closed his eyes for a brief moment, as if there were something written on the inside of his eyelids that he needed to read. “My friend,” he then said, “be happy that you drive a small car.”

  “Why?” Søren recalled Babko’s volcanic eruption of laughter at the sight of it.

  “Because if you drove a big one, I’d never tell you this.”

  Søren forced himself to be patient. “What?” he asked.

  “No one in GUBOZ or the regular criminal police knew that Natasha Doroshenko was in prison in Denmark until Savchuk appeared and requested an extradition order. Maybe SBU knew. Maybe it was something Savchuk had found out on his own.”

  “Okay.”

  “I was added on at the last minute.”

  “Why? Why you?”

  “Because someone has asked me to start an investigation of Savchuk’s circumstances.”

  “You’re his guard dog.”

  “Yes.”

  “And what do you expect to find?”

  “My friend, I have no idea. I have a suspicion that it was Colonel Savchuk who made the accusation against Nikolaij Filipenko go away back then. But to disprove false evidence is not a crime—at the worst, it is a declaration of war against those who have fabricated it.”

  “And you still don’t know why he’s interested in Natasha and Pavel Doroshenko?”

  “No. I’ve poked around in the case a bit, as much as I had time for. The permission to interview Natasha came through unusually quickly.”

  Søren couldn’t decode th
e questioning tone in the last statement. “What do you mean?” he asked.

  Babko shrugged. “Perhaps the Danes are just efficient at that kind of thing. What do I know? But in Ukraine, if you need to speed up the paperwork …” He let the sentence dangle there unfinished.

  “Did you think that Savchuk had bribed someone?”

  A shrug. “As I said, my friend, it’s good that you drive a small car. Honest cop car.”

  Søren finally understood Babko’s appreciation for his practical little Hyundai. Ukrainian police with well-paying clients in the corruption shop apparently didn’t drive Korean dwarf cars.

  “What kind of car does Savchuk have?” he asked.

  Babko laughed. “A huge BMW. But maybe his mother gave it to him.” He rolled his shoulders a little. “In fact, he’s got it with him.”

  “I thought you flew.”

  “I flew. He was already here. He was kind enough to pick me up at the airport, but that might have been because I had the extradition order.”

  “You don’t by any chance have the registration number?”

  A quieter version of the volcano laughter. “My friend, I just happen to.” Babko pulled a small notebook out of his pocket and wrote it down. He knew it by heart, Søren noted. Then Babko tore out the page and handed it across the table. Søren received it with the appropriate gratitude.

  Darkness had long since fallen outside among the pear trees. Babko yawned again, and even in the soft light from the Tiffany lamp his face looked worn.

  “Do you want me to drive you to a hotel?” asked Søren. “Or do you want to go back to headquarters?”

  “Headquarters.” Babko yawned again. “There’s nothing wrong with the bed there. And if Savchuk checks in, it’s best if I’m there.”

  “You don’t like it—that he doesn’t check in.”

  “No. It’s not good. For him or for me.”