The Last Compromise (15 page)

‘We’re
taking the body to forensics now,’ the voice in his phone said. ‘Doctor Offerbrück
will do the autopsy.’

‘Okay.
Thank you.’

Becker
put his phone back, saying nothing. Then he looked up and said, ‘I’m sorry
Madame.’ He finished writing the last letters of her name and said, ‘I’m afraid
something happened to your colleague Boris Zayek.’

Brussels

Geoffrey
Clarke was sitting in an afternoon meeting on the twelfth floor of the
Commission’s main building, with Nathalie Bresson from legal and a few other
directors-general. The room was bright and spacious. The view was impressive;
it would have been magnificent if the sun had been shining, and it would have
been breathtaking at dusk. Bresson was just discussing how important it was to stick
to common European rules.

‘The
legislation of the European Union is adopted
with
the member countries
and
for
the member countries,’ she lectured. ‘It achieves on a European
scale what individual countries wouldn’t be able to achieve when acting alone.’
She made a significant pause. ‘But for that it is important that European law
be respected and enforced, every day, by the national authorities themselves.
This is not just a legal imperative. It touches upon the fundamental logic of
European cooperation. It is not necessary that every country be wholeheartedly
in favour of every single regulation, or of every single compromise. But what
they all must cherish, and defend, is Europe’s ability to produce binding laws
that apply to everyone. Including those laws of which they
are
in favour
while others are not.’

‘The
problem is that they sometimes aren’t even party to the compromise,’ Sloboda
said. He was director-general of environment. ‘They get outvoted by the other
countries, and then they have to swallow the deal nonetheless.’

‘But
that they accepted themselves,’ Raevens from agriculture replied. ‘They all
agreed to have majority voting on most issues. This is ridiculous. First they
complain that they can’t solve common problems alone, so they set up the European
Union to do it together. Then they complain that decisions are taking too long,
because everybody has to agree. So they switch to majority voting. And now they
complain that they get outvoted sometimes. What do they want?’

There
were chuckles all around. Not from Bresson, though, because she was in the
middle of something that required her full concentration. And Clarke didn’t
laugh either, because he wasn’t really listening. This whole meeting was about
precisely nothing at all. They were again retelling each other things they already
knew. And even if it had been about something meaningful, he would have found
it difficult to concentrate on the discussion. His mind was somewhere else at
the moment.

‘Whether
they are adopted by unanimity or by majority, results have to be binding,’ Bresson
insisted. ‘The reason the Union has been attractive for countries to join, ever
since its creation by the original founding members, is precisely that it is a
community of nations that is governed by law.’

Clarke
sat there, wondering why his phone still hadn’t given him any signal. He waited
some more, without talking, without listening. He had concluded a long time ago
that as director-general he didn’t have to constantly say something. He could just
keep his mouth shut and look pensive. People would think he was pondering some
weighty arguments for a decision that would have far-reaching consequences.

And
in the particular case of Clarke, there was an additional reason to let him sit
there in silence and leave him alone. He was director-general of anti-fraud,
after all. He had the power to sniff around other people’s departments and dig
up all kinds of unsightly phenomena. They all joked about it, of course, but it
was only half funny. Clarke liked to keep it that way, like a rumour or
assumption that would never be confirmed nor denied.

His
thoughts returned to what he had started to call the Luxembourg situation. And
to the question why he still hadn’t received any news, neither from Willem Tienhoven
nor from Commissioner Maria Schuster-Zoll.

Finally
his phone hummed inside his breast pocket. He took it out and lowered his arm
so he could read the text below the top of the conference table. The screen lit
up and displayed the long-awaited message:
Good news from Lux. More later.
MSZ.

Clarke
pocketed his phone and looked over to Bresson. She had started what had to be
the fourth or fifth part of her monologue. It was on the need to create legal
certainty in the payments of agricultural subsidies.

‘The
British are right,’ Raevens interjected. ‘The French can feed taxpayer money to
their farmers if they like. But then they should use their own money, not
European money.’

‘But
they all love spending other people’s money,’ Sloboda said. ‘They all have
their pet projects, and they all say that it’s terribly important for the
European idea, or for public health, or for economic growth, or for cultural
diversity, or for the overall happiness of mankind.’

All
except Bresson laughed light-heartedly. Clarke chuckled, too.

Becker said
goodbye to Anneli Villefranche and saw her boss Stavros Theodorakis stand
outside the door to his own office. ‘Come in,’ Becker said to him as she left. ‘Please.
Thank you for letting your team member go first.’

Theodorakis
closed the door behind him and sat down in the visitor’s chair.

Becker
asked, ‘Could you perhaps tell me what exactly your unit does, just so that I
understand Monsieur Zayek’s work environment.’

‘Of
course,’ Theodorakis replied. He was no longer irritated by being basically
dispossessed and evicted from his workplace in favour of one of his
subordinates. He was trying to help, it seemed. ‘The Commission monitors the
use of nuclear material in the member countries, and our unit provides
administrative support for the reporting process.’

Becker
raised his eyebrows. ‘You mean atomic bombs?’ He knew it probably wasn’t atomic
bombs.

‘No
no,’ Theodorakis said delightedly. ‘We monitor nuclear material that is used
for peaceful purposes. U-235 and the isotopes from the fission, for example.’

Becker
considered it likely that Theodorakis didn’t know what exactly he was talking
about either. Someone who truly understood something would be able to explain
it better to a layman. But Becker stayed on the subject. ‘There must be a lot
of material to monitor. If I think of all the hospitals, they also use
radioactivity, no?’

Theodorakis
nodded. ‘There is a lot, yes, and the Commission does on-the-spot inspections,
too. We have almost two hundred nuclear inspectors. That’s not our unit,
though.’

That
addition had sounded a bit sad.

‘And
you go and check all the hospitals in Europe?’ Again, Becker knew that this
could not possibly be true.

Theodorakis
showed Becker a sad, wise smile. ‘It’s a drop in the ocean, Inspector. What you
sometimes see in the news are train transports with spent nuclear fuel, with protesters
chaining themselves to the rails, and riot police carrying them away or beating
them up. What you don’t see are the normal transports that go on every day, on
ships, on lorries. Yellowcake uranium that goes to conversion, UF-6 drums that
go to enrichment, fission targets that go to reactors, each shipping container
with enough material for several months of production, and cylinders with medical
isotopes, and depleted uranium. Transport by plane is more problematic of course,
but you need it to quickly get Mo-99 to hospitals. And think of all the
centrifuges and accelerators and reactors that run every day, day and night,
all across Europe. No-one can ever hope to monitor every single gramme of
nuclear material. It wouldn’t even be smart.’

Very
impressive, I’m sure.

‘Why
would that not be smart?’

‘It’s
like with police work,’ Theodorakis said. ‘You should spend resources on
fighting one type of crime, until that becomes too expensive considering all
the other crimes that also need policing.’

Becker
took out his e-cigarette.

Theodorakis
added, ‘I’m sorry Inspector, I didn’t mean to qualify or comment on your work
in particular. It’s just an economic theory of fighting crime in general.’

Becker
understood that perfectly well, he just didn’t feel like nodding. He felt like
puffing.

‘Please,
Monsieur Theodorakis,’ he finally said, putting away the device. ‘Do you maybe
have a picture of Boris Zayek? We only have the little photo from his badge,
and that’s bagged as evidence now.’

Theodorakis
nodded and said, ‘If you let me use my computer I will print one out for you.’

Becker
got up and let his host have his chair back. They switched places. The
visitor’s chair where Theodorakis had sat felt warm. Surely his own chair was
now even warmer. But the man didn’t say anything. Swapping chairs always
created an unpleasant kind of intimacy that Theodorakis, like most people, pretended
not to notice.

The
printer next to the screen started buzzing and whirring, and a colour picture
emerged from it. Theodorakis handed it to Becker, who recognised the face from
the badge the white-clad crime scene person had shown him at the hotel.

‘Thank
you,’ he said. ‘Now can you tell me what exactly happened here today.’

‘I
am sorry, Inspector,’ Theodorakis said. ‘The only thing I know is that you came
in and told me that Boris Zayek had died in the hotel across the street.’

Becker
nodded slowly.

He
asked, ‘Do you know why he died?’

Theodorakis
stared at him.
‘No,
Inspector, I do not. I have no idea.’

‘Did
maybe two men come to your office, or your building, before this happened?’

Theodorakis
recovered from the slight shock of being asked whether he had any theories of
his own. He shook his head. ‘There have been no visitors, at least not for me.
We don’t get that many visitors here.’

‘Madame
Villefranche saw someone come in to talk to Zayek.’

‘That’s
very well possible, their offices are downstairs, I’m up here.’ Theodorakis
looked up, somewhere in the direction of the ceiling above his door, as if
trying to catch an idea with his gaze. ‘If there were visitors they should be
logged.’

‘What
if they were Commission staff, too?’

‘Well,
then they are not. But they would still be on camera, there’s a security camera
in the entrance hall.’

Becker
appreciated the idea that Theodorakis had successfully picked up from his
ceiling. ‘Can you please call your security people and let them print out a
still of the two men in question?’

Theodorakis
looked up a number, made a call, discussed a little, allowed himself to be put through
to someone else, then discussed some more and finally received an e-mail with
an attached image that he printed out for Becker, too.

The
picture was grey-and-white, showing two men, one young one old, talking to the
guard of whom only the back was visible. Behind the two visitors was the
entrance door and the array of flags Becker had seen on his way in. The young
man was Hans Tamberg, whom he had talked to at the hotel. The older one had to
be his boss, Mister Tienhoven with the heart attack from which he so quickly
recovered. As Becker had expected, the third one, the outsider Hans Tamberg had
mentioned, was not on the picture.

Becker
asked, ‘Please tell me, did Boris Zayek have family?’

‘No,’
Theodorakis replied. ‘He wasn’t married, and he lived alone I believe.’

‘Where
was he from?’

‘He
has, he had a Bulgarian passport, because of his father, but he was German.’

Becker
nodded.

‘Where
did he live?’

‘In
Wincheringen, on the German side of the river. I’ll send you the exact address.’

Becker
considered this. All these cross-border aspects complicated his case. First
Belgium because of Brussels, and now this. But it wasn’t as bad as it sounded.
The truth was that they had very good working relations with the German
authorities, especially the local police of Rhineland-Palatinate, one of the
two German states bordering Luxembourg. They understood each other in a way
foreign ministries did not.

Becker
returned to the subject of Zayek himself.

‘What
was he like?’, he asked.

Theodorakis
hesitated. It was clear that he was going to start his description with the
same apologetic qualification Anneli Villefranche had used. ‘Out of respect for
my team member and his, er, untimely passing away.’ He stopped his phrase in
mid-sentence. Then he started a new one. ‘I will be honest with you.’ Perhaps
his having reclaimed his own chair was making him feel more secure now. ‘We
weren’t friends, but we’re not here to socialise. We’re here to do our work.
And Boris Zayek was a decent worker. His English wasn’t very good at first, but
it improved. He was always on time, he was diligent, he was never sick, he
never complained. He wasn’t very creative or witty, but his job profile didn’t
require any of that. And it’s not easy to find motivated staff here, because
most people want to work in Brussels. I’m happy that I could recruit the team
that I have now. That I had, I mean.’

Theodorakis
seemed lost in thoughts for a few moments. Maybe he was considering the
management implications of Zayek’s death.

Becker
asked, ‘How many team members do you have?’

‘Four,
I had four. Anneli you already saw, and there is still Pedro and Ilona.’

And
now his unit had been cut by a quarter. Becker remembered when two of his own
colleagues had left the unit because they couldn’t stand their boss and had had
enough at some point. The boss had been running around sweating and building up
blood pressure for weeks, desperate to make sure he could fill his vacancies.
He’d been given his posts in the end, but under the condition that he leave his
inspectors alone to prevent any future exodus from happening. This had suited Becker
well. He hadn’t liked his boss either, and now he was almost completely
autonomous in his work. Free as a bird, but armed with the claws of law
enforcement. Yes, it had all worked out very well for him.

***

Pavel
saw it from the street corner. There were still too many policemen in and
around the hotel, but here, a hundred metres up the street in the direction of
the motorway, there were none. He kept his breath steady as he watched. His
lips were forcibly relaxed.

They
tightened again when he saw the young man from the lobby leave the hotel. A red
Volkswagen with a yellow Luxembourgish license plate had just arrived and
stopped across the street from the hotel entrance. A man at the wheel, alone.

The
young man from the lobby looked around and crossed the street. He was holding a
little black object in his hand. He walked around to the passenger’s side and
got in. The car drove off in the direction of the motorway. The two men drove
right past Pavel’s position. The driver had black hair and wore round glasses.

It
was too late for Pavel to get to his car and chase it. Within a minute they
would be on the cloverleaf, turning either to Belgium or Germany or France, or
heading to any Luxembourgish town on this side of the border.

Pavel
took out his phone and dialled a number.

‘I’m
a friend of Bruno. I have a license plate. No, Luxembourg. Name and address.
Yes, please.’

***

Becker
let a red car pass, crossed the street, and reached the entrance of the hotel.
Over at the Commission they all had in the end said more or less the same thing
about Zayek: Anneli Villefranche, Stavros Theodorakis, as well as the other
team members, Ilona Velikova and Pedro Maluenda. They had all said it differently,
so probably they hadn’t pre-agreed what to say. Not that they’d said very much.
The bottom line was that nobody knew anything about what had or could have had happened.
At least Anneli Villefranche had heard Zayek talk to someone and leave, and the
guard at the reception had told him that two men, the young one and the old one
from the camera still, had come to look for Zayek and that the three of them
had left the building shortly afterwards. But that wasn’t a big breakthrough,
because Becker had known already that the Commission people had come for Zayek
to talk to him at the hotel. At least these were mutually supporting
statements.

Becker
entered the hotel lobby. There were still a few policemen hanging around the
reception area but the crime scene people were gone. All the armchairs were
empty. There were people from a private cleaning company walking in and out of
the hallway in the far left corner of the lobby. Next to the hallway Becker saw
the new receptionist standing behind the counter.

‘Moïen,’
Becker said to her. ‘Is the manager still here?’

She
pointed with her thumb behind her back. The restaurant, or somewhere behind it.
Becker nodded and squeezed past the cleaning crew into the hallway, heading for
the restaurant door. He opened it and saw the manager talk to the waitress he’d
talked to earlier. They were standing in the middle of the room and were going
through some papers. Maybe new prices, or lists of ingredients for the kitchen
that they’d had to cancel. As before, the tables were set but vacant. Since it
was getting dark outside, the lights had been turned on.

‘Sorry
to interrupt,’ Becker said. ‘Can I please talk to you again for a moment.’

The
expression on the manager’s face was rather a no.

‘Look,
there’s no need for this,’ Becker said. ‘You don’t want to talk to me, so I
can’t do my job. I take you to police headquarters and keep you there all
night, so you can’t do your job. Why are we doing this to each other? Please,
let’s sit down, okay?’

Becker
followed his own friendly suggestion and sat down heavily at one of the tables.
It was the same table he’d sat at when talking to the first receptionist; in
fact he had reclaimed his old spot. The manager whispered something to the
waitress and sat down at the same table, in the spot where the receptionist had
sat earlier. The waitress disappeared into the kitchen. Becker noticed that
they had replaced the glass from which the receptionist had drunk his sparkling
water. All wine glasses were fresh.