The Last Compromise (19 page)

Some
of the background noise outside must be the sea, he thought. The sound of waves
in the distance, immersed in the sound of wind over land.

Something
changed again on the other side of the wall. Siim stopped moaning, and for a
few seconds there was no sound at all. Then Clarissa’s voice started erupting
joyful moans between breaths. It was more intense than before. Again, there was
no sound from Siim.

Hans
threw his blanket to the side and got up. He pulled up his trousers, folding
his penis sideways into the fly, put his shoes on, went out into the hallway and
put on his jacket without the shirt.

The
moment he opened the door to the yard, a sharp wind started whipping his skin and
wetting his face. He closed the door behind him, crossed the yard and stood in
the middle of the compound. It was completely dark, except for the illumination
from the lamps along the fence, and the projectors highlighting the frightening
reactor dome. A dog barked, barely audible in the gusts. A security man with a
German shepherd was patrolling the perimeter.

Hans’s
erection was long gone. He faced the strong wind with his eyes closed and let
it forcefully chill his forehead, his eyebrows, his lips, his chin. Tiny arrows
of water hit his skin and formed larger drops.

Then
he opened his eyes. He held them wide open. The water in the wind hit his
pupils like shards, the cold was tormenting them. He forced himself to keep his
eyes open. They hurt, they felt like they were burning. The lids were pressing
him to squint, but he resisted. Tears formed inside his eyes and started
running down his cheeks, first from one eye, then from the other. He kept them
wide open. When the pain in his eyes became unbearable he finally squinted. But
he kept them narrowly open nonetheless. He stood there for a long while,
squinting into the wind coming in from a stormy sea, freezing, his eyes
hurting, tears running down his cheeks.

It was a fresh
new morning, and Inspector Didier Becker was smoking in his office. These
e-cigarettes were a miracle of technological progress, as far as he was
concerned. If only they could do something about the food, too. He had started
sweating just walking to the elevator. He should be doing something about his weight.

His
thoughts were interrupted by the roar of a cargo plane taking off. His
department was housed in a police complex right next to Luxembourg airport.
They had all gotten used to the noise, but sometimes the really big planes
still made them crane their necks and look out the window. Some had gotten good
at predicting in which direction they’d lift off; it depended on where the wind
was coming from. Today the sky was overcast and the wind came probably from all
directions, so it didn’t matter much to the pilots whether it was left to right
to right to left.

So,
where were we. Becker was investigating the dead man Zayek, but that wasn’t the
only case he had. He also still had the disappearance case, but that wasn’t
very urgent because it was clear that the child hadn’t disappeared. The mother
had just taken her son away from the father. Becker had talked to the father,
and concluded that the mother had done absolutely the right thing. Or rather the
second best thing. The best would have been to press charges against the father
and remove
him
, instead of removing herself and her child. Better still
would have been for the father to be normal and live together with his family.
That would have been just perfect.

But
you can’t always have that, Becker thought. Even when the father was a normal
person, like he’d been. He thought back to the family he’d once had. It simply
hadn’t been a happy marriage. There’d never been any violence, no scandals, no
affairs, no nothing. They had been unhappy, and at some point they’d said what
they both had known. The time had come for one of them to leave.

‘Any
messages from pathology or the chemicals lab?’, Becker shouted through the open
door to the unit secretary.

The
answer was a little soprano song. ‘No-oh!’

‘Any
witnesses from the consultancy? Tamberg or Tienhoven from the Commission?’

The
answer was the same song, half a key higher.

Becker
dialled a number on his desktop phone. It was the landline number Hans Tamberg
had given him in the hotel lobby. Six beeps, and still nobody had answered the
phone. Then Becker punched the mobile phone number into the desktop phone. No
need to pay for international calls out of your own pocket if it’s for work, he
thought. There was no answer here, either.

Then
Becker checked his mobile phone’s call history and typed over the central
switchboard number of the European Commission in Brussels. He called it and,
like the day before, asked for a Willem Tienhoven from anti-fraud.

A
woman answered the phone. ‘Director Tienhoven’s office.’

‘Didier
Becker, Luxembourg police. Can I please speak to Mister Tienhoven.’

‘I’m
sorry,’ the woman said. ‘Mister Tienhoven is in a meeting at the moment, but I
will tell him to call you back.’

‘So
he’s already feeling much better now, yes?’

‘Is
there anything else?’

‘Do
you have my number?’, Becker asked.

‘I
see your number on my display. Have a nice day.’ She hung up.

Becker
hung up, too. He wasn’t angry. He dialled another number, a local rather than
an international one. Heavy obstacles required strong levers, that was all.

‘Becker
here,’ he said into the receiver. ‘Can I speak to Jacques? I see, okay.’ He
checked his new wristwatch. Oh, it was massive. ‘I’ll be back by that time, so
I’ll just talk to him here. Thanks.’

He
hung up. Monsieur le chief prosecutor was in a meeting, but would come to the
police headquarters for some other meetings later this morning, he’d just been
told. So there’d be enough time to go talk to the security camera people, then
return and catch the man before he’d leave the building again.

Becker
wasn’t worried too much that the chief prosecutor would try to avoid him, or
would not be interested in his case. First, Jacques was almost a relative of
his, more or less. Second, and more important, the case didn’t look very much
like a suicide. It looked like murder, making it the second murder case in the
first quarter of the year for the whole country. That meant the national murder
rate had just been doubled in comparison to the statistical quarterly average
of one. And this one wasn’t a homicide between already dubious criminals, like
the last one had been, but a case with some political implications. Maybe it was
the chief prosecutor who should seek an audience with Becker, not the other way
around.

Becker
quickly checked his e-mails and his paper mail, found nothing urgent and got up
to take his jacket off the hook. Just as he was about to leave the office, his
phone rang. He hurried back and picked up the receiver. He smiled, recognising
the young man’s voice before he had recognised the foreign number on the
display.

The
young man said, ‘Happy birthday, dad.’

‘You
too, I mean thank you. Thanks.’

Becker
sat back down.

The
divorce had ended his first family life, but it’d also been the beginning of
his second. Becker had left his wife, but he hadn’t dumped their son on her.
There’s no way I’ll have him all day, Monday to Friday, with all the day-to-day
problems, so that you can have him on the happy weekends and take him to the
zoo, she’d said. Their son would live with
him
, and
she
would do the
fun stuff with him on weekends.

He
had gladly accepted it, but in the end this was not what had happened. His wife
hadn’t wanted to see her own son only on weekends after all. So they’d split
whole weeks. One week him, one week her.

‘Have
you decided about the offers yet?’, Becker asked.

‘As
usual,’ his son said. ‘The glory is in academic research. The money’s on the
oil rigs in the North Sea.’

‘And?’

‘I’ll
let you know. I’ll pick you up in a golden helicopter and tell you.’

‘Both
things are very good,’ Becker said. ‘Just do them both, first one and then the
other.’

‘I’ll
call you on Sunday, okay dad?’

‘Yes,
great. Bye.’

‘Bye.’

In
the end the daddy weeks had become longer and longer. During his teenage years
their son had basically lived with his father, right until he’d finished school
and moved out. It hadn’t always been easy. But it was the happiest family life Becker
could remember having.

Petten

Hans
greeted Siim and Clarissa as they came into the guesthouse kitchen. Hans had
gotten up early, he had showered, used a deodorant spray he’d found on a shelf,
and gotten dressed. He was still wearing yesterday’s clothes and underwear; he
hadn’t wanted to borrow any of Siim’s. But that was a minor discomfort, just
like the fact that he hadn’t brushed his teeth. He’d buy a toothbrush or
chewing gum later. Now he was standing in the kitchen, welcoming them with
fresh coffee he had made. Kenneth hadn’t come back from the meeting with his
mystery relation. Hans would have heard him. He had barely slept.

‘Ah,
thanks, perfect,’ Siim said, putting sugar into his coffee. He was wearing the boxer
shorts and t-shirt in which he’d slept. His almost fiancée was wearing long
pyjama pants and a t-shirt the length of a night gown.

‘Clarissa,’
Hans said, ‘I’d need to make a phone call. Can you please tell me how the phone
works?’

Clarissa
smiled at him. ‘You first press 9, then you wait for the beep, then you press
0, and then you dial the number.’

Hans
went over to the phone he had tried to use earlier, and followed Clarissa’s
instructions.

‘I
have cookies in my car,’ Siim remembered. ‘I’ll be right back.’

He
gently touched Clarissa’s shoulder and left the kitchen. Clarissa took the
first sip of her coffee.

Hans
dialled his boss’s number. After a click he heard Gabriela’s voice.

He
said, ‘This is Hans. Is Willem back yet?’

He
heard no reply, just a few clicking sounds. Then he heard Tienhoven’s voice. It
sounded weak, or hoarse perhaps.

‘Tienhoven.’

‘Good
morning Willem, this is Hans.’

A
long pause.

Then
Tienhoven started talking, quietly, almost pleadingly. ‘Hans, I am sorry. I’m
sorry I left.’

‘Why
did you check yourself out of the hospital?’

‘I
thought it was all going to be too much, I wanted to be at home.’

What
an odd way of saying it. ‘Well, it all has been a little too much for me, too.’
Maybe Tienhoven had also seen a bloody corpse in a toilet, and maybe he had
also gotten beaten in the face and suffocated with chemicals. But Hans was
pretty sure he had not.

‘Where
are you now, Hans?’

Although
Tienhoven did have a heart attack, Hans thought, they say it’s very painful and
frightening. But he needed information regardless of any of that.

Hans
asked, ‘What happened in the hotel?’

‘I
really don’t know, Hans. There was the explosion and the commotion. I took a
taxi and came back to Brussels.’

‘Did
anyone visit you at the hospital?’

‘No Hans. I just left.’

Hans
had to make a choice. Maybe it was a gamble.

‘Willem,
I’m following the nuclear theft. And right now I need help. Logistical
assistance.’

‘The
investigation is basically closed, Hans. Clarke said that there was nothing
else to investigate. Zayek took his own life, and he took his manipulation of
the nuclear reports with him.’

Hans
paused. He had never heard of anything like that before. The director-general
didn’t just go around closing people’s investigations on his own; he normally
received a final report first. And report or not, how could he have closed it?
Zayek had died only yesterday, in extremely dubious circumstances, and the
first thing Clarke does the next morning is to say everything is solved?

Hans
asked for precision. ‘What do you mean by “basically” closed?’

‘I
mean that Clarke said it. I just had a meeting with him. Now he’s in more meetings
all day, so I expect that we’ll receive the standard notification of the
closure this afternoon.’

‘Do
you share Clarke’s opinion?’

‘It
doesn’t matter what I think. The closure comes from above.’

Jesus,
they were really putting an end to it. What was going on? On the bright side,
Hans now had an approximate idea of how much time he had left to find out.
There was no way he would just go back and sit around at his desk now,
subjecting himself to so-called closures from above.

So
he said, ‘That means officially the investigation is still open. At least for
another couple of hours, until the notification is issued. And that’s why I
need assistance.’

Tienhoven
seemed only mildly surprised. ‘You want to check all those countries with the
missing uranium before noon?’

‘There’s
no time for that, is there. But I can do the Dutch side. I’m in Petten.’

‘What,
at the reactor?’

‘My
question to you is: do you know someone at the police of Rotterdam. Someone you
maybe know from the old days.’

Now
we’ll see, Hans thought. Are we in business?

There
was a long wait. Finally Tienhoven replied, ‘There is a senior inspector named Visser.
We used to work in Utrecht together, now he’s in Rotterdam. If you call him and
tell him about me, he might help you, I hope. He should.’

Hans
turned around as he heard a knock against wood. It was Siim, he was standing in
the open doorway, mutely showing him a black round object the size of a large,
thick coin. There were chips of white paint on it.

Siim
said, quietly, ‘I just pulled this out of my car, it was buried in the metal
above the rear tyre. I think it’s a tracking device.’

A
metallic clonk near the rear wheel on Hans’s side. Siim listened for a second.
The tyres were all right.

Hans
said nothing. He was thinking. Thinking and deciding.

Tienhoven
asked, ‘Hans, are you still there?’

‘Willem,
we’ll do it differently. You call your friend in Rotterdam. And you tell him
that the European Commission is requesting urgent operational assistance in an
ongoing investigation. The case is still open.’

Hans
put the receiver to his other ear, and continued, ‘The assistance consists of
the following. I need access to shipping records from the Rotterdam port
concerning a company in Vienna called A&C. And I need police protection
when going there. Make them send a police car to the research centre compound
to pick me up and to get me to Rotterdam. Okay?’

A
pause. ‘Okay. Where can I reach you?’