The Last Compromise (23 page)

They were back
at the noisy police station.

‘The
next flight from Amsterdam to Tallinn leaves tomorrow morning,’ Hans said,
looking up from the screen. He was sitting at one of the dozens of desks in the
open office space. Its usual occupant had gone out for a coffee or a smoke or
both. ‘I just booked it.’ It’d had to be business class, everything else had
been taken. Hans’s credit card had allowed him to pay for the trip, and he
could only hope that his credit limit would also allow him to book the return.
But that was a problem he’d solve later.

‘You
can stay at the police station if you like,’ Visser offered. He was standing on
the other side of the desk, with an empty coffee cup in his hand. ‘Then I can
tell you if we receive news from the Bulgarian police this afternoon. And
tomorrow we’ll give you a lift to Amsterdam airport. But no marechaussee this
time, a normal cop car, okay?’

‘Where
do I stay tonight?’

‘Prison
cell.’

Hans
wasn’t sure what to think, but after all that had happened he liked the idea of
staying in the security of a police station for the night. His face didn’t seem
to express his satisfaction, though.

‘What?’,
Visser laughed. ‘It’s like a simple hotel room, for free. If you feel better I
can interrogate you for a little while, see what crimes you have committed. Then
I’d even have a proper reason to put you in, yes?’

He
walked around the desk, slapped Hans on the shoulder, and said, ‘Something
always comes out, if you ask long enough, right?’

Right.
Stalin’s secret police had made people confess to the most outlandish of
crimes. Of sabotaging the economy. Of spying for the British, the Germans, the
Japanese, or for all of them at the same time. The police had been given arrest
quotas, which they sometimes had met by rounding up people in alphabetical
order from the phone book. But to this day historians had difficulty
understanding where this obsession with confessions had come from. They could
have just put them on a cattle train to Siberia right away. Which, in fact,
they had done, on several occasions, to several population groups.

‘Thank
you,’ Hans said in a neutral voice. ‘I’ll be in that corridor over there, maybe
get something to eat and to read from the kiosk.’

Visser
nodded and left to go fill his cup.

While
he was still sitting at the computer, Hans used the opportunity to check his
e-mail. He couldn’t access his work e-mail from here, but his private mail he
could open.

There
was only a message from Julia. The first line of the text was displayed. It
mentioned her not being able to reach him on his mobile phone.

Hans
didn’t open the whole message. He closed the account, got up and left the noise
of the room behind him, mentally preparing himself for a long, long afternoon.

Brussels

Anatoly
Slavkin picked up the receiver of the phone that was sitting on the heavy table.
This time he didn’t answer the phone. This time he made a call himself.

‘This
is Brussels station. Tamberg, Hans, booked tomorrow’s Estonian Air morning
flight from Amsterdam to Tallinn. If you need the services of our embassy
there, they no longer use the green numbers. They now use the blue ones.’

Pavel
hung up without saying a word to him.

Slavkin
put the receiver back down. Now some sweet tea would be nice. Or some orange
juice. He’d have to drink it somewhere else, though, any stains would ruin the wooden
table. It was a hulk the weight of a small car, with decorative stars, oars of
wheat and hammers and sickles cut into it. Legend had it that they had put the
table down first, and built the embassy around it. Probably that was a
variation of another legend. Diplomats’ lore from the embassy in East Berlin,
where they had put down a giant Lenin’s bust and built the reception hall
around it. After the end of communism old Lenin hadn’t fit through any of the
doors, so they’d put a blanket over his head.

The
building of the old Soviet embassy to East Berlin now housed the modern Russian
embassy to unified Germany. Its architecture wasn’t too subtle. Slavkin had
never been posted there yet, but he had visited twice. It was more of a
statement than a building, a triumphant temple of Stalinist architecture
saying: we own this half of the city. The message conveyed by the embassy to
Estonia in Tallinn was more complex in comparison. The building had housed the
Soviet embassy to independent Estonia before the war and then, when Estonia was
Soviet, it had been the seat of the local branch of the secret police. After
the end of communism Russia had reclaimed it as an embassy, stating that it was
the legal successor to the Soviet Union. Arguably the logic was a bit mixed. On
the one hand, Russia said it had inherited the old Soviet embassies; on the
other hand, it insisted that by the time the Red Army had returned after
Hitler’s invasion, Estonia had already been a part of the Soviet Union, and
that it had therefore been liberated rather than occupied. But if Estonia had
already been part of the Soviet Union, then there shouldn’t have been a Soviet
embassy. Embassies were for foreign countries. Yes, the logic was complex.
Everything is complex, Slavkin thought. Only American movies are simple.
Private Ryan jumps off the boat when the war is almost over and saves the day.
Ridiculous. The Battle of the Bulge, which they glorified so much, was nothing
but a skirmish in the woods, in comparison to the meat grinders of Kharkov,
Kursk and Stalingrad.

And
Slavkin had seen better war movies, too. A Russian miniseries about the Soviet
penal battalions, for example. The plot and dynamics had been mercilessly
equivocal. Hitler’s armies crush one Soviet division after the other, the
country is on the brink of collapse. The Soviet government decides to recruit
volunteers from among the population of its own labour camps: freedom in
exchange for military service, an offer to allow the inmates to pay back in
blood the debt they owed their country. The volunteers are put into the penal
battalions, expendable units that are used to charge and clear minefields by
trampling across them, for example. No, nothing had been straightforward in
that plot. The inmates who were expected to do their patriotic duty for a
system that had incarcerated them, often for no reason other than mass terror
itself. The army that was expected to defend the country, after seeing its most
experienced officers shot or put into the camps in a wave of purges just before
Hitler’s invasion. Regular army units assisted by secret police units whose job
it was to shoot their own soldiers in the stomach if they retreated, and to
shoot them in the back if they weren’t charging enthusiastically enough. Soviet
soldiers of different ethnic backgrounds suspicious of each other. Foot
soldiers suspicious of their officers and vice versa. Army soldiers suspicious of
penal soldiers, who were their former comrades deprived of their rank and life
expectancy for often trivial or made-up infractions. Penal soldiers from the
army suspicious of those from the camps. Men from the camps who had been
political prisoners suspicious of those who had been actual criminals, thieves
and murderers. Political prisoners who had been put into the camps for
belonging to different factions of the communist party during the purges who
were still squabbling, even though both had ended up in Siberia and were now
expected to fight for Stalin and the motherland.

It
was a good thing Stalin had industrialised the country in time though, Slavkin knew.
Even if that had come at the price of displacing and starving and enslaving and
breaking and killing millions. The old Russian monarchy, the Tsar’s archaic and
rotten regime, would not have withstood the Nazi onslaught. Russia would have
fallen in the same way the rest of the European mainland had.

Slavkin
gently ran his fingers over the surface of the table, the wheat, the stars, the
hammers, the sickles. No, he thought. Simplicity was a luxury that his country
didn’t have, didn’t need, couldn’t afford. Everything was tainted, everything questionable.
Everything was a price paid for something else. Maybe some systems made a
greater effort to create an illusion of democracy or global harmony for their
population. But reality was the same everywhere, in every single country on
this sad, beautiful planet.

Luxembourg

Becker’s
mobile phone rang just as he had sat down comfortably in his big black SUV
outside the hospital. He touched the screen and said his name.

‘Good
afternoon Inspector Becker, this is the US embassy,’ the male voice said. ‘The
statement from Lieutenant Lawrence which your government had requested just
arrived. Please ask for Mrs Kate Harrison.’

Becker
wasn’t sure whether this had been an actual person who had called him, or
whether it had been a recording. The effect was the same: a brief monologue in
American English followed by the click of a receiver. The United States didn’t
have time to chat with some village cop from a country not much larger than the
village itself. If he wanted his witness statement, he’d have to pick it up
himself, thank you and have a nice day.

This
again could be either very good or very bad, Becker thought. It was good in the
sense that the administration of the superpower that still more or less
guaranteed Europe’s tranquillity had moved at an amazing speed. Majerus could
have dispatched his request only around noon, and a few hours later he had his
answer. Then again, noon here means early morning in Washington, he thought.
Still, it was amazing. Which brought him to the worse possibility: the speed
was not just amazing, it was improbably fast. There was no way Lieutenant
Lawrence would have just written something down by himself. He would have had a
whole national security bureaucracy looking over his shoulder; or writing the
statement for him, to make things even easier. There was the distinct possibility
that what was waiting for Becker at the American embassy to Luxembourg was not
a statement at all, but basically an acknowledgement of receipt of the request.
Or a letter with whole sentences covered by black bars, sparing only words such
as ‘and’. Or a letter saying nothing, citing some of their national security
legislation empowering the US President to wish Inspector Becker happy Easter
holidays, and nothing else.

Becker
started the engine and drove down the length of the Kirchberg, past the
European institutions, past the law firms and banks and consultancies, towards
the city centre plateau with which it was connected by a wide, pale red steel
bridge across a gorge. Becker reached the other end of the bridge and turned
right, and after a few more turns he arrived at his destination. The American embassy
was a complex of mansions near the gorge. He could see the Kirchberg on the
other side, the twin office towers he’d just passed guarding the narrow tip of
the plateau.

Becker
was given the privilege of being allowed to drive through the gate up the
driveway to a small parking lot. Good thing he had the black SUV, he thought,
it made an impression appropriate to the surroundings.

A
staff member came towards him and said, ‘Inspector Becker? This way, sir.’

Becker
followed him through the doorway of one of the mansions, where he was made to
understand that parking privileges didn’t mean exemption from the security
check. He had to walk twice through a detector gate, and was searched by a man
wearing rubber gloves. It was a private security contractor, he wasn’t even
given the courtesy of being frisked by one of the Marines he’d seen outside. Becker’s
body wobbled as the man patted him down. It was deeply undignified. Becker
stared into the distance while letting it happen to him.

The
staff member, a young man in a black suit and a dark blue tie, had walked
around the gate and was waiting for Becker near a door on the left that led
into a corridor. When Becker was finished he approached him and followed him. The
corridor was decorated in the same style that, according to pictures and movies
Becker had seen, dominated the interior of the White House. Becker found it
somehow grandmotherly, with all the beige wallpaper and curtains and armchairs
beneath extravagantly framed oil paintings of historical naval battles.

‘Mrs
Harrison will be right with you, sir,’ the young man said and showed him to one
of the offices. It had been furnished by the same interior decorator. Stars and
stripes in the corner behind the host’s empty chair reminded visitors where
they were.

Becker
sat down in the visitor’s chair and waited. He looked around. The oil painting
on the wall in his host’s office was the portrait of a statesman wearing
nineteenth-century clothing, after the wigs but before the suits. Probably one
of their presidents somewhere between Washington and Lincoln, Becker thought.
In the end he had ten minutes to try and figure it out, because this was how much
he had to wait for his host.

She
strode into her office, prompting Becker to turn around in the visitor’s chair.
He cut short his turn, because by the time he’d completed half the rotation the
woman was already right next to him. By the time Becker wanted to offer her his
hand, she was already sitting behind her desk. ‘Kate Harrison, welcome Inspector,’
she said. She didn’t find it necessary to wait for Becker to introduce himself,
because she knew who he was and why he was here. She didn’t waste any time discussing
her late arrival, either, because Becker hadn’t been given a fixed appointment
to begin with.