The Last Compromise (26 page)

Saar
was at least thirty years older than Hans. He had a thin pale face, droopy
eyes, narrow teeth. He was balding but kept a thick white beard which was
shaved clean on the cheeks. An undernourished Santa Claus with a goatee, and
without the friendly face.

‘Please
excuse me, I will call you back,’ he said quietly into the receiver and put it
down. ‘What was that?’, he asked Hans. ‘I didn’t understand you, I was on the
phone.’

‘You
heard me,’ Hans said, sitting down in one of the two visitor’s chairs. He made
himself comfortable. ‘Do you mind if I sit down? I usually prefer doing this
sitting down.’

‘Commission,
you said?’

Hans
took out his identification card with the shiny stars, leaned forward and held
it in front of Saar’s face. ‘Hans Tamberg, anti-fraud.’

Saar
grinned. His teeth looked long and thin because the gums had receded.

‘Why
is your face swollen, Hans Tamberg, anti-fraud? When have you last shaved?’

‘You
will understand that in a minute, I promise you.’

‘So
if I open the Commission’s website, and look up the number, and call, they will
tell me that you work there, and that you’re here right now?’

Hans
was still leaning forward towards Saar. He took the receiver of Saar’s phone
with his left hand and offered it to him. Saar looked at Hans for a moment.
Without accepting the receiver, he turned to his computer screen, opened his
browser and found the anti-fraud department’s central switchboard number. Hans
put the receiver down next to the phone. He assumed it would revert to the
sound of a busy line in a few seconds, so if Saar wanted to make a call, he
would have to press the receiver down again to get a free line. Saar looked
again at Hans, picked up the receiver and held it to his ear. Pressed the
cradle button on the phone to clear the line, and dialled the number he had
found. He switched to English.

‘Good
morning, I have an appointment with Mister Hans Tamberg now, but he hasn’t
arrived yet. Is he at the office?’ Saar watched Hans’s eyes while he waited.
Hans watched his. ‘Okay, thank you.’ Saar hung up.

‘You
are not in the office, apparently,’ he said to Hans, switching back to Estonian.

‘That’s
because I’m here,’ Hans replied, leaning back into his visitor’s chair. ‘Now
listen very carefully, Mister Saar. You are a suspect in a European anti-fraud
investigation into irregularities in the award of construction works contracts
to Vanabalt, in the context of the harbour extension which is co-financed by
the European Union. You have the right not to incriminate yourself, do you
understand this.’

Saar
listened. It wasn’t really a question, and he was receptive to information.
More curious than frightened, but that was enough.

‘I
don’t need to tell you what we found,’ Hans continued. ‘In one case you
required all potential bidders to have a certificate which only Vanabalt had,
and which had nothing to do with the works. In another you decided that bidders
had made an error when quoting their prices, and recalculated them yourself, so
that Vanabalt ended up as the lowest bidder. In another case the price offers of
the other companies were more or less the same, but Vanabalt’s offer was thirty
percent cheaper. Unrealistically cheap. There were cost overruns, of course, but
by that time Vanabalt already had the contract, and they could invoice you
whatever they wanted. Which they did. I have to say it’s all very disturbing,
Mister Saar.’

Saar
waited for a moment. ‘You don’t know any of that. You still need some answers,
or you wouldn’t be here.’

Good,
Hans thought. The bits he had found out and remembered from the file were more
or less correct. ‘If I still needed answers I would not be talking to you, my
friend,’ Hans continued without slowing down. ‘I would be reading documents and
talking to other witnesses right now. I have all the answers I need regarding
you. At this stage it doesn’t even matter if you get convicted in the end or
not. Because the end is very far from here. For the next two years you will be
running in a hamster’s wheel denying the corruption charges. To investigators,
the press, your relatives back in Pärnu.’

Saar
kept listening without saying a word. Yes, Hans had remembered correctly, the
man was from Pärnu. Hans took a breath to stress the pause.

‘This
conversation can have two different outcomes,’ Hans said. He leaned forward
across his host’s desk again, and lowered his voice. ‘Either you and your
fucking harbour drown in all this shit.’ He gestured to the ships and port
cranes outside the window.

Saar
did not ask the next question, he waited for the answer.

Hans
gave it. ‘Or I can make it all go away.’

He
paused to let Saar think about it, and leaned back into his visitor’s chair.

Saar
took his time. The computer on the desk made a sound, telling Saar that an
e-mail had arrived. He didn’t look at the screen, he kept looking at Hans. Finally
he said, slowly, ‘I am not commenting on any of this. I am only curious about
what you suggest.’

Now
Hans took his time. ‘I am not suggesting,’ he said, pronouncing clearly every
single word, ‘I am offering that we help each other out. I just told you how I
can help you. If you are interested, I will now tell you how you can help me.
Are you interested in hearing it?’

Saar
didn’t say a word.

‘Are
you interested in hearing it, Mister Saar?’

Saar
took a breath. ‘Yes, I am interested in hearing it.’

‘Good.
There is a container that arrived on a ship from Rotterdam earlier this
morning. I will give you the name of the ship and the container identification
number right after I finish talking. You can return my favour by telling me
where that container is, who the addressee is, and who came to pick it up. Do
you think you could do that?’

Saar
nodded slowly.

‘I
am finished talking,’ Hans said, and passed Saar the piece of paper with the information
Bas the young port controller had printed out in Rotterdam. ‘Now it’s your turn
to do something for me.’

Saar
slowly took the paper, looked at it, and put it back on the desk.

‘How
exactly will it go away?’, he asked.

‘I
will conclude that there are insufficient reasons to make a formal accusation.
And you try and give some of your contracts to some other companies in the
future. Not just Vanabalt, okay?’

Saar
showed a little smile. He turned to his screen and started clicking and typing.

Hans
was waiting patiently in his chair. He looked around the man’s office. It was
neat because it was fairly new. There was a painting on the wall, an idyllic
seashore landscape with Estonian peasants in white folk costumes sitting in a
pine forest right above the water’s edge. The scene was absurd. Maybe Saar had
painted it himself.

‘Here
it is,’ Saar said. ‘The container arrived from Rotterdam this morning, on a
ship called Karelia. It contains dangerous goods marked “ionising radiation”,
so we reported it to the health and safety inspectorate.’

‘Where
is it now?’

‘The
container? We no longer have it.’

‘Someone
picked it up?’

‘Either
that, or it was put on another ship.’

The
secretary came back from her coffee break and peered into Saar’s office. Then
she closed the door again. Saar made some more mouse clicks.

‘The
container left the port this morning on another cargo ship called Bogatyr.’

‘Where
to?’

‘Saint
Petersburg, Russia.’

***

Saar
frowned, his dark eyebrows squeezing his droopy eyes. He looked out the window,
then back at his screen, then at the tasteless painting on his wall.

‘Mister
Tamberg,’ he said, and finally turned to face Hans. ‘Can I please know why you
are asking me these questions.’

‘I
just told you that, Mister Saar.’

‘No,
that’s why I’m helping you. But I am asking what exactly you are looking for.’

‘What
is your problem?’ Hans was getting annoyed.

‘My
problem is that the container was supposedly shipped to Russia, but it’s still
here. It’s still on the same ship that it arrived on.’

Now
Hans frowned. ‘How do you know that?’

‘Because
I can see it from here.’

Saar
got up and pointed at a ship with a red hull and white superstructures and a collection
of containers looking like colourful lego bricks in the distance of the dock. It
was the fourth of five ships moored one behind the other, parallel to the
leftmost dock, like a row of oversized lorries outside a car wash. Hans stood
next to Saar and saw it, too. Karelia.

‘They
haven’t unloaded it yet,’ Saar said. ‘It must still be waiting. Oops, no, it’s
leaving.’

The
ship in the distance sounded a horn that they could hear in Saar’s office.

Hans
felt like grabbing Saar by his collar. ‘Why is it already leaving if it hasn’t
unloaded?’

‘What
do I know,’ Saar shrugged. ‘Maybe they just changed crews, or refuelled their
diesel engines before sailing to where it’s more expensive.’

‘Stop
the ship right now!’, Hans yelled at Saar. The man hurried outside to his
secretary’s office. It was empty again.

‘She
has the mobile phone numbers of the supervisors on the docks,’ Saar apologised.
‘Maybe she’s in the canteen or having a smoke or…’

Hans
didn’t wait for any further hypotheses. He rushed past Saar, swung through the
antechamber into the corridor, found a staircase to his right, slammed open the
door and ran down the stairs, taking three or four stairs at a time. He threw
himself against the staircase door on the ground floor, ran through the entry
hall and outside. He sped around the building and headed straight for the dock.
He heard a second horn from the ship in a distance that still hadn’t diminished
much. The port was huge. Containers that had looked like lego bricks from far
away were now the size of bungalows. He kept running, breathing heavily through
his mouth. He had barely reached the end of the first ship that was moored to
his left, and there were still two more to go before the Karelia even began.

He
saw the Karelia slowly move out sideways into the open water. He could hear the
roar of its engines. He wasn’t even halfway past the second ship. It was
hopeless. Once he’d arrive he could only wave his hands at the crew to turn
around, except ships like that barely even had a crew, and they wouldn’t do it
even if they’d see him. He saw a dock worker in the distance, he was slowly
walking towards Hans. Hans’s speed started decreasing. He was panting as he
reached the end of ship number three. The Karelia was already fifty metres out
in open waters. Hans looked up, there wasn’t a human soul on deck, and the
windows of the bridge only reflected the clouds. He couldn’t see anyone in there.

‘Can
you stop. The ship.’ Hans puffed in the direction of the dock worker as he came
closer. The man was wearing a yellow vest and an orange hard hat.

‘No,’
he said, calmly. ‘Why?’

Yes,
indeed, why? What would he say to them? Please turn around, you forgot
something, and while you’re here please show me your cargo?

‘Fuck!’

Hans
bent forward, supporting the weight of his upper body on his extended arms, his
hands gripping his knees. He slowly got this breath under control.

The
dock worker stood there, looking at him.

The
ship made a turn and its engines roared up again to push it out into the sea.

Hans
got up, turned around and strode back past the last ship he’d just passed,
heading back to the building he’d come from. At the start of the second ship he
increased his pace to a jog.

***

When
he arrived, the secretary was back at her workstation. Hans walked right past
her into Saar’s office. ‘Excuse me,’ she said to him, dutifully jumping up from
her chair.

‘It’s
okay,’ Saar shouted to her, just in time before Hans slammed the door shut
behind him.

‘First,
where is the Karelia going,’ Hans said, sitting down in his visitor’s chair, breathing
heavily.

Saar
waited for the second question. Hans snapped, ‘What are you staring at me for?
Go look it up! For God’s sake, in your own interest I hope you can figure this
out.’

Saar
checked his screen.

‘It’s
crossing over to Helsinki, Finland.’

Okay.
At least that’s inside the European Union, Hans thought. But he had no time.
These ships were hulks, but they were surprisingly speedy. He’d just seen the
swift turning manoeuvre himself.

‘Call
the coast guard,’ Hans said. ‘Tell them there are people traffickers on the
ship, with refugees trapped inside one of the containers. In this nuclear
container from Rotterdam. Women and children are suffocating. Now, do it right
now.’ For the second time today Hans handed Saar the receiver of his own phone.

It
was his only hope. Any other type of contraband, and the Estonians would just
call the Finns and tell them to wait for the ship on the other side of the Gulf.
And for the Bogatyr it would be too late now anyway. It would have long left
Estonian territorial waters and be escorted, if anything, by the Russian navy.