The Last Compromise (28 page)

Helsinki,
Finland

The
sky over Helsinki had almost cleared. Individual rays of sunlight breached the
clouds and shone down on the sea, like in a painting depicting a divine
intervention.

The
two policemen were sitting in their patrol car and waited. They had parked
right in front of the dock of the passenger ferry from Tallinn. The blue light
bar was flashing in silence. They had taken a length of plastic tape with red
and white stripes, and closed the off-ramp of the ferry dock. Then they had
returned to their car and sat down to wait, the younger one behind the wheel,
the older one in the passenger’s seat next to him.

They
watched the ferry as it carefully but routinely approached the dock. Tows were
thrown and fastened. Commands were shouted. Then the doors opened, and a trickle
of passengers started to emerge from the ship, into the open air, and onto the
solid ground. The people slowed down and stopped as they saw that the ramp had
been closed off by the police.

‘There
he is,’ the younger one said to his colleague. ‘This is him.’

They
left the car, closed the doors and approached Hans in a broad stride.

‘Helsinki
police, good afternoon.’

Hans
stopped in front of them. He tried to make a neutral expression with his
swollen, bloody, hurting face. ‘Good afternoon. Can I help you?’

The
gathering crowd around them stepped back, to respect an invisible perimeter of
discretion or wariness.

‘We
were asked to meet you here,’ the younger of the two policemen said. ‘I think
you know why.’

Hans
didn’t reply.

Hans
wasn’t in a good shape at all. But he was the only person from their group who
had neither died nor disappeared nor completely passed out.

And
now there was no American in the lobby, and no attacker either. And no
Hoffmann. And no Tienhoven.

Luxembourg
police want to talk to you, they keep calling.

‘Do
you have anything to say?’, the older policeman asked.

Hans
cleared his throat. His chest still hurt.

‘It
was just a misunderstanding,’ Hans said. ‘The man on the ferry here had
confused me with someone else. He was very angry, maybe he had drunk a little
too much, but it had nothing to do with me.’

‘We
were called to check on this situation,’ the younger one said. ‘There has been
a fight on a Finnish ferry, after all.’

The
older one took over. ‘The man must still be on board. Do you wish to press
charges against him for physical assault?’

‘I
don’t even know who he was,’ Hans said. The relief made breathing a little
easier. ‘And I think he was Russian.’

The
two policemen looked at each other.

‘I’ll
be fine,’ Hans continued. ‘It’s nothing. Thank you. I think you can let
everybody go. But could you perhaps tell me where I can find a Professor
Mäkinen from the University of Helsinki.’

The
policemen looked at each other again.

‘It’s
okay. We’ll take you there,’ the older one said, and led the way to the police
car. The younger one hurried back to remove the tape and to release the waiting
crowd into freedom.

***

The
three of them sat in the police car, the two policemen in the front seats
waiting for Hans to say where he needed to go so they could start the engine
and take him there.

It
was a Saturday, but that didn’t mean much to the research staff at the
University of Helsinki, Hans hoped. His hope was based on what Julia had told
him about the lab sciences. Weekends and nights didn’t really exist as concepts
to these people. To the contrary, it was the prime time for not-so-senior staff
to use lab facilities.

Professor
Mäkinen, the addressee of the shipment from Tallinn to Helsinki, was unlikely
to be junior staff, but there could be junior collaborators who’d be at work
now. An assistant professor, for example. That would be more a professor than
an assistant; they weren’t actually assisting anyone, they were just doing their
research. Either on their own or, more probably, in a team with others, hoping
to become second rather than third author, or first rather than second. And
that meant they needed lab time. And such a person could lead Hans to Mäkinen.

Hans
would have loved to approach all this in a more systematic fashion, so that he
could go after the recipient directly. But he didn’t even know Mäkinen’s first
name, and in Finland half the population was called Mäkinen. It could be a man
or a woman, living in Helsinki or in any commuter town along the coast. It
could be a fake recipient who didn’t exist at all, or a real person who had no
idea that his or her name was being used to divert uranium from one port to
another. Or it could be a real professor who was somehow involved in the whole
scheme, either in league with the Russians or in league with those who had
siphoned off the material while it was in transit to Saint Petersburg.

The
main constraint was time. Hans simply wasn’t sure how much time the Russian had
given him back on the ferry to return the box. And he wasn’t sure whether perhaps
he really was a fugitive sought by the Luxembourgish police with a Europe-wide
arrest warrant. He had booked his flight online under his own name, after all,
and he had paid for the ferry with his normal debit card. For the police in
Luxembourg requesting local assistance in Helsinki wasn’t harder than it was
for the Commission. It was probably even easier.

So
he leaned forward, sitting in the same position in the back of a parked car
that he’d assumed when talking to Tienhoven and Hoffmann in the picnic area on
their way to Luxembourg. He addressed both policemen at the same time.

‘I’m
sorry, do you have an internet phone? I think I lost my phone on the ferry. I
just need to find Professor Mäkinen’s office address, that’s all.’

They
were still speaking English. Finnish and Estonian were relatively close, but
not too much. During the Soviet days, Estonians would watch Finnish television,
and the languages were related enough for them to get the gist of the world
news from the West. But there were limits to mutual comprehension in a normal
conversation, especially when the interlocutors weren’t even facing one another
while talking.

The
older policeman, sitting in the passenger’s seat, made a sound with his mouth
or his throat, took out his phone and tapped on the screen. ‘Where?’

‘Just
the university. Maybe there is a search function to look for staff members.’

The
man tapped and waited. ‘Okay, I have the website. There’s a telephone
directory.’

‘Mäkinen.’

The
driver tapped, then said, ‘There are more than twenty Mäkinens. Which one?’

‘Does
it show where they work?’, Hans asked.

‘Yeah.’

‘Just
the professors then, please.’

The
policeman started reading out the names of the faculties or institutes. ‘Behavioural
sciences, chemistry, medical sciences, agricultural sciences, mathematics.’

If
it’s a university, and if it’s even vaguely legitimate, it would have to be
about medical isotopes. That was more likely than chemistry. Hans said, ‘Medical.
If it shows an address, it would be really great if you could drop me off there.’

The
man checked his phone. His throat stayed silent. He showed the screen to the
younger policeman at the steering wheel, who promptly nodded and started the
engine. They left the ferry dock, heading presumably to the seat of the local
university’s medical school.

***

They
left the port area and drove in silence through the peninsula that was
Helsinki’s city centre. Neither of them spoke, and there wasn’t even any police
radio chatter Hans would have expected to hear.

The
container had ended up here and not in Saint Petersburg, but the two cities
looked somewhat similar. Hans didn’t need to look around to know it, he was
staring straight ahead. He had been to Helsinki a dozen times, and he had
visited Saint Petersburg twice. Helsinki’s streets were much narrower, but the
old pre-war apartment buildings nevertheless had something imperially classical
and above all distinctly Eastern European about them. The same went for the Art
Nouveau flats with their high windows and decorative masonry. It was a bit like
Vienna which he’d seen once, only much smaller. Hans closed his eyes. He had
barely slept in two days. His face hurt. His stomach hurt. He could faintly
smell his shirt; he should have bought a new one in Amsterdam after all. Right
now a few minutes of stupor were needed.

They
reached an intersection, Hans felt the brakes and opened his eyes. He
recognised the street corner. The road straight ahead would take them to Helsinki
University’s main building, a neoclassical Greek temple with yellow rendering
and white columns. But instead of going straight, the car turned left onto a
wide avenue that led north towards the isthmus which connected central Helsinki
to the mainland coast. Hans had never been there, but it made sense that the
medical school would be on a hospital campus and not in the old town. He closed
his eyes again and felt the car drive through the city on a long straight path.
No sounds, no music, no talk, no thoughts.

Hans
woke up from the sudden vibrations as the car turned left, crossing the tramway
line in the middle of the avenue.

Hans stepped out
of the back of the police car, closed the door and waved the two policemen
goodbye. As the car drove off, Hans turned around and took in the view of what
was a whole sunny city of light grey, modern buildings spread over a wide
campus.

He
rubbed his eyes. He sensed that he was moving through a surreal world that was
governed by the sort of self-evidence that existed inside a dream, where the
dreamer also knew very well from the start where he was going and what he had
to do, even while he realised at some level that his constraints were purely
notional, and that all his actions were simulated and would have no
consequences at all. It was much like his obvious task of crushing tiles with a
little hammer, or of chopping away at timber with an axe that didn’t exist.

Hans
approached a group of female students who were waiting for the bus and asked
them for directions to the building whose name the policeman had told him. They
all pointed simultaneously to one of the glass-and-concrete cubes. They didn’t
say a word though. Hans didn’t look too good. They had been chatting away
happily before he had come to them.

He
walked over to the cube. He tried to walk slowly, not because his feet hurt,
but because the pumping of his blood against the inside of his face was very
unpleasant. When he arrived at the glass entrance he peered inside. There was
no security guard, no receptionist he could see though the doors, and the
reason for that was obvious. You had to have a badge or a keycard to unlock the
door. There was no-one inside he could have waved to. There was a button, but
it had the label of a private security firm glued to it. It wouldn’t have
connected him to anyone inside that particular structure.

The
campus itself was by no means deserted, though, there were people walking
around in the sun. They were patients or their visitors who were getting some
fresh air around the hospital next door. But Hans didn’t need patients, he
needed researchers.

A
man in his late twenties was walking down the street towards the bus stop where
Hans had asked the students for directions. They were in fact still waiting
there. The man wore a cord jacket, a white shirt with no tie, dark blue jeans
and brown leather shoes matching the brown leather belt. Young academic, Hans concluded.
He had seen plenty of them at his own university. This had been almost their
uniform. The man was talking on the phone. Hans approached him, gesturing that
he was sorry to interrupt. The man ended his conversation with a slightly
worried expression on his face.

‘Sorry,
I’m Hans Mäkinen from Tallinn,’ he said. ‘I’m the nephew of Professor Mäkinen,
he’s in this building here but I can’t call him. They broke my phone.’

He
stuck with the masculine, assuming Mäkinen was a man. If it turned out it was a
female professor, he could still apologise for the mix-up, implausibly citing the
fact that he was Estonian and wasn’t used to different genders.

The
academic glanced at Hans’s clothes; they weren’t fresh now but they had been
decent very recently.

‘Who
broke your phone?’, the man asked, a tentative mix of wariness and compassion
in his voice.

‘A
drunk man on the ferry. A Finn, I’m sorry, but that doesn’t matter. Pejorative
terms for Estonians, it was pretty bad.’

Hans
sensed how the man’s shame for his compatriot’s behaviour generated the impulse
of a wish to help, to compensate, to make good.

‘Could
you perhaps call him from here,’ Hans asked, pointing at the building. ‘Just so
he comes down? He’s in the university’s phone directory. Professor Mäkinen,
medical sciences.’

The
man was still holding his phone in his hand and seemed glad to do the unfortunate
fellow from the Estonian cousin nation a favour. It wasn’t too big a favour anyway,
and safe enough. He wouldn’t let Hans into any building himself, he would just
call somebody else. The man looked up the number, touched the screen a few more
times and held the phone to his ear.

‘Don’t
say I’m his nephew,’ Hans whispered to him. ‘Just tell him it’s someone from
Estonia.’

The
man nodded, switched to Finnish and asked for Professor Mäkinen. Then he
listened for a few seconds, looked at Hans, and said some more words, basically
asking the person on the other end of the line to come down and let in an
Estonian visitor.

‘Mäkinen
isn’t in the office, but someone will come downstairs in a second,’ he said as
he pocketed his phone.

Hans’s
tiredness was almost gone, his work had energised him. A few seconds later a
young man opened the glass door from the inside. He was dressed more or less
exactly like the man who had just called him to come downstairs. Academic
standard issue. But he wasn’t as tall as the other man, or as Hans. He was
skinnier, and he had a more delicate face. Thin blue blood vessels were visible
underneath the paper-like skin on his temples. Then again it wasn’t difficult
to have generally finer features than Hans, since Hans had just been beaten up.

‘I
know I look horrible,’ Hans said to him. ‘Something bad happened on my way here.’

The
man who had made the phone call saw the bus arrive, briefly wished Hans all the
best and hurried off to catch it. The students were already preparing to get
in.

‘My
name is Hans Tamberg,’ Hans continued. ‘I’m working at the University of Tartu,
in a project on Mo-99 medical isotopes, together with Professor Koopmans in
Petten. I was just visiting for the weekend, but then I had to go to the hospital
here, so I thought I’d see if someone from Professor Mäkinen’s team was in the
office, since it’s next door. To maybe talk about your last publication.’

The
young man’s initial desire to ask what exactly had happened to his visitor, and
who the hell he was, was swiftly brushed aside by the dropped names and the prospect
of recognition for his work.

Still,
Hans’s host visibly hesitated whether he should ask first about the incident,
which would have been polite, or about the publication, which was much more
interesting.

‘I
got mugged, sadly,’ Hans said to help the man decide. Hans was standing still;
he didn’t want to be pushy by taking a step across the threshold. He wanted to
get invited inside. ‘They took my phone, that’s why I couldn’t call you myself.’

‘That’s
terrible, where did it happen?’

‘Near
the harbour, just after I got off the ferry.’

‘Did
you call the police?’

‘Somebody
else did, a woman,’ Hans said. He was really getting into it. ‘The police took
a description, but it won’t help very much. A guy in a hoodie, what can I say.’

‘Awful,’
the young man said.

So
where was the invitation?

Hans
asked, ‘Sorry, could I perhaps use the bathroom first to wash my face? Do you
have a bathroom?’

‘Ah
yes, sorry. Of course, please, come in. Marko Krohn.’

They
shook hands and Krohn led the way to the second floor. Hans tried to keep pace
with him as they climbed up the stairs. He neither wanted his physical state to
slow him down nor to emphasise the incident. On the second floor they entered a
corridor. All the doors were closed, the whole floor was silent.

‘It’s
very quiet,’ Hans remarked. ‘Is it because it’s a weekend?’

‘Yes,
and the teaching period is over. Some people are in the lab. The whole building
is empty.’

Krohn
showed Hans the door to a men’s room and said he’d wait for him at his office
at the end of the corridor. Hans thanked him, went in, symbolically washed his
face, and left to continue down the corridor towards the only open door.

Krohn’s
office looked basically like Hans’s back in Brussels. Neutrally efficient, and
relatively spacious. Krohn had the space to himself, too. The large window let
plenty of sunlight in.

‘Would
you like a coffee?’, Krohn asked. ‘The espresso machine with the capsules is
broken, but I can boil some water for instant coffee.’

‘Yes
please, that would be great,’ Hans replied, closed the door behind him and sat down
in the visitor’s chair. There’s the difference, he thought. Back in Brussels he
had two visitor’s chairs. If ‘back in Brussels’ still existed, if the term still
had any meaning at all. Much would depend on the outcome of the chat over coffee
that they would be having now.

The
kettle hissed, and Krohn handed Hans a cup with coffee made from dissolved
granules. He offered sugar, apologising for not having any milk. Hans accepted
the sugar and the spoon that came with it, stirred his coffee, took a little sip
of the hot beverage and put the cup down on the desk. A bunch of keys,
including a car key, lay next to it. Hans took the spoon out, licked it dry and
placed it between the cup and the keys. Krohn poured himself a cup, too. No
milk, of course, and no sugar either. He sat down, took a big sip, and got
ready.

‘So
you’re from Tartu, are you are researcher?’, Krohn asked.

‘The
board is selecting projects for possible Baltic co-funding, it’s a new scheme
they are thinking about. And that’s where we could work together, they say. It’s
about your most recent work.’

‘The
optimisation of the mix of different isotopes for radiotherapy on children?’

‘I’m
sorry, I’m not a medical expert myself,’ Hans said. ‘May I ask where Professor Mäkinen
is?’

‘It’s
Saturday, he’s grading exams at home,’ Krohn said, frowning. He was slowly starting
to realise that he’d made some kind of mistake. ‘I’m sorry, but I know nothing
about any Baltic funding, frankly. What did you say your name was?’

It
hadn’t worked. He had to practice more, Hans decided. But he’d heard and seen enough
already. The main point so far had in any case been to get inside the building
for a quiet talk.

Hans
took his cup and held it in both hands, keeping the content hot.

‘Okay
Mister Krohn,’ he said. ‘I work for the Estonian police. I didn’t get mugged, I
was in a fistfight with a Russian this morning. He’s in prison now. But that’s
not why I’m here. You are doing your radiotherapy here. At the same time A&C’s
uranium is getting diverted from Holland. Are you following?’

Krohn
looked completely puzzled.

Hans
kept pushing. ‘Right now Finnish police are on their way to arrest Professor Mäkinen.
You’re next, because you work with him. I’m your chance to save your career.’

Krohn
still had the same incredulous expression on his face. Then it changed to
irritation. He said, ‘But there’s nothing wrong with our uranium?’

‘It
gets diverted from Rotterdam to here, from Russia to here, that’s what’s wrong.
I’ve just been to the harbour. What do you think the freighter Karelia brought from
Tallinn to Helsinki today?’

Krohn
shook his head. ‘But it’s not diverted. It just comes, from Yadrotech in
Moscow, not A&C. You know, I’ll call Professor Mäkinen right now, and see
whether the police are already there,’ he said to Hans. ‘And if not, I’ll call
the police myself. In fact, I’ll call them right now.’

‘As
you wish. Let’s just go there straight away. You take me to Mäkinen and join
the party. We talk to him together. I see you have a car. Maybe it was just a
mistake.’

Krohn
shook his head and leaned over his desk to reach his phone.

Hans
released the left hand from the cup he’d been cradling and threw the hot coffee
into Krohn’s face. The man shrieked and pressed his back against his chair,
covering his face with both hands. Hans clenched his teeth, pressed his lips
together, jumped up from his chair, formed a fist and bashed it against the
back of Krohn’s hands. Then he pushed him backwards from his chair, abruptly
but carefully enough not to hurt his neck or skull. Then Hans sat on his
stomach and started hitting him on the hands above his face. He knew he couldn’t
just hit a person once and then apologise. He’d have to go through with it. One
strike, then the next, then the next, a sequence of strikes with alternating
fists. Then he used the lower edges of his palm, and the punches became more
effective. He kept hitting him, faster and faster. At first he was restrained. His
inhibition, which he had overridden for a second to throw the coffee, had
returned. It was as if his upper arm was pushing with full force, but his lower
arm resisted, cutting the force in half. But he needed to get over the
restraint. To be credible you had to become an animal. An animal that didn’t
care about credibility. His punches grew more forceful as he kept battering the
man’s hands and face.

Krohn’s
helpless voice was muffled by his own hands, blood started running through his
fingers. Hans roared at him, like a soldier, a warrior who was himself scared
shitless but whose life depended on scaring the enemy even more. Hans grabbed
the man’s ear and forcefully twisted it. Krohn struggled, kicking around with
his legs in pain. ‘I’ll break your fingers!’, Hans hissed, catching his victim’s
hand with his own left and forming a fist around his middle finger. He jerked
it upwards. ‘You fucking cunt, take me to Mäkinen.’ He’d pressed the words
through his clenched teeth. He didn’t want to shout in case someone was in the
building after all. Krohn tried to free his finger with his other hand, but
Hans grabbed the other hand, too, and pulled up the man’s ring finger. Then he let
go and punched him in the now exposed nose with his clenched fist, and spit in
his face. The saliva landed on Krohn’s eye and ran down his temple. The blood
was now streaming from both nostrils. Hans forced himself to remember how
robust his own face had proven to be when hit by a much stronger foe than
himself, and he forced himself to assume the same would be true of his victim
now. He punched him again, with full force, with the edge of his palm, right in
the delicate nose.