The Last Compromise (34 page)

Hans
allowed the emptiness in the streets to clear out his mind, giving it some time
to rest. His brain received the supply of fresh air that it deserved.

He
crossed a wide avenue; it was empty enough to cross irrespective of the traffic
lights. Again he saw relatively chic stores a few hundred metres from some of the
dodgiest bars in town. He continued down the avenue he’d just crossed and
turned right into a side street. He was almost there, in the quarter near the
Brussels Midi railway station at the southern end of the city centre where he
lived. Again he crossed a small intersection and, after another one hundred
metres, turned left into his narrow street following the direction of the one-way
traffic.

His
destination was fifty metres away. His own building to the left, and the little
café across the street to the right. It was still open, the lights were on.
He’d never sat in that café, not once in the three years he’d been living here.
There’d been no point going downstairs to pay for beer which he could just as
well buy in the little grocery shop on the corner at the far end of the street.

He
reached the door of his building, glanced across the narrow street, and decided
that tonight would be the night he’d try out the café for the first time in his
life. It wasn’t that he particularly needed a drink. He was fine. The reason
was that the man sitting all alone at one of the two metallic tables out on the
pavement was Frank Hoffmann. He and Hans were the only people in the whole
street.

***

Hans
joined him without asking. They both sat with their backs to the café, Hoffmann
to Hans’s left with a table between them, both facing the narrow street and the
door to Hans’s apartment building.

‘I
knew you booked the evening flight from Helsinki,’ Hoffmann said. ‘I hope this
answers your first question. So all I had to do is sit here, drink Belgian beer
all evening, and wait for you to show up.’

There
was a full glass of dark beer on the table. It hadn’t been touched, the froth was
entirely gone. Hoffmann saw that Hans noticed, and nodded approvingly.

Hoffmann
said, ‘I see Pavel slapped you around a little while getting back his little
box. And you should shave, and put on a fresh shirt.’

A
delivery van with a noisy exhaust drove from left to right past the café. The
sound was amplified by the buildings on both sides of the narrow street. Even
without them it would have been noisy, since the car had passed just one metre
in front of their faces.

‘You
found out where the missing uranium went?’, Hoffmann asked when the van had
disappeared from view and its noise had subsided.

Hans
didn’t reply. He just looked at the entrance to his house.

Hoffmann
continued, ‘The Commission is happy to blame the Russian spy and forget about
it. Case closed. But not for you. You found out.’

‘Who
was Zayek?’, Hans asked.

‘Zayek
was a nobody. You know how the Russians recruited him to begin with? He
recruited himself. During his military service he photocopied a ton of useless
shit and mailed it to the Russian embassy.’

Hans
looked at Hoffmann. ‘How do you know?’

‘Pavel
told me. All these years at the Commission the guy Zayek has been sitting
around doing absolutely nothing. Thinking he was some kind of sleeper maybe.’

‘So
why did you kill him?’

‘I
didn’t kill him. Pavel did. You saw him, in the lobby.’

‘You
poisoned Zayek’s coffee to make him run to the toilet, into Pavel’s arms.’

‘Maybe
I did. Or maybe the guy just got very nervous. Or maybe he preferred to explode
in the toilet, instead of messing up the lobby.’

‘Did
your poison cause Tienhoven’s heart attack?’

‘It
was only in one cup, Hans. In Zayek’s. No need for all of you to go puke
together.’

Another
noisy engine, but at a higher pitch. A Vespa, a young man with his girlfriend, buzzing
past from right to left against the one-way traffic direction.

Hans
asked, ‘If you helped this Pavel, why did you bother to contact the Commission
to begin with?’

‘At
the time we really wanted to check out Zayek, and then expose him together with
you guys as a spy inside the Commission. I only saw and recognised Pavel in Luxembourg,
before you came back with Zayek.’

‘And
so you helped the Russian.’

Hoffmann
shrugged. ‘Look, we didn’t have much of a plan for Zayek. The so-called
defector in the consulate wasn’t really a defector, as I guess you figured out
yourself. But we were going there no matter what, orders were to meet with you
and to confront him. Zayek was a suspicious character with or without the
defector, and our respective bosses wanted a big bust of a Russian agent. They
had fallen in love with the idea, they could barely wait. So there I am, and I
see Pavel hanging around the Commission building, on a mission to shut him up.
But Zayek hadn’t said anything yet, we’d just arrived. Pavel hadn’t expected us
to take so long. So we made a deal. First Zayek says at least a few words, then
Pavel finishes his job. Both missions complete, everybody goes home.’

Mission
complete. Zayek had been worth more dead than alive.

Hans
said, ‘And you took my phone.’

‘It
had Pavel’s picture on it. At least I thought it did. You liar.’

Hoffmann
put Hans’s phone on the table and shoved it over to him.

Hans
was starting to feel cold. The walking had kept him warm, but now he was
sitting outside on the street. The waiter hadn’t come out to take any last
orders. But Hans wouldn’t have ordered anything anyway. There were still only
Hoffmann’s stale beer and Hans’s old phone on the table between them.

Hoffmann
found it necessary to elaborate. ‘I prefer working with a Russian I can
recognise’, he said. ‘If his picture’s in the open because someone puts it on
the social media, they will replace him with someone I don’t know at all.’

‘His
face must have shown up on the hotel’s security camera tapes.’

‘It’s
all digital, and they hacked into it. There’s no footage. That way they
protected their man Pavel, plus I think they wanted to show off.’

A
pause.

Hans
asked, ‘Did you help Pavel chase me?’

Hoffmann
shook his head. ‘No. His box, his problem.’

‘Was
it the fingerprints?’

‘Forget
fingerprints, you can scan and manufacture and plant them wherever you want.’

‘So
what’s so special about the box?’

‘It’s
the box itself,’ Hoffmann said. ‘It fools both the latest and the upcoming generation
of explosives detectors at airports. We don’t need Pavel’s box, we have three of
them ourselves. But I can understand his anxiety. If I lost one I’d be in very
big trouble, too.’

Another
silence. People put in danger, and nothing to show for it. A price paid for
nothing.

Hans
asked, ‘Who was the American?’

‘Yes,
I saw him, too. He was an American. A man from America. That’s it.’

Hans
watched a passing ambulance car, going in the correct direction, from left to right.
Its blue lights were turned off; it just drove by, without any urgency. It made
very little noise for a car of its size. Maybe the absence of sirens made it
appear more silent than it really was.

Hans
turned back to Hoffmann. ‘Why are you telling me all this, Frank?’

‘Because
I want to ask you: do you want to work for us.’

Hans
kept breathing as calmly as he had before.

It
was a Saturday night, there were clubs in this town that were just opening. But
this here was a residential street, only apartments except for the little
grocery shop that was closed, and the café in which Hans and Hoffmann were the
only two customers. It was very quiet.

Hans
asked, ‘Why for you? I’m not German. I don’t even speak the language.’

‘So
what?’, Hoffmann said. ‘We’re a European agency, one of the major European agencies.
What matters to Europe matters to us, by definition. I told you that in
Maastricht.’

There
were no more cars passing. The whole street was deserted.

‘We’ll
give you some training, obviously,’ Hoffmann added. ‘How to spot whether you’re
being followed, how not to get kicked around by Russian agents, that sort of
thing. And it wouldn’t be instead of your Commission job. It would be on top of
it. For now.’

Hans
smiled. ‘So I can end up like the poor fucker Zayek?’

Hoffmann
gave him a mischievous grin. ‘What, Hans, you want to grow old chasing
bureaucrats who lie about their expense claims?’

The
waiter came out from the café and cleared his throat. ‘Excuse me gentlemen, we
are closing in five minutes.’

Thionville,
France

Anneli
had been almost asleep when she heard the footsteps. She opened her eyes and
saw the outlines of her younger son in the doorway of the dark, quiet bedroom.

‘Mama,
I’ve had a bad dream.’

Anneli
extended her arm and moved over a little, away from the bed’s edge and closer
to her husband. ‘Come here, Matti,’ she whispered. The boy came closer and
crawled in, cuddling up to her. Soon he would grow taller and skinnier, like
his older brother Eric, so Anneli enjoyed it while the cuddly phase lasted. Her
husband was already asleep, and hadn’t woken up from the boy’s crawling into
their bed.

What
a day, Anneli thought. For such a long time she had been solving other people’s
problems. Her boss’s problems at work. Her father’s problems in Finland. And
now all of a sudden they were gone. Even now she barely dared believe that both
burdens had been lifted at almost the same time. And even more burdens than just
those two, in fact.

Yesterday,
on Friday afternoon, Viktor had called her at the office.

She’d
picked up the phone and said, ‘Hello, what is it?’

‘Anneli
it’s me.’

She
hadn’t replied. Viktor hadn’t continued. It had been a long silence. She’d
quietly hoped that Viktor had come to the same conclusion as she’d had.

Finally
Viktor had asked, ‘Do you think we should end it?’

It
had been odd. It had seemed that making this proposal had cost him much greater
courage than entering into their affair to begin with. And Anneli had felt
happier hearing it than she had been even at the start of their romance.

‘Yes
Viktor,’ she’d said. ‘We should.’

There’d
been another silence.

‘Goodbye
Viktor,’ she’d said. ‘I’ll bring the boys to school on Monday, so I’ll see you
there. I will say hello to you, and you will say hello to me, okay?’

There’d
been another pause, then a sigh from Viktor’s end of the line. ‘Yes, okay.
You’re right. Goodbye Anneli.’

She
had hung up, happy like a schoolgirl. She had erased the phone’s call history
and gone to help Ilona move into Boris’s old office. There’d been no need for
her to sit at the very end of the corridor with two empty rooms between her and
the entrance. Ilona hadn’t minded moving into a dead man’s office at all, she
wasn’t like that. They had all misjudged Boris, whatever he’d really been up to
after work. But the puzzlement and discomfort had quickly passed. It was as if
he’d never even worked there at all.

That
was yesterday. A world away. Right now it was dark and quiet, only her son was
wriggling a little in Anneli’s embrace. Soon he’d fall asleep.

And
then earlier tonight there’d been some more uplifting news. Not a phone call,
only an e-mail. The boys had already been fast asleep. Anneli had been checking
her private e-mails on the laptop on the kitchen table while brushing her
teeth. Her husband had been under the shower, not something he normally did in
the evening but something he had felt like doing tonight. And something they
had felt like sharing tonight, in fact. So any checking of e-mails had needed
to be quick.

There
had just been a short message from her father, sent in the afternoon.

My
dear Anneli, I will not ask for your help anymore. They think it was your dead
colleague, please let’s keep it that way. You know nothing, and the donors will
not use my services anymore either. Kisses to you and the boys. Goodbye.

She
had smiled in disbelief, spat out the toothpaste foam into the kitchen sink, turned
off the laptop and hurried to join her husband. The laptop had powered down for
the rest of the night, to sit idly on the kitchen table next to a pile of
papers. The topmost sheet had been the letter she’d received only that morning.

Dear
Ms Villefranche, It is my pleasure to inform you that, on the basis of your
application file and your interview, your candidacy has been accepted. You will
be employed at the European Commission’s department for communication with the
citizens as of 1 June. Please contact me to arrange for a visit before that
date, so we can choose an office for you at our building in the
Luxembourg-Kirchberg district. Kind regards, Louise Chevalier, Head of Unit.