The Last Compromise (4 page)

The
truly local population in this town were old people like his landlady. Retired
peasants, mostly. The rest were commuting to Luxembourg or to Trier or to
somewhere else, and now they’d all be getting ready for dinner like he was. That’s
what the neighbour downstairs was doing, too. But the indigenous locals would
already be sitting at the corner pub right now, getting drunk on regionally
brewed beer and locally produced white wine. Not that it was any more
distinguished than any random type of beer, or any random sort of wine. Zayek
wasn’t much of a drinker himself. He was more of a smoker than a drinker, and
he wasn’t even much of a smoker to begin with. The cigarette pack he’d bought
this morning was still sealed, lying buried deep inside his jacket pocket. The shopping
bag contained no alcoholic beverages, either. It contained pasta, a glass of
tomato sauce, a net with three onions, a cucumber and a bar of chocolate.

Zayek
had long ago switched to what he liked to think of as just-in-time delivery. It
was part of lean production, they had taught him during his studies. Every day
he would only buy supplies that he needed for the evening, either at a
supermarket or at a petrol station with a groceries section. He alternated
between the two, to keep the market forces in balance, even though he knew perfectly
well that he, as a single customer, couldn’t possibly tilt the profit-and-loss
account of either of the two stores in any particular direction.

He
took off his jacket and hung it on the hook that he’d nailed to the wall the
year before. Until then he’d been putting his street clothes on a chair in the living
room.

He
picked up his shopping bag and carried it over to the kitchen, which was about
as small as the hallway. He liked his kitchen a lot, precisely because of its
small size. He had optimised it to his needs. There was one piece of
everything. One flat plate, one soup plate, one small bowl, one glass, one cup,
one fork, one butter knife, one sharp knife, one pan, one pot, and so on. He’d
bought the cutlery, like most of the rest of his furniture and kitchen tools,
at Ikea. The German one near Saarlouis, not the Belgian one across the border
on the other side of Luxembourg. And wherever there had been sets of two or
four or six, he’d taken out one for use and stored the rest in the cupboard. It
was extremely efficient. In case he needed more he was well-equipped, but for
daily use he had one piece of each to handle and hence only one piece of each
to clean afterwards. He didn’t want to waste any more time than was strictly
necessary on cleaning. That was also why his furniture was relatively
minimalistic, so that he could easily wipe the surfaces and reach behind corners
when he was vacuuming the place.

He
washed his hands. He put water from the still running tap in his pot and placed
it on the stove, cut up one of the onions and the cucumber with his sharp knife
while he waited for the water to start boiling. Once it had started boiling he
added salt, grabbed about a third of the contents of the spaghetti package he’d
bought, put them into the water and pushed them down with his spoon. That way
the pasta would be fully submerged, and he didn’t have to break it in half.

About
ten minutes later he poured the water with the cooked spaghetti into his sieve
and put the empty but still hot pot back on the stove. He put in a drop of oil,
threw in the cut onions, and turned the stove down to low heat. A loud sizzle
and the pleasant smell of onions filled the small kitchen. He used his spoon,
which he had just used to drown the pasta in the boiling water, to stir the
onions. A minute later he poured the tomato sauce from the glass into the pot,
and kept stirring. Another minute later he put the spaghetti from the sieve
into the pot and mixed it around until every string was covered in red sauce.
He turned the stove off completely.

He
took his soup plate, his fork and the spoon from the pot and put it all on the
small table in the living room. He returned, filled his glass with water from
the tap, fetched his cork mat and carried both over to the table, too. He
returned again to put the cut cucumber on his flat plate and put it next to the
soup plate. He returned a final time, carried over the pot with the pasta,
placed it on the cork mat, and sat down to eat.

Brilliant,
he thought. Two plates, one fork, one spoon used for several purposes, one
glass, one sharp knife. And the pot, obviously. If he always drank both coffee
and water from a cup, he could even dispense with the glass, he realised.

After
dinner would come the cleaning up, the chocolate and some television. He needed
to keep track of political developments, or at least know what other normally
informed people were expected to know. It would be an otherwise uneventful
evening, he felt it already now. Pornography, whether online or on disks, he
couldn’t permit himself to purchase for understandable reasons. And he wasn’t
seventeen anymore, anyway. So he would watch television, brush his teeth and go
to bed. This was important, he knew. Without a fixed regime, and with no
particular external reason to go to bed at all, he would just stay up all
night, and that would mean he’d be sleepy the next morning. All his work was at
the office, and that’s where he needed to be alert. Again, for understandable
reasons.

Zayek
turned off the television at half past ten, changed, brushed his teeth, went to
the toilet one last time so he wouldn’t have to get up in the middle of the
night, lay down in his bed and turned off the light.

The next morning
Hans’s phone rang just as he had logged into his computer. His plastic cup of relatively
hot coffee was waiting next to it. He had mixed feelings about the morning. Or
rather about the night before. He had talked to Julia on the phone again. Another
long-distance call over internet telephony. It was going well between him and
her, he thought. Well but not great. Maybe even less than well. But the morning
itself was not the problem. The morning was fine.

The
phone rang a second time. The display showed Viktor’s name and his Luxembourg
extension. When Hans made phone calls his number didn’t show up anywhere. Anti-fraud
extensions never did. This fact still gave him a little jolt of satisfaction
every time he thought of it, even though it was probably silly. His mood
brightened nonetheless. He picked up the receiver.

‘Hello
Viktor,’ he said. ‘How’s life at statistics?’

‘I
worked on the train yesterday, and some more at home, when the kids were in bed,’
Viktor said. There was no urgency in his voice. ‘I checked one of the months
when the reported amounts of nuclear material dropped. And two other months at
random, within the same two-year period, as a control group.’ Viktor kept
talking in his calm and steady voice. It didn’t seem to make any difference for
his intonation whether he talked to Hans on the phone or in person. Or which
person he was talking to. Or what the topic was. How did he have a wife, let
alone kids? But Hans didn’t care about that right now, because he knew Viktor
had something to tell. And it wasn’t like Hans himself had any wife, let alone
kids.

‘The
consolidated monthly reports are prepared by the atomic energy department, on
the basis of incoming reports from the national authorities,’ Viktor continued.
‘The incoming reports show the amounts of nuclear material used, and the
occasion of the use, for example a centrifuge running for so-and-so many
seconds, although most of the details are coded in numbers and abbreviations.
They also show the occasions when a planned event was cancelled, and usually
also the reason why. Technical malfunction, delayed delivery, and so on.’

‘And
the Commission’s reports?’

‘The
Commission’s reports only list the amounts actually used, and put the aborted
events in an annex. And here is the news. In the unusual month the annex to the
Commission’s report fails to mention some of the aborted events.’

‘But
the events that took place are still there?’

‘They
are, but some of the aborted ones are not. It’s as if they had never been
planned at all. They just disappear. But only in that month, never in the
control group.’

Hans
said nothing, just breathed into his phone. Viktor didn’t say anything either.

‘So,’
Hans tried to follow up. ‘It could be that certain quantities of let’s say uranium
or whatever go missing, their planned use is reported to the Commission as
cancelled, but the Commission itself pretends that no-one had ever planned
using them to begin with.’

‘This
depends on the interpretation of the data. If this is true, then the following
month the aborted event is not repeated, because the finished low-enriched uranium
targets are already gone. And actual use is back to its normal level.’

‘And
no-one noticed?’

‘We
noticed,’ Viktor replied. Kind as ever. It was Viktor who’d noticed, not the
two of them. ‘But we only looked closely after running a forensic statistical
analysis. Remember, the raw data is spread over thousands of lines over dozens
of columns in hundreds of Excel sheets.’

‘And
you went through all that, during one afternoon and half a night?’

‘Not
through all of it. I took a sample. For one country at random, the Netherlands.
Not entirely random, I just thought of it because your boss is Dutch. So for
only one country out of four unusual ones, out of almost thirty member countries
in total. And only for three months out of twenty-four in the dataset.
Statisticians take samples. Like interviewing a number of people about their
work situation, to calculate the unemployment rate in a whole country.’

Hans
frowned. ‘I thought unemployed people are registered, so the numbers are right
there?’

‘That
only gives you registered unemployment. But not everyone who’s registered is
really looking for a job, and not everyone who’s looking for a job is
registered. You have to ask people, but you cannot ask them all, so you take a
sample.’

Hans
said nothing.

‘I
looked at a sample of the nuclear reports,’ Viktor continued in the same voice,
as if he had not digressed at all. ‘Deeper analysis on a larger dataset would
take more time, and I’m not sure I can do that in the coming days. There’s a
big conference coming up here.’

‘Okay,
but just on the basis of what we have now,’ Hans said. ‘Say it’s true. Who takes
cancelled events from national reports and makes them disappear?’

‘Someone
who’s in charge of consolidating national reports into a Commission report.’

‘The
atomic energy department.’

Viktor
said nothing. Hans put the receiver into his left hand. With his right he moved
the mouse over his desktop to revive his computer screen. He opened the list of
staff at atomic energy. There were over a hundred names on the first page alone.
‘Who could it be specifically,’ he asked Viktor. ‘Someone high up?’

‘This
sort of manipulation, if it is happening, is ground work. If it’s someone high
up, he would probably need the help of someone far down.’

‘Or
it could be someone far down on his own,’ Hans said. ‘Either way, we should
focus on those who handle the actual reports. Administrative support staff.
Then we work our way up from there.’

Viktor
said nothing.

‘Thank
you Viktor,’ Hans said. ‘I’ll look into it. We stay in touch, yes?’

Viktor
hung up. Hans was still holding the receiver to his ear. Clearly Viktor was not
entirely normal, but Hans felt great. He put the receiver down and got to work.
He opened an organisation chart of the atomic energy department, a broad
pyramid of hierarchical cells, and began to look for a place to start. The
coffee was probably no longer drinkable.

Luxembourg

Boris
Zayek was sitting behind his desk, drinking hot chocolate from a plastic cup
that had come out of the machine. He was looking at the computer screen in
front of him. He had just arrived from his daily commute and was getting
started. It had taken him forty minutes, which wasn’t bad. He had thought about
opening his pack of cigarettes, but he hadn’t wanted to smoke in the car.

The
poor souls who lived in France sometimes spent two hours on the clogged
motorway to get to work, even though the French border wasn’t really further
away than the German one. Anneli lived on the French side of the border as
well. No-one in his unit lived in Luxembourg itself. Housing prices here were
unaffordable. The phenomenal salaries of European Union officials were
definitely a thing of the past. The old guard still had them, but for the rest these
were just popular myths. The Commission had difficulty attracting qualified
staff from Britain or Scandinavia, for example, because its entry-grade
salaries were simply not competitive with the private sector’s. Zayek himself wasn’t
starving, but he wasn’t exactly living like a king either, spending a total of up
to two hours every day commuting to and from a rented apartment in a border
village.

‘Hello
Boris,’ Anneli said as she walked past his open office door. Her office was
right next to his. Yes, hello hello.

‘Hi
Anneli!’

He
heard her shuffle around with her coat through their open doors.

‘You
have three new customers!’, he shouted, a friendly notification.

They
had received new reports from the nuclear inspectorates of Portugal, Italy and
Austria, as well as from the Netherlands and Latvia. In his unit they had
divided Europe between them, by drawing thick black lines on a map on the wall
in Anneli’s office. It looked like a board game of territorial conquest. Anneli
handled Southern Europe, in a broad sense. Portugal and Italy were hers, and on
their particular map Austria also counted as South. These were her three new customers.
Zayek did the North, which included the Netherlands and Latvia, and which would
be his own two new customers. Pedro the Spanish guy, two offices down the hall,
did the East. Ilona, the Czech girl, did France. She had her office at the end
of the corridor, beyond it were only the restrooms and the emergency staircase.
The office between Pedro and Ilona was vacant, just a desk and chair, no
computer.

Every
four months their boss would rotate their geographical area, so that no staff
member would get too attached to certain countries over time. A sound measure, Zayek
thought. It hadn’t been their boss’s idea; according to Anneli he had inherited
it from his predecessor. She would know, she’d been here long before any of the
others had arrived. But the country rotation did make sense. Except that, if
there was something urgent coming up, or if one of the colleagues was sick or
on holiday, Zayek could also take care of other countries.

‘Thank
you Boris!’, she answered. She had a smile in her voice.

The
next thing he heard was Ilona coming over to Anneli. Fortunately Ilona had a
loud voice. He understood that they agreed to have lunch together today, and to
skip the coffee because Anneli had a lot of work to do. And right she was, Zayek
thought. He himself had work to do as well.

Cologne,
Germany

Hoffmann
was sitting at the desk, drinking milk from a carton. It wasn’t his own desk,
just a little table in a hotel room, with a laptop attached to a small printer.
He looked out the window. The only thing he saw was a lot of roofs against a
greyish sky. The heavy dark twin spires of the Cologne Cathedral should have
been dominating the view, but they didn’t. There were hardly any places in this
city from which you could actually see them.

He
looked back down to his laptop. They had been to Zayek’s rented apartment in the
border town of Wincheringen, which hadn’t been entirely legitimate because it
was on German territory. They had been to his workplace, which had been more
legitimate because it was abroad. He had seen him at the newsagent’s shop. He had
a summary of his old file from the army, and some material from his later workplace
in Germany. The papers were right there, lying on the bed.

The
man at the wheel had already returned to Berlin in a different car, so Hoffmann
had to wrap it up by himself. If this had been a proper operation they would
have been given proper resources. But it wasn’t. Just a check. Hoffmann hadn’t
even been told who exactly the source was. Instead, he’d been lectured: don’t
provoke the Russians too much unless you really mean it. And we don’t mean it,
not for the moment. And don’t be messing around inside the Commission too much.
German foreign intelligence activity inside the European Commission, the
central apparatus of the European Union of which Germany is itself a member? What
would people say?

Hoffmann
could only hope that the man at the wheel had been wrong about yesterday. About
Zayek, about the queue in the shop. Although he was almost certain that the man
had been wrong about both. Either way, his instructions were clear.

Hoffmann
picked up the phone and dialled a number. He waited, then said, ‘Yes. I think
we’re ready.’

Brussels

Hans
returned from a quick lunch. With Caitlin it would have taken longer, but he
had just needed to stuff his mouth with nutrients and return to his post. He picked
up the phone on his desk and dialled Viktor’s number. A few piles of paper had
accumulated around the phone, and he had to pull the cord around them.
‘Hi Viktor, it’s Hans in Brussels.
Do you have a moment?’

‘Of
course,’ Viktor replied. Hans wasn’t sure whether that was true, because at the
other end of the line there were people talking in the background. Talking, but
not laughing. Some kind of a meeting. But Viktor had said of course, so Hans
felt entitled to ask.

‘Tell
me, just briefly, since you are in Luxembourg, what do you know about the atomic
energy department there? I don’t mean the official stuff, I mean the work
reality.’

‘It’s
not a very attractive place to work,’ Viktor said. ‘It’s at the Commission, but
it’s not in Brussels. It’s in Luxembourg, where no-one wants to live. And
within Luxembourg it’s not here on the Kirchberg plateau, where all the
European institutions are, but in Gasperich, at the opposite end of town. It’s
an office building in the middle of nowhere.’

Hans
thought about the price and quality of coffee in canteens without any
competition from cafés across the street.

‘That’s
what makes it unattractive?’

‘For
people with kids, yes,’ Viktor replied. ‘Our kids go to school right here on
Kirchberg, it’s next door. But if you work in Gasperich and the kids are on
Kirchberg, you first have to commute to school, drop off the children, then drive
to work to Gasperich, then all the way back to pick up the kids, and then back
home again. Either only one parent works, or both work and take turns somehow. The
mother of one of the kids in our daughter’s class works over there. She hates
it. It tires her out.’