The Last Compromise (3 page)

Hoffmann
looked out the window on the passenger’s side, watching the grey sky and the woods
and the fields and the power lines next to the motorway as they raced back to
base.

Hans returned to
his office. He had just said goodbye to Viktor and seen him to the elevator.
There’d been a handshake, but it had been somehow bungled and awkward. Either
way, Viktor had left the Brussels anti-fraud building with his black rectangular
bag containing his return ticket to Luxembourg and his laptop that was now full
of raw data.

Getting
the raw data had been relatively easy, because the IT unit within anti-fraud
could grant access to all work-related virtual computer drives within the
Commission. Unlike access to personnel records or other semi-private data, this
didn’t even have to be approved by a director. Together Hans and Viktor had
clicked themselves through the atomic energy drives and folders, and had found
a treasure chest of reports sorted by month and by country. They hadn’t had
anyone from atomic energy itself to explain it, because Hans had preferred not
to alert them to their little probe. They may have felt like they were being
investigated, which they weren’t. Not yet. In any case Hans and Viktor had
found what they’d needed on their own.

Without
closing his office door, Hans took out his keys and opened the steel filing
cabinet to take stock of his open cases. There were cardboard boxes and stacks
of paper, clustered together to represent the hardcopy versions of the
accumulated material from various ongoing investigations. The new nuclear
dossier was definitely the hottest of them all. The star of the cabinet, as it
were.

Not
that the other cases were trivial or boring. They were just in different stages
of ripeness. There was the director in a policy department on consumer safety,
for instance. The department was charged with drafting common standards, so
that manufacturers could comply with just one set of safety regulations for the
whole European Union, rather than with over two dozen different national
standards. Not easy if every European country has its own ideas about what’s
necessary and what’s not. But that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that the
director had hired a consultant who was also her nephew, without disclosing the
family link. A secretary had blown the whistle. From the personnel records Hans
knew that the consultant’s last name was also the director’s maiden name, and
that both had been born in the same city. He also had the details of the
parents of both persons, because they were also included in the record. To have
definitive proof, all he had to do was request, with Tienhoven’s approval, the birth
certificates of the consultant’s parents. If even one of the grandparents was
the same as one of the director’s parents, Hans would wrap it up and recommend
questioning the two: the nephew as a witness, the aunt as a suspect. Hiring
relatives was unethical but not in itself illegal. Hiding a conflict of
interests was.

Another
one was the port authority in Estonia. The port of Tallinn had received European
funding to expand the harbour and dig deeper approaches for heavier cargo
vessels. What was suspicious was the fact that six out of seven works contracts
so far had been awarded to the same construction company. A competitor had
complained to the Commission, and anti-fraud had considered itself empowered to
investigate since the European Union’s financial interests were at stake. The
Commission was co-financing after all. Hans still needed to work through the
files to see the reasons why the other companies’ bids had been rejected, even
though in some cases their prices had even been lower than the winner’s. He had
already done about half. Some of the reasons were fishy, he pardoned his pun.
There were no direct links between the port’s project leader and the company as
far as Hans could tell, but there could be indirect links, mutual interests. Or
it could be simple corruption. All those were harder to detect.

‘Hi
Hans.’ Her familiar friendly voice came from the corridor. ‘How are your
statistics coming along?’ Caitlin from the money-laundering investigation unit
stood in his doorway.

‘Hi
Caitlin, yes, great, maybe I’ll find some gangsters and put them in prison.’

‘Maybe
they’ll try to bribe you at last.’

‘It
would be about time,’ Hans said. ‘I’m here for three years, and nobody has
offered me any bribes yet. What’s wrong with this place?’

‘Exactly.
Why did you even come here. Afternoon coffee later?’

Hans
took out his mobile phone to check the time. He had gotten used to not wearing
a wristwatch.

‘Twenty
minutes?’, he proposed.

‘I’ll
stop by to pick you up.’

She
left. Caitlin was a few years older than Hans. She had a son, an Irish husband,
a relatively common English last name, and a Gaelic version of that same name
that Hans had learned to pronounce quite well. To Hans she compensated for a
lot of the seriousness that was surrounding him. Yes, coffee, absolutely.

Hans
returned to his open cases in the cabinet in front of him. A similar but rather
less complicated case than the Estonian contract fraud was the embezzlement in Portugal.
A rural town had obtained European development money to build roads that didn’t
exist. It looked like they had covered existing roads with a cheap layer of
asphalt and redesignated them with a new number, keeping the rest of the money for
themselves. The written documentation was almost ready. At anti-fraud they
still hadn’t decided whether they should hand it over to the Portuguese police
completely, or whether they should go and investigate it themselves with local
assistance. Hans preferred an on-the-spot inspection, arriving in a convoy of
cars to check the tarmac and question the mayor right there, in his own city
hall. Telling his secretary to please give them some privacy, to close the
door, and not to put through any phone calls, thank you. How cool would that
be? Very.

There
were some smaller dossiers and a few preliminary cases to determine whether a
full investigation was even necessary or not. But the nuclear fraud case was
definitely the one that would bump the others down the list of priorities once
it would really get going. Now Hans would finish up the director and her
nephew, and then continue on Estonia and Portugal while he waited for news from
Viktor about the atomic affair. Portugal first. True, in Estonia contracts were
still being awarded while the Portuguese roads wouldn’t go anywhere. But
Portugal would be ready for the next stage very soon, while Estonia required a
few more weeks, and it would have been a shame to let Portugal wait even though
it was almost ripe. Hans took out the aunt-and-nephew file, put it on his desk
and locked the cabinet.

***

‘Ready
to go?’

Hans
nodded enthusiastically, locked the file in his cabinet, and followed Caitlin
outside. They took the stairs, not the elevator, down to the third floor, and
entered the cafeteria. At the counter Hans bought them a cup of coffee each
because last time Caitlin had paid for the two of them.

They
took their cups and sat down at a small table for two at the wall. The tables
at the windows were all taken, but there wasn’t much to see outside anyway,
here on the lower floors. Just the windows of the office buildings across the
street, which were partly reflecting the grey sky over Brussels.

The
caterer holding the cafeteria concession in their building did a decent job.
The coffee was good and not overpriced. The firm certainly knew that there were
dozens of cafés just around the corner, so the competition kept standards up.
It must be tougher in cafeterias in the middle of nowhere, Hans thought. These
were market forces, and the occupants of the Commission’s anti-fraud building were
fortunate to be at the good end of a deal where it actually worked.

‘How
are the casinos doing?’, Hans asked, holding his cup in his hand.

‘Making
money, what else,’ Caitlin said. Caitlin was going after casinos which held a
state license or a monopoly on gambling in seven different European countries.
The idea of money laundering was always the same, though. The mafioso comes to
the casino with three million dirty euros, loses a third at the blackjack
table, and comes out with two million clean euros. Look what I just won.

‘Are
they cooperating?’

‘The
casinos, yes,’ Caitlin said. ‘Most of them, most of the time. It’s not their
fault, really. Apart from the fact that they’re casinos to begin with.’

The
casinos themselves were a purely national matter, to the extent that purely
national matters still existed within the European Union. But if proceeds of
fraud affecting the European Union’s financial interests were being laundered,
then the Commission had a stake. That’s what the Commission argued, anyway.

‘I
should check it out for myself, though,’ Caitlin said, putting her coffee cup back
down for the moment. ‘You know, an on-the-spot inspection at the roulette
table. To get into it, get a feel for it.’

‘Take
the corporate credit card,’ Hans said. ‘Declare it as travel expenses.’

‘My
thoughts exactly. The name is Bond, I am with my friend, the European taxpayer,
it’s all right.’

‘Credit
limit: not applicable.’

‘It’s
what the banks did, why not me. Are you going home for Easter?’

Yes,
the banks had surely plundered the European taxpayer. Hans knew it wasn’t that
easy, though, and Caitlin knew it, too. The taxpayer couldn’t have been
completely innocent for all those years of happiness on borrowed money. Still,
one way or the other, now there were youth protests all over the news.
Unemployment was up again.

‘Not
sure if I can make it,’ Hans said. ‘Julia won’t be there. I might go see my
parents, though. And a few dozen of my brothers and cousins. You?’

‘Going
to church at his parents’ place in Dublin, as usual.’

‘See,
I’m a Nordic guy. We work and then we die. No time for church.’

‘You
just want to go to hell on purpose, for the kinky pleasures.’

‘It’s
just a little rough, I’m told.’

Caitlin
was again holding her cup against her lips, a smile in her eyes. As usual, Hans
had to remember to sip his own coffee before it went completely cold.

Saint
Petersburg, Russia

Pavel
stood at the window. It was slowly getting dark outside. The cold air, the
exhaust fumes, the crowd, the cars with the brown mud sticking to their sides,
all these things were outside. The cold and the noise and the dirt. In here it
was warm and quiet. The giant black eagle with its red beak and red claws was unflinchingly
blocking the view from the window to the left. They had already turned on a
lamp attached to the outside masonry to illuminate the fabric. To the right the
view of the trees on the boulevard and of the buildings across the street was
clear. There, too, they had begun turning on the lights in some of the windows.

Pavel
tried to relax his lips. It’s wasn’t easy. The pressure on his lips made him
look immensely tense and focused, but the effect was actually meant to go the
other way. It helped him, it physically forced him to concentrate. Yet he knew that
he also had to relax the lips at least sometimes, or at some point it wouldn’t
work anymore.

He
turned around. The gentleman from the consulate had come back and brought him
another cup of tea. Hot black tea in a glass, held by a metal
podstakannik
,
a tea glass holder with a metal handle on the side so you could lift up the
glass without burning your fingers. And a metal saucer with some strawberry
jam, a metal teaspoon stuck into it. The gentleman put it on the low table in
front of the sofa, next to the empty glass and the empty saucer from before.
Russians sweetened their tea with jam, not with sugar. And they drank it from
glasses, not from cups. That was what the German consular staff wanted to
believe, apparently. They were adopting some local customs while posted in this
country.

‘I
will come back in, let us say, two hours?’, the man said. He had a soft voice.

‘When
can I leave?’, Pavel asked.

‘You
can leave whenever you wish,’ the man replied, slightly raising the corners of
his mouth. ‘You understand that it was you who came to us.’

‘I
meant when can I leave the country.’

‘I
am sorry about your situation,’ he replied, this time without raising the
corners of his mouth, but still as softly as before. ‘You can leave at any
moment. You are a visitor. A visitor is not a prisoner.’ He placed the empty
tea glass on the empty saucer, took it into his right hand, stood upright again
and continued. ‘But a visitor is not the same thing as a
guest
. You
might leave the country as a guest of our consulate. We are currently finding
out whether this is possible. What you said about this gentleman in Luxembourg
needs to be verified. In the meantime, you are a visitor.’

He
turned around, walked out with the empty glass and saucer, and softly closed
the door behind him with his free left hand.

Wincheringen,
Germany

Boris
Zayek put the plastic shopping bag down, turned on the light in the small
hallway and closed the door behind him. He had just come back to the tiny German
border town on the river Mosel from which he was commuting every day. It was
dark outside. He lived on the top floor in a small three-storey building with
one apartment on each floor. The landlady lived on the ground floor.