The Double Bind of Mr. Rigby (21 page)

‘Something has to be done about the mess here. It is so bad for our image. The whole of Paldiski needs discipline. The trouble is that the government in Tallinn is not interested in this old Russian base, especially when there are still some Russians living here. So … I suppose we shall have to make our own arrangements.’

I thought to myself that once Arne had put his mind to it, this place would look as good as new. We pulled up in front of a pair of doors recently painted dark blue. Next to them on the wall was a notice in three languages, English, Russian and Estonian, which said ‘Myrex Holdings (Research): private’. Lars came round to the back of the car, opened Arne’s passenger door and ushered him out. He then did the same for me. We went through the double doors and Arne showed me into a reception room. The interior of the block was infinitely better appointed and maintained than the outside. The walls were painted in what suburban chic interior decorators would call ‘magnolia’. There was a Persian carpet on the floor that looked authentic. I remembered someone instructing me about patterns woven into the design that would invariably prove that such carpets were genuine. This one looked the real McCoy. There were four leather armchairs and a Middle Eastern upright upholstered bench which could seat four people, three comfortably. On the walls hung, inconsequentially and bizarrely, a portrait of General De Gaulle and cityscapes that I recognised of Seville and Copenhagen. Naturally, I was not surprised about the scene of Seville.

Arne suggested we had some coffee. He stepped towards a telephone on a small occasional table, picked it up and spoke rapidly into it in Estonian. After a minute or two a rather drably dressed girl in a navy blue suit brought in coffee and a bottle of vodka. The old Soviet habits died hard. She looked as though she could have been working as an airhostess on a low-budget internal airline of a central European state. We drank some coffee. Both Arne and I declined the vodka, but Lars poured a measure into his cup. Arne said he would show me what they had set up so far in the Paldiski complex: perhaps, he added, what I saw might encourage me to join them. He was still insistent in his persuasive attempts. He mentioned that later in the day some of the main board directors would be in Paldiski. Raoul was already there but he was not certain who else would arrive. At the mention of Raoul’s name, my heart leapt and my imagination took off. Where would Roxanne be? Would he bring her with him? It was hardly likely that he would have taken her to Paldiski, but, I questioned myself, might he not have left her in Tallinn? What a delight it would be to return to the Gloria and find that she was staying there. More likely she would be at the Italian hotel: that was more Raoul’s style. I brought my mind back to the reality of the present.

Arne explained to me that the series of low buildings were being renovated, the computer labs being upgraded and refitted. Two sections of the spiderweb complex were working fully. He intended that we should look at them. We left the reception room and in it Lars. He was still drinking his coffee. He had poured himself another cup from the jug that had been left on the table. Arne clearly did not intend him to accompany us on our tour. His remaining behind was not instructed: it was understood. Lars knew his place.

Arne and I walked from the reception room down a corridor with a number of doors on either side. It reminded me of a provincial university back in the UK, one of those housed in converted mental asylum buildings or in cheaply constructed concrete-shed architecture of the fifties and sixties. The wall surfaces were painted brick or breezeblock. Economy, Soviet-style, had prevailed in the planning and execution of this development. Arne commented that it would not do for the future. The whole place was going to have a face lift. He had been looking at forecast figures of the profits from their Russian trade. Myrex was scheduled to do well. Somehow Arne’s optimism did not balance with what I saw there in Paldiski. The site was run-down and seedy. It would take years of investment to put things right there. Messing about with computer technology, e-commerce, encryption systems, was not going to produce enhanced profits that could take care of Paldiski’s immediate rehabilitation. Where was the finance coming from?

‘I don’t understand,’ I said to Arne. ‘Where does the money come from for this enterprise? Your resident computer boffins aren’t going to generate the cash for this venture.’

‘Not yet,’ he replied. ‘They will, once we get going. In the meantime, our other interests will subsidise Paldiski. There is more than enough profit coming out of Russia to finance this project. Raoul is a careful investor. He knows what he is doing.’

‘How do you make so much out of Russia?’ I decided to ask a leading question. It had puzzled me for a long time, and I regarded their operations in Russia as highly suspect. To make money out of Russia, any business had to have special blessing from the Russian government, or you had to be involved in organised crime. In Myrex’s case, since I had no evidence of the former and nor did the intelligence service, I concluded Myrex must be connected with the mafia underworld in some way. It would have to be my job to find out what was going on. A good one-way bet was that it would have to do with drugs and then money laundering. So far as I knew, Myrex was well positioned for both activities. It had the contacts, the installations, and the cover as a legitimate international business. Maybe, it occurred to me, the computer labs were just simply a blind, and if my conjecture, rapidly maturing in my mind, were right, then I should keep alert in my tour for evidence. It would also make sense for Raoul to be so keen to have me working for them. I put myself in the place of Raoul and Arne. There I was, known to be an inquisitive reporter and with someone like Willy as a contact. I had to be either neutralised, or suborned to work for Myrex. It made sense. It was no doubt for that reason that Arne was insistent. He avoided an answer to my question by walking briskly ahead of me.

We reached a point where the corridor turned to the right. Arne held open one of a pair of dark blue doors. We entered a long room with four parallel benches running its whole length. There were six men and one woman working at computers. The computers were in various states of existence. Some were skeletal with their inwards showing. The woman was tinkering with a microprocessor board that she appeared to be fitting into a machine. One or two of the others were entirely preoccupied with what was happening on the screens of their monitors. Arne explained to me that they belonged to one of the working labs. We walked through and out of that room into another, and then turned left and went through a series of other disused, unoccupied labs. It was obvious that they were in a similar state to that in which the Russians had left them. Nothing seemed to have been done. They stood derelict.

Arne took me through a number of similar lab rooms. A huge amount of money needed to be spent on the project. In one room that was in the process of being cleared and tidied, Arne spoke to one of the men engaged in the work. He was a native Estonian. To begin with, Arne spoke in Estonian. He then changed to English and introduced me to the man. The Estonian spoke near perfect English and for some time we chatted as Arne talked to some of the other workers in that room. The Estonian explained when I asked him that he had worked for the old Soviet navy as a computer scientist. He had been trained in Helsinki and then in Moscow at a technical laboratory in the outskirts attached to Moscow University. He held a doctorate from Moscow University. So, that was the quality of employee that Myrex was able to employ in Paldiski. It did not surprise me. We knew that the Soviet retreat had left many well-qualified people like the Estonian without any employment whatsoever. He told me how grateful he was for Western investment and development in his country. He saw Myrex as a kind of economic saviour for him and his family and was full of praise for what the corporation was doing. I asked him how long he thought it would be before the Paldiski site was properly put back together again and functioning at full throttle. He thought it would take about three months. He was extremely optimistic and enthusiastic. I thought to myself that if all Myrex’s employees were like this, the firm would flourish in that part of the world.

Arne rejoined me and said that there was not much more to see at present. He suggested we went for a walk outside the Myrex site to look at the state of the rest of Paldiski in the Myrex vicinity. That seemed a good idea but I mentioned my fear that it might be dangerous. Arne told me not to worry and that precautions would be taken. We went back through the lab rooms to the reception room, a warm and hospitable contrast to the largely derelict labs. Lars was not there. Arne summoned the girl who had first met us, spoke rapidly to her and she disappeared into what appeared to be her private office. Some minutes later, Lars returned accompanied by three well-built men in heavy loose-fitting overcoats: two were in their late twenties and the other in his early forties, fit-looking and decidedly tough. I realised immediately that these were our bodyguards for our walking tour. Sure enough, when we went outside and started to walk away from the lab complex, Arne and I were well protected. The three men and Lars took up their positions and hemmed us in: they made up the four angle points of a square, and we were kept inside it. They certainly looked menacing. Nobody was likely to interfere with us. The four of them emanated a ferocious, threatening energy that it was clearly unwise to unleash. They were obviously armed.

So, I felt safe walking round the filthy streets of Paldiski with that escort. There was refuse scattered around and every so often there were piles or smears of dog excrement frozen by the sub-zero temperature. The only cleaning that the streets of Paldiski received was from wind and rain.  

Anyone we encountered in those dismal streets gave us a wide berth. When they saw us coming, groups of two or three people would cross to the other side of the street, and watch us sullenly. They were used to the phenomenon and were wary. Our minders did not look particularly thuggish or brutal, just tough, not to be argued with, and gave an impression of immediate violent response if opposed. They looked more like fit, young, American football players than gangster hoods who operated on hair-trigger control.

At the foot of external stairwells, small groups of men stood and smoked cigarettes, muffled in old coats, some ex-naval greatcoats. It was the same there in Paldiski as in Russia itself, ex-military personnel seemed to have been left behind, still dressed in the remnants of their uniforms. Moscow, indeed the whole of Russia, was full of what seemed to be a second-hand army, individuals in ill-kempt greatcoats and caps, some selling cigarettes and matches, some just begging. We came to a part of a street that seemed to provide shops of a poor sort. Steel shutters presented shop fronts. They either covered the remains of glass windows or stood in for those shattered windows. They were lifted halfway up where the entrances were, and most of the goods were in boxes on the pavement outside. Food, cabbages in their crates, potatoes in sacks, carrots in boxes, all stood on the sidewalk. Boxes of cheap clothes, shirts, women’s and men’s underwear, tights, cheap shoes and boots, rails of coats and trousers, were lined up outside another steel-fronted shop. Paldiski provided subsistence living. It contrasted vividly with prosperous Tallinn. It was a Baltic sink: nobody wanted to know about it. The Soviets had airbrushed it out of the picture. The Estonians preferred to keep it that way.

Paldiski could hardly be called a town. It was, or rather had been, entirely functional. It had existed specifically for the Soviet navy. Now it held on to life by virtue of the few remaining Russians left over and living there. Yet I detected from what Arne said that Myrex had great plans for that desolate settlement. It occurred to me that they could smarten up the place and convert it into a modern privately run town that existed just for Myrex: a privately run computer equivalent of the old Cold War naval base. Perhaps they would even change its name from Paldiski to Myrex. Certainly Myrex had plans for a huge area of the town close to the complex they were developing. Arne explained to me how buildings would be razed, landscaping effected, gardens planted. He saw the possibility of that site as the Baltic headquarters of the corporation, in summer attractive for clients to visit, close to the old city of Tallinn, and en route for Helsinki and St Petersburg. Arne was decidedly one of the people in Myrex with a grand vision of the future.

As we walked round, and eventually took a minor street down across the main road towards the waterfront, a subdued but gently nagging worry surfaced in my mind. I wondered about Mark. Why had I not heard from him? I had left a couple of messages on his voicemail. I did not know where he was. He was supposed to be keeping close watch on me. I was very unsure that he was aware of where I was. I had told him that I was going to Paldiski with Arne, but had he taken it in? I hoped so. We crossed down to the seafront, and as we did so, a large black Mercedes with smoked-glass windows coming from the direction of Tallinn drove at high speed towards the Myrex complex. In the distance I watched it come to an abrupt halt. As soon as it was stationary, the front passenger door opened and a man, clearly trained in escort duties, emerged swiftly and moved to the rear. He opened the kerb-side door and what looked like a hooded figure was assisted out, followed by another dark-suited escort. I could not quite make out what was covering the person’s head and obscuring the face. Pinning the man firmly by the arms, the trio disappeared inside the building. The car drew away and disappeared behind the spider complex of the labs. Naturally, that did nothing to set at rest my increasing nervousness. Was I mistaken? Was the figure hooded? I judged it imprudent to ask Arne what was happening; but there was no doubt he had seen the arrival. His brow had momentarily furrowed in annoyance.

We continued to the beach. We stood on the stones and sand with a bitterly cold wind blowing off the sea and looked both ways along the expanse of the promenade. It was bleak: concrete road, functional for the movement of military vehicles and goods. Inland, the prospect was of decaying concrete offices, workshops and laboratories. I wished desperately that the day was over and that I was back in Tallinn at the Gloria. I little realised then what was in store for me.