The Last Compromise (17 page)

‘What
happened?’

‘Nothing.
I want to see her. It’s Thursday night, I’ll take the day off tomorrow. It’s
just three hours by car. You’re on your way here you said?’

‘I’m
getting a lift. I’ll be in Brussels in maybe one hour.’

‘Well
perfect. They now closed the last street around our building for works, and
reopened another one, but only in one direction. It’s a maze. I’ll just meet
you at your building, in an hour. I’ll wait for you in the car, it’s still the
rusty white one.’

Tienhoven’s
secretary had said that the boss wouldn’t be in the office until the next
morning anyway, certainly not after having suffered a heart attack. And Hans
didn’t feel like sitting around at home now.

‘All
right,’ he said. ‘See you then, Siim.’

‘A
long weekend by the stormy sea. And I’ll still have all night, if you catch my
drift.’

Hans
touched the screen. A warning appeared that battery death was imminent. He handed
the phone back to Viktor and said, ‘That was someone from Brussels. He’ll meet
me at the anti-fraud building. I can tell you how to get there, so far you
always came by train, I believe.’

Viktor
didn’t reply.

‘Thank
you Viktor,’ Hans added. ‘I really appreciate this.’

Brussels

Anatoly
Slavkin was a thin young man with a pale face. Not the most imposing character
physically, certainly not when he was sitting in a low chair behind a large and
empty wooden table with intricate carving. But he knew that there was a reason
why he was posted here. He, and not the hundreds of others who had wanted a
posting at an embassy in Western Europe. He, and not the thousands of others
who had applied for the academy. He was better than the others, and the others
were worse. There was nothing heart-breaking about it. Not about the
competition, not about his posting. It was life, no-one had promised it would
be pleasant for everyone. Or for anyone, in fact. Now he was where he was, and
there was a phone ringing. His job included picking up this particular phone,
during this particular late afternoon. So he did his job. He lifted the phone,
an apparatus with a landline cord, from a chest next to the table and placed it
on the heavy wooden table top. Then he hummed, because he knew that it worked
better to prepare his voice than clearing his throat. Then he picked up the
receiver and said, ‘Da, slushayu vas.’

‘This
is Pavel. Here are the numbers.’

Pavel
quoted a sequence of numbers, which Slavkin confirmed were correct.

Then
Pavel continued. ‘A man wearing glasses will bring another man who’s around
thirty to the Commission’s anti-fraud department in about one hour from now.
Red Volkswagen Shahran, Luxembourg, CP 4478.’

‘I
can walk around and wait there, but the moment I leave the embassy the Belgians
or Americans will shadow me.’

‘Yes,
you are very important, you moron.’

‘It’s
the same in every embassy in Europe these days.’

Slavkin
listened quietly for another twenty seconds. Then he put the receiver back
down, and recorded the event in his log. The anti-fraud building was in the European
quarter, about five kilometres from the embassy. Time to wake up the driver.
The man had been around when there had still been pictures of Lenin on the walls.
Now the lazy bastard should work a little for his salary.

It was almost completely
dark outside when Viktor and Hans arrived at the anti-fraud building. Hans saw Siim’s
more or less white car waiting on the other side of the street, illuminated by
a street lantern.

‘Thanks
again,’ Hans said to Viktor. He felt that shaking hands would lead to
awkwardness. Viktor didn’t seem to mind. He said nothing.

Hans
got out and crossed the street. He waved Siim hello as he approached his car
and went around to the passenger’s side. As he got in he saw Viktor’s red
family van leave. Hans closed the door with a not entirely healthy sound of
metal on metal.

‘Ready
to go?’, Siim said as he started the noisy engine. The car coughed and roared
as it started moving. There was a metallic clonk near the rear wheel on Hans’s
side. Siim listened for a second, then shifted to second gear. The tyres were
all right, and the engine’s coughing got better in third gear. The car’s
interior was as messy as Hans had remembered it from last time. There was a
package of cookies lying on the floor on the passenger’s side. Hans didn’t want
to trample them to crumbs, so he took them and put them on the floor in the
back.

‘So
tell me what happened,’ Siim asked as he steered his car into the lane leading
to the motorway that would take them out of Brussels and north towards the Netherlands.
‘Or should we talk women and football first?’

‘Women
and football, in that order,’ Hans said. He wasn’t even kidding. He could use a
little distraction, and Siim was very good at these things.

‘Come
on, there was an explosion and someone died,’ Siim protested. ‘Who was it?’

Siim
was right. He was doing Hans a favour here by giving him a lift. Not entirely
selflessly, since he was also flying on the wings of love to his not-quite-yet
fiancée Clarissa, but it was a favour nonetheless. And Hans needed fresh input.

So
Hans said, ‘The man who died was a Commission employee at atomic energy. I
don’t know exactly how he died, he was probably killed.’

‘What
was the explosion?’

‘His
head exploded.’

‘Whoa.’

‘And
he may have been a Russian agent.’

‘A
Russian spy? In the Commission?’, Siim asked incredulously.

‘What,
you think the Commission is so secure that a spy could never infiltrate?’

‘No,
it’s just such an improbable target. What were they hoping to steal? The top
secret drafts of next month’s fishing quotas? Or the calculation of next year’s
milk subsidies? Or my extremely sensitive railway plans, destroy after reading?’

‘One
thought I had was that the Russians put him on the reserve list, without
knowing where in the Commission he would end up,’ Hans replied. ‘And the place
where he did end up is not entirely harmless. They process reports about the
use of nuclear material in the member countries. That’s what I used your phone
for yesterday morning, to check out which unit was in charge of this.’

Siim
changed lanes again to stay on the correct motorway. North via Antwerp,
Utrecht, past Amsterdam, and up along the North Sea coast to the northern tip
of the landmass.

‘So
what would the Russians do with nuclear reports?’, Siim asked.

‘Falsify
them. To hide uranium disappearing.’

‘Why?’

‘Indeed,
why,’ Hans said. ‘If you were the Russians, what would you do with stolen
uranium?’

Siim
thought for a few moments as he overtook another car. The third within two minutes.
He was a more dynamic driver than Viktor, even though this car probably could
use some rest. Or replacement.

Siim
said, ‘I guess they have enough uranium of their own, so they’d only use stolen
one to make it deniable.’

Hans
nodded.

Siim
continued, ‘And then they could do some mischief. Drive a wedge between one
country and another. Is that why you want to talk to Clarissa? Have they stolen
uranium from Petten?’

Hans
shrugged. ‘They stole it in four different countries, at least planned uranium
use has been cancelled in four, a couple of times. In Holland, yes, but also in
Poland for example. Wait.’ He took out Viktor’s Excel sheet about the
Netherlands. ‘JRC-PRR, is that it?’

Siim
nodded. ‘Joint Research Centre, Petten Research Reactor. That’s where she is.’

‘Shit,
I could have asked her right away.’ Hans folded the sheet and put it back in
his jacket pocket.

‘Don’t
worry,’ Siim said. ‘You’ll see her soon enough.’

Hans
exhaled. He had lost time, although it wasn’t clear what exactly he could have
used it for earlier.

‘Yes,
Clarissa might know more,’ Hans said finally. ‘Plus, I don’t know enough about
what else they could do with stolen uranium. Like threaten their neighbours?’

Now
it was Siim who shrugged. ‘They have more than enough tanks to threaten their
neighbours. But if it’s supposed to be deniable… Sponsor separatists? Or help
them in some way?’

The
engine’s roar became worrying as Siim accelerated again to overtake two more
cars in one go.

‘Separatists.
In the old Soviet republics,’ Hans said, thinking aloud.

‘They
aren’t necessarily separatists until they’re activated,’ Siim said. ‘They are
Russian-speakers who’ve more or less always lived there. You know how it works.
There is a movement demanding a separate province, or a separate country for
the Russian-speaking population. For many Russians the breakup of the Soviet
Union feels like an extended practical joke, they are sort of waiting for
things to go back to normal. And so once the militias or whatever have their
province, they’ll plead Moscow to please attach them to Russia proper. Russia doesn’t
send any tanks. At least no tanks with the Russian flag on it. At least not in
the beginning. In the beginning it’s all mysterious local volunteer activists
with surprisingly modern weaponry.’

Hans
knew what Siim was talking about, of course. But he was also thinking of
potentially new theatres of conflict.

‘You’re
thinking about Estonia,’ Siim said. ‘We’re a bit different, I think. I hope.’

Another
noisy acceleration. He was really pushing it to the extreme.

‘How
exactly are we different?’, Hans wondered. ‘A quarter of our population defines
itself as Russian-speaking. Many of them are feeling like a minority trapped in
a foreign country through no fault of their own. Like you said, a practical
joke.’

‘Narva
on the border, you think that’s our Crimea? The chunk Moscow will want to have?’

‘It’s
the whole NorthEast.’

‘Well,
we are inside NATO already. And that’s the big difference. They now even have a
proper contingency plan in case we’re invaded. All our training in the army may
pay off after all.’

Hans
thought back to the hiking in the woods. Estonian military doctrine was
basically to deter casual incursions, and otherwise to hold out and buy time
until allies arrived, if there were any. Hence all the hiking and the camping and
the minelaying and grenade-lobbing in forests and swamps. Slow the Russians
down, ambush them, disrupt their communication lines.

The
Russians. A strange word. Normally this meant the Russian leadership, or
authorities, or their army, not the sum of all individual Russian people. Like
the British meant the government, or a particular British agency, not every
single Briton. But where lay the distinction?

Hans
thought about his grandmother, the Russian one. An exceptionally kind woman.
Thanks to her he still spoke the language a little. Not much, but at least he
didn’t make the typical Estonian’s mistakes. A Russian noun could be either a
he, a she, or an it. In Estonian nouns didn’t have any gender, so Estonians
were known for picking just any random gender when speaking Russian. There were
plenty of jokes about Estonian men using the feminine form when talking about
themselves, which to Russian ears made them sound like transvestites. Hans
spoke correctly in that respect. In addition, when they were old enough, his
grandmother had taught Hans and his older brothers Russians swearwords, and the
proper way of pronouncing them so that they sounded convincing.

But
that had come later. When they’d been smaller she had read stories to him and
Lennart. And Margus before them, but he had been too old for stories at some
point. Anyway, there’d been lots of stories, lasting for hours. Hans and
Lennart had been read to together, Hans remembered. Their grandmother had
covered the Soviet children’s classics, of course. About the talking crocodile
in the city. About the doctor who flew on the back of an eagle to heal the
monkeys of their belly ache, and who then hijacked a pirate ship. Or about the generous
fly who was almost eaten by a spider and then married a brave mosquito.

And
there’d been the Russian fairy tales, full of recurring magical characters in
ever-changing combinations. His favourite had been about Prince Ivan on his
horse at the crossroads, reading the inscription on the stone: he who goes
straight ahead will be cold and hungry; he who goes to the right will be alive
and well but his horse will be dead; he who goes to the left will die himself but
his horse will live. Hans had loved it.

‘Have
you met someone new in Brussels yet?’, Siim asked. He probably now thought that
Hans could use a little distraction, so the topic should change from
geopolitics to women. But now Hans didn’t want to be distracted anymore. He
wasn’t done thinking yet.

The
same kind grandmother would become very outspoken when it came to geopolitics, certainly
after the end of communism and the breakup of the Soviet Union. That was also
when Hans was becoming old enough to follow such adult conversations at the
kitchen table. People in the West are only watching the news from the West, she
would say. They should see it from Russia’s perspective, for once. The country
is huge, but it’s mostly Siberia, where no-one lives. The cities are crowded on
the edges. Just look at Leningrad. She would never stop calling it Leningrad,
even after they had changed it back to Saint Petersburg. The Finnish border is
just outside the city limits, she would say. Just outside our second city,
imagine. She had lived most of her life in Estonia, and the country had been
independent again for a few years already. But to her the second city was not
Tartu right after Tallinn. It was Leningrad right after Moscow.

The
Finnish border used to be even closer, good thing we pushed it back a little,
she believed. That pushing back a little was basically a land grab by Stalin,
their father had once objected. A bloody carnage at minus thirty degrees or
worse. The Finns suffered and paid dearly, while the corpses of Russian
soldiers kept piling up in the snow at alarmingly high rates. They couldn’t dig
the usual ditches to throw them all in, because the soil had frozen solid. And
the death rates weren’t even all that alarming to the Soviets, he had added,
because they didn’t care about conditions for their own troops. That’s why they
had started the war in the middle of the bloody winter, it was sheer
callousness and indifference.

It
was the only time Hans remembered his father discussing politics with his
mother-in-law. One of the very few times he had seen him agitated, in fact. The
rebuttal had followed swiftly, in the form of a sharp reminder of the siege of
Leningrad. When Hitler invaded, the Finns used the opportunity to get their
strip of land back. They advanced to their old border, which they had been
forced to leave a year earlier, but this then cut off Leningrad from the north
during the German siege. Hans’s grandmother’s older sisters had starved to
death inside the city. When the tide of the war turned, the Soviets pushed the
Finns back again to their previous and now current border line. Hitler killed
one person in every Russian family, she had said. One or more. Or in fact the
whole family. Having enough land between yourself and your neighbours is not a
matter of prestige, it is a question of life and death. To her sisters the lack
of it had meant death.

Siim
was still waiting for an answer. ‘You know where I’ve been all day,’ Hans said,
in reply to his question. ‘In Luxembourg, and I didn’t hang around in bars to
chat up women.’

It
was again, still, always the geopolitics. Look at the map. All we have are land
borders, she had said to Hans and Lennart once. There are no proper seas. And where
there are seas, we have no proper navy ports. They either freeze in winter, or
they are right next to someone else’s border. It’s easy for the Americans to
lecture us. They have a big army, lots of money, an ocean to the left and an
ocean to the right. Just imagine if right behind Los Angeles came not the ocean
but the Chinese border. Who would lecture whom then? The Americans should swap
places with the Russians and live here for a century or just a decade, she had
said. And then we would sit in Florida and lecture them about how they should
deal with their neighbours. What would they say then? Obviously they would tell
us to shut up and go to the sauna. ‘Go to the sauna’ was a child-friendly
version of a much stronger Russian expression. His grandmother never swore in
ordinary speech.

‘Forget
bars,’ Siim insisted. ‘Think translators. A lot of our translators work in
Luxembourg. They are just typing stuff all day, and it doesn’t matter where
exactly they do that. So they put them in Luxembourg. Many highly qualified
young women, I understand. They pass the translators’ job competition and wait
for some other vacancy to open up.’