The Next Stop

by Dimitris Politis

  As soon as he set foot in the room, Keith felt out of his depth. He was not used to this office, nor to meeting her tête-à-tête. There were other meeting places for staff. Although he headed a small department, his fairly comfortable office bore no resemblance to this one. He was startled by the stylish luxury, the open space and simplicity. Yet, he was also impressed by the absolute tranquility of the place, how calm and orderly everything appeared. In spite of her astonishing workload and much responsibility and power, nothing in her office betrayed the smallest hint of pressure or stress.

  “Good evening, Mr. MacFarland,” she greeted him, raising her eyes from the single open file decorating the otherwise empty polished expanse of her desk.

  “Good evening to you. May I disturb you for a moment? It’s about something strictly confidential,” he asked her as he paused, a little awkwardly, a few steps away. “I’ll try to keep it brief. I won’t keep you long.”

  She had understood at once that it was serious. Her first response was silence. She tipped her head back and looked at him, severe grey-blue eyes fixed on him with curiosity. He looked right back at her eyes, partially camouflaged behind her silver-framed half-glasses, recognising the straightforward and clear gaze of a responsible person who deserved his trust. This gave him courage. His decision to meet her seemed validated.

  “Come in, sit down,” she said and indicated a huge black leather chair on the other side of her desk. Keith lowered himself uncomfortably to the edge of it as though he were sitting on nails. Unintentionally, his eyes fell on her impressive breasts, half covered by a light woolen pullover with a deeply plunging neckline revealing a generous section of splendid bosom. He suddenly realised with horror where his gaze had rested and dragged it hastily down to the gleaming surface of her desk where she had folded her hands.

  “The matter is so serious,” he faltered, “that I didn’t make an official appointment through your secretary according to protocol... I, er, honestly don’t know where to start,” he went on, then thought it would be better to get right to the point. Just speak to her frankly and state the facts as they happened, he thought. He took a deep breath and began. “Last evening, when I was looking for something in the electronic files of our department, I accidentally ran across a rather peculiar document.”

  Her eyes sharpened with interest. “Exactly what do you mean, ‘peculiar’?” she asked, emphasising each syllable.

  He explained what he had found and where. “I think that I’ll have to make it official, because it amounts to a very serious offence, but before doing anything, I wanted to talk to someone higher up in the service. That’s why I thought I should tell you about it first. As you know, this could cost the man his job and do irreparable damage to the name and reputation of the whole of the European Commission. If a journalist gets hold of it, the scandal could be bloody awful and, well, think of the consequences.”

  Anna looked at him with complete concentration. “And you picked me? You did very well,” she concluded in her pleasant but severe voice, and her official authoritative tone was somewhat softened.

  “I don’t know if you already knew anything about this, or if Mr. Weller has already told you about it.” Helmut Weller was Keith’s former supervisor. A youngish, ambitious German, he played mediator between the strict hierarchy of the European Commission and Aggerblad. With his administrative and diplomatic skills and incredible energy, Helmut had already managed to become second in command to the Swedish director of the service. He was extremely demanding of colleagues and subordinates, but even harder on himself; he had won the admiration and esteem of most of his department, including Keith. Most important was that, in addition to his hard work, he had often shown that his austere façade of a courteous but distant bureaucrat concealed a man of human sensitivity and genuine feeling.

  Keith trusted him, but feared that he might not react coolly to such a report. The last thing needed when facing such a situation was panic. Besides, Helmut was out of the office on leave, gone with his wife to Africa to arrange the adoption of a baby boy. Keith had judged that he had best see Anna now rather than await his return.

  “Helmut is already aware of the existence of this memo” said Anna calmly.

  Keith stared at her, open-mouthed. This was a hell of a note! It threw his thoughts into turmoil. He gazed at her as he tried to take this on board. She already knew! There was no reason to doubt it. He firmly believed in her blameless ethics and integrity of character. He swallowed. “So... er... what do you think we should do in such a case?” he asked in a low voice and leaned conspiratorially towards her. “What did you and Helmut intend?”

  “And just what do you intend to do?” she fired back abruptly without offering an answer.

  This disconcerted him further. Keith had expected none of this; it was not very encouraging: on the contrary. “I was thinking of notifying the Fraud Squad… isn’t it required? I think it says so in the regulations...” he continued unsteadily, but before he had completed his sentence, the director interrupted him again.

  “I think it would be better to do nothing at present. I will ask you to have a little patience and wait. Helmut will be back at the beginning of next week and we’ll discuss it then. I’ll keep you posted, I promise. That particular commissioner is a politician with great impact inside and outside of his country, very likely to run for president in the next elections in a few weeks. The matter is extremely delicate and the balance to be observed is… tricky. We must be equally delicate and extremely careful how we handle this case. There’s no need to rush into action and create a diplomatic problem or scandal unnecessarily.”

  Keith was even more taken aback. Aggerblad’s attitude was almost opposite to what he had expected. “B-b-but don’t we have to do something right away?” he dared argue. “The staff rules say...”

  “As I said, we have to be very careful; I didn’t say to forget the matter or to cover it up. I merely ask that you trust us and be a little patient,” she interrupted again, clearly growing irritated. Obviously, continuing this discussion and any persistence on his part would merely serve to annoy her further. She wanted to get rid of him as soon as possible. “We will talk about this next week as I told you. Just be a little patient and wait until then. Thank you very much for the confidence you showed in coming straight to me. I appreciate that especially.” Her words were rapidly spoken as she rose from her chair, giving him to understand that the discussion was closed.

  There was no room to insist. Numb and disappointed, he stumbled reluctantly to the door, pausing as if to say something but changing his mind. He moved on and shut the door of her office behind him without even the normal ‘have a nice evening’.

  He was not at all satisfied. In fact, her peculiar reaction had aroused his suspicions and made him even more determined to investigate the matter himself and dig up what exactly was going on. He had certainly not received the support he had anticipated, nor the slightest encouragement to go on and somehow solve the riddle of the mysterious document. He trudged down the long corridor back to his office. His first act was to quickly lock the door behind him and dash to his computer for another look at the mysterious document.

  Not altogether unexpectedly, it was not there.

  He frantically searched again and again through all the files, hammering at the keys, swearing at himself for neglecting to make a backup copy or even a printout. He had to stop and ask himself if he had dreamed the whole thing. Had he created the whole drama from nothing? But no, the conversation with the director a few minutes earlier had taken place, had been real. “Damn it, I hadn’t imagined it!” he accepted that and there was no doubt that something was very wrong somewhere.

  He remained at his computer screen looking randomly at the files, still more confused as he tried to remember where precisely he had originally discovered the document. But he had no real doubt that it had been in this particular folder from which it had now vanished.

  A thought struck him.
He turned back to his computer and in a flash had typed a detailed e-mail addressed to the Fraud Squad. He checked it over several times to make sure it was convincing and logical, that it would be taken seriously by whoever opened it.

  “At least it’s written down,” he thought. “Should I actually send it? I don’t know, I just do not know if it’s the right thing to do... but somebody should be informed… What if something happens to me?” He recalled that there was a way to instruct the e-mail system to defer delivery... “That’s it! I’ll delay it for a week or so till I see which way the wind blows. But at least there’ll be a record and if something goes wrong in the meantime, this will reach the right destination...”

  With a sigh, he typed the necessary keys to delay the delivery of his message by a week and pressed the ‘send’ button. “That’s some relief, at least,” he told himself the minute he jumped out of his chair.

  Que será, será.

  CHAPTER THREE

  First Stop: Roodebeek – Keith

  Keith quickly left his desk behind, his computer screen still lit. He disappeared, a solitary shadow in the empty corridors of the labyrinthine building, leaving behind him just the soft imprints of his steps on the lush carpet.

  He boarded the train home seeing nothing that passed before his eyes. What in God’s name should he do? Aggerblad’s reaction had thrown him completely; it was the last thing he had expected from a responsible superior. If he now went over her head to the Fraud Office, he was risking the kind of career blight that attended on whistle-blowers who had laid down their lives for the sake of revealing truths. A decision not to be taken lightly. He wished he could consult his feisty, fearless grandmother. Maura always knew what to do. She had a strong moral compass in her soul and indomitable faith.

  The window next to him reflected an image from his memory. He recalled her angular form as she interrupted whatever she had been doing as the sun was completing its daily journey southwards, to don the old-fashioned glasses which always slid gently down her nose; he watched her pause for a moment and then, with a little sigh, turn her bright gaze across the marshlands stretching westward. And then she would cross herself ritually, almost theatrically, three times like the faithful and God-fearing Catholic she was and repeat, loud and slow, the precise same words: “Another day comes to an end. God grant that I see the new light of tomorrow. Glory to His name and His great Grace!”

  And truly, it was as though her God listened attentively to her daily prayers, taking them seriously into consideration. In the end, He awarded her immeasurable days and as many sunsets in her little one-storey farmhouse domain, with its ancient toilet squashed in beside the kitchen. He awarded her two sons and a daughter to comfort her, when her Anthony finally expired from the poison gas he had inhaled in that cursed ‘war to end war’, like so many of his fellows.

  Keith had never known his parents; they had perished in the Aer Lingus crash of 1968 soon after he was born. He was raised by those two redoubtable ladies, Maura Donnelly and Ginger, of the village of Sallins in County Kildare.

  In her own way, Maura had initiated Keith to almost all the great secrets of life. She taught him how to play cards and hoodwink his opponents. She taught him the clever secrets of good beer – how to judge the most profound taste, texture, aroma and quality, how to distinguish different types. She led him through the maze of the always-inexplicable-to-male-logic antics of the female. She devoted much time and effort to teaching him how to behave like a perfect gentleman according to the strictest standards of savoir vivre. She told him of the Sidhe and the dreaded banshee, of Cúchulainn and the Irish saints and how to use cobwebs to staunch bleeding. She guided him with her usual shrewdness and foresight through his studies, which brought him the tools to use his talents in a useful profession, a blessing in the harsh employment climate of Ireland. And though mystified, she encouraged his interest in the new-fangled devices which could count numbers faster and more accurately than any man.

  And from Ginger he learned devotion, forgiveness and how to scratch his ear with his foot... Maura had rescued her as a half-dead bedraggled pup, abandoned in the lily pads of the Royal Canal, hard by her house.

  He could just hear Maura saying, “Lad, in your heart you always know what’s the right thing; that’s either God’s voice or your conscience, which may be the same thing. If you follow that, you will never be sorry, even if trouble follows. If you don’t, you can get mixed up inside about truth and get lost.”

  He never had undergone an adolescent rebellion; he had always before him the model of the schoolgirl Maura in her plaits and uniform, brandishing a long-handled skillet in the streets of Dublin during the Easter rising of 1916, cornered in a bomb-blasted angle of the city by three Black and Tans. Those worn and bitter remnants of the British veterans of the Great War who had been posted like so many parcels to Ireland to suppress the rebellion by fire and sword were noisily threatening rape. And likely worse.

  Young Anthony Donnelly, with his khaki knapsack on his shoulders, had just returned from defending the British Empire in the trenches of the First World War. Perceiving her plight, he waded in.

  He saved her life and was then and forever her hero. So when the upheavals of the failed revolution calmed down, and her handsome soldier with the blond handlebar moustache came wearing the same uniform that drove her crazy – as if he had any other clothes to wear – from Dublin to ask for her, he created unawares a new Great War. Her parents were adamant; they had no enthusiasm at all for their daughter’s marriage to a penniless soldier from the miserable slums of the capital. On the contrary, they had counted on some wealthy local farmer winning her, so she would live grandly near them in the fertile land of County Kildare.

  So Maura simply upped and rode off with her soldier wearing her old shoes, creating a huge scandal which spread far beyond the little village.

  Between the social disgrace and their stonewalling daughter, her parents finally had to bestow their blessing on this runaway match, so that Maura returned with her Anthony and was reinstated after Palm Sunday, root and branch in Sallins. Her family was soon thriving socially and economically. She was among the first in the village to acquire expensive consumer goods, a car, a television set. It was generally accepted that whenever an Irish national team was playing live on either of the channels, whether rugby, football, hurling or Irish football, the only TV set in the village, Maura Donnelly’s, was set in her front windows so that, weather permitting, the whole village could watch from outside.

  As the stations passed, more Maura memories filled the windows...

  Far down the line was his first day of school. He had come home late with his shirt torn and spattered with blood, Ginger agitatedly sniffing and making a noise that wasn’t quite a growl.

  Maura gasped. “Saints preserve us, what’s this?”

  “It’s not my blood, Nana! It’s Mickey O’Brien’s!”

  Maura heaved a deep sigh of relief and glared down at him. “And jist why are you all over Mickey O’Brien’s blood, my fine boyo?”

  Keith stuck out his small chest proudly. “He called me a bad name and I gave him a good pop on the nose. It bled a lot.”

  As she cleaned him up and pulled a clean shirt over his head, she began to lecture him about fighting in school.

  “I know that, they said all that at school. But he shouldn’t call people names!” said the boy impatiently. “Can I have an apple now?”

  As he swallowed he asked, “Nana, what’s a norfin?”

  “A what?”

  “Micky said I was a norfin, so I punched him,” explained Keith patiently, “but I don’t know what it means. I just knew it was a bad thing the way he said it. Am I a norfin?” he added doubtfully. “I thought I was a MacFarland.”

  Maura’s brow cleared. “He called you an orphan?”

  Keith nodded. “That’s a bad name, isn’t it?”

  “No, lad. It just means that your mam and your da have gone to heaven.”

/>   Keith looked relieved. “Like Uncle Danny’s gone to Boston. Oh, I guess I shouldn’t have popped him. But it sounded so wicked the way he said it.”

  Thereafter, according to the mysterious ritual of youthful males, he and Mickey became and remained fast friends for the remainder of their school days. What was it that had finally broken that friendship? Keith tried to remember… Ah, yes, it was Maggie O’Rourke of the long red plaits, or was she the other one with the blonde curls?

  But back then, Keith was still troubled. Something had stuck in his mind. Never having met his mother and father, they were only empty names to him. The very next day he looked up that word in the school dictionary, though he had to consult his teacher about the spelling.

  That afternoon he entered the house with resolution written all over him. “Nana,” he said sternly, looking up at her with an accusing frown. “You said mam and da went to heaven. But in the word book a norfin, I mean an orphan, means someone whose mother and father are dead. But I couldn’t understand what that is! So, what is dead, exactly, Nana? What does it mean?”

  His grandmother, taken unawares by this question, took a deep breath and led him into the kitchen. Her spectacles slid down her nose again. She stopped to straighten them. “That is a very big question, Keitheen…”

  “You said my mam and da went to heaven. Why don’t they come back to see us? Uncle Danny and Aunt Didi came from America. Is heaven farther away?”

  “Sit down and eat your apple.”

  “I don’t want an apple. I want to know about this dead. How do you get deaded? Where did my ma and da go? Are my ma and da dead, Nana?” he added without giving her time to answer his barrage of questions. She let out another deep breath. Then she leant towards him and seized his hand gently. Her warm wrinkled palms were trembling slightly, and he felt the touch deeply within him. He had already sensed that his questions had an importance he could not comprehend.