The Last Compromise

by Reevik, Carl

  ‘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.

  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 o
r 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.

  3

  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.r />
  ‘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.