by Reevik, Carl
‘Kirchberg hospital,’ she said.
‘Do you maybe have their number?’
The woman hesitated, then typed something on her keyboard and told him the number, figure by figure, as Hans pressed the buttons.
‘Thanks,’ he whispered to her. She turned around to continue her conversation with the man in white.
‘Centre Hospitalier Kirchberg moïen?’
‘Hello,’ Hans said. ‘I’m looking for my friend, he had a heart attack at the hotel in Gasperich today and was taken to your hospital.’
‘One moment please.’
Hans listened to a violin concert that was sometimes interrupted by recorded voice messages in different languages.
A female voice said, ‘Cardiologie bonjour?’
‘Good afternoon, I’m looking for my friend Willem Tienhoven, he had a heart attack today, an ambulance came to pick him up from Gasperich.’
‘Mister Tienhoven is no longer here.’
There was a silence because the woman wasn’t continuing talking.
Hans asked, ‘Where did he go?’
A hesitation. Damn discretion.
Hans said emotionally, ‘Oh God, did he die of his heart attack?’
‘No, he checked himself out. Against our advice.’
Weird. But at least he had an answer.
‘Did he say where he wanted to go?’
‘I’m sorry, if you are his friend I’m sure you can find him.’
‘Of course, I know. Thank you Madam. Goodbye.’
He hung up, and thought for a moment.
Then he dialled Tienhoven’s office number. His boss couldn’t have been back in Brussels already, but he could have left a message. Just as Hans had expected, the secretary answered his call.
‘Hello Gabriela, this is Hans.’
He decided not to say anything more, and see what she would tell him on her own initiative.
‘Hans, I’m happy you call. Willem asked me to tell you he’s very sorry, in case you called.’
‘Did he say where he went, or why?’
‘No, he just said that he had to leave Luxembourg, and that he hopes to be able to talk to you tomorrow morning here in Brussels. Is there anything I can tell him in case he calls again this evening?’
Hans considered various options, but he quickly realised that he only had one choice. He needed to talk to his boss, have a long and thorough conversation with him, but he knew that without a mobile phone he himself wasn’t reachable, and he didn’t want to stay at the hotel. He didn’t want to stick around in Luxembourg at all, in fact. Not at this hotel, and not at the Commission building across the street either. He had nothing to do there, and he didn’t consider himself ready to answer any questions from Zayek’s head of unit, for example. Above all, he didn’t consider himself ready to answer any further questions from the local police. No, his only choice was to get back to Brussels, figure out what had happened, and get his story straight before talking to anyone else.
If he could trust his boss in the first place that is, which was by no means a certainty. It had been Tienhoven who had sent him ahead to meet with Hoffmann, the man who had in the end physically assaulted him with his fists and suffocated him into unconsciousness. It had been Tienhoven who had promptly agreed with director-general Clarke to forget about commissioning a legal expertise, and to immediately cooperate with the BND, dismissing or explaining away the doubts that Hans had expressed. And now it was Tienhoven who had absconded for the day, heart attack or not, leaving Hans stranded on the scene of what looked very much like a crime. Since it had been Tienhoven’s car they had taken here, and since the Belgian railways were on strike, Hans wasn’t even sure how he would get home now.
‘No it’s okay,’ he said to Gabriela. ‘If he calls, just tell him that I’ll try to get home to Brussels now, and that I’d very much like to talk to him tomorrow.’
They said goodbye and Hans hung up.
What had Tienhoven gotten him into? Who was Zayek, who had killed him, why? Why did Hans end up in the middle of it? How would he get out of it? How would he even get out of this country, for starters? What other ways were there to get from Luxembourg to Brussels? A short-distance flight seemed a bit out of proportion, even if there maybe was a connection. Hitchhiking might have worked, except he was a man who looked, quite accurately, like he’d just been hit in the face. Perhaps there were bus connections from somewhere. Hans felt what little energy he had recovered drain away again. All this had caused him so many problems, so much mental strain, and so much physical pain. Any willpower he could muster would be eaten up by questions that wouldn’t go away. Getting the questions in a logical order, let alone answering even some of them, was more than he could accomplish in his current state. He couldn’t do it, not now, not alone. But he was alone, in a city, in a country where he knew no-one.
Except one person, though.
Hans picked up the phone and dialled the Commission’s central switchboard number in Brussels.
‘Hello, could you please put me through to Mister Takacs.’ He waited. ‘Viktor. Statistics in Luxembourg.’ Waiting. ‘Thanks.’ Waiting. Beeps, then the sound of a receiver being picked up.
‘Hello?’
‘Hello Viktor, this is Hans.’
‘Where are you?’
As always Viktor got straight to the point. It felt reassuring.
‘I’m here in Luxembourg.’ He told him the name of the hotel. ‘In Gasperich, across the street from the Commission building.’
‘Yes, I know the hotel. What happened?’
If only Hans himself knew.
He tried to concentrate and said, ‘I followed up on the statistics situation inside atomic energy, their administrative support unit. Things got a little complicated here. A little dangerous, too. Very dangerous, someone died. I need to think, and I need to get back to Brussels. I was here with my boss, Tienhoven, but he left and there are no trains today.’
‘Wait right there, don’t move,’ Viktor said. ‘I’ll come and pick you up, and I’ll drive you to Brussels. We can talk in the car.’
Hans paused. This was very prompt.
He answered, ‘No Viktor, please, I was just hoping you could maybe…’
Indeed, maybe what exactly? Drive him to some bus depot in Luxembourg? Help him catch a ride on a lorry?
Hans reconsidered and asked, ‘Are you sure this is not too much trouble?’
The answer was, ‘Fifteen, twenty minutes.’
Hans exhaled. ‘Okay, thanks Viktor. I’ll wait in the lobby then.’
‘It’s a red family car, a Volkswagen Shahran.’
Viktor put the phone down.
Hans hung up as well and went to the armchair he had sat in when they’d been questioning Zayek. He wanted to get some distance between himself and the policemen near the reception. He sat down and started thinking again.
Two men had been after his phone. Both had physically attacked him, although one had done it more violently than the other. Still, they were either rivals or associates.
There will be more BND people around the building? You won’t see them.
Whether they worked with or against each other, chances that they had nothing to do with each other at all were low. Hoffmann had gotten it in the end, that much Hans could safely assume.
Then, for another fifteen minutes, his thoughts went in an increasingly lazy circle. If the first attacker had wanted his phone, why had he left? And if Hoffmann had wanted the picture, why hadn’t he just accepted the image he’d been offered? Why had he wanted the phone itself, in the same way the other attacker had?
It was a circle, not just because it didn’t lead anywhere. It was also a circle because it moved around something. It was doing the rounds around the one big question that was sitting in the middle, its object leaning against a toilet cubicle.
He needed to break out. He took out the box. The policemen weren’t watching anyway. He wanted to check the serial number again, and
to copy it on a piece of paper. Just to be sure. With the same difficulty as before he managed to open it. He got up, borrowed a pen with the hotel logo from the reception, and copied the number on the back side of the first sheet of Viktor’s analysis of the Netherlands. He kept the pen.
***
‘Inspector Becker, Luxembourg police, criminal investigation. You are the boss of Boris Zayek?’
Becker had left the hotel. After talking to the receptionist, he had tried the mobile phone number Hans Tamberg had given him, but his phone had been turned off. Becker had then found and talked to the red-headed hotel manager. But the man had still been cranky and useless as far as information was concerned. He’d been preoccupied with finding a replacement for the woman he’d just moved to do reception counter duty to replace the first receptionist. The only useful thing he’d told him was the full name of the American officer. Becker had then proceeded to the kitchen to talk to the waitress who had been on duty in the lobby at the time of the event. In the end she’d merely told him that she had brought four cups of coffee to the victim’s group, and that she didn’t remember anything special about it. So now Becker had crossed the street to talk to the victim’s colleagues in the Commission building. The security man at the reception had told him where the office of Zayek’s boss was. Becker had started sweating, but not much. The cold air outside had chilled his face and neck.
‘Stavros Theodorakis, oui, je suis le chef d’unité de Monsieur Zayek,’ the man said. They shook hands as they stood at the door to Theodorakis’s office. Good news at last, Becker thought. The Greek, at least those from the older generations, often had French rather than English as their first foreign language. It made life a lot easier for him. He switched languages.
‘Can I please use your office to talk to you and your staff, Monsieur Theodorakis.’
‘Of course, please. Is this about all the police across the street?’
Becker moved his body forward and sat down heavily in his host’s chair. Clearly Theodorakis hadn’t expected to be relegated to a visitor in his own office. ‘Let me just log off,’ he said hastily, leaning over his desk to make the necessary mouse clicks and lock the screen of his computer.
‘Please don’t log off yet,’ Becker said. ‘Could you e-mail Monsieur Zayek’s closest co-workers in this building and ask them not to leave so that I can talk to them, too?’
Theodorakis nodded and started typing while leaning over his desk. Meanwhile Becker took out his e-cigarette and inhaled.
‘Please, take a seat,’ Becker said when the man had clicked the send button. Theodorakis took one of the four visitor’s chairs and sat down.
Becker told him, ‘Your staff member, Boris Zayek, died in the hotel across the street.’
Theodorakis covered his closed mouth with his hand.
‘This is horrible,’ he said. ‘Why, I mean how?’
‘We are working on both questions,’ Becker replied. ‘I was hoping you could tell me a little about the victim, so that I get a complete picture.’
‘Excuse me,’ a blonde woman of about forty stood in the open doorway. She spoke French as well. ‘Can I please go first, Inspector,’ she said. It was more a statement than a request. ‘Today I have to pick up the kids from school.’
Becker looked at her. This was an attitude he didn’t see very often. He liked it.
She added, ‘On Thursdays my husband brings the kids to school and I pick them up.’
Becker turned to Theodorakis. ‘Is this okay, Monsieur Theodorakis?’
Theodorakis nodded to him, then to the woman, got up and left the office that had once been his.
Becker pocketed his e-cigarette. ‘So,’ he asked when Theodorakis had closed the door and the woman had sat down. ‘What is your name, Madame?’
‘My name is Anneli Villefranche. Let me spell that for you.’
Becker was halfway through the last name when his mobile phone rang. He answered the call without looking at the woman.
‘Becker.’
‘Moïen Inspector Becker, this is crime scene. Like we suspected based on the blood spray pattern, it wasn’t a gunshot. We didn’t find any bullets or cartridges or bullet holes. It was an explosion in or near the head, probably inside the mouth, but not a shooting.’
Becker continued listening.
‘And we found the vomit of a second person on the toilet floor. It could be your witness who saw the body, or someone else, we don’t know yet.’
There was a pause.
‘Thanks,’ Becker replied. Hans Tamberg hadn’t mentioned throwing up on the floor. There were a lot of things he hadn’t mentioned.
‘And another thing, and more important. The security cameras in the lobby haven’t recorded anything. Some technical failure.’
Was this some kind of prank?
‘Anything else?’
‘Yes, has Felten called you yet about this Willem Tienhoven?’
‘No, what about him?’
‘Felten went to see him, but he was too late. Tienhoven did have a heart attack, but he checked himself out of the hospital. Nobody knows where he is.’
Becker started tapping with his pen next to Anneli’s half-finished last name. The name ended in a growing cloud of ink dots. He kept listening.
‘We’re taking the body to forensics now,’ the voice in his phone said. ‘Doctor Offerbrück will do the autopsy.’
‘Okay. Thank you.’
Becker put his phone back, saying nothing. Then he looked up and said, ‘I’m sorry Madame.’ He finished writing the last letters of her name and said, ‘I’m afraid something happened to your colleague Boris Zayek.’
Brussels
Geoffrey Clarke was sitting in an afternoon meeting on the twelfth floor of the Commission’s main building, with Nathalie Bresson from legal and a few other directors-general. The room was bright and spacious. The view was impressive; it would have been magnificent if the sun had been shining, and it would have been breathtaking at dusk. Bresson was just discussing how important it was to stick to common European rules.
‘The legislation of the European Union is adopted with the member countries and for the member countries,’ she lectured. ‘It achieves on a European scale what individual countries wouldn’t be able to achieve when acting alone.’ She made a significant pause. ‘But for that it is important that European law be respected and enforced, every day, by the national authorities themselves. This is not just a legal imperative. It touches upon the fundamental logic of European cooperation. It is not necessary that every country be wholeheartedly in favour of every single regulation, or of every single compromise. But what they all must cherish, and defend, is Europe’s ability to produce binding laws that apply to everyone. Including those laws of which they are in favour while others are not.’
‘The problem is that they sometimes aren’t even party to the compromise,’ Sloboda said. He was director-general of environment. ‘They get outvoted by the other countries, and then they have to swallow the deal nonetheless.’
‘But that they accepted themselves,’ Raevens from agriculture replied. ‘They all agreed to have majority voting on most issues. This is ridiculous. First they complain that they can’t solve common problems alone, so they set up the European Union to do it together. Then they complain that decisions are taking too long, because everybody has to agree. So they switch to majority voting. And now they complain that they get outvoted sometimes. What do they want?’
There were chuckles all around. Not from Bresson, though, because she was in the middle of something that required her full concentration. And Clarke didn’t laugh either, because he wasn’t really listening. This whole meeting was about precisely nothing at all. They were again retelling each other things they already knew. And even if it had been about something meaningful, he would have found it difficult to concentrate on the discussion. His mind was somewhere else at the moment.
‘Whether they are adopted by unanimity or by majority, results h
ave to be binding,’ Bresson insisted. ‘The reason the Union has been attractive for countries to join, ever since its creation by the original founding members, is precisely that it is a community of nations that is governed by law.’
Clarke sat there, wondering why his phone still hadn’t given him any signal. He waited some more, without talking, without listening. He had concluded a long time ago that as director-general he didn’t have to constantly say something. He could just keep his mouth shut and look pensive. People would think he was pondering some weighty arguments for a decision that would have far-reaching consequences.
And in the particular case of Clarke, there was an additional reason to let him sit there in silence and leave him alone. He was director-general of anti-fraud, after all. He had the power to sniff around other people’s departments and dig up all kinds of unsightly phenomena. They all joked about it, of course, but it was only half funny. Clarke liked to keep it that way, like a rumour or assumption that would never be confirmed nor denied.
His thoughts returned to what he had started to call the Luxembourg situation. And to the question why he still hadn’t received any news, neither from Willem Tienhoven nor from Commissioner Maria Schuster-Zoll.
Finally his phone hummed inside his breast pocket. He took it out and lowered his arm so he could read the text below the top of the conference table. The screen lit up and displayed the long-awaited message: Good news from Lux. More later. MSZ.
Clarke pocketed his phone and looked over to Bresson. She had started what had to be the fourth or fifth part of her monologue. It was on the need to create legal certainty in the payments of agricultural subsidies.
‘The British are right,’ Raevens interjected. ‘The French can feed taxpayer money to their farmers if they like. But then they should use their own money, not European money.’
‘But they all love spending other people’s money,’ Sloboda said. ‘They all have their pet projects, and they all say that it’s terribly important for the European idea, or for public health, or for economic growth, or for cultural diversity, or for the overall happiness of mankind.’
