The Last Compromise by Carl Reevik Page B

Commission, it would be Hoffmann’s turn to ask whatever
questions he had. Then it would be up to Hoffmann to decide whether he would
call the police or not, which would have been true in any case, with or without
them. At the end of the day, anti-fraud was neither a counter-intelligence
service nor a police. For any use of force they depended on local operational
assistance from the national authorities.
    Hans
looked out the window. The road signs were showing the first exit into the city
of Namur, the next one would come two kilometres later. It meant that they had
covered almost a third of the distance to Luxembourg.
    Now,
after all the initial excitement and before the real show would start, Hans would
have loved to talk about miscellaneous things. He had learned from Tienhoven
that the Dutch expression for this was ‘to talk about cows and calves’. The
problem was that Tienhoven himself was such a taciturn driver, no cows no
calves. Not that he was particularly chatty when not driving, apart from the
litany-length monologue earlier in his office. But in the confined space of a
car without any music on, and without any conversation being opened by the
hierarchical superior, Hans felt very acutely that the situation was not quite
as exhilarating as it could be.
    Perhaps
he could ask Tienhoven about his old work back at Utrecht. Maybe Hans’s
unflattering memories of the brutalist concrete city were unjustified. He’d
been to Utrecht only once, together with Julia, and that had been an accident. It
had been just before Hans had learned that he’d passed the Commission’s job
competition, when they’d lived together in Estonia. They had decided to make a
trip over the weekend, and to have some fun in Amsterdam, in the way people
were supposed to have fun in Amsterdam. Hans hadn’t been sure about it, he’d
known nothing of the city, and Julia had seemed only lukewarm about the idea,
too. But somehow they’d persuaded each other that this was a thing that people
had to do at least once.
    So
they’d booked a cheap flight to a small regional airport in Eindhoven, and
taken the bus to the train station in the inner city, and then the train to
Amsterdam. Normally it would have taken them a mere two and a half hours to get
there. Except their train had got stuck. It had been autumn, and leafs had
fallen on the tracks, making it dangerous for trains to roll on them. Hans had
wondered whether this had been the first time in the history of the Netherlands
that leafs had come off the trees in autumn. In fact this was precisely what
everybody around them in the train had said, too. Every autumn the damn leafs
fall on the damn rails, and every time the national railway company is
completely overwhelmed by the logistical challenge of this totally unexpected
freak event.
    Their
train had crawled to Utrecht central station and released the passengers into
the hideous concrete jungle to survive on their own. Hans would even have found
it a little exciting to be stranded in an unknown city like that. Julia had
found it totally unexciting to be stranded in an unknown city like that. They’d
found a frighteningly cheap hotel for the night. The bed had been soft like
warm butter in the middle, worn out by generations of couples making love on
it, putting the centre of their weight on the exact centre of the mattress.
Hans would have loved to see whether the bed could handle some more repeated
downward pressure, but Julia hadn’t been in the mood for any of that. The
following day they’d spent mostly indoors because it had been raining. They
hadn’t felt like going to Amsterdam at all, and in the evening had returned to
Eindhoven airport. The trains had been running again. They’d slept on the
plane. Afterwards Hans would have preferred to have stayed in Estonia and gone
to Lake Peipus instead. It was a large lake, so large it was almost a sea. He’d
spent many pleasant evenings there growing up. There at least he would