Death of a Nightingale

“Is she difficult?” Mikael Nielsen had asked when Søren turned over the watch to him back at the house on Kløvermosevej.

“She has actually been pretty cooperative,” Søren had assured him. Now he wondered whether he should have warned Nielsen about Nina’s oddities anyway. Small talk and bedside manners were not Nielsen’s forte, nor did his restless nature adapt particularly well to the long, dull hours of surveillance during which nothing happened. But he was Søren’s man, and he was available and willing to sacrifice his Sunday, and thanks to all his gadgetry, he saw pretty much everything that moved, even though he might not look particularly alert. He had immediately distributed a number of small webcams both indoors and outside, and if Søren knew him at all, he was currently engaged in tracking them all simultaneously on his self-designed tablet computer, colloquially known as The Gizmo—possibly playing Battleship or indulging in a game of chess at the same time.

Søren would have preferred to be there himself. But he needed to talk with Babko, and in spite of the new era of bicultural trust and peace, he had no intention of letting the Ukrainian anywhere near Rina. Apart from Søren’s own people, at this moment only Heide and Heide’s boss knew where the girl was. He had promised to bring both Nina and Rina in for a more thorough interview Monday morning if the girl’s health allowed.

Babko had shaved and generally looked fresher and sharper today—Søren was in no way sure that the same thing could be said about him.

“I managed to get through most of it,” he said, poking the substantial pile of papers. The printer had been going for almost two hours; it wasn’t among the fastest, but it had been easier than going to Søborg to use the one at the office. He was still better at reading things on paper, and when he was also faced with a linguistic challenge, he needed all the help he could get. His reading speed had definitely not been optimal.

“Did you find it interesting?” asked Babko.

“Much of it, yes.”

Pavel Doroshenko had been born and had grown up in a little village south of Kiev. His father was a dairy worker, and his mother had been employed at the same dairy for most of her adult life. The most unusual thing about the family was the mother’s background. She was originally from Galicia in eastern Ukraine, one of the local minority of ethnic Germans who had been blown hither and thither by various national and military storms around the time of the Second World War. First the area had been under Polish rule, then the Soviets came, then the Germans, with a short-lived attempt to create an independent Ukrainian state, and finally the area had again been absorbed by the Soviet Union. Galicia’s history was more turbulent than most, and Søren wondered how it had shaped Pavel’s mother.

“You wrote ‘Mama’s boy’ in your notes,” said Søren. “Why?”

“She died in nineteen ninety-seven, so it’s an entirely secondhand impression. I spoke with the father; he is still alive but hadn’t been in contact with Pavel for several years. The marriage wasn’t exactly harmonious. It’s a small town, everybody knows everybody’s business, and if Pavel was a ladies’ man, he didn’t get it from strangers.”

“But they didn’t get divorced?”

“No. You’re familiar with the propiska system?”

“Yes.” During the Soviet era, one needed an internal passport, a propiska, to live in a certain place. The propiska simultaneously served as right of residence to a specific address. “Is that still in use in Ukraine?”

“It was officially judged to be unconstitutional in two thousnd and one, but not a lot changed. So with certain modifications, yes. The short answer is that even if Pavel’s parents had divorced, they couldn’t just split up. At least not without exchanging the propiska on their little house for two propiskas to much less desirable apartments. Pavel’s mother defended her right to the house with tooth and claw, understandably so. The result was that they lived like a dog and a cat. Funnily enough, most of the villagers sided with the husband, perhaps because her Ukrainian was pretty poor. She’d grown up with German and Polish, of course. Pavel was called Niemcy, ‘the German,’ in school, or ‘the Nazi brat’ if they were being particularly cruel. And apparently they spoke German together, his mother and he. She called him Paul. So you could say he grew up strongly motivated to succeed. He was going to show them all.”

“And he did, didn’t he?” said Søren, thinking of a few pieces he had found on the Web. German television in particular had apparently used Pavel as a local expert a few times. “A career as a journalist, a good income, an apartment in Kiev and a young, beautiful wife … to them, he must have looked every inch the successful media star.”

“At least to his mother he did, though she didn’t get to see the final chapters.”

“I’ve looked at everything you found on him,” said Søren. “His stories are generally pretty black and white, aren’t they?”

Pavel Doroshenko never seemed to just write about people. He wrote about villains or heroes. The heroes acted “without thought of personal gain” and “with great personal courage” and were “tireless,” “selfless” and “determined,” whether he was describing a fireman in Chernobyl, a local businessman, the director of an orphanage, a mayor who fought crime in his city or just a retiree who had defended himself against a pickpocket. The villains were similarly described as “calculating” and “greedy”; they were “caught in their own snares” and could often look forward to “many years behind bars”; people foolish enough to defend them were described as “collaborators” or “coconspirators” without it being clear what the conspiracy consisted of. Pavel fairly often cited family background or ethnicity, creating the impression that evil was genetic rather than personal. To Søren, the rhetoric seemed oddly old-fashioned and pretty tiresome.

“You think so?” said Babko. “A lot of people write like that. At least in Ukraine.”

“I haven’t been able to find anything that explains Savchuk’s interest in his widow.”

“No, me neither.”

“Is he another Gongadze?” Søren said, although broken fingers and a heart attack did not quite seem to match the gruesomeness of the decapitation of that particular heroic journalist.

Babko shook his head. “I don’t think so. The people he would attack were mostly nationalists. At the beginning of his career, he was more politically focused—accusing the early nationalists of being a collection of Kosak-romantics, bumpkins and anti-Semites. Later his attacks became more personal, though funnily enough, most of the people he attacked still belonged to the Orange faction. The Blues—that is, the more ethnic Russian- and Moscow-friendly wing—he never wrote much about them, although there would be no shortage of material if he had wanted to have a go at them.”

“Are his personal beliefs a factor here?” asked Søren.

“Possibly. Or it might just have been to please his audience. For a time, he lived and worked in Donetsk, which is a predominantly Russian-speaking area. His motives could also have been more narrowly financial. There was and still is a lot of money flowing out of Moscow to willing mouthpieces in the media world. How else did you think Yanukovytsj managed to get himself reelected a mere six years after the Orange Revolution threw him out?”

Was that the pattern Søren’s tired brain had tried to decipher last night? No. He didn’t have Babko’s local knowledge and couldn’t automatically recognize the party colors of the people Doroshenko had written about.

“I wonder about two things,” he said. “First of all, I think his style changes. It becomes even more purple yet at the same time less precise, wallowing in phrases like ‘could it be that …’ or ‘might not stand up to closer examination.’ In his earlier articles, he is sharper and produces names and facts. Secondly, as his income grows, the apartment in Kiev and so on … he writes less and less, and for more local and smaller media. The year before he died, he published almost exclusively on some Web news site, what was it called …”

“Velyka Tayemnitsya. The Big Secret, in the English version.”

“Yes. It seems paradoxical.”

“That’s because he is no longer a journalist in the true sense of the word. He was producing kompromat.”

Søren’s inner dictionary managed to provide a definition a second before he had to ask. Kompromat—by now a fairly old Russian abbreviation for “compromising material.” A tactic in the information war that had roots all the way back to Stalin and which, in all its simplicity, consisted of digging up, fabricating and throwing as much dirt as possible at the person or persons with whom you were at war. American election campaigns were like Sunday school sessions by comparison.

“It’s still used a lot?” he asked.

“Oh, yes. Big Bizniz. Now also as a more private enterprise. And the richest kompromat producers are usually the ones who don’t print what they write.”

“Blackmail?”

“Yep. As a kompromat producer, you always have two potential customers—the person who has paid for the dirt and the person you’re planning to throw it at. The latter usually pays more.”

“And the vague articles that just make suggestions but don’t name names …”

“Those are warning shots. They let the victim know what he can expect if he doesn’t pay up.”

Søren looked at the pile of articles with renewed interest. That meant that the “warning shots” offered up a number of people who had good reason for murdering Pavel Doroshenko and possibly also for pursuing his widow. That is, if Søren and Babko could figure out whom the warnings were directed at.