“Is he arrested?”
“Not right away. The folder … is lost. But a new one quickly appears. And then he is arrested. Detained. And in Ukraine, that is … no fun.”
“No. I know.” Plastic bottles and handcuffs. But Babko wasn’t one of the torturers. Søren believed that now. He was a person who longed for decency and integrity, the way a man longs for a woman he can’t have.
“I thought, he’s done for. That was that. They got him. But that’s not how it goes. Suddenly he is released again. The prosecutor has to apologize and say that the evidence was flawed.”
“It was.”
“Yes, but that doesn’t usually mean anything. It didn’t mean anything this time either. That’s not why. Someone made the accusation go away, as it so often happens, even in the cases where you’ve seen the proof yourself before it disappeared.”
“So your clean man isn’t so clean, after all?”
“That’s the odd thing. I think he is. Why else would he want to investigate who made the accusations disappear?”
“And that’s what he did?”
“Yes. Most people would have thanked their lucky stars for the unexpected justice and let it go at that. Not him. He discovered that I was the one who had made the original file disappear.”
“Did you get an appropriate thank-you?” Søren couldn’t quite keep the irony out of his voice.
Babko laughed—a somewhat quieter version of the volcano laughter that could make people turn around to look at him. “That depends on what you mean by ‘appropriate.’ He grilled me several times to find out if I knew anything about the prosecutor’s sudden change of heart. That’s gratitude for you …” But the thought seemed to cheer him up. Cheer him up immensely, in fact.
Søren thought about his own boss. A career man, true, fixated on competition, but basically decent. He backed up his people, he followed most of the written and unwritten rules, and it was absurd to imagine that he would consciously hang someone on trumped-up evidence. That was not how he played the game.
Babko came from a country where that pretty much was the game. Søren tried to imagine what it would be like never to know if you’d been bought or sold, who was the buyer and who was the seller, and what version of the “evidence” you were using any given week. Of course the Danish system had its flaws. There were omissions, excuses and lies; there were favors and nepotism, of course there were. It happened from time to time that loyalty to the team degenerated into cover-ups—yes, it happened, but it was the exception, not the rule. It was a rare Dane who believed he could avoid a ticket by adding a bill when he handed his driver’s license to the officer. Søren didn’t feel amazed gratitude for having a boss who had reached his position with his personal integrity more or less intact. He took it as a given.
Babko did not have that luxury.
“Who is he, then—your clean man?”
“Filipenko. Nikolaij Filipenko. Have you heard of him?”
Søren thought. “I don’t think so,” he had to admit.
“He was an amazing soccer player, had twenty-one games for the national team before he was injured. That’s why almost everyone in Ukraine knows him. That’s probably also why he was elected to Verkhovna Rada the first time, because people knew and liked him. Otherwise it can be expensive to run an election campaign in Ukraine. And though he has money, he doesn’t have that much money.”
“So he’s a member of Parliament?” The way Babko had discussed Filipenko, Søren had gotten the impression that he was a superior within the police.
“Yes. For Ukrainska Justytsiya, a small centrist party. They probably didn’t believe their own luck when he wanted to run on their platform; otherwise they would never have gotten a foot in the door. He’s on the parliamentary committee for the Eradication of Organized Crime and Corruption. Many hope he’ll be our next minister of the interior. And Colonel Savchuk is his brother.”
At last. The connection.
“So you’re saying that the man we have …” Søren was about to say “lost,” but the colonel wasn’t a missing wallet, after all. “… lost contact with … that he may be the brother of the future Ukrainian minister of the interior?”
“Half-brother. And not many people know. They didn’t grow up together. Savchuk is twenty-six years older. An entirely different generation.”
“Same father or same mother?”
“Mother. Tetjana Filipenko. She owns U-card.” Babko must have seen that it didn’t mean anything to Søren and explained briefly, “It’s a Ukrainian credit card. Like Visa or American Express.”
“It sounds as if she’s fairly wealthy.”
“Extremely. U-card let the average Ukrainian acquire all the consumer goods we felt we had to have after the old regime fell. Who do you call when you need a bit of cash? U-card, U-card, U-card …” The last was offered in a mellifluous falsetto that made both dogs lift their heads.
“So there’s nothing odd about her son being able to afford to run a Ukrainian electoral campaign?”
“U-card has supported the campaign with exactly 30,000 hryvnia. No more, no less. They’ve made a big deal out of that, and it’s true. I’ve spent over two years checking. Nikolaij Filipenko is not a man who built his career on his mother’s money.”
“He sounds … remarkable.”
“He is.”
“And you still haven’t answered my question. Why are you here? You and Savchuk? Why the two of you specifically?”
Babko closed his eyes for a brief moment, as if there were something written on the inside of his eyelids that he needed to read. “My friend,” he then said, “be happy that you drive a small car.”
“Why?” Søren recalled Babko’s volcanic eruption of laughter at the sight of it.
“Because if you drove a big one, I’d never tell you this.”
Søren forced himself to be patient. “What?” he asked.
“No one in GUBOZ or the regular criminal police knew that Natasha Doroshenko was in prison in Denmark until Savchuk appeared and requested an extradition order. Maybe SBU knew. Maybe it was something Savchuk had found out on his own.”
“Okay.”
“I was added on at the last minute.”
“Why? Why you?”
“Because someone has asked me to start an investigation of Savchuk’s circumstances.”
“You’re his guard dog.”
“Yes.”
“And what do you expect to find?”
“My friend, I have no idea. I have a suspicion that it was Colonel Savchuk who made the accusation against Nikolaij Filipenko go away back then. But to disprove false evidence is not a crime—at the worst, it is a declaration of war against those who have fabricated it.”
“And you still don’t know why he’s interested in Natasha and Pavel Doroshenko?”
“No. I’ve poked around in the case a bit, as much as I had time for. The permission to interview Natasha came through unusually quickly.”
Søren couldn’t decode the questioning tone in the last statement. “What do you mean?” he asked.
Babko shrugged. “Perhaps the Danes are just efficient at that kind of thing. What do I know? But in Ukraine, if you need to speed up the paperwork …” He let the sentence dangle there unfinished.
“Did you think that Savchuk had bribed someone?”
A shrug. “As I said, my friend, it’s good that you drive a small car. Honest cop car.”
Søren finally understood Babko’s appreciation for his practical little Hyundai. Ukrainian police with well-paying clients in the corruption shop apparently didn’t drive Korean dwarf cars.
“What kind of car does Savchuk have?” he asked.
Babko laughed. “A huge BMW. But maybe his mother gave it to him.” He rolled his shoulders a little. “In fact, he’s got it with him.”
“I thought you flew.”
“I flew. He was already here. He was kind enough to pick me up at the airport, but that might have been because I had the extradition order.”