1 July, 3:45 PM, Czernograd, the Government Quarter
He was tall – taller – at about 5 feet 2 or 3 inches, and thick-set, with strong hands and sausage-like fingers into which her own hand briefly disappeared, only to emerge unharmed a second or two later. The gentleness of the greeting surprised her.
“I know,” he said, motioning for her to sit down, “Everyone thinks certain things of the dwarfs, as if we, and only we, were somehow resistant to... change.”
“Yes,” she drew the word out, lowering herself into a plush chair at an expensive wine bar, halfway between the Parliament House and the Palace. “I was expecting someone...”
He interrupted her before she could find the right, tactful word. “Such are the new times we live in. My people have been growing; your horns have been shrinking.”
It caught her by surprise, but she resisted responding.
“Don’t worry,” he smiled, shifting around in his chair. “No psychic powers here; one’s just sticking out of your hair,” he discretely pointed with his finger, barely lifting the hand off the table.
“Oh,” Halszka said and very conscious of her every movement ruffled her hair back into place, as it supposed to have been, burying the grandfather’s gift under the mass of blonde strands.
She smiled back, and he raised his eyebrows in response, as if saying we’re all in this conspiracy together. He would have been in his early forties, balding, with the remainder of his ginger hair cropped closed to the skull. His eyes were eerily green and alive, floating on the wide expanse of his clean-shaven face, as if looking for mischief.
“No beard and no braids either,” he shrugged. “There are hundreds of idiots who’ve watched ‘The Lord of the Rings’ coming here on adventure holidays, as if it was a fucking – excuse my language – Middle Earth. All they do is bother the hell of any of my people they can find, like we’re some freaks of nature that they can take photos with, with their stupid grins and thumbs up.” He sighed. “We’re pretty private sort of people, like to keep out of everyone’s way...”
“Underground,” she felt confident enough now to contribute.
“In a manner of speaking,” he said. “Now we’ve got the technology instead, to dig up stuff. But the inclination remains pretty much the same.”
He ordered two glasses of chardonnay for them.
“So how can I help?” he said. “And you will have to forgive me, but I genuinely do not have a lot of time,” he added apologetically, quickly glancing at his large wristwatch.
“I understand,” Halszka said, “and am very grateful that you were able to squeeze me in at such a short notice.
“Josef is an old friend,” Wentz the dwarf said. She almost never heard anyone refer to the Director by his first name; he must have indeed been an old friend. One of the very few, she gathered.
“And to answer your question... I’m not quite sure.”
To his credit he smiled.
“The Director assures me of your discretion...” she started.
She was expecting a nod, or some other sign from him, but he just stared at her impassively; those green eyes drilling into her, as if he did have some psychic powers after all, and was trying to read her mind. There was no need; she was about to tell him things; though not all the things.
“Why would the Palace be very interested in the resources sector at the moment, particularly oil and gas?” she asked.
“Who wouldn’t?” Wentz cackled. “When you say ‘the Palace’, I assume you don’t mind the King himself, whose only interest in excavations, I gather, now only extends to six feet down?”
She nodded. “The Prince. And some people around him.”
The waiter brought over their wine and the dwarf raised his glass to the light, sniffed over the glass rim, and took a small sip.
“What do you know about the new discoveries? Of oil and gas, I mean,” he asked. Halszka couldn’t quite pick from his reaction whether the wine has lived up to his expectations.
“No more than an average person, I imagine,” she said. She has never been a white wine connoisseur; this one tasted as good as any. She then remembered the price on the wine list and thought it probably should taste better than that.
“The biggest thing to happen to this country,” he said. “Apart from the whole revealing itself to the world in the first place, that is. Certainly more important, economically speaking, than joining the European Union. Of course, it’s true that no one yet quite knows just how much of it there is, but what we already do know is quite spectacular, and what we can guess based on what we know is... well... even more so.”
“So we’re really going to be like Kuwait with a temperate climate and magic?”
“I’m not sure why everyone has been so fixated on these comparisons with the Middle East, as if it’s the only place that sits on top of fossil fuels,” the dwarf sighed and shook his head. “Not that, with a few exceptions the region is a particularly great example to follow of what to do when you come across a lot of money for nothing. Anyway, Russia, the States, Canada, Australia, Venezuela, Brazil... the list goes on. It’s not so much who’s got a lot of that stuff; it’s more who doesn’t.”
“Europe?” she took another sip.
“Location, location, location, as they say in real estate. Europe as a whole is largely dependent on oil and gas which comes from outside of the continent. The most of it comes from the closest source – Russia.”
“But with strings attached.”
“Implicitly,” he said. “When you’re totally or largely dependent on one source for some very important commodity, no one even needs to say very much. That’s the universal law of political economics.”
“So suddenly we have this new, previously untapped, reservoir of the goodies that everyone wants, and we get...”
“We get one very happy little country in Eastern Europe. We get a lot of relieved people elsewhere throughout the Europe who can now diversify their supply. And we get one angry bear to the east, who has just acquired an unexpected competitor and is suddenly losing a lot of economic leverage and political clout, and of course the hard currency.”
Is that why the angry bear has been making phone calls to the Palace? The bear didn’t sound particularly angry. Determined, perhaps. She still didn’t quite understand what they were thinking they could achieve. Once genie was out of the bottle – these Middle Eastern metaphors were proving irrepressible – surely it could not be put back in and the bottle buried again in the sand?
“But it’s more than that,” he said.
She raised her eyebrows.
“The Russians, I mean,” Wentz said. “Very paranoid people.”
“What about?”
“Let me ask you something,” he said, leaning forward on the table. The bar was air-conditioned, but he was still sweating. He took a white handkerchief from a coat pocket and wiped away his brow. “Where do you think all of its coming from?”
“The oil and gas, you mean?” she shrugged. “From... underground?”
“Sure,” he nodded, “but where exactly is... underground.”
Ah. Yes, indeed. When you are a country that exists somewhere, but no one quite knows where or how, where exactly is the sky above you, or the ground beneath your feet?
“You see,” he went, “the Russians aren’t just pissed off there’s suddenly a new supplier around; they think that the supplier might actually be selling stuff that doesn’t belong to him.”
“You mean?...”
“Like a giant straw,” he pursed his lips, making a sucking sound, “from underneath the Mother Russia all the way to the surface somewhere in eastern Galicia.”
“Surely not?” she shook her head, trying to come to grips with the concept.
“Unlikely,” he shrugged, “but who can ever be certain? And we’re talking about people who take a standard of proof that’s a lot lower than a certainty.”
She finished her glass, savouring the last of the rich, fruity aftertaste. Wentz has finished his some time ago and she noticed he did not order another one, which probably meant she didn’t have much time left.
“What is the status of it now?” she asked.
“Well, there’s still plenty of exploration going on, but around that which we already know about there’s plenty of talking and deal-making. The reps from all the big and small Western companies are in and out the country like through a revolving door. Long-term supply contracts; extraction infrastructure – which as you can imagine we don’t have – my people have dug stuff out of the ground in the past, not pumped it out. We’re talking pipelines; we’re talking lots of things.”
“Nothing fixed yet, though?”
“It’s in the process of being fixed” he said. “Why?”
She sidestepped him. “Which brings me back to my first question: why would the Palace be so interested in all this?”
“Why would the Palace be interested in anything?” Wentz shrugged. “I’m not a constitutional scholar, but the monarchy can be quite influential when it’s interested in something. It’s just that it hasn’t been very interested in anything much for a long time.”
That’s a nice way of putting it, she thought. But it almost sounded like a warning.
“I really appreciate your time,” Halszka smiled. “Just one last thing.” She pushed a piece of paper across the table. “These are the people that the Prince has been meeting with. Can you tell me anything about them that... I perhaps should be aware of?”
Wentz studied the list for a moment, then put it down on the table and pushed it back to her.
“To be honest, not what I was expecting,” he said.
“Really?” she folded and pocketed the piece of paper.
“When you said that the Palace – or the Prince – has been meeting with people from the oil and gas industry, I was expecting to see some familiar names; people who have been around for some time. These-“ he waved his hand, “-aren’t exactly the first league.”
She waited for him to continue.
“I mean I know the names,” he said, “but they’re not actually the top people who are currently stitching up all the deals. Lutwak and the other one... what’s his name... Kokosz, they’ve worked for Gazprom for years. Gazprom is-“
“I know,” she said.
“-the Russians; natural gas. They have been back home for a year or two, hanging around on the edges of the industry. Same with Kalinowski, except that he’s been somewhere in Central Asia, one of the ‘Stans.”
“Well,” she said, “thank you once again for your time; the Director and I are very appreciative.” She reached for her purse, but he waved her down.
“Please pass my best regards to Josef,” he said. “I’m in talks with the Dutch at the moment. When we pull it off I’ll send you a few cases of this white, to celebrate.”
She smiled. When. Could the question be different, though? Like, for example, if.
Photo by Jackson Jost on Unsplash
Comentários