Читать книгу Ján Kuciak - Christoph Lehermayr - Страница 5

Ján Kuciak is facing the grand finale. Only six more days, and the underdog journalist will get the government between a rock and a hard place, the prime minister under pressure and the prime minister’s beautiful assistant on the streets of the capital half-naked. But Ján Kuciak’s life will only last another 12 hours.

The familiar quiet bustle that will be familiar from open-plan offices fills the editorial department. If anyone speaks up, everyone looks their way. The journalists sit opposite each other at long tables, type on their keyboards and stare at their screens. Kuciak has the second spot from the window. He’s a young man, 27 years old, in jeans, a t-shirt and a sweater, with bushy dark brown hair and glasses. As usual, he’s wearing large headphones, from which the sound of classical music can be discerned by close bystanders. The music seems to calm him as he looks at his computer. Kuciak looks more focussed than usual, and a little tense.

It’s snowing outside. Winter, which no one had been expecting to return this year, suddenly has Slovakia’s capital in its grip. Today the temperature in Bratislava won’t go above freezing, and a cold snap with up to 30 centimetres of snow has been predicted for the weekend. Traffic on the broad arterial road where the editorial office is located is moving more slowly than usual. Only the snowploughs are defiantly battling the whiteness that has descended on the city.

It’s Wednesday, the 21st of February 2018. Kuciak, known to all his colleagues as Janko, is a quiet, conscientious, but also funny guy. “He’s like a big teddy bear,” says his colleague Annamária Dömeová, “incredibly sweet, helpful and courteous.” If you call Kuciak an investigative journalist, he’s not entirely comfortable with it. “Let’s say I might be on the way to becoming one,” he demurs, smiling. He’s not someone who enjoys taking centre stage, the way some in the trade like to, even when their articles don’t always justify it. Kuciak has crucial days ahead of him. For two and a half years he’s been working on the investigative team at aktuality.sk, the second-largest news site in Slovakia, part of the Swiss-German Ringier Axel Springer group. He digs into scandals that concern the nation. They usually consist of the same pattern of money, greed, corruption and abuse of power. In the best case, the stories put politicians or entrepreneurs – or the popular hybrid of both – under pressure. But often nothing happens at all: the media reports, politicians issue denials, the police stays silent, the judiciary does nothing. This time it ought to be different. Kuciak is in the final stages of an investigation that has barely let go of him for a year and a half. Only a few of the other editorial staff know about it. And for those who do, the anticipation of a journalistic scoop is mixed with an uneasy feeling. This time, Kuciak’s opponent seems bigger, more powerful and thus more dangerous.