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From Russia with Love

Marcus Speh

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Two heads and founders of two companies jumped out of windows to their deaths in the presence of their families. The autopsy showed that they both had a synthetic amphetamine in their blood which is known to induce instant suicidal feelings.

The speaker of the secret police, after saying that the secret police was a state secret and was not supposed to be written or talked about other than with the admission that nothing was known for certain about the existence of aforementioned secret police, said that the secret police had not secretly or officially been involved in the death of the two businessmen.

Their families chose not to press charges against the unknown.

The doctors in attendance admitted that there was a very slight chance that the high levels of amphetamine might have been mismeasured due to instrument malfunctions, adding that the measuring devices were of Soviet origin (a remark which was not further explored, the doctors seeming however to imply that this meant they were possibly involved in previous false measurements, compromising the objective functionality of these devices, which in principle could not be meddled with by outsiders who did not have a secret code).

The vice presidents of the companies announced that the companies would be sold to a subsidiary of the state energy company, without divulging the price of the transaction. The sale to a French-German-Spanish conglomerate, which had been planned by the firms’ founders, was cancelled immediately. Both emphasized that it had not been a secret that selling the companies to foreign partners had been a shortsighted premature decision not benefitting either society, the companies’ employees or the shareholder. They also announced the intermediary CEOs for the companies to be two former colonels of the secret police (which as a matter of state security, might not even exist).

During investigations of the country’s business practices, a Finnish journalist who later, curiously and supposedly because of a sudden hay fever sneezing attack, also fell out of a window to her death, in November, before being able to finish her documentary feature, came across this case and interviewed the family of one of the dead business men: Igor, his ten-year-old son said, sobbing: “The pater always warned us not to play near open windows above the first floor!”

We hear the case has now been closed.