The Searcher

by Christopher Morgan Jones

  Hammer thanked him, walked down to the bridge, crossed the river, and turned right onto the busy road that led to the new town.

  It was another warm evening, the day’s heat caught hanging in the air and close on his skin. He passed police slowly patrolling the streets, machine guns slung casually across their chests, and watched police vans racing ahead of him with their lights flashing. Every face he saw looked Georgian. The tourists had already left or were staying inside.

  The tail was there again, as he knew it would be. Two men on foot, one of whom he recognized from earlier, and a car, a blue Toyota this time. A proper team. He was gaining in importance. He kept his pace steady and stayed on wide streets where his pursuers were unlikely to worry about losing him.

  Soon he was part of a flow of people that slowed and thickened the nearer it came to the square. Songs broke out and fists punched the air. Red T-shirts were everywhere. This was a different crowd from the night before—there were old women, mothers with their children—but the anger was a constant. Hammer could hear it in the shouting, see it in the jaws set all around him. A heavy-headed man in a denim shirt walking by him clasped his shoulder and asked him something in Georgian. Hammer smiled up at him and shrugged, and the man seemed content with the reply. Soon they weren’t walking but marching, all at a uniform rate.

  Ahead, he heard a speech being made over loudspeakers, loud cheers punctuating it. The flow became a mass, which slowed as they reached the square itself and patiently shuffled into the standing crowd that already filled the space. Thousands of bodies, a different sort of heat coming off them, all intently facing a platform fifty yards away where a tiny figure was pacing and gesticulating, his words booming at them and drawing huge cheers in return. Hammer kept moving onward through the hot air and the smell of fresh sweat, threading his way through the press of people, not stopping but occasionally looking over his shoulder to see whether he could see movement behind him. A long way back there was some jostling, and through the heads of the crowd he glimpsed one of his tails pushing people out of his way. He became more conscious than ever of the documents folded in his back pocket.

  He went faster, trying to slip between people and leave as little trace of his direction as possible. Most ignored him; some scowled at the disturbance. “Gmadlobt,” he said often, and tried his best smile. Behind him he could hear a single voice shouting commands over the tinny drone of the speech, and a rumble of discontent in response. The crowd was thicker here in the center of the square, and he had to use his arms in front of him to pry open space between the bodies. He was beginning to get on people’s nerves.

  A hand grabbed the collar of his shirt, twisting, and brought him to an abrupt stop. Hammer looked round into the full beard and gray eyes of a solid man who was regarding him with curious contempt, a sneer on his lip. He wore the red T-shirt of the opposition, and in his free hand held an unlit cigarette.

  “Sorry,” said Hammer, wishing he knew the Georgian word. His captor brought him closer, until they were only a foot apart, and bending down said something slow and threatening whose gist Hammer thought he understood. He was close enough to see a small patch of bare skin in the man’s beard and smell old coffee on his breath.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, reaching up to his neck to try and loosen the man’s grip and wondering whether to bring his knee up into his groin. “I have to go.” The Georgian said something else and twisted Hammer’s shirt a little harder. Over the man’s shoulder he could see the policeman gaining, now only a few arm’s lengths away. “Police,” he said to the man, pointing the way he had come. “Polis. Polizei. They’re chasing me.”

  The man turned to look and saw the policeman approaching, the only person in the crowd in a suit. His sunglasses weren’t helping; he looked every bit the secret service agent. Hammer felt the grip relax, and without saying anything the bearded man let him go with a push in the right direction. As he set off he saw his new friend square up to the policeman, with his arms out, and draw some of his neighbors into the cause. The policeman pulled out a badge, but as Hammer disappeared finally into the crowd the last thing he saw when he looked back was the bearded man pushing his new prey hard in the chest with the flat of his hand.

  • • •

  Despite his maneuvers, he was first to arrive. She had named somewhere at the edge of the old town as it backed up against thickly wooded hills, in a hidden square where people on benches talked intently and old men played bowls on a broad track of sand. Hammer could hear amplified voices in the far distance but no one here seemed conscious of them. They might have been in a different country altogether.

  The restaurant was called Pascal and inside, with its bare brick walls and wooden floor, it reminded him of cafés in Greenwich Village from many years ago. No two pieces of furniture were the same, and every old table, lamp, and chairback was covered in a different fabric, a calming mess of floral prints and faded stripes. A high, pretty room, conscious of its sense of romance, like the city around it. It was almost empty: three couples, a group of what looked like foreign students arguing earnestly across a table. A wooden record player played old European folk songs, and the reedy violin was a sound directly from his childhood. Someone might have designed all this to make him at once relaxed and unsure of himself. After that intense, seesawing day he finally felt comfortable, for the moment, at his corner table, and out of place. Somehow out of time. They had rye whiskey here, to his surprise, and he ordered one with ice.

  A second day over, almost. His crop of information whirled around his head, refusing to be reconciled. Ben was investigating false bombs and fake suicides. He had come here to take a gangster’s money; he had come to bury his friend. He was in Turkey, living the high life, or more likely in a makeshift grave. He sent a text to Elsa that hinted at progress and mentioned none of this.

  Nothing was fixed in this country, Hammer realized. Certainties had deserted him. In their place was a set of rotating hunches and assumptions and half-truths whose probabilities he could only guess at. It was like playing poker with an unknown number of unseen opponents. Vekua was right: logic was twisted here, into a shape that he couldn’t yet make out, but given long enough he might begin to see its outline. Already he had some dim, instinctive sense of it. If you were weak and ringed by enemies a hundred times more powerful, your national bearing would be a mixture of pride and steeliness and cunning. That he understood. What he didn’t understand was the charm. In a little over a day he’d been beaten up, arrested, followed, briefly kidnapped, and threatened with being savaged by a bear, a first in his experience, but Tbilisi was nevertheless beginning to take hold of him. It had the precarious beauty of some delicate treasure that against all odds had survived repeated attempts to destroy it. The flaws were testament to the achievement.

  Natela, when she came, seemed intent on piercing the mood. She walked stiffly to the table, her back straight, and held out a rigid hand to Hammer as he rose. Her gaze said: you’re still on trial; I can leave at any time. She was wearing the gray suit she had worn at work that morning, and around her was the fresh, dank smell of a cigarette just smoked.

  “Thank you for coming,” said Hammer, smiling but serious.

  Natela sat, without replying, and looked around the room, from table to table, checking the faces, not looking at his.

  “This is a nice place,” he said.

  She was trying to find something in her handbag on her lap. Without looking up she said, “It is Georgian but not Georgian. I come here when I want to escape.”

  “I’m amazed it’s open.”

  She didn’t respond but continued to root around in the large bag, which seemed full and unfathomable.

  “With the demonstrations going on, I thought everything would be closed.”

  “Why? There is no demonstration here.”

  Finally, she gave up on the bag, put it on the floor, and fixed Hammer with a
straight look, which he met. She did not return his smile.

  “You say you have work. For me.”

  “I do,” he said. “What will you drink?”

  “Whiskey. With ice.”

  He attracted a waiter’s attention and ordered two more.

  “So you live in the city?”

  “That does not matter.”

  “Actually, I know you do. At 23 Gudauri Street. Half an hour from here.”

  Natela sat even straighter in her chair. “How do you know this?”

  “I’m an investigator. It’s what I do.” He drank the last of his drink and challenged her with a frank look. “It’s in here.” He pushed some folded papers across the table to her. “They’re my friend’s notes. Yours is one of a bunch of addresses and telephone numbers he needed.” He separated out the sheets. “I can’t read half of it, but they mention K a lot, and I think that’s your husband.”

  “My husband, for all time.”

  “I’m sorry. Your ex-husband. I’m showing you this because I want you to see I’m keeping nothing from you. In my job you’re taught to trust no one, but in fact that’s never practical. Comes a point where you have to share, and you’re the only person in Georgia I can begin to trust.” He gave her a frank look. “You’re also the only person in Georgia I know.”

  Her eyes relented and he thought she might smile, but she held it.

  “So these are in English. But this,” he brought the final sheet to the top, “is clear enough, but it’s in Russian. And I don’t speak Russian.”

  Natela scanned the document and frowned. “This is work?”

  “Yes.”

  “It is nothing. How much you pay?”

  “This much.” From his jacket he produced the envelope.

  Natela closed her eyes in frustration and shook her head. “No. No. I do not like tricks.”

  She pulled her chair out and Hammer reached across the table to touch her arm.

  “Sit down, will you? You sure have powerful principles. Listen. I need to know what this says. I can’t send it back to London because I can’t do that safely. OK? I can’t take it to a translator because God knows who they are or where it’ll end up. You’re the only answer I’ve got. That makes you valuable.”

  Staying where she was, her chair pushed back, Natela looked from the document to the envelope.

  “I am here for work. Not gifts.”

  Hammer grinned, incredulous. “Natela, would you just take the money? Please? You need it, I need what you can give me. It’s a transaction. A deal. I’m an American. This is what we do.”

  “In America money makes everything simple.”

  Their drinks came. Hammer took his, and the waiter set Natela’s down on the table. She looked at it for a moment, shrugged, and tucked in her chair.

  “Your nose. What is wrong?”

  Hammer smoothed the bandage out across the bridge.

  “I got in the way of someone’s elbow. Careless of me.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Just enough.”

  Apparently satisfied, she took the Russian fax and started studying it.

  “You have pen?”

  Hammer took a pencil from his pocket and pushed it across the table toward her. “Will you have something to eat?”

  “Sure. Why not.” She drank half an inch of whiskey and set the glass down. “But I pay.”

  Hammer laughed. “Is this a Georgian thing? Are you all like this?”

  She glanced up from the document. “Why should we trust strangers? I do not know why you trust me.”

  Hammer watched her as she worked: in silence, concentrating, taking large sips from her glass. When it was empty he ordered her another. She wore no jewelry, he noticed, unless you counted the enamel clip that held her hair, nor any makeup. Freckles clustered at the bridge of her nose.

  She was dark, her skin olive and tired around the eyes, which in this light were close to black. Her black hair was tied tightly back. Had her lips been fuller and her skin less dry she would have been beautiful in the way that men instantly prize, but Hammer saw something much greater there, in the lines on her brow, in the sorrow and humor of her eyes: a great seriousness, a deep engagement with life. This was someone who had never turned from reality, even when there had been rather too much of it. Beside her he had the odd sense, not usual with him, of feeling frivolous. Insubstantial.

  “OK,” she said at last with another shrug. “You want to know what is here?”

  “Please.”

  “It says this. Thank you for your question. I have asked my normal—I do not know this word.”

  “Sources?”

  “Sources. I have asked my normal sources the question and I have met a wall. In Russian, it is stena, literally wall. The wall cannot be climbed. I asked very high sources, and they all stated they did not know the subject, or any information. Nothing. So. Second . . .” she pointed with the pen.

  “Paragraph.”

  “There are two possibilities, it says. One is subject not known in Russia. Two is subject who is special and no one can talk. Result is same.”

  She looked at Hammer, who smiled, alone, and nodded for her to go on.

  “Then here, last one, it says this. I received strong feeling that subject was person sources were not happy to discuss. Person was . . . how you say . . . made safe . . .”

  “Protected.”

  “Protected. This happens when person holds money for administrators or when person is spy.”

  She ringed the two Russian words, put down her pen, and started her second whiskey.

  “‘For administrators’?”

  “For government. For politicians.”

  Hammer had suspected before but now was almost certain. The fax was from Mr. V, former KGB, former FSB, an old spy who was Webster’s first resource for all matters Russian. Mr. V knew everyone in Moscow: from the men in the archive rooms who would quietly pull a file for a hundred dollars, to his old colleagues, the colonels and generals who had quietly taken back so much of the country.

  “Are there any names? Of people?”

  “No. Only this.”

  “Nothing else?”

  Natela raised her eyebrows, as if to say that she didn’t intend to repeat herself, and pushed the paper back to him.

  “So, you are detective or spy?”

  “I’m an investigator. I don’t really trust spies.”

  She touched the paper.

  “This is about Karlo?”

  “Maybe. Ben sent a request to Russia. To find out about a person. This was what came back. I have no idea where it fits.”

  She nodded, considering.

  “He is good friend, your friend?”

  “He was.”

  “Not now?”

  “We don’t speak.”

  “Then why do you look for him?”

  “It’s complicated. I need him.”

  Natela nodded slowly, and then finished her drink all at once.

  “The people who go away, they never go.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your friend. Karlo. My apartment, they search it, I am sure. Sometimes they are waiting outside and they follow me to work, to supermarket. I want to scream at them that he is dead, it is over, I know nothing, but I cannot.”

  He shouldn’t have called her. He hadn’t thought.

  “Did they follow you here?”

  “I don’t know; no, I did not see.” She reached down for her bag. “Do you have family?”

  “No. Passed me by.”

  “That is good. You can be a detective by yourself. Run around, investigate. No one will suffer. I need cigarette.” She felt around in the bag. “I’m sorry. I should not have said.”

  “It’s fine.”

&nb
sp; “Do you smoke?”

  “No. That’s another thing I left behind.”

  Natela surveyed the table, shook her head, and stood up.

  “I have to go. I’m sorry.”

  He stood with her. “Stay. Let’s order some food.”

  “I want to forget all this things.”

  They looked at each other for a moment, and he thought, perhaps fondly, that there was a trace of regret in her eyes.

  “Would you take this?” said Hammer, picking up the envelope and holding it out for her. Natela eyed it, for the first time not sure.

  “You did your part,” he said.

  She closed her eyes, as if making some accommodation with her conscience, and took it.

  “Thank you.”

  “And take this. Call me if you need to.”

  He handed her a business card, and she took it with a nod.

  “Good luck with your friend,” she said, and went.

  Hammer watched her leave, her steps quick, her bearing correct. At the door she stopped, took a moment to find something in her bag, and came back to the table.

  “For my drinks,” she said, dropping a twenty-lari note on the table and turning again.

  It was too much, but Hammer knew better than to say anything, and with his own regret gathered his papers, put the twenty in his pocket, and picked up the menu.

  ELEVEN

  Hammer slept in pajamas, not for formality’s sake but because he found that they kept his body evenly warm and encouraged an even sleep. As with most things, he had thought closely about it, to a point just short of fussiness. Now, sitting up in bed with his notebook open before him, the pajamas made him feel old. An old man gone to bed early while the city outside went inexorably about the business of living. The door onto the balcony was open and through it he could hear shouting and the yowling of sirens and dogs and the occasional crack of a distant gun.

  These pajamas were Turkish, cotton, and had a scratchy label at the back of the neck. They could do with a few washes. He put his tired thoughts away and continued to fail to write anything coherent; after two whiskeys and some red wine and that long quick day, he could do little but catch fragments of his thoughts as they bounced about. Images of Ben, tied up or holed up or dead. Scattered bits of information with little to connect them. And one recurring memory, of Natela drinking whiskey as she worked, and of the pang of responsibility he had felt when he had realized that they would be listening to her phone.