The Searcher

by Christopher Morgan Jones

  Putting the book aside, he switched off his light and tried to concentrate on sleep. No matter what everything meant, he had to be up and at the car rental office by eight.

  When there was a knock at the door five minutes later he was awake enough to hear it but not to register it as real. But it came again, a firm double knock, and switching on the light he swung himself slowly out of bed and went to answer it.

  On the landing, backlit by the bright light on the stair, was Colonel Vekua, rigid and correct.

  “Mr. Hammer. I am sorry to wake you.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “Of course.”

  “Not quite.”

  Hammer blinked, growing used to the light.

  “Can I come in?”

  She was smiling her winning smile. No, he wanted to say. It’s late, by my standards, and I’ve had better days, and the last thing I can stomach is sitting in my pajamas being charmed or warned or whatever you have in mind by yet another policeman or spy or whatever the hell you are. I would like to be left alone to do what really ought to be a simple enough if difficult job.

  “Of course. Please.”

  He grabbed a robe from the bathroom.

  “I get you anything?”

  “What do you have?”

  “Scotch. And that bizarre stuff you call water.”

  “Borjomi?”

  “I don’t know what it is. It tastes of plumbing.”

  “It is good for you. Your digestion.”

  “Like I said, plumbing.”

  Vekua smiled and pointed to the tiny bottle of Scotch he was holding. He poured it into the one clean glass, took another miniature for himself, and sat on the bed.

  “Shouldn’t you be out on the streets?”

  She was in black again, a different suit but precisely cut and immaculate, even now, at the end of a hot day. She sat upright on the room’s one chair with her hands clasped on her lap, still the same, strange combination of strict and engaged.

  “I told you, I am not a policeman.”

  “But you must be busy.”

  “And you are important. Some people think.”

  “Really? You have big stuff going on here tonight.”

  She drank a little whiskey, considering.

  “To you it looks big. To me it looks the same. Occasionally there is a little war that no one cares about. A bomb goes off. There are riots. The president changes. This will be the same, always. Georgia is a constant.”

  “That’s cheery.”

  Vekua smiled. “You are American. You can believe in progress, because sometimes in your country there is progress. We have been the same for thousands of years. We are different animals.”

  Hammer drank, the whiskey jarring with the taste of toothpaste. This woman unsettled him.

  “Forgive me for being direct, Elene, but what brings you here? I have an early start tomorrow.”

  Vekua smiled and put her drink down.

  “I have been asked to tell you that you are embarrassing our police force.”

  “How am I doing that?”

  “Do you always rent two hotel rooms in the same city?”

  Hammer smiled back.

  “OK. I get a little edgy when people are tailing me. Especially when they’re not so good and I can see them all the time. No offense to your colleagues but they . . .”

  “They are not my colleagues.”

  “Whoever they are, they’re not the best.”

  “Was it necessary to lose them twice?”

  “I lost them twice?”

  “Mr. Hammer.”

  “I had no idea. I haven’t seen a tail since the Marriott.”

  Vekua raised an eyebrow.

  “They are not the best. But they do not have resources. It is difficult work, as you know.”

  Hammer acknowledged the point.

  “If you continue, you will have to leave. I will not be able to argue for you again.”

  “If it makes things any easier, tomorrow I’m going to Batumi, follow a lead. Ben’s wife just got a postcard from him. Tell them where I’m going, by all means.”

  “You have found him?”

  Hammer shook his head. “We’ll see.”

  “They may not follow you to Batumi. I will tell them.”

  “Thank you. Appreciated.”

  Finishing her whiskey, Vekua stood and held out her hand.

  “This morning I looked in our files, about your friend.”

  “You did?”

  This was curious. Hammer longed to ask her what she wanted in return.

  “He was monitored, when he came to Tbilisi.”

  “I wondered.”

  “This is normal, at a time like this.”

  “You mean I’m not that special?”

  “He was watched for two days. While he was in Tbilisi. Then the surveillance stopped.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it was clear that he was no threat to our security.”

  Hammer waited for her to explain.

  “He went to Karlo Toreli’s funeral. Afterward he went to a bar, by himself. Then he went to a restaurant, with a woman. After that to another bar, and then back here, to this hotel. With the woman. On Tuesday we followed them to Gori and then we turned back.”

  “I guess you don’t do marital work either, huh?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Never mind.”

  Vekua opened the door and stepped out into the hall.

  “Thank you for the drink. I am sorry to give this information.”

  “Hey, no problem. I’m not his keeper. Who was the girl?”

  “We do not know. Russian, I think. Blonde. Not Georgian.” She attempted a sympathetic look. “You will still go to Batumi?”

  “I still need to find him.”

  • • •

  Hammer slept, and dreamed deep, irretrievable dreams full of unnamed and fearful things churning about.

  At their deepest point something like a great crash broke in, and when he opened his eyes the room was bright and voices not unlike those he had dreamed were shouting something he couldn’t understand. Groggy, instantly registering anxiety, he twisted and raised himself on his elbows, and found two men standing over his bed. They looked like brothers—squat, heavy, heads shaved above recessed eyes, arms bulging—and at least one of them smelled strongly of cheap, soapy aftershave. One wore a shiny sky blue tracksuit, open a little at the neck to show knots of black hair and three or four gold chains, the other a leather jacket. The first one pulled the duvet off Hammer and flung it into a corner of the room.

  “Polis,” he shouted. “Passport.”

  Hammer felt small and exposed, like a bullied child. And old. He was fit enough, and strong enough, but not against people like this. These were expert frighteners. Career men. He made to stand and was pushed back onto the bed. Properly awake, he felt rage and fear starting up in him.

  “Don’t touch me, and tell me who you are.” He kept his voice level.

  “Passport.”

  “Tell me who you are.”

  The first man blinked dully, looked at his partner, and gave him the merest of nods. The second man moved toward Hammer, grabbed him by the arm, pulled him off the bed, and pushed him toward his partner. His chubby fingers dug in.

  “You get the fuck off me.”

  Unhurried, the first man looked Hammer up and down and then stared at him hard. His eyes were dark and bloodshot. Without looking away he said something in Georgian, and his friend let go of Hammer’s arm and started to search the room, opening cupboards and drawers and throwing what he found there behind him.

  “It was stolen from me. I don’t have it.”

  They didn’t seem to understand. Hammer stayed where he was and watc
hed, wondering who these men were and who had sent them. How many others they had intimidated and terrorized in their time. They looked nothing like police, and cruder than Iosava’s mob—they were gangsters, plain as day, but then gangsters in places like this could work for anyone. The thought scared him: why involve such people if not to do the dirtiest of jobs? Last night, in the police station, he had felt ill equipped. Now, he felt acutely alone.

  “I have money. There’s money in my pants.” No reaction from the man in front of him, who continued tirelessly staring. “Dollars. Lari.”

  Eventually the man gave up his search, throwing his hands up in a shrug. At some further instruction from his friend, he picked up Hammer’s clothes from the chair where they had been neatly folded and thrust them at him.

  “Uh-uh,” said Hammer, shaking his head. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  The first man nodded, slow and deliberate.

  “Forget it,” said Hammer.

  Reaching behind him and under his tracksuit top, the man produced a pistol—black, automatic, efficient—and holding it by his side nodded again.

  TWELVE

  There was no one in reception, and barely anybody on the streets. He had no idea what time it was, but the city had finally gone to sleep. He had no one to call to, and no words to call.

  Hands bound with a plastic tie, Hammer sat in the back of the car next to the man with the gun, who held it casually in his lap. The air was a dull stink of cigarette smoke and bitter sweat. His neck squashing out under his massive bald head, the thug in the leather jacket was driving, too fast, along the empty road alongside the river and then off into a part of the city Hammer hadn’t been to before, where the buildings grew less solid, the road more uneven. Houses gave way to warehouses and scrappy undeveloped lots studded with rusting machinery and overgrown with grass and weeds.

  Now he was scared. Everything else had been negotiable, but this—this was looking final. His last trip. The fear was different, too—consuming, but somehow healthy. If he had ever worried that life had no meaning, now he knew without doubt that it did.

  At a red signal Hammer quietly moved his hands across to try his door, ready to spring as quickly as he could into the dark side streets, but found it locked.

  “Where are you taking me?”

  The man with the gun seemed not to hear. Hammer patted the pocket of his trousers.

  “There’s money here. Lari. How much do you want? I’m a rich man. Ten thousand dollars.”

  The car continued to drive.

  “No one’s paying you anything like ten thousand dollars. You want to be rich?” Nothing. “A hundred thousand.”

  But neither man answered, and their silence felt like the end.

  Finally, they stopped at what seemed to be the edge of the city, a black wasteland of dead buildings and abandoned things. Nothing happened here; no one came here. That was why he had been brought.

  Hammer felt his heart quicken and his breath go short. This was the kind of fate he’d imagined for Ben, but it seemed it had been his own all along. He cursed his preparations, or the lack of them. He should have found a bodyguard of his own. What would that have taken, a couple of calls and a hundred bucks a day? Never underestimate your opponent. How many times had he said it? Even if you had no idea who they might be.

  The first man pulled him from the car and marched him with the gun at his back toward a compound of low prefabricated buildings surrounded by a high metal fence and sparsely lit by two dim lights in dirty housings. In among them stood a larger concrete block, windowless, with a stubby chimney rising above it. Three ancient vans stood by the gate. A waste management plant, Hammer thought. The mob were the same the world over. In the air there was the sound of howling and an acrid stench of ammonia and shit that went deep inside and made it impossible to think. His captors seemed not to notice and pushed him on. He forced himself to think.

  Four concrete blocks marked the end of the road and beyond them, perhaps half a mile away through the darkness, he could see a highway with the odd car and truck on it. The ground in between he couldn’t see, but whatever was there couldn’t be worse than being shot in the head without any kind of struggle. Probably they’d simply shoot him in the back instead, but it was dark, and he was still quick, and neither of these lunks was a runner. Poor odds, but at least they were odds.

  Hammer ran. Got a good start on the loose dirt underfoot and, leaning forward as far as he could with his hands tied together, set off, half a dozen determined strides, aiming for a gap in the concrete blocks and waiting every moment for a shot to crack the air and tear into his back. Voices shouted and footsteps followed, clumsy and heavy, and still he ran. Then with an abrupt clap a shot came, and he felt the muscles in his back tense in expectation, but the bullet flew past him—where, he couldn’t tell. A second, then a third; he was off the road now and forced himself to concentrate on staying upright on the sand and stone that stretched ahead of him. The light to see by was going and a single stumble would end it. Ignoring the shouting and the shots he propelled himself forward, foot after foot, until, coming down a bank, he saw the darkness in front of him take on a different quality and only by sliding onto his backside stopped himself from pitching into the lights from the road reflected in a broad channel of water.

  “Fuck,” said Hammer, and pushing himself up on his elbow got upright again. The water ran across his path, a canal of some sort; it must have been twenty yards to the other side. He ran to his right but found the driver scrabbling down the bank; turned to see the other man standing above him with his gun faintly silhouetted against the night sky.

  “Sakmarisi,” said the man, and gestured to his partner, who walked calmly toward Hammer and with the back of his clenched hand struck him across the face. Hammer cried out with pain and felt himself being pushed up the slope, back toward his fate.

  • • •

  While the driver held Hammer tightly by the arm his friend shot the padlock off the railings that ran round the compound. The first bullet didn’t do it, and he fired another, relaxed in the knowledge that there was no one nearby to hear or care. Breathing hard from the exertion, Hammer turned away, his head resounding with the noise and the fresh pain, but he couldn’t escape the smell—an unholy caustic dying reek that seemed to occupy the whole of him. Like sulfur and burning tires and month-old fish. Somehow it scared him more than the two men who had such total power over him. He brought his sleeve up to his newly broken nose in a hopeless attempt to filter it.

  As the ringing of the shot died and he was pushed through the gate a frenzy of barking began, and over it the howling Hammer had heard earlier, high and ghostly. There were dogs here. Many of them—dozens, it sounded like, fear in all their voices. Hammer recognized it as his own.

  He was pushed past the low buildings to the side of the enclosure and rounding the corner saw in the scant light two rows of pens made of chain-link fencing about six feet high. There were maybe ten in all, and in each one there were ten or fifteen dogs, some lying down, some prowling madly, some with their muzzles pressed to the wire and their teeth bared, angrily barking, crazed at the sight of the three men. The straw in their cages was matted with feces and slick with urine. Hammer halted, gagging at the smell, and was pushed ahead once more. This was where the strays were brought to be destroyed. This was where he had been brought for the same purpose. He looked at the dogs and wondered who was better off, the ones who didn’t understand or the ones who had given up hope. With panic starting up in him he struggled against the grip on his arm but it was unyielding, and too strong.

  The man with the gun walked down the corridor between the two pens and, stopping by the last one on the right, took a flashlight from his pocket and shone it inside. A large black dog was by the door; Hammer could see its ribs under molting fur and a red sore that ran from its neck down its foreleg. As the light flashed in its eye it bared i
ts teeth and gave a long, low growl. A smaller dog, tan and wire-haired, yapped behind it, alternately inching toward and backing away from the fence.

  The man aimed the gun at the smaller dog and shot it. The bullet struck it in the flank, halfway along, and Hammer shouted out as he watched it topple from the force. Something about the casualness of the act and its innocent victim appalled him, even here. The black dog whimpered and turned, and as it backed away the man tucked the gun in the back of his trousers, opened the door to the cage, took the dying dog by the scruff of its neck, and pulled it out, shutting the door behind him. He held the dog by his side, its blood streaking his tracksuit.

  With a jerk of his head he told his friend to follow, and set off toward the biggest of the buildings, three stories tall and now looming over them in the night. In the light of the flashlight, Hammer saw the dog’s blood dripping onto the ground and by some old, futile instinct stepped around it. The butt of the pistol was visible under the man’s tracksuit and he began to imagine how he might reach it, but his guard seemed wise to the possibility, and hung back while his friend opened the heavy metal doors.

  The stench outside was of animal decay; in here it was chemical, like a blast of bleach with fire in it. It hit Hammer in the face, burning his eyes and the back of his throat and causing a new terror to rush through him. He fought again to get free, stamped his feet on the man’s shoes, tried to wrestle his arm away, but the man tightened his hold and then brought the point of his elbow sharply onto the base of Hammer’s neck. His knees went and he sank back, powerless, into the man’s arms.

  The lights were on. He was being dragged through a vestibule into a larger space, perhaps twenty feet wide, that was gloomily lit by two fluorescent strips. The walls and ceiling were concrete and filthy with muck and blood; but for a tiled strip running round the outside, the floor was a pool of liquid.