The Searcher

by Christopher Morgan Jones

  Hammer knew what it was the moment he saw it. It was thick, like loose mud, and an uneven brown made up of blacks and dull reds, and though it was still it seemed to seethe, as if it had purpose of some kind. There was a pure horror in it. He turned away, but that did nothing to dull the sense of it, the dark presence that filled his head. His chest had tightened and his lungs seemed to contract.

  One of the men shouted, and Hammer felt his head being lifted by the hair above his ears.

  “Please,” he said. This was how he would die. Pleading for life to men who had never known the value of it. “Please.”

  He hadn’t thought he would beg. He would go out nobly, even if there was no one to see his dignity. But that was a vain thought; of course you begged. Every cell in him was straining in terror from the end that seethed and swirled beside him, and his tongue was no different.

  “Don’t.” If he could see the man’s eyes, find some forgotten scrap of good in them. But his head was being twisted away.

  His time hadn’t come. He was just required to watch.

  The leader was squatting down halfway round the side of the pool, holding the dog out with a straight arm above the sludge. The dog seemed to be moving, but Hammer couldn’t tell whether it was alive or just swinging in the man’s grip.

  He let go, and the dog dropped onto the surface of the liquid, sank an inch and stayed there, its legs out awkwardly beside it.

  It was still, thank God; already dead. A terrier: short-haired and black-eyed, a chunk gone from its uppermost ear. Nothing happened for several seconds, and then Hammer heard a faint fizzing noise as the fur began to burn. He looked away but the man in the blue shell suit was by him now, gripping his chin and forcing him to watch.

  After thirty seconds the fur was slipping off; after a minute the flesh on the creature’s legs began to dissolve, melting into the ooze around it. A minute later, bone showed on its front leg. Through the acid fumes Hammer could smell burning meat. Time slowed to a stop.

  Revulsion and fear filled him; he had had enough. He wrenched his head from the man’s hand and looked him full in the eye.

  “Fuck it. If you’re going to do it, do it.”

  The man glanced at his partner, nodded, a mere jerk of the chin, and grabbed Hammer’s shirt around the neck, twisting it until he had a firm grip. Then he turned so that Hammer’s back was to the pool and his shoes at its edge, and began to lower him toward the surface. Hammer grabbed instinctively at the man’s jacket and let his feet slip between his legs, but still he went down, the fumes growing stronger, until his head was six inches away.

  The man’s face above him was fat and solid and certain. He didn’t blink. Sweat beaded at his hairline; half his teeth were yellow-black. On his neck a tattooed spider crawled up toward his face. Tightening his fist he let Hammer down.

  Hammer could sense the acid beneath him as surely as if it had been a flame and its heat playing over his skin. His bravery was all external. All he knew was his fear. He closed his eyes and when he did he saw Ben, and Elsa. Saw Natela, at dinner, pen in hand.

  “You. Go.”

  Hammer opened his eyes and the man repeated what he had said.

  “You. Go.”

  With that he swung Hammer round and flung him hard against the wall. For a moment he stood over his broken form, letting his prey appreciate the quality of his mercy, then nodded to his partner.

  “You go. Georgia. Now,” he said, and together they left, calmly, their work done.

  Hammer stayed where he was, on one elbow, pressed awkwardly against the wall, tears of fear and exhaustion and pure release starting in his eyes. The dog was almost gone.

  The palm of his hand was tingling sharply, beginning to burn. Some acid had splashed onto the tiles and was now eating into his trousers and the sleeve of his sweater. He stood quickly and left the gruesome place, staggering out into the air and breathing the dogs’ stench with something like relief. Hardly hearing the barking all around him, he watched the car drive away, throwing up dirt behind it.

  By the pens was a pile of buckets and a freestanding tap. He rubbed the water between his hands and let it run over his clothes, and when he was done brought some up to his face in his palms, again and again, the cold vital and pure and finally familiar.

  Still the dogs barked. As quickly as he could, Hammer made his way between the two sets of pens, shooting back the bolts as he went.

  THIRTEEN

  The first thing he did when he got back to the hotel was to tidy his room. As long as his things were strewn all over the floor those men would still be here, and it was important that he forget their existence. They had to cease to exist. This was logical: nothing could happen while they remained in his head, so he set about forcing them out. Put his clothes away, made the bed, restored order. Checked his passport, taped inside the gathered tops of the curtain. Showered, with his head bent under the jet, until his skin was red from the heat and the stench had begun to leave his nostrils. Removed all the traces.

  The aftershave was still there, though, when he came back into the room, hanging in the air like a memory he could neither confront nor banish, and for a moment he stood in the doorway and contemplated the knowledge that those men and that place would always remain. They had made themselves a part of him. This was what such people did, the world over, every day. They got inside and didn’t leave.

  It was five now, and the day had begun. Hammer dressed in his new shorts and T-shirt and pulled on his new sneakers and left the hotel to run, over the bridge, into the old town, through the waking streets, bidding “gamarjobat” to the few Georgians he saw, reconstituting himself. Being Isaac David Hammer. Who had not gone so soft in his comfortable middle age that he couldn’t absorb some hardship, or overcome a trial. That was all this was. A trial.

  He found the steep road to the castle and attacked it as fast as he could manage until the air was deep in his lungs, expelling the acid fumes collected there. At the top he turned and flew down the hill and at the bottom turned again to make the climb. God, how alive everything was. Every tree, every face, every leaf of every vine, every crack in the wall, sharply defined as itself, lit from within. He felt the fear begin to leave him.

  On the fourth repetition the roar in his head was beginning to fade and he found himself able to think. Those men could have been working for anyone—for the police, who couldn’t be seen to terrorize him, or for Iosava, who didn’t like being scorned. For someone else, whose motives he couldn’t possibly know. Who they were didn’t matter, not yet.

  All that mattered was that they didn’t want him here, and he could think of only two reasons for that. Because he was Ike Hammer, and there was an election, and someone thought he was up to no good. Or because he was looking for Ben, and Ben had stuck his meddling nose into some delicate business neither of them could do more than guess at.

  But then, if Vekua was to be believed, it wasn’t Ben’s nose that was leading him west.

  There were so many possibilities. This woman, the Russian, was helping Ben; he was investigating her; Vekua was lying to get him out of Tbilisi; Iosava was lying, and Ben was here for other reasons altogether. For a while Hammer’s mind flitted from one to the next, until he realized that he should be looking not for the answer, but only the next step. And that was to Batumi.

  Almost the moment he stopped running, the doubt set in. You. Go. The words were imprinted on him. When he closed his eyes, he saw them, and the man who had said them, saw his blackened teeth and the spider forever stamped on his neck. Smelled the sweet soapy smell of his aftershave.

  In three or four hours he could be on a plane, in business class, safely cosseted in a world he understood. By this evening he and Hibbert could be working out a solution to his problems that didn’t involve Ben. And Hibbert was good—at the very least he’d minimize the damage, and maybe better than that. Maybe there was a
route out of this Hammer hadn’t even considered.

  It was crazy to come here. Fear drove me, and the need to do something in the face of it. If I was a wiser man, I’d have stayed and toughed it out. Following Ben was the sort of idiocy Ben indulged, and like all his follies, just another form of running away.

  And then a voice that until now he hadn’t chosen to heed told him why he had really come. He wasn’t here to protect himself from Detective Inspector Sander and the worst that she could do, or to save the company that had become his life, though he wanted both those things. He was here to prove Ben wrong—to show that this gross hypocrite could still do something selfless and plainly good. And to rub the bastard’s superior nose in it.

  • • •

  By eight he was packed and ready and waiting by the car-rental office for the door to open—tired, pale, but something approaching himself. The second day without his medication. Only when he thought of it did he miss it.

  They had his booking, and his paperwork was all in order. All they needed was a credit card, which he gave them, and a driver’s license, which he could not. Usually it sat in its own pocket in his wallet, behind the credit cards and the library card and the coffee shop loyalty card, but now it was gone, no matter how many times he looked. He was certain it had been there after the riot and less certain that it had survived the police station or the search of his room.

  Plead as he might, Hammer couldn’t persuade the charming man behind the counter to make an exception in his case, even with the offer of more money, perhaps in cash. With great reluctance he left, and surveyed his options. A car was out; chances were that no rental company in Tbilisi would take him. He had dismissed the taxi driver who had brought him here and who in any case drove like a lunatic and spoke no English. And that day’s one train to Batumi had just left.

  Scanning the traffic for cabs, he phoned the Kopala. Rostom answered, and from him Hammer learned that his driver was still off work but they had other drivers they could provide, a good one came to mind, an older man, experienced, knew Georgia very well. Rostom would call him and see if he was free.

  FOURTEEN

  Across the plain west of Tbilisi the wind gusted, strong enough to shunt the car out of its lane and into the wayward traffic ahead. Hammer’s new driver, twitching the wheel, didn’t seem to mind—the lanes were a loose guide, and overtaking a lazy drift across and a lazier drifting back. They spent half their time on the white line. But Hammer saw no point in protesting. As a taxi driver in Istanbul had once explained to him, it was all in God’s hands.

  Koba was genial, at least, knew where he was going, and clearly wanted the work; he had been at the Kopala within twenty minutes, helping Hammer with his bags, promising to take him to all the most ancient sites in Georgia, and generally behaving with great hustle and verve. Hammer was grateful to be distracted.

  “Ha!” Koba had said, on meeting his client, “We are brothers, yes?”—making great show of the discovery that they were the same height and roughly the same age and had less hair than had once been the case. Hammer was five years his junior, probably, but in every other respect they would have made strange brothers indeed. Where Hammer was slight, Koba—he volunteered no surname—was broad across the shoulders and round through the middle, filling out all the contours of a white linen shirt that was thin with wear; and where Hammer, though he cared little about it, was always careful with his appearance, Koba seemed rather more relaxed. Three or four days’ growth of graying beard sat by his white mustache, and a distinctive smell of sweat and cigarettes and last night’s garlic followed him around.

  All this was fine with Hammer, who was pleased with the way things had worked out; for a hundred bucks a day he was getting a driver, a guide, a half-decent translator, and someone to talk to. And this morning he needed to talk.

  The sun shone and the wind blew at them and they quickly left Tbilisi behind.

  “You live in a crazy city,” said Hammer as they headed into open country.

  “Ya,” said Koba. “Everyone crazy.” He tapped his temple with a stubby finger.

  Hammer learned that no, Koba had not always been a driver; he had lost his job as a building inspector five years earlier and, jobs in Georgia being scarce for normal people, had been forced to take whatever work came his way ever since; he had his 4 x 4, a good car, thanks God, and he drove for people when he could—mainly tourists, taking them up into the mountains or to the seaside, but also some local businessmen, friends of his, who did their best to keep him busy. When there was no driving he did whatever else came his way. His wife had work as a cleaner in a government building, and their children had all left home, thanks God, and when there was time he and Lela went to their little house up near the mountains—a tiny house, but Hammer must come, of course, there was a bed for him; after Batumi they would go. There he kept bees and grew some grapes and made chacha, very good chacha, they would drink some later, because since this president came to power it was no longer as easy to drink and then drive. Hammer should have some now. Two fingers, for the journey. With persistence, Hammer persuaded him that he would wait.

  Koba was an easy talker, and with the help of some sweeping sign language made himself well understood. He had a slow, thick voice that Hammer liked, stretching all the vowels until they were halfway to song. Ten miles outside Tbilisi he pointed to his right, where miles of flat hot fields reached up to a low range of mountains that ran across the horizon. They passed a sign: Ankara, 995.

  “Beautiful, yes?”

  “Very beautiful.”

  “There is story, all Georgians know. You believe in God, Isaac?”

  “Less than I should.”

  Koba looked across, puzzled.

  “I don’t think about it so much.”

  Koba replied with a deep, tolerant nod, as if he were a big enough man to accept all positions.

  “Is OK. Is normal. Story is about God. He has finished world, has made all things, and He says to all peoples, come, I will give your land. Yes?” He looked across for seconds at a time as he talked, so that Hammer, still on edge, was torn between meeting his eye and watching the road. “So Chechens come and God gives mountains to them. Armenians, they have desert. And on and on. All peoples wait, in big line. But Georgians, they are at big party. Much wine, much chacha. And when they come, line has gone. Yes?” Koba glanced back to the road and twitched the car back into its lane. “God says to them, is no more land, land is all gone. You are late. Why you are late? And Georgians, they, how you say?” Koba dipped his head emphatically toward the steering wheel, twice.

  “Bow,” said Hammer, promptly.

  “Bow. They bow, and say we were drinking to Your name, oh good God. And God, He is so happy He says OK, I give you land I keep for myself.”

  Koba grinned, and clapped Hammer on the shoulder with a thick, strong hand.

  “Georgia is paradise. This is good. So everyone wants it. Not so good.” Laughing, he jabbed a finger at the windshield toward the mountains in the distance. “Here is where I come to fight. Russians came here.” He tapped his watch. “It was five years. Tanks and how you say? Army cars?”

  “Jeeps.”

  “Ya, jeeps. Bombed Gori. In Tbilisi, we think we are next. Me, my friends, everyone, we take guns, stick, everything, come here. To fight Russians.” He waved one belligerent hand at the mountains.

  “Did you fight?”

  “They run! How you say in American? They fuck their mothers.”

  “Motherfuckers,” said Hammer.

  “Ya, motherfuckers. They run. Or they stop. This, here, nearest they go to Tbilisi. It’s good for them. Motherfuckers!” He laughed a grand laugh, his head so far back he could no longer see the road. Hammer was getting used to seeing him in profile: the squat forehead, the still muscular, sturdy neck, the flat drinker’s nose, the old man’s broken veins across his cheekbone.
/>   “Smoke?” Koba pulled a packet of cigarettes from his pocket, thumbing the lid and offering him one.

  Hammer shook his head. “No. Thank you. Not anymore.”

  “Is OK?”

  “It’s fine.”

  Leaning across, one eye occasionally on the road, Koba opened the glove box, scrabbled around in a mess of stuff, and after what seemed an age, as the car wandered toward the shoulder, produced a lighter.

  “You have fight?” he said, lighting the cigarette.

  “Excuse me?”

  “This.” He touched his nose.

  “Oh, OK. Yes. I got into a fight.”

  “You hurt them more, yes, Isaac?”

  He beamed at Hammer, the cigarette hanging from his lips.

  “Something like that.”

  “Of course. We are brothers.” He took a deep drag. “You want go to Gori, yes? Stalin museum.”

  Hammer tried to explain that no, he didn’t want to see the Stalin museum. He needed to go to the apartment building that had been bombed.

  Koba’s smile flattened out until his lips were a dry line.

  “Apartment? Why?” he said.

  “To pay my respects,” said Hammer.

  The driver shook his head. “I not understand.”

  “I want to give respect to the dead.” He put his right hand across his breast, as if swearing allegiance. “It’s the right thing to do, a visitor in your country.”

  The driver nodded intently and clasped Hammer’s shoulder, so that the car began a new drift. “You are good man,” he said. “Good here.”

  He mimicked Hammer’s action, with a fist on his heart. “We go to Gori.”

  • • •