The Searcher (11 page)

B
atumi. The seaside. Casinos and promenades and nightclubs, to judge by a quick search. Palm trees and bright colors and couples strolling arm in arm on the beach at sunset. It had seen no bombs, no dead journalists, no riots. There was no link to Karlo or Iosava or anything that had brought Ben here, no obvious thread.

This much was clear. The day after he had last called Elsa, Ben had rented a car and driven to Batumi, via Gori, traveling in some comfort. If he was following a lead, why not call Elsa? And if he wasn't alone—if he was traveling with a woman—why stop in Gori? There was a final possibility, of course, that someone had stolen his credit card, but any sensible thief would spend as much as he could within a few hours and then dump it. He wouldn't have it fund his holiday.

Life was a good deal simpler last week, thought Hammer. He had imagined himself finding a clear trail but everywhere there were only indistinct tracks in the mud. Still, he must make a decision. Leave Tbilisi, the heart of the whole business, at the heart of the country, and risk losing time; or stay, and try Natela again, God knows how.

In the end there was no question: the card was his best lead.

The next train left the following morning, but the journey was only two hundred miles, and the roads seemed fine. He called another car-rental company and told them that he'd be there in an hour to pick up a nice, solid, unremarkable car. That was no problem. They shut at six. He could be in Batumi by ten.

This settled, he headed back to the Kopala, walking fast now through the old town and across Metekhi Bridge, where a young boy with a crutch,
running alongside him to keep up, begged him for money, the crutch going comically under his arm like a broken piston.

“Mister, mister. Lari, mister. Lari.”

Hammer kept walking, and the boy went faster until he was a little ahead and skipping backward.

“Mister. USA. Lari.” His face sank into a practiced frown. “Very bad.” He patted his thigh, the wrong leg. “Mister. Very bad.”

Hammer stopped. The boy had chutzpah. He was skinny and dusty and wore odd shoes.

“Bad leg, huh?” he said.

The boy grinned, then remembered that he was in pain and grimaced once more. He clutched his thigh. “Very bad.”

“You want to get that seen to.”

Looking around for any quick-fingered friends the boy might have, Hammer took his wallet from his back pocket, found a five-lari note, and held it out to the child, who after a moment's hesitation, as if this was too good to be true, snatched it and ran off to boast to his friends about the tourist he'd just fleeced.

From this point of the bridge, near the northern end, Hammer could clearly see his room, two stories up from the top of the cliff on which the hotel perched, and looking up now he thought he could see movement inside, a brush of shadow across the door that led onto the balcony. He stopped for a minute and watched, but saw nothing, and made to move on. But his eye was caught by something else, on the floor below: a rectangle of what seemed to be black plastic on the outer lip of the wooden balcony. Of Webster's old room. As he walked closer he kept his focus on it. It was hard to tell from this distance what it was: it might be some sort of electrical housing, but there were no wires coming from it, and that was a strange place for it to be.

To reach the hotel he had to climb the road to the side of the cliff and double back, and by the time he got to his room everything appeared to be as he had left it—but then there wasn't very much. His new clothes were still wrapped in their bags; the things from the pharmacy lay undisturbed on the sink. If someone had been here, chances were they'd come not to take
anything but to leave something behind, which was fine. He was leaving now in any case. Once he had made a second trip downstairs.

 • • • 

T
he wind had calmed, and the late sun, glaring past the shaded hills and churches opposite, was caught on the brick terrace of the balcony. Hammer had showered and put on a fresh shirt, and stood now for a moment with his hands on the railings letting the heat sink into him, drinking deeply from a cold bottle of water and encouraging his thoughts to settle. A path to follow. That was good; it felt like progress. The dread that had settled on him after seeing Iosava began to lift.

When the water was finished he set the bottle down and leaned out over the edge to make sure there was no one on the balcony below. Two sun lounge chairs were angled toward the sun, towels rumpled on each.

A moment later he was downstairs outside the door to number 27. Before trying his key card Hammer knocked, and was surprised to hear steps inside, and a few words, and a door closing, before he was greeted by Mrs. Witt in a bathrobe. Her wet hair was a dark gray and her glasses, the kind without rims, held drops of water. Behind them her eyes registered an instant suspicion.

This was excruciating but there was no way round it. There was simply no time for anything else.

“Mrs. Witt. You didn't make it out?”

“We have a flight tomorrow.”

She was a less helpful sort than her husband, but Hammer persevered.

“That's great. Thank heaven for that. Mrs. Witt, Arnold may have told you that this morning I managed to lose the one document I need to get my emergency passport and get out of this country. I'm only supposed to be here until tomorrow and then I fly to Istanbul, but if I can't find my social security card I'm going to be here until Monday at the earliest.”

“That's too bad.”

“Mrs. Witt, it is a holy pain in the rear end, is what it is. Now I'm ninety-nine percent certain it isn't there, but could you stand for me to just check your balcony one last time? I'd feel such a fool if it was there all along.”

It was plain on Mrs. Witt's face that whatever charitable construction her husband had put on the morning's events, she didn't share it. But the request was hard to refuse. There was, after all, no harm in it.

“Come on in.” As invitations went, it was reluctant.

Hammer moved past her into the room and made straight for the balcony, turning only to say that she shouldn't worry, he'd be done in a moment and she should get on with whatever she was doing. As the bathroom door opened he heard Witt's voice inside.

Though he couldn't see it, he found the package straightaway, fishing through the railings and feeling along its edges. It was held on with tape, and irritatingly secure, but his fingernails finally found a loose corner and in a minute he had it. Slipping it into his trouser pocket he stood and turned to find Witt in the doorway, his head on one side, his expression aggressively blank. He wore a white Kopala towel around his waist and another over his shoulder, and there were smears of shaving foam on his neck.

“D'you find what you're looking for?”

“Arnold. Hi. I'm here again.” Hammer grinned, and pulled out his social security card from his pocket, where he had put it earlier. “There's a little gutter down there, like a little lip. Quite a relief.” He made to leave. “Arnold, I've been a real pain in the butt. I'm sorry. This is the last time you'll see me.”

“What about the other thing you got in there?”

“Excuse me?”

“Whatever you just put in your pants. I'd like you to tell me about that.”

“My wallet?” Hammer's hand went to his back pocket.

“Uh-uh. Not that. If that's drugs or some other nonsense in my room I want to know about it.”

“You sure about that?”

Witt didn't have an answer.

“OK,” said Hammer. “You're right. I didn't want this but it's my mistake. Arnold, would you get Mary out here?”

Witt hesitated, unsure. “I think we should leave her out of this.”

“What I have to say, I have to say to both of you. It's nothing bad.”

Witt held Hammer's eye and made up his mind. “Good thing you got a
good face.” He turned to the room and shouted to his wife. “Mary. Mary, come on out here.”

Mrs. Witt had put on a dress and wrapped a towel round her head. She looked warily at Hammer and went to stand by her husband.

“Please,” said Hammer. “Have a seat.” He sat down on one of the lounge chairs. “Please. I can't shout about this.”

The Witts sat opposite him, as upright as anyone has ever sat on a lounge chair, and Hammer dropped his voice low so that they were forced to lean in.

“Tell me. Have you noticed any strange activity in this room?”

They both looked at him, half suspicious, half intent.

“Your things being moved around? Housekeeping coming in at strange times of day? Any beeps or clicks on the phone?”

The Witts had gone from looking lost to looking nervous.

“No. I mean I don't think so. Why would—”

“That's good, but then you might not notice. OK. Here it is.” He dropped his voice a further notch. “This business in Georgia? There's a US dimension to it.”

He let the words take effect before going on.

“The president loses the next election and Russia's hold on the Caucasus is complete. Yes?”

“Sure,” said Witt, relieved by the relative sanity of the statement, but sounding less sure than he might.

“That's a nightmare for us. It's probably going to happen and we're going to have to get used to it. But these riots? We suspect foul play.”

He raised a meaningful eyebrow, made sure the Witts grasped the severity of the implications, and went on.

“Up until three days ago, a colleague of mine was staying in this room. He chose it because from up here, with the right equipment, you get a great view of a certain house across the river. I can't tell you what goes on there but let's just say that there are some interesting comings and goings. Yes? Now this colleague, he's gone missing. These papers,” he patted his pocket, “he left for me to find. Until this evening, I didn't know where.”

Hammer paused, and looked steadily at one then the other.

“OK. You know what I'm going to say now, yes?”

Mr. and Mrs. Witt were lost.

“What I've told you can't leave this room. That's very important.”

“Of course.”

“Also, I'm going to give you a number.” He stood, went inside, and came back with pen and Kopala paper. “Anything unusual happens in here I want you to call me. Don't use the hotel phone. You have a cell?”

“I got a cell,” said Arnold Witt.

“That should be OK. Here, Arnold. Keep this safe.”

Witt took it and made to stand.

“Don't get up. Please accept my apologies for bringing this into your holiday.”

“Is there anything we could do to help?” said Witt. His wife blinked slowly, not seconding the offer.

“Do you know, Arnold, there is. Just a small thing. I'm going out now. You happen to be here, you hear footsteps in my room in the next two hours, you let me know. If I can, I'll see you at breakfast tomorrow.”

“We're not going anywhere,” said Witt. “Not tonight. We'll leave that to guys like you.”

“That's probably best. And one last thing. Never put the clean-my-room sign on your door. It's an open invitation for thieves.”

 • • • 

I
t was a neat packet, constructed with care. Inside, once he had torn through the many layers of plastic, Hammer found a sheaf of documents that had been carefully folded in half and then in half again. There were several pages torn from a ring-bound notebook and covered in Webster's swift, expansive handwriting, which Hammer had always had trouble reading. But the final document was a fax of two paragraphs, all information about its origins removed, in typed Russian—which he couldn't read at all.

Batumi would have to wait until morning.

L
ast night's riot had started in Freedom Square, by the city hall, and according to Rostom a few thousand people were already there again. Police had been drafted in from Rustavi and Kutaisi and all over, and a huge number were now stationed around the city. The only good advice was to stay in the hotel, but if Mr. Hammer insisted on going out he should stay in the old town, and at all costs well away from the square.

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.

 • • • 

D
espite 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.”