“The only thing I fear losing is you,” I said.
That stopped her, at least for the moment. Affection was still difficult for her, probably always would be, the way it dogs most survivors of abuse. Even though she knew my sincerity, believed it, speaking of it could bring her to moments of confused silence. Love was still a fragile thing for her, despite all its strength.
“You should never have gone over there at all.”
“I didn't know what I would find,” I said.
“It's not a question of what you found! You shouldn't have
done it
, Atticus!”
The mere fact that she'd used my real name was proof of how upset she was. I got out of my chair, went over to her, rested my hands on her arms. When I kissed her forehead, she closed her eyes and put her arms around me.
“They were our friends,” I said, holding her.
“Yes, they were,” she whispered. “And now they're gone.”
We spent the rest of the day going about our routines. I made my daily check of the security arrangements, the alarms, did yoga for an hour with Alena, then went for my run, leaving her to work out in the studio.
I covered eight miles, down to the water, along the beach. It was hot and growing humid, even by the waterfront, and the
beach was beginning to fill. It was tourist season, and the influx had easily doubled Kobuleti's population, though that was down from the previous years. Another by-product of Russian pressure on the economy.
I passed the Gio, a café that, like so many others in town, turned into a bar-slash-nightclub after dark during the summer months. One night, the summer after we'd returned to Kobuleti, Iashvili had been dining there with a couple off-duty members of the force, celebrating a junior officer's impending marriage. A group of laughing teenagers attracted the policemen's attention. Iashvili thought he and his fellows were the source of amusement. The fight that followed ended with the chief shooting three of the boys in the foot. There was no official record of the event. Even the hospital where the boys had been treated refused to document the case.
Democracy was wheezing its way into the Republic of Georgia, but it still had a very long way to go. The Russian Army still maintained a presence in both Poti, further north on the coast, and in Gori, restricting traffic to Tbilisi. In the open land between the Black Sea and the capital, brigands still lurked the roads. The declaration of independence in both South Ossetia and Abkhazia made Moscow's shadow fall long and cold throughout the country.
I looped back, this time following the main street, waving at the people I knew and exchanging brief good-mornings as I went past. I no longer got the stares I once did, but the amusement at my commitment to exercise still remained. I made my way back up the road toward the house, digging down for extra speed, feeling my lungs starting to burn. At the fork in the road, I went right, heading toward home, telling myself there was nothing in Bakhar Lagidze's house that I needed to see again.
The rest of the day passed in tight silence. Late in the afternoon, when Tiasa would've come for her lesson, Alena went out to the studio again. I was working in the yard on an old Dnepr motorcycle I'd bought a couple of months earlier, Miata lazily watching me as I tried to make sense of the schematics I'd downloaded from the Internet. Alena and I had only the one car for the two of us, a forty-year-old Mercedes-Benz diesel sedan that took five minutes to start during the winter, and that could easily double as a light tank in an emergency. The Dnepr, once repaired, would hopefully serve as more reliable, if smaller, transportation.
The music in the studio came on, one of the more energetic pieces that Alena used for warming up. She'd left the door open, and the noise kept Miata and me company. After a few minutes there was a quick silence, and then the sound of John Lennon's voice as she switched to her Beatles playlist. Alena had loved the Beatles for as long as I'd known her, and she frequently danced and taught to their catalogue.
So when “Golden Slumbers” came on, I barely noticed, occupied as I was with trying to remove the dead battery from the bike without tearing my knuckles open. It's a short song, hardly a minute and a half long, and so when it repeated, I missed that, too. But somewhere around the fifth time through I registered what I was hearing, and when the song ended, and then began again almost without pause, I got to my feet, wiping my hands on my jeans. Miata lifted his head to see what I was doing, then went back to watching the squirrels.
The song had ended and begun again when I stuck my head through the doorway. Most of the space was cleared for dancing, mirrors on the barre wall. At the far end was our heavy bag, the stack of weight plates and barbells. The stereo sat in the opposite corner.
Alena was on the floor, her back to the mirror, facing the
stereo. She sat with her knees drawn to her chest, arms holding them close, head buried, and now that I was inside, I could hear it. In all the time I'd known her, I'd seen her cry only once. Tears weren't something she cared for, nor were they something she offered readily. And even when I had seen her cry, it had been nothing like this.
The sobs wracked her, making her shake, and it was obvious she was trying to control them, to control herself, and that she was failing, but yet unwilling to surrender. It was so utterly unexpected, so unlike her, that I spent an instant unsure of how to react. Then I went to her side, and she heard me coming, and tried harder to hide her face away. I sat on the floor beside her, the mirror glass cold against my back, and carefully put my arms around her, waiting to see if she'd resist. She didn't; she slumped against me, her whole body shaking.
She continued to cry, and I continued to hold her, and Paul continued to sing, and I wondered if this was grief, or something more.
I couldn't leave it alone.
The next morning, when I reached the fork in the road, I went left instead of right.
There wasn't much sign of crime scene investigation as I approached the house. The front door still hung open, the splintered and burst wood from the rounds that had torn through it all the more garish. Bakhar's car remained where it had been the other night. I slowed to a walk, feeling sweat dripping off me into the dust. A dark brown puddle had dried on the dirt road, where the man I'd shot had bled out. When I listened, I could hear the buzzing of flies from inside.
There was no police tape, nothing saying that I could not enter, not that the presence of an official sign would've stopped me. There was a curious sense of déjà vu when I stepped inside, triggered, perhaps, by the shift in the illumination, the transition from bright sunlight without to the shadows within. A cloud of flies, swarming over the still-tacky puddle in the entry-way, scattered and then almost as quickly re-formed, ignoring me.
The house had already had one full day to cook in the summer heat, and it reeked. Whatever tracks I may have made had been obliterated by the multiple police boots that had tromped up and down the hall since the discovery of the bodies. I wondered, idly, who had called the crime in to the police, how they had been notified. Conceivably, it could've taken days before anyone noticed what had happened here.
Unsure of what exactly all my questions were, I started searching for answers in the kids' rooms first.
I spent nearly five hours on the search, with a couple of breaks in between to grasp some fresh air and clear my head. In Koba's and Tiasa's rooms I found nothing extraordinary, only sad. Koba had an eight-year-old's collection of detritus, scraps of paper covered with drawings of spaceships and football players. He'd taped a crude family portrait he'd drawn on the inside of his bedroom door, the house small in comparison to the figures. In it, he'd drawn himself biggest of all, smiling with lots of teeth. His sister had been smallest, but not by much, almost as tall as he'd drawn Ia.
Tiasa's room was harder. Books, schoolwork, magazines. A DVD Alena had lent her of a Savion Glover tap performance. A bottle of cheap perfume, and a brand new lipstick. I didn't find a diary. If I had, I doubt I could've brought myself to read it.
It was in the master bedroom that I began to concentrate my efforts. There was nothing in the clichés—no documents taped to the back of the furniture, nothing beneath the mattress or submerged in the toilet tank. In the back of the closet I found a nylon carry-all, the kind of thing to hold towels and swimsuits for a day at the beach. This one held three pairs of underwear, three clean shirts, three pairs of socks, a pair of pants, and a toothbrush. It also held just shy of five thousand euros, a loaded 9mm Makarov, and two passports, one Russian, the other Romanian. The pictures inside each matched Bakhar, even if the names didn't.
There was also a small, tattered address book. When I flipped through it, the entries were all in Georgian, first names and phone numbers. Some of the country codes I recognized-Ukraine, Romania, Turkey, Russia, Germany, England—and some I didn't.
I put it aside, wondering why it was Bakhar Lagidze needed a go-bag.
The only other item of interest I found was in Bakhar's tackle box, the same one he always took with him fishing. Beneath the top compartment, wrapped in an oily rag, was another pistol, this one a small Czech semi-auto. The gun was a cheap one, poorly maintained, and nothing I would have trusted my life to in a pinch. Bakhar clearly seemed to have thought otherwise.
That was all I found.
Alena was in the kitchen when I got home, putting together a salad, and I let her know I was back, though she'd already determined that from Miata's reaction the moment I'd come onto our property. I dropped the go-bag on our bed, stripped and
took a quick shower. When I returned, Alena had the contents dumped out, examining them. She shot me an accusing glare as I passed her but said nothing until after I'd finished getting dressed, and then, when she did, failed to deliver the admonishment I'd expected from her expression.
“I have to go to Tbilisi tomorrow morning,” she said, tossing Bakhar's Russian passport back onto the pile, and picking up the address book.
“Why?”
“Nicholas is meeting me at the Marriott.” She leafed through the little book in her hands, flipping the pages slowly.
“We saw him in March,” I said, surprised. Nicholas Sargenti, to grossly oversimplify things, was our banker.
“Yes. I want him to free up some more funds, just in case we need them quickly.” She looked up from the book to read my expression, and then added, as if it needed further explanation, “In case we have to run.”
I tucked in my shirt, thinking. In the world Alena and I had made for ourselves, Nicholas Sargenti was the hidden facilitator. When Alena had been working, it was he who had arranged contact protocols, had retrieved job offers, passing them along to her through varied and elaborate cutouts and dead-drops. He had been her hidden necessity, able to provide papers and identities on short notice, and all of them entirely legitimate. From his office in Monaco, he had moved the substantial amounts of money required for her to do her job around the world quietly and quickly, deftly funding each cover. While we rarely availed ourselves of his other services these days, Nicholas still handled the majority of our finances.
Alena had never admitted to him what it was she got paid tens of millions of dollars to do, and he had never asked, but he was smart enough to do everything else, which meant he was
smart enough to have figured it out. Which meant he was a risk to us, albeit a very calculated, necessary one. For that reason, face-to-face meetings with him were always planned with great care, their number limited. That Alena had arranged to meet him only three months after last seeing him concerned me, but not nearly as much as the fact that she was meeting him in-country, in the capital. It was sloppy, and that was utterly unlike her.
“I'll come with you,” I said.
“Better if you don't. If Iashvili comes back with more questions and we're
both
gone, it will look worse than it already does.”
“It doesn't look bad right now. You heard him, he's calling it a murder-suicide and putting it all on Bakhar.”
“Even so.” She indicated the spilled contents of the go-bag on the bed with her free hand. “Did you find anything else?”
“Bakhar kept a pistol in his tackle box,” I said, aware she was changing the subject. “Piece-of-crap little Czech thing.”
“That is not so unusual, that he would bring a weapon for self-defense.”
“Maybe. Wouldn't do him much good at the bottom of a tackle box.”
“That implies a level of tradecraft that isn't evident here.”
“He had a go-bag.”
“A very bad go-bag. Too many clothes. Not enough cash. No credit cards. And this.” She held up the address book. “If this is a list of contacts in whatever his business was, this is very unprofessional.”
I held up a hand, began counting on my fingers. “Drugs, guns—”
“It doesn't matter,” Alena interrupted, dropping the address book on the bed. “Whatever it was he was into, his sins caught up with him. Come, dinner's ready.”
She walked out of the bedroom. I stared at the scattered clothes, the two passports, the address book, the gun. I thought about my own go-bag, waiting on the top shelf in the front closet, resting beside Alena's.
Wondering how much longer I had before my sins caught up with me.
CHAPTER
Four
Alena took the car, leaving before dawn. If things went
well, she could do the drive to Tbilisi in four hours. If things went the way they normally did, it would take her closer to eight, accounting for the appropriate checkpoints and shakedowns. I didn't fear for her well-being. Anyone who tried to take something from her she wasn't willing to give would draw back a bloody stump, and that was only if she allowed them to keep their life.
