The Searcher

by Christopher Morgan Jones

  Out of the line of sight of the sentry, if that’s what he was, looking up at this unlikely stronghold, Hammer stopped to weigh his options. The most direct, sadly, were the worst. He could simply ring Natela’s buzzer and hope to be invited up, and if he had better Georgian he could buzz someone else and try the old forgot-my-keys trick. But there was a light above the doorway and in both cases the guy in the car might sit up and take greater notice. At least if he was any good.

  No, the front door was out. Nor could he call her and ask her to meet him somewhere because he had to assume now that her phone wasn’t safe, and that she’d be followed. Also, she’d say no. Somehow he needed to get in there without being seen.

  There was always a distraction, something to get that guy out of his car. As he discounted various unconvincing ideas Hammer paid closer attention to the building itself. At the back a narrow strip, perhaps three feet wide and too unintentional to be called an alleyway, separated it from the building behind. Closing his umbrella and hunching his shoulders against the rain, Hammer walked along it, treading down the high weeds. He was now a prowler, and his heart beat a little faster. The windows began at chest height for him, but all were shut. Some were lit up, and through net curtains he made out a bathroom, a bedroom full of boxes. Directly above the bathroom, perhaps twelve feet above the ground, a window was open an inch or two.

  He stopped and thought. He was just beyond the midpoint of the building and so long as he was quiet, no one who passed by the narrow gap would think to look his way. Anyone foolish enough to be out in this weather would be walking fast with their eyes down.

  The window was hung on vertical hinges and held open by a metal arm. It looked wide enough for him. Koba might have struggled but he would fit. If every floor was laid out the same way, it would lead into a bathroom, and if the light was off, as it was, there was almost certainly no one in it. The windows next to it were all dark, too.

  All this was good, but the window remained frustratingly high, the walls sheer, and there was nothing to grasp to help. A leg up from Koba would probably have done it.

  The two buildings were close enough, though, for him to brace his back against the one and with his legs straight out slowly walk, or shuffle, up the other. He had seen it done. Presumably it could be done. He failed on his first two attempts to lock himself into position, but soon enough started moving, his feet by the window on the ground floor and walking slowly up to the next. Someone walked by in the street and he stopped, rigid, with his head down, as if that would make any difference, making a note to himself to buy Koba a new umbrella when this was done. His coat was wet through against his back. After a moment, listening to the rain and his own breathing and wondering how he might explain himself to Vekua, he started again.

  In another minute more he was there, with his feet alongside the sill and no notion at all how to get himself through the window. It wasn’t obvious. The room beyond was wholly dark, and below him the ground a surprisingly long way away. A fall would break something. He leaned forward and unhooked the arm that held the window open; shuffled down a little and then across, so that his toes were touching the frame; and with a lunge grabbed the two uprights with his hands, loosening the lock in his legs as he did so. In that instant he felt his weight again, and the balance getting away from him. His hands slid on the wet frame, and the fall began, but as he went he clawed at the sill and caught it, scraping his forearms against the wood.

  “Fuck,” he said, as he hung in space. Using the frame of the window below, he gained some purchase with his feet and dragged himself up and through, slithering headfirst onto the floor with his hands stretched out in front of him. His legs noisily followed.

  Lying with his face next to what seemed to be the porcelain bowl of a toilet, conscious of his wet clothes, Hammer stayed still and listened. The floor was tiled and cold on his cheek. In a room nearby, voices and laughter were coming from a television or a radio, and to his left a warm light showed along the frame of the door.

  Moving lightly and with care, he stood up and walked across the room and listened once more. Music started playing, but he sensed no movement. If he was right about the layout of the apartments, the stairwell was now on his left, and if he was lucky he would find the front door right there. He turned the handle and opened the door a crack. The music continued playing, a Georgian song. If someone came he had no idea what he would say.

  Outside the bathroom was a short dark corridor, at the end of which were two other rooms, the light on in one and not the other. But the noise came from the far end, where the corridor turned toward what he hoped was the front door. He slipped off his shoes and inched forward until he could look around the corner with one eye. There was the door, past a row of hooks hung with coats and a mess of shoes on the wooden floor, and just before it, on the right, was the room from which the music came, its own door open. Hammer heard a man’s voice over the singing, and knew that it wasn’t from any television. Some of the shoes were children’s shoes, he noticed, looking closely, boys’ and girls’.

  Keeping close to the wall, he moved ahead and stopped by the open door. The music turned to talking. He considered the odds. They were watching some show or other. Chances were the television was in a far corner, because most televisions were. And if anyone was facing this way he was done for in any case.

  He crossed the gap in one swift, silent movement and stopped on the other side, not breathing. On the television the song finished, and there was applause. He took the five steps to the front door, turned the latch, and slowly opened it an inch, wincing at the harsh creak it gave. But still no one stirred behind him, and after listening for footsteps outside with his ear to the crack he slipped out.

  He was in a fluorescent-lit stairwell, roughly painted in a drab blue, its steps worn concrete. On the landing there were three other doors. With his hand on the handle, he closed the door as softly as he could and in a few long strides was on the floor above, waiting motionless. He heard the click of a handle below and a man’s voice saying something indistinct, and then a final click. Putting on his shoes, he went up one more flight.

  • • •

  Natela was in 3C. Taking a moment to compose himself, brushing water off his coat, Hammer knocked. Now that he had come to a stop he realized that his heart was beating hard, from exertion and nerves.

  For half a minute there was silence, and he thought with a sinking sense that his elaborate entrance had been for nothing. But then there were footsteps inside, and a hand on the handle, and Natela opened the door the four inches that the chain would allow.

  Her eyes showed not surprise but a sort of weary expectation, and the first thing she said was in Georgian, to herself. But she kept the door open.

  “You saw Ben.”

  Hammer watched her closely, looking for signs of admission and seeing nothing but resolve. Dark rings underscored her eyes, and he smelled tobacco and alcohol on her breath.

  “You cannot be here.”

  “No one saw me. There’s a guy in a car outside, but I came in the back door.”

  “There is no back door,” she said, meeting his look for the first time.

  “I found one,” he said, smiling. “It’s OK.”

  But the smile was wrong, and her eyes hardened on him.

  “I have no time, for this. For you. I have appointment now.”

  “Natela, I need to know what you said. This is serious.”

  “You must go. Now you must go.”

  “It’s OK.”

  “It is not OK. It is not OK to come to this, my house, like it was public place. And you bring them. Understand, I want them to forget me. I want you to forget me.”

  “They were here already.”

  Hammer reached out but the door was already shut.

  He would have done well to see more clearly the fear behind her anger. He knew it was there, so wh
y badger the poor woman? Because you have to, he told himself; you’ve been careful, and no one else knows what she knows. If it wasn’t necessary you wouldn’t be here.

  No answer came when he knocked on the door. He tried again, and a third time, but inside was silence, not even the footsteps he had expected to hear. Carpet, perhaps—or perhaps she was standing by the door, torn about closing it in his face or simply waiting to know that he had gone.

  Leaning against the door, he spoke as loudly as he dared, his voice echoing brightly round the stairwell.

  “I think Ben has been kidnapped. If he hasn’t been killed. I don’t know how much time I have.”

  Still no answer came.

  “Natela, please. He was a good friend to Karlo. A good friend to me.”

  Possibly that was a mistake. The silence continued, and with a shake of his head Hammer started down the stairs. On the third step he stopped, shook his head again, and went back up to Natela’s door, knocking a final time.

  “Natela, I need a hat. Or an umbrella. The only way out is out the front and the guy in the car may get a look at me.”

  For a moment he stood by the door, not knowing if she’d heard.

  “Something I can hide behind.”

  As he knocked again, the door opened on the chain for only a moment and Natela pushed something purple at him. Then he was on the landing again, holding a woman’s raincoat in a vivid shade of mauve. It was too big for Natela, and for him, but it had a hood and did the job. And it would keep out the rain.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Hood up, sleeves rolled at the cuffs, and feeling more conspicuous than he probably looked, Hammer turned right out of the building, away from the guy in the car, sparing him not so much as a glance—even though he’d have to be really good to recognize anyone in that coat at that distance in the rain and the stubborn gloom—and once off Natela’s street half walked, half ran in a large rectangle that brought him up again behind the sentry.

  He was still there, still smoking, one arm rested across the back of the seat beside him. Hammer wondered whether his brief was to watch the building or to follow Natela, and hoped that he was about to find out. With luck, her appointment was real.

  It was a miserable day to be conducting surveillance without a car. The rain had pooled across the uneven pavement and as Hammer took up his post behind a tree he began to realize that his new shoes weren’t quite equal to the job—slowly, they were growing damp. At least there were few people about, and those that passed didn’t linger long enough to notice his vigil. Not for the first time in this city, he wished that he still smoked.

  For more than solely professional reasons he would have liked to know where she was going—to have some glimpse of the life that he had so glancingly strayed into. It was Sunday; probably she was going to see her children, or friends, or a new man. Questions like this he was used to asking to some fixed end, but now they pressed themselves on him with more urgency than the situation seemed to demand. It didn’t matter where she was going, and yet it mattered very much. More, almost, than everything else.

  His instinct was protective, he told himself, even guilty—a natural result of his rekindling the danger in her life. But he was honest enough and far too logical to believe it. She had taken a hold on him, and when he asked himself why, he found no clear answer. In his fastidious later years he had become fussy about people smoking, but in her he liked it. He knew nothing of her life, her country, the language that she spoke, and yet these were not obstacles but opportunities. Her black eyes did their best to keep him out but succeeded only in drawing him in. In London, roughly every six months or so, his friends would make an introduction, suggest a blind date, and he had gone through with enough to think that the lack he felt each time was something that now sat permanently in him. Well, it didn’t, and the realization left him giddy and faintly fearful, as if someone had whirled him up to a great height.

  For an hour he stood, under his tree, whose leaves had begun to fall in the wind, until he began to think that the appointment was a fiction, a way of telling him in shorthand that her life extended beyond his clumsy attempts at drawing information from her. In another hour he would have to leave for his rendezvous with the idiots, curse them. And if she came out, would he know her? Of course. Her brisk, clipped walk was already familiar.

  There she was. In a navy coat and carrying an umbrella that obscured her face, but he was right, he would know her anywhere. She headed up the street toward him, on the other side of the road, and, keeping one eye on the other surveillance team, he moved round the tree as she passed. This coat was going to be a liability if he had to keep up the tail for long.

  He let her get thirty yards ahead, and so did the guy in the car, who now opened his door and headed off after her, beeping the lock behind him and talking softly into a radio or a phone. Hammer slid back to the other side of the tree. This was going to be hard.

  • • •

  One of the strange effects of following someone was that it inured you to the idea that you were being followed—you tended to concentrate on what was in front. That’s what the Georgian did now, and after half a mile or so of walking in a spread-out chain of three, Hammer had been reassured of a couple of things: he wasn’t going to look round, and wherever she was heading Natela wasn’t taking the bus, which would have made the whole thing more or less impossible. Surveillance was luck at the best of times, and without a team of five it was a lottery.

  He was finding a wary rhythm when it happened. Natela was walking away from the center of the city, through blank streets of apartment blocks made blanker by the rain, leaning a little into the wind, with the policeman or whatever he was thirty yards behind on the other pavement and Hammer another thirty further back behind him. They were alone on the street, which was narrower than most and had at its far end a cluster of shops and what looked like a café in a small square, its chairs tilted against the tables for the rain. The odd car drove by, but it was quiet here; it felt like a Sunday. It was just occurring to Hammer that Natela might only be going for food, or cigarettes, when a figure by the café started moving quickly in her direction. A man, in what looked like a white shirt. Right away there was something about him Hammer didn’t like—that he had no coat, or the way he moved, which was swift but stuttering. Purposeful but not in control. Natela seemed not to have noticed him and kept the same pace.

  In front of Hammer the policeman slowed and stopped by a side street, still watching Natela, and Hammer pulled himself into a doorway. Natela went on, and so did the man in the white shirt. As he came nearer Hammer could see that the shirt was unbuttoned almost to the waist and filthy round the cuffs. Matted beard ran up into patchy black hair that looked like he’d cut it himself. He was wrong, out of place. He shouldn’t be here. Every instinct told Hammer to break cover, or to shout, but he hung back, waiting for the policeman to resume or to walk away. And why had he stopped? He seemed expectant, which was a strange thing for a man doing his job to be.

  When he was ten yards from Natela, the man in white reached his hand into his pocket and came out with something that he held down close by his side. Hammer couldn’t make it out but knew instantly what it was.

  “No!” he shouted, as loud as he could make it, and breaking cover ran to her, past the policeman, dodging a car in the middle of the street. “Natela!”

  He was still so far away. Natela stopped and looked back at him, but the man in front of her didn’t falter. He had the knife up now, and its long blade looked savage in his hand. His eyes were far apart, like a prey animal.

  In the same moment, Natela turned and he jabbed the knife at her; as she recoiled, the blade seemed to disappear inside the folds of her coat. Hammer shouted again, shouted at the policeman to fucking help, saw Natela stagger back silently and look down while the man, unsatisfied, tried to set himself again. But he was unsteady, and it took him a second to find h
is balance, and in that time Hammer was on him. With all his weight he barged him, shoulder to shoulder, keeping his head down and away from the blade.

  The man hadn’t seen him, and he went over easily; together they fell against a wall and down onto the pavement. Hammer landed on his elbow and rolled instinctively onto his back, pushing the other body away from him and looking for the knife. He couldn’t see it. The man held on to him, stopping him from getting up, and his grip in his left hand was strong despite the stale sweet smell of drink that came from him. Hammer tried to get enough room between them to land a decent punch but he was too close and his efforts had no force.

  Then the knife appeared. A kitchen knife, probably nine inches, incongruously new—pristine in the filthy hand. The man was on his side; he was heavier than Hammer and was trying to get on top of him. Succeeding, in fact. Hammer grappled and kicked but could not get free, his blows slipping off in the wet, and the only thought in his head was that he needed to win this fight for Natela’s sake. If she was injured he was the only thing stopping this madman from finishing his job. He couldn’t see her. It was possible she had managed to go, to crawl away.

  The drunk had his full weight on Hammer now, astride him. He brought the blade up and at the top of its arc Hammer imagined its extreme sharpness, the softness of his flesh, its unerring passage into him. As it came down toward his heart he wrenched his body to the right and reached up one last time to pull the man off balance; felt his weight shift, and the knife slice cleanly into his upper arm, so sharp that he felt not pain but just the clinical intrusion of the blade.

  Electrified, his mind and body coursing with the need to survive, Hammer grabbed the man’s leg with his good arm and heaved, trying to unbalance him, as the man drew the blade back again. But then Natela was by him, and in one powerful motion kicked the man squarely in the face. Hammer saw her boot connect with his scraggy jaw—saw his skin pressed into his skull like a face against glass—and watched him topple backward, cracking his head on the wall, slumping into a heap, his expression half stupor, half surprise. He was done. Natela kicked at his hand and the knife fell from it, and only as it clattered onto the pavement did Hammer register that the blade was clean.