The Searcher

by Christopher Morgan Jones

  Irodi got down from his horse and squatted to inspect the floor, which was covered in cones and needles, and dry despite the recent rain. His eyes scanned the area around the truck and the route they had come along the path.

  “It’s still here,” said Hammer, swinging his leg over the saddle and patting Shakari’s flank.

  In this truck the two Dagestanis had crossed the border, on the other side of Tusheti where the one road ran into Russia. They had driven here, perhaps thirty miles across the wilderness, and then taken another vehicle down the mountain and on to Gori; the tracks were still clear. It seemed extraordinary that it hadn’t been taken away to be examined, and stranger still that this place showed no sign of disruption. It looked as if no one had been here for fifty years.

  The truck was really a jeep with a canvas canopy, Russian-made and ancient. Hammer got inside, ran his hand under the plastic seats, felt under the instruments and along the seal of the roof, checked the back, and found nothing at all. He even lay down and looked underneath, but whoever had found it had taken anything loose.

  In the absence of evidence, he tried to engage his imagination. Two men had driven into these woods, left their vehicle, and then somehow, somewhere between here and Gori, taken delivery of a 4 x 4 full of explosives. The quietest place for that to happen would have been here, no question, and the easiest, too, in the dark of the forest with not a soul to witness anything. If this had been the place, how had it worked? Was the truck waiting for them, or had a Georgian been here to hand it over, and to seal this double betrayal—of the seventeen dead of Gori, and of the men persuaded to kill them?

  Irodi was walking back along the path with his eyes set on the ground. Twenty yards back along the way they had come he stopped, straightened up, shaking his head, and turned round. When he reached Hammer he shook his head again and said something in Georgian, which might have been that no one had been here recently or that it was impossible to know if they had. Whatever his conclusion, there was no speculation about it; as with everything Irodi seemed to do, it had certainty.

  He jumped onto his horse, springing up in a single motion, and set off, not waiting for Hammer to struggle with the stirrups and haul himself back on. At the crossroads beyond the woods he turned left, which, if Hammer’s bearings were at all correct, took them away from the border and eventually to the road that would take them back to the plain, and for a while they rode uphill, the track so steep in parts that Hammer felt himself slipping off the saddle as Shakari charged up the sharper inclines. Lean forward going up and back coming down. Was it that way round?

  Clouds were settling on the peaks ahead of them and a brisk wind was beginning to gust. Hammer had explained earlier that when his friend came over the mountains he would have headed this way, his intention to speak to local people about the truck—when it had been found, who had found it, what they had seen, what they knew—and now he guessed that Irodi was taking them back along Webster’s route to see who they might come across. His fear was that he was five days too late, and that anyone who knew anything had probably already left for the winter. That was, of course, if Ben had made it over the mountains at all.

  Houses here tended to cluster together, but after a little while they came across one that was set back and up from the road, on its own shelf of land that gave a view of the whole valley behind them, lit up as if from within by the afternoon sun shining out from behind dark clouds. A wooden fence at a little over waist height, screened with chicken wire, enclosed a large space around it, and sitting by the gate in the last of the sun were two dogs which, as Irodi turned off the main track, began to bark, loudly and with grim enthusiasm. Halfway up the path he dismounted, held up a hand for Hammer to stop, and walked the last twenty feet, keeping a decent distance between him and the fence, against which the dogs were now jumping, their paws scrabbling on the wire. Both were huge, with thick white coats. Even from a distance Hammer could see the red of their jaws and the white of their teeth, and he noticed that for the first time Irodi’s gait wasn’t its usual easy roll.

  The door of the house opened, and from it came a tall, bearded man in a striped jumper and a blue cap, stooping a little and walking without hurry toward Irodi, who was standing a few feet short of the gate. In an improbably loud voice he shouted something, twice, and the dogs relaxed, stopped barking, and withdrew, deflated. Irodi thanked him, and for a while they talked, leaning on the fence, the tall man occasionally glancing back down the hill at Hammer. They seemed to have found something to talk about, though for all Hammer knew it might have been the weather, or the winter, or the idiocy of the foreigner standing at the bottom of the drive. As he watched them and Shakari chewed the grass on the shoulder, he felt a spot of rain fall on his arm, then another on his forehead, and at the same moment the sun went behind clouds and the wind started to blow steadily from the east. Irodi looked up, toward the mountains, where the sky was now black, thanked the tall man, and jogged down the hill to his horse, gesturing to Hammer to turn his horse round.

  “Interesting?” said Hammer, knowing that any explanation was hopeless. Irodi ignored him, leaped onto his horse, and rode off at a brisker pace than he’d set on the way out, but Shakari showed no signs of wanting to follow. Hammer kicked his heels, once and then again, while she carried on eating, not even bothering to snort her disapproval.

  “Go, would you?” said Hammer, zipping his fleece up as the rain began to fall, big drops on his balding head. Still he wasn’t used to those first few drops falling directly onto his skin. He kicked again, with no response. Irodi was now on the track, waiting; he shouted Shakari’s name, in among a few Georgian words that had no effect.

  Hammer leaned forward in the saddle until his face was close to the horse’s ear and whispered, in the gentlest voice he could manage. “Shakari, you’re a lovely horse and I appreciate that you’ve got a good thing going on there, but you’re making me feel a little foolish and very soon we’re both going to get very wet. So how’s this. You quit eating and when we get back I will get you something sweet and delicious from my good friend Koba’s secret store. How does that sound? Otherwise I may buy you from Irodi and have you turned into glue, which is not something I want to do, of course.” He patted her neck. “What do you say?”

  With an air of resignation, Shakari lifted her head, circled neatly, and set off after her master, who was holding his thumb up for Hammer to see.

  • • •

  The rain poured from the sky in one long, heavy burst, with such force that Hammer wondered whether here he was truly closer to the heavens. It roared down, turning the grand landscape into a sodden gray patch around him and his horse. Ahead he could just make out Irodi on the track, which was an inch underwater and spitting with mud. The cold had come, too, and he was grateful for the warmth coming from Shakari, who had picked up her pace to a trot. Irodi, he assumed, could have galloped home, but he hung back, occasionally glancing behind him to check on his solitary charge.

  Where the road climbed outside the village an unfamiliar noise sounded from somewhere inside his saturated clothes. The ping of a text message. His phone must have found some slender signal. He sat up in the saddle, eased it from his back pocket, and looked at the screen, which was instantly obscured by the rain. Wiping it on his sleeve, he looked again, and saw that there were three messages there, two of them from Georgian numbers he didn’t recognize. Although they were simple, it took him a moment to make out the words. The first was from Hibbert:

  Where are you? Three days left, Ike. Call me TODAY.

  Hammer just looked at the screen until the rain obscured the letters again. He should call Hibbert. He would call Hibbert. But how distant that world was, and how disconnected he felt from it. He’d been in the mountains only one day and already it was impossible to imagine being anywhere else. Hibbert, Sander, Katerina, his staff, his clients, all seemed to occupy a phantom world that no longer had substa
nce, and the thought left him feeling at once liberated and rootless, like a man set adrift from the shore.

  He wiped his phone again but the second message took a moment to absorb.

  Two days no news. OI.

  OI. Otar Iosava. Hammer had forgotten about Iosava and his persistence. How did he have the number? For a moment he let this puzzle him, but the third message cut him short.

  Isaac. There is problem. I must leave Tbilisi. Where are you? Natela.

  Shakari kept on going, but Hammer felt as if he had stopped dead. The number was not Natela’s, at least not the one he had stored for her in his phone, and his first thought was that the thing was a trick, played by someone exploiting this new vulnerability in him. In the same instant he hoped that this was and was not true: nothing could be worse than harm coming to Natela, but to help her, to have that opportunity—well, he would rather it came to him than to anyone else.

  “Irodi!” He pulled firmly on the reins. “Irodi!” He shouted again, louder, but Irodi was almost out of sight and couldn’t hear over the sound of the rain. “Shakari. Stop.” He continued to pull at the reins, and with a snort Shakari slowed and came to a halt. “Good girl.”

  The signal was thin indeed. He wiped the phone again, smearing the water over the screen, and dialed the number. It rang, and the tone in his ear was the strangest sound. A female voice answered.

  “Natela? It’s Ike.”

  The voice said something that he didn’t understand, and for a moment it crossed his mind, illogically, that the whole thing was a mistake, a wrong number.

  “Natela. Can you hear me?”

  The line was quiet, and then he heard a voice that he did recognize, even above the din.

  “Isaac. Where are you?”

  “I’m in Tusheti. It’s raining like hell.”

  “Tell me where. My friend will bring me.”

  “What’s happened?” Hammer hunched over the phone in an attempt to keep it dry.

  “I cannot talk. Tell me where.”

  “Natela, you can’t drive. No way. We’re underwater up here.”

  Through the deluge Irodi was coming back, watching him silently.

  “I need safe place.”

  “I’m not sure this is it.”

  “There is nowhere else.”

  Hammer looked at Irodi and shrugged. Maybe it was safe here.

  “OK. You need to fly. A woman will call you from London. Her name is Katerina. She’s a friend of mine and she’ll tell you what to do. I’ll call her now.”

  “OK.”

  “You OK?”

  Natela was quiet on the other end of the line.

  “Come. Bring a coat.”

  SEVEN

  Eka had laid a fire, and handing Hammer a towel she sent him to have a shower, in the same slightly stern way that his mother might have welcomed him back from some boyhood escapade. The shower wasn’t altogether hot, and out of respect for his hosts he didn’t stay under it for long, but by the time he was done and had put on fresh clothes he felt revived and ready to resume the search.

  Even without the priest to translate Irodi’s few words, though, Hammer knew that there would be no more tracking today. Too much rain; impossible to see a thing. Irodi left, and Hammer, frustrated but resigned, helped prepare for the evening’s feast. He peeled potatoes, chopped cabbages, ground walnuts in a stone mortar, letting his technique be guided by Eka, who was amused by his incompetence, and patient with it. Probably she imagines I’m too much the patriarch to cook, he thought, but the truth is that for ten years I’ve had someone to do it for me, and before that I didn’t care enough to learn.

  The work did little to calm his thoughts, which darted between fear and a strange, unearned hope. Anxiety was more or less unknown to him, but powerlessness made him think too much, and to replace action with an almost obsessive concentration on the facts—and in the absence of facts, on the competing claims of improbable theories.

  For a week these had been about Ben; now they moved to Natela. Questions hummed about him, and one kept returning. If he wasn’t the cause of her troubles, it seemed likely that he hadn’t helped. At best he had disturbed something that had barely begun to settle, and now he was responsible for her as well. When he wasn’t wondering what might be bringing her here he let himself imagine how good, in better circumstances, that might have felt.

  After a while Irodi returned, bringing with him the priest, who fell to helping as well. Irodi disappeared again into the rain. There was much to be done, and while the three of them worked they talked. Hammer was finally able to tell Eka that a friend of his was coming, that she was in some danger, and that he regretted bringing these problems into their home. If she would like, they could find a place to stay elsewhere.

  Whenever Eka looked him in the eye, as she did now, he had the unnerving, comforting sense that she understood him—that she knew there were things he couldn’t express and other things he couldn’t say—and that without good cause she trusted him, too. In her place he would not have done so. His friend could have her daughter’s room, next to her own. Ordinarily, they did not let it out, but Lida had been gone for a week and the situation was unusual. That was the word the priest used, at any rate; Hammer sensed that Eka had meant more by it.

  A little before five, Irodi drove Hammer to the point where the phone worked, just beyond Shenako.

  The rain still fell, but with less force, and in the south, where the plain ran out and the mountains rose up, Hammer thought he could see some brightness in the sky. Opening his window, he held his palm out and let it collect the drops.

  His phone sounded in his hand. A message from London, from Katerina at Ikertu, to tell him that everything was set. Natela was with a friend at an airfield outside Tbilisi. She was there now, waiting for the weather over the mountains to clear; if it didn’t, there was a hotel booked for her under another name and she would try again tomorrow.

  By seven it would be dark, and too late to land without lights. Hammer’s fingers continued to beat a tattoo on his leg, and again he cleared the window to peer out at the sky. Through the gloom he saw headlights, and recognized Koba’s Toyota, heading back toward Diklo with heaven knows what news. Irodi looked at him as if to ask whether he should signal his friend to stop, and Hammer shook his head. An understanding passed between them.

  For an hour more they stayed, even though Hammer knew that there was nothing for him to do and nothing more to learn. Yesterday he had found the utter separation of this place exhilarating, but now there was comfort to be had in being at the end of a telephone line, even if he knew there was nothing coming down it. He felt like the stationmaster of some isolated western town in the first days of the railroad, on hand to take important communications from the wire. But there were none, and as the time passed the odds lengthened and his thoughts turned to whether he could get down the mountain that night.

  But he hadn’t been wrong about the sky. The peaks to the south were showing now, and behind them glowed late afternoon sun. His mood began to lift, and the phone to weigh heavier in his hand.

  • • •

  Arriving in Diklo, Hammer felt like the oldest son returning home with his new bride. There was even a priest, in case a blessing was needed.

  He had been anxious about offending the morals of his hosts, but they received Natela with concern and warmth, as if she, too, had been caught out in a storm. Vano nodded his welcome, with a gravity that suggested that she had his sympathy, and Eka took her bag and showed her to her room.

  A fire was burning in the wide hearth and on the table in the kitchen plastic bowls had been set out, full of salad and bread and cheese, and next to them skewers of cubed lamb rested on a plate. Koba hovered by them, a bottle of his beer in his hand, proprietorial about his contribution, a guest uncertain of his welcome. Though he said nothing, and seemed to be on good behavio
r, Hammer knew that he was wondering why the invitation to Natela had not been extended to him.

  He offered a bottle to Irodi, who took it with a nod. Watching him, Hammer realized that some of his hostility to the mountains was mere awkwardness; not to know things was to lose face, and here he knew almost nothing. But he did know how to cook meat, and Hammer hoped that would restore his pride enough to keep him in check. It looked as if he had donated all his precious store of food to their dinner, and that was a positive sign.

  Was this Hammer’s first Georgian feast? the priest wanted to know. He was sitting at the table, paring cucumbers with a small knife, and was still wearing his black cap, which against the dark walls and the firelight gave him and the whole scene a medieval air. He should have been applying gold to an icon, or reading an illuminated text.

  My very first, said Hammer, unless you count the feast that Koba cooked for me last night. And the other feasts he’s had me eating every night. This, the priest explained, would be different. This was a supra, a conscious coming together of friends, and on centuries of such humble gatherings rested the language and culture of Georgia—and even its survival, if you listened to some. It was a little more formal than Hammer might imagine, and at the same time more intimate. There would be toasts, and he would get drunk.

  “Not again,” said Hammer, and Koba gave an extravagant laugh.

  “Last night was not drunk,” he said, and laughed again.

  Hammer smiled, but he didn’t need a drink or, for that matter, a feast. He had to speak to Natela, and to know what Irodi had been told earlier, and to make a plan for the next day, for which he wanted above all else to be alert. Instinct told him that if tomorrow yielded nothing, his search would soon be over. He did his best to mask his restlessness.