by Dan Mayland
“Tea?” he asked.
What he really wanted was a strong cup of coffee, but that was a luxury he couldn’t afford and Katerina, being Russian, probably didn’t want to drink.
A pause, then a smile, and a tip of the head. “Da.”
8
Tbilisi, Georgia
The present day
Mark had come back to Tbilisi plenty of times since his student days, during the bitter civil wars that had followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, then later—after he’d left the CIA—as an academic.
He hadn’t brooded much on the past on those return trips, but seeing the painting caused him do so now, so that when he and Keal drove through the square at the southern end of Rustaveli Avenue in downtown Tbilisi, he didn’t see Saint George atop the massive pedestal in the center of the square, he saw Lenin, the man who used to be there. When they passed the old Parliament building, he didn’t see floppy-haired teenagers doing backflips off the steps, he saw Soviet paratroopers beating Georgian protestors to death. And instead of the little beggar babies he now saw sleeping in front of al fresco cafés and high-priced perfumeries, he saw swept sidewalks and lines snaking out from government-run stores.
“Where’s this hospital?” Mark asked, after they passed the Tbilisi Concert Hall, which now also housed an Elvis-themed American diner that sold cheeseburgers and sushi.
“Vazha Pshavela Avenue.”
Which meant they would pass near Tbilisi State University. Mark pictured the old cypress trees out front, the overlook out back where he and Katerina used to build campfires at night, the wide museum-like steps in front leading up to building #1. How many times had he sat on those steps with Katerina?
Katerina. What the hell had that painting been doing in Larry’s hotel room?
Although her late father had been a Russian apparatchik who’d been transferred from Moscow to Tbilisi, and her mother a Moscow-born Russian who’d lived on the outskirts of Tbilisi, she hadn’t cared much one way or the other about politics of the day, or what had been the sour state of Russian-Georgian relations at the time. She’d only taped old Saint Ilia to her notebook because a few of her Georgian friends had been devoted to the cause of independence and she liked to go along to get along. Art was what really interested her. She liked to paint flowers, children, old people, her friends...and over tea she’d asked Mark if she could paint him. She’d never painted an American before!
Russians had a reputation for being dour and complicated and brooding, a reputation that Mark had thought then—and still thought—was well-earned. But from the day they met until the day they parted, Katerina had been anything but. Her glass had always been half full.
They’d walked back to his apartment that first afternoon. He’d felt awkward, sitting there as she studied him as though he were some kind of exotic zoo animal. Commanding him to turn his head left, then right…she painted mercifully fast, though, and the portrait she’d done of him had been an adequate representation. He’d been sitting on his balcony, wearing jeans and a black sweater, in front of an overgrown wisteria vine that had crept up the side of the building. It had been twilight in January, and cold; the wisteria vine had looked like a cluster of twigs.
In her painting, though, it was sunny and the wisteria was in full purple bloom, cascading around him. And instead of the cheap Russian beer he’d been drinking, she’d painted him grasping what looked like a crystal goblet—filled with what Katerina said was lemonade.
Mark had thought he’d looked a bit like a French dandy, but he’d kept that opinion to himself. He was so mesmerized by the way she spoke, by the way her lips opened when she said ya. Russian was so much softer, so much more interesting, coming out of her mouth than when spoken by bureaucrats with bad teeth and worse breath.
They’d had dinner in his apartment that first night—just khachapuri, thin bread with melted cheese on top—and a couple of bottles of Georgian wine. They’d listened to The Rolling Stones’ Let It Bleed, through a little speaker off his Sony Walkman.
God, what a wonderful time that had been. He remembered the smell of beeswax candles and sex—she hadn’t been a shy woman, that he remembered with perfect clarity—and resiny white wine, and his nearly empty apartment. He’d had just a pine bed with rough white sheets he’d bought down at a dreary government-run department store on Lenin Square, a single pillow, a kitchen table that was actually an elementary-school desk he’d found in an alley and had cleaned up, two metal chairs, and lots of wine-bottle candlestick holders for when the electricity would go out.
“Goddamn traffic,” said Keal, interrupting Mark’s thoughts. “It’s usually not this bad at this time of day.”
Stick with the present, Mark told himself. And stop thinking about sex you had twenty-four years ago when you have a beautiful wife now. He looked out the front windshield of the Ford Mondeo sedan they were riding in, to the line of stopped cars. Glancing in the rearview mirror, he noted just as many were piled up in back.
Keal added, “There must be an accident up ahead.”
Mark pulled the SDXC card out of his satchel, slotted it into Larry’s laptop, typed in Larry’s password, and began to examine the photos more carefully, zooming in as best he could on the various Russian-made vehicles Larry had documented coming in and out of the Russian military base—UAZ Hunter 4×4’s, BRDM and BTR armored cars, old Zil trucks, and new T-90 tanks. There were hundreds of images. It seemed like a lot of activity—the T-90 tanks were a worry—but without any baseline to compare it to, Mark couldn’t come to any useful conclusions.
The contract Mark had signed with the CIA’s Central Eurasia Division had specified that Global Intelligence Solutions—Mark’s firm—was to surveil the entrance to a Russian military base located in South Ossetia, a disputed patch of land claimed by Georgia but occupied by Russia.
Via satellite observations, the CIA had detected increased activity at the base. But the Agency hadn’t been satisfied with the satellite data; they’d wanted ground-level photos that could lend additional insight into the types of troops that were exiting and entering the base. Because the CIA station chief in Tbilisi had balked at assigning one of his own operatives to the task—the Agency tended to promote the cautious over the cowboys—Kaufman had turned to Mark’s firm.
Upon arrival in South Ossetia, Larry had boozed and schmoozed with local vintners, then rented an apartment on the top floor of a six-story building in Tskhinvali, the region’s capital. From that vantage point, he’d been able to photograph Russian military vehicles and personnel entering and exiting the adjacent military base.
Was it possible that the Russians had discovered what Larry was up to and killed him? Sure, thought Mark. But that didn’t even begin to explain the painting.
He clicked through more of the photos, but there wasn’t much to see. They might eventually prove useful to Kaufman, who could have them analyzed by Russia specialists, who in turn could study the uniforms and license plates and armor, and contrast the level of activity at the base when Larry was there with what satellite data suggested had been the level of activity over the past year. But to Mark the photos said little. South Ossetia was a heavily militarized disputed territory, and it lay just south of Chechnya and several other heavily militarized disputed territories—the Russians had been fighting a series of low-grade civil wars in the North Caucasus for years—so it would have been surprising not to see a robust level of activity at the base.
It was only when he got to the end that he noticed that the last photo of the lot was dated June sixth, four days earlier. It was a late afternoon shot of a Russian armored car just outside the base. But Larry hadn’t left South Ossetia until the afternoon of the seventh.
“Shit,” said Mark. Was it possible Larry had just neglected to take any photos on the seventh? Mark doubted it; Larry had known that the contract with the CIA had specified ninety-six hours of surveillance. Those ninety-six hours would have ended at noon on the seventh.
“Something wrong?” asked Keal.
“Yeah. This traffic.”
A hunchbacked old man with a handful of tacky nesting dolls was making his way down the line of cars, hoping for a sale.
Keal waved him off, then said, “We’re almost there.”
Mark navigated to the folder on the laptop’s hard drive where Larry had stored backup copies of all the photo files. No, he hadn’t messed up—the photos that had been backed up on the laptop were exactly the same as those on the SDXC card. Nothing from June seventh.
Which left one more thing to check: Mark had made sure that Larry’s laptop had been equipped with a wireless Internet card with international roaming capabilities—so that Larry would be able to backup offsite, even when traveling to remote locations.
He clicked open the Internet browser, navigated to the online backup storage site for Global Intelligence Solutions, and typed in the password for Larry’s account.
A long list of folders appeared, each representing a different job executed by Larry over the past six months. Mark opened the most recent and examined the photos inside it.
There were, he realized, twenty-eight more photos stored online—all from the morning of the seventh—than were stored on Larry’s laptop and on the SDXC memory card that had been hidden in the Band-Aid box. Which could only mean one thing—someone had found, and then deleted, the extra photos on the laptop and memory card, but had done so after they’d been backed up online.
Mark began examining the photos in question. All were of the entrance to the military base; none seemed much different from any of the earlier photos. He tried enlarging a few, but the image-editing software Larry had on his laptop was lousy, and the enlarged photos looked grainier than they should have.
Traffic started moving again. Mark glanced at the cars in front of him, and then at the rearview mirror. He wondered whether he was being followed.
Photos of a Russian military base deleted. Katerina’s self-portrait. Larry dead. What was the connection? He sensed menace, as though a fog of poison gas were gathering at his feet, slowly billowing upward.
He googled Katerina Kustinskaya Tbilisi, first typing her name as it would appear in Georgian, then in Cyrillic. He came up with a few hits, but nothing that pointed to the woman he’d known. He dug up what phone records he could for Tbilisi. Nothing.
To Keal, Mark said, “If I were to give you a name of someone, a Russian woman who used to live here in Tbilisi and might still be living here, would you be able to run it for me at the embassy? Maybe come up with an address?”
“I can try. What’s the name?”
He told him. “She’d be forty-five years old.” Mark searched his memory. “Born in July. I don’t remember the exact day.”
Keal pulled a pen out of the dash compartment. “Spell it.”
Mark did, and Keal jotted down the name as he drove. “You have a photo?”
“No. Kustinskaya might not be her last name anymore, she might have gotten married. But she was a student at Tbilisi State University from 1988 to at least the middle of 1991. You might find some information about her there.”
Keal picked up his phone. As he dialed the embassy, he said, “Why am I running this name?”
“She’s an old friend I lost touch with years ago.” Mark paused. What would he say to Katerina if he saw her again? To be sure, he’d have to ask her about Larry, but…he just hoped this wasn’t all leading to a place he didn’t want to go.
“Larry knew her a lot better than I did”—Mark thought that was a lie, but wasn’t sure—“and it’s possible he tried to contact her when he was here. If I could find her, it would be worth asking her whether she and Larry saw each other, and if they did, whether he was feeling OK. I’d like to be able to tell his family everything I can about his last hours.”
9
The parking lot of the cheerless low-slung Soviet-era Clinical Hospital Number 9 was only half full. Keal drove around for a while until he found the open spot that was closest to the entrance. He threw the car into park, turned off the engine, and looked at Mark.
“You ready?”
“Sure,” said Mark, but he continued looking out the front windshield for a moment, staring absentmindedly at an overfull garbage can.
He was being pulled in two directions, stretched thin. His marriage to Daria and the birth of Lila had made him feel young; it was as though he were embarking on an entirely new life, shedding his old life the way a snake might shed its skin. He felt more limber, and healthy, than he had ten years ago when he’d been living on his own; even his eyesight had improved, thanks to a LASIK operation Daria had prodded him into getting. But this business with Larry, and Katerina, was pulling him in the opposite direction, back into the past, reminding him that he wasn’t so young anymore at all, that his current life was built on layers upon layers of twisted history.
Keal stepped out of the car, and Mark followed suit.
“I’m hoping this doesn’t take too long,” said Keal. “But it probably will. We’re supposed to meet—”
“Mr. Keal?” Mark and Keal turned. They hadn’t taken two steps from the car. Walking toward them was a middle-aged woman in a black pantsuit. In her left hand she carried a clipboard. “James Keal, from the embassy?”
“Yes.”
“I’m glad I caught you.” She introduced herself as the administrator of the hospital’s mortuary. “We’ve already arranged for the transport you requested. So if you could just follow me.”
“Huh,” said Mark. “You were expecting us then, I take it.”
“Yes, yes. The embassy, they called. We’re doing everything we can to help.”
“Yeah, that’s him.”
Mark stood behind the open rear doors of a white Ford van. He’d assumed that he’d be required to identify Larry’s body in the morgue, prior to having the corpse packed and prepped for transit. Instead, the administrator who’d intercepted them had explained that the body had already been prepared for transport, that the death certificate and other documents were ready as well, and that if they would just follow her inside for a moment so that Mark could pay for the various costs associated with the services that had been provided, they could then complete the process in the rear parking lot.
“Is this the way it’s usually done?” Mark asked, as she was charging over a thousand dollars’ worth of lari to his credit card. He was assured it was.
Larry had been vacuum-packed inside a clear plastic body bag, and then placed inside a zinc casket that was narrower and shallower than normal, so the corpse wouldn’t move around during transport, explained the administrator. Wads of what looked like couch-cushion stuffing had been wedged tightly between his arms and legs and the casket walls. The zinc casket had been slotted inside a wooden box that was marked with the words EXTREME CARE in Georgian, English, French, Russian, and Turkish. The top of the casket had been removed and the lid to the wooden box left open.
Mark stared, transfixed for a moment. He and Larry had been through so much over the years. It was an unsettling twist of fate that it was all ending in the same city in which it had all began. Not a mile away from the hole-in-the-wall cafeteria-style restaurant where Larry had first recruited him.
10
Tbilisi, Georgia
May 1991, seven months before the dissolution of the Soviet Union
“Jesus, you couldn’t even spring for a place with seats? What the hell is wrong with you, son?”
A man of around fifty, with salt-and-pepper hair and eyes that looked a little rheumy, plopped down a mug of beer next to Marko’s red lentil soup and freshly baked torpedo-shaped rolls.
It was true, there were no seats at his favorite lunch spot. Just chest-high tables at which stood men who were eating and smoking; many wore the brown, short-sleeved uniform of Tbilisi’s road repair crews.
As Marko eased his soup bowl down the table, trying to give himself a little room, the rheumy-eyed man said, “Your monthly stipend is, what—$
1,475 dollars a month? For that Fulbright thing?”
Marko’s eyes narrowed. “Do we know each other?”
“Hey, that’s peanuts in New York, but over here a buck goes a long way. Hell, you could afford the Daryal once a week.” The Daryal was considered the best restaurant in town, meaning it was just OK. “At least there they got chairs. You can call me Larry, by the way. Can I get you a beer?”
Although it was only noon, most of the men in the buffet were drinking beer with their soup.
“No.” Marko dipped a piece of his bread into the soup and took a bite, torn between telling the guy to get lost and curiosity. “How do you know what my monthly stipend is?”
“Oh, I know lots about you, Marko.”
Marko took another bite of bread. “Like?”
“Like you bolted from home at seventeen when your mom died, managed a shithole gas station in Piscataway, New Jersey, to put yourself through Rutgers—crummy school, by the way; I went to Yale—but you did manage to score pretty well in math—”
“Who are you?”
“—you figured you’d be an engineer, but instead wound up studying Russian history. Yeah, that’s practical. Made no sense to me at first, until I learned that when your mom was a little girl she and her family got run out of Georgia by the Soviets. I’m no shrink, but I’ll bet that after she killed herself, you went looking for her in the past, looking for her here in—”
“Who the fuck are you?”
“I already told you—Larry.”
“Larry who?”
“We’ll stick with just Larry. You got balls, I’ll give you that. And smarts—the ’78 protests…ha! That was good. The commies actually bought your BS. At first, that is.”
Marko frowned.
In 1978, when the Soviets had tried to make Russian an official language of Georgia, massive protests had erupted. In the end, the Soviets had shown uncharacteristic restraint and allowed the Georgians to keep their language; it was a sliver of history that the Soviets wanted Americans to know more about, because they thought it painted them in a forgiving light. To ensure that he would be granted a visa, Marko had emphasized that he would be studying that history.
