The Searcher (21 page)

T
he good roads were behind them now. For a while there was rough tarmac, and then the tarmac began to break up, and as they drew near the foothills they were on a wide track lined with trees, even enough but muddy after the rain and scattered with stones and potholes. Civilization began to slip away. They passed overgrown farmsteads, wild horses grazing under wet oaks, herds of bony cattle ambling about. From time to time the sun broke through and lit some part of the scene with glistening light, causing Hammer to forget his mission, forget the trials of the last four days, and wonder at the innocent perfection of the place, the magic of its simple elements.

“It's beautiful here,” he said, more to himself than to Koba, and tried to remember the last time he had been in nature like this, with the world he knew unimaginable and forgotten.

“Ya,” said Koba, unengaged.

The road settled alongside a fast-flowing river and started to climb.

Soon the river was far below them and the road had narrowed to a single rocky track, a foot wider than the car, that clung to the rocky hillside. Grass gave way to sinewy trees that still dripped after the rain, and hardy bushes sprouted over the cliff face. Every so often wooden posts set back in little clusters marked their progress. If Hammer looked down to his right all he saw was an abrupt and growing drop and a shoulder that just crumbled into space, but Koba charged on unaffected, taking corners at the same speed as the straights and letting the car veer wide in the mud as he fished in his top pocket for his cigarettes and rummaged in the glove box for his lighter. They might be in a hurry, Hammer told him at one point, but there was no
need to rush on his account—as long as they arrived today. But Koba insisted he was taking it slowly, they'd be OK, and bristled, if anything, at the implied slight on his driving. Entrusting himself to the god of the road, Hammer held on. As long as they arrived.

Perhaps because of the recent rain they saw few other cars going their way, and those they did see were soon compelled to stop on one of the rare stretches that were wide enough to let them by. The drop now was sheer, and already hundreds of feet. As Koba crept past them, no more than an inch away, Hammer forced himself to look ahead so that he couldn't see how close the wheels beneath him were to the edge. At every moment he expected to feel them start to slip and then give.

As a cursing Koba maneuvered around a Lada that was barely coping with the steeper stretches, Hammer got to inspect the wooden marker posts by the side of the road. There were three together, in the form of crosses, carefully made, and at each intersection was a faded portrait.

“I guess they didn't make it.”

Koba, concentrating on the Lada, merely grunted.

“The posts,” said Hammer.

Koba glanced across. His mood seemed to be declining as they left his world behind. Hammer suspected that he was finding the driving more taxing than he let on. “Idiots. They drink, fall from mountain. You will see. All this people are idiots.”

With a final curse he was free of the other car.

“Should we help them?” said Hammer, looking back. “They're never going to get up.”

“I tell you. Idiots!”

For all Koba's dispatch, progress was slow. In a straight line it was only twelve miles to Omalo, where they were headed, but the road snaked so tightly upward, hairpin after hairpin, that there were eighty to cover in all. After an hour the last straggling trees ran out and they emerged into sunshine; when he looked down, Hammer could see glimpses of the way they had come, the track winding in and out of sight hundreds of feet below, and beyond, already unimaginably remote, the distant plain. Above and around them were sublime peaks and green ridges folded like cloth.

Another hour passed, his ears popped twice, the air grew cold, and still there seemed to be more mountain above them than there was below. Except to make the odd curse, Koba drove in silence now. Hammer's conversation had dried up.

“Fuck,” Koba said, straining to look at the road above them. Hammer followed his gaze, and saw, a hundred feet up, three vehicles in convoy, two of them the old army trucks he had grown used to seeing everywhere, and in between them a smaller white van.

Within ten minutes they had caught up with the second truck as it waited for the first to pull the van through a particularly steep hairpin, its huge wheels laboring and slipping on the rocky ground. Somehow it managed it, whereupon both stopped, the rope was released, and they all set off lumbering toward the next turn. Koba looked at Hammer and slowly shook his head.

“All way up,” he said. “You see. No way past. All way up.”

This corner the van tried to take on its own, but it failed and the procedure was repeated. Koba turned off the engine and lit another cigarette, watching the group climbing at the slowest possible speed up one leg, then another, and another. Shadows began to appear on the eastern slopes. Hammer's watch showed four.

“Must be in Omalo before night,” said Koba.

“There's plenty of time.” He didn't mean it. It was the hardest part of this whole thing, racing against time and having no idea how much was left.

“Is dark early, the other side.”

“Of course.”

“Not good in dark.”

For almost another hour they hung back, caught up, hung back, Koba occasionally trying to find a way around, frustrated now beyond measure. Dead pylons bent by winter snowfalls loomed over the road. Then, rounding a long corner, they found the first truck stopped in a crook of the track where it crossed a shallow stream, from which the driver and another man were filling a collection of plastic bottles. Koba saw his opportunity and moved sharply to the left to go past.

“Stop!” shouted Hammer. What Koba had seen as a dip in the road was in fact the shoulder. There was no road, just space.

Hammer felt the wheel underneath him lose grip and begin to slip away. There was nothing to check their fall but scree and scrub. By the stream the two men were shouting, their arms up in warning and disbelief.

Koba braked hard, and the car's three wheels scrabbled to a stop on the loose grit. Hammer, fear coursing through every part of him, looked across at Koba with astonishment and reproach, but Koba just stared straight ahead, his big face white and furious. Even in that moment Hammer felt a certain awe at the extent of the man's pride.

Koba put the car in reverse, checked twice that he had the right gear, and slowly took them back. Outside, the Georgians were incredulous and let Koba know it. Through the open window he shouted back.

Hammer breathed deeply, but his pulse still raced. “I think I'd like a smoke,” he said.

Still staring straight ahead, Koba removed the pack from his shirt pocket, took one for himself, and offered the rest to Hammer, who found the lighter in the glove box and lit first Koba's, then his own. This cigarette was different from last night's. Calming, yes, but not comforting. Two thoughts occupied him as he smoked: that if he and Koba had tumbled down the cliff, there was no one who might come for him as he had come for Ben; and that the only memorial he might leave behind was a cross at the side of this fucking road.

“That was close,” he said, already thinking about Koba's fury and the rest of the journey. “You did good.”

But Koba either didn't believe him or was still too angry—with himself, with the other drivers, with the mountains—to speak.

“For a moment I thought you and I were going to have a nice little spot on the road, here, with a couple of crosses.” He gave Koba a chance to respond in kind. “We could have been together forever. People would have taken us for brothers.”

Koba flicked his half-finished cigarette out of the window.

“Idiots. Up here, like this.” His jaw jutted out as he shook his head. “Motherfuckers.”

T
hey had to wait until the summit to pass the convoy, and the far side of the range was already in deep shadow. All the way Hammer had thought that every peak would be the last, but here it was finally clear that they had made it: behind and giddily far below them was the plain, and ahead a long green ridge curved down toward a high plateau, taking the road with it and drawing his eye to the distance, where, just emerging from the retreating band of dark clouds, were the real mountains, immense, snow-capped, unrelentingly endless, range upon range stretching into Russia.

“Tell me we don't have to go up there,” he said as they began to descend.

“That is Caucasus,” said Koba, his first words since the incident besides great Georgian oaths.

“To keep the Russians out.”

“Russians not so bad. Better than mountain motherfuckers.”

Miles above the world, and much further from his own, Hammer felt a simplicity settle on him, as if everything he had learned, everything he knew, had slipped away. How he wished Natela was with him.

Slowly, they reconnected with the land. It was as if they'd been flying; the sense of potential collapse was the same. As the road slowly sank down, and the drop beside him diminished, and normal things began to appear—a river, a bridge, the first trees—he felt a great joy in seeing them that went beyond relief. Here again were the elements of things, which for years he hadn't seen.

Circled by mountains, Tusheti was a place of great quiet. The wind, fierce in the last stages of their ascent, had dropped to nothing, and the pines that bunched together on the gentle hills didn't stir. Rough fences
divided up the pasture where cows and horses grazed together; set back from the road were houses made of wood and piled slate. In the thinning twilight it felt like a place for fairy tales. There was no logic to it—he had no idea where it came from—but after the chaos and rage of the city and the trials of the last few days Hammer felt that this place was benign, and that he might be safe here. If Ben had come to harm here it was despite Tusheti, not because of it.

They reached Omalo just as night was falling—too late for work but in time for dinner. On a hill above the road he could make out perhaps twenty wooden houses, only three of them lit up. By the first of these Koba pulled over, muttered something that Hammer didn't catch, and stumped his way up some steps and along a balcony to the front door. Within a minute he was back.

“This is place.”

Hammer got out of the car, stretched his arms above his head, and breathed the sweet air, which was cool now and smelled of damp grass. His neck ached with the day's tension. He wanted a bath, and a drink, and some time away from Koba.

There was unloading to be done, and hosts to be greeted, and rooms to be chosen, but his first thought was to ask whether there was any signal in the village. There was, a thread, if you walked up to the top of the hill behind the house, and through it he picked up a single message, a voice mail from Hibbert, sounding less worried now than alarmed, to tell him that they had just a week left to prepare, and that a normal person would have been busy preparing. It wasn't a reality Hammer could contemplate. When he was done, Koba wandered up after him and spent five minutes tapping out texts to his wife.

The house was Henrikh and Irine's, the Omalo Guesthouse, as it said on a hand-painted sign above the door, where for thirty lari, which Hammer insisted on paying in advance, travelers and hikers could spend the night in a simple, wood-lined room and be fed whatever it was they ate in Tusheti. Tonight Hammer would not find out, because Koba was not ready for local food after the day he had had and insisted on taking over the kitchen to cook his own. Irine seemed not to mind, and provided him with knives for
him to cut up his lamb, and skewers to run the pieces through. These he placed on the open fire, once he had seen to it that the coals were burned down and hot, and while they cooked he went to one of his bags and produced three old plastic water bottles full of brown liquid. Irine began to chop the vegetables they had brought, and Henrikh left them all to it.

“Tonight, need chacha,” said Koba.

Hammer saw no reason to argue. Koba poured two glasses—this was clearly not an honor to be conferred on mountain folk—and passed one to Hammer, who waited politely for his first proper Georgian toast. It was warm in here, and the air was beginning to fill with smoke from the lamb fat dripping onto the fire. With his elbow high, Koba held up his glass and looked Hammer in the eye.

“Georgia is beautiful country. Very beautiful. Old country. Old as mountains.” Hammer doubted this, but kept quiet. Koba had the air of someone who was not to be interrupted. “People try, hurt Georgia. Muslims from Turkey, Iran, Genghis Khan—all people. Now, people hurt Georgia from inside. President, politicians. No jobs, people hungry. Young people not marry. Tbilisi full of . . . how you say? Men who like men?”

Hammer closed his eyes. This was a new side of Koba that he didn't relish coming to know. Next it would be the Jews.

“We say gay. Gay men.”

“Ya, gay. Tbilisi full of gays. Women wear nothing, in church wear nothing. But. But.” He punctuated this turning point with his glass. “Georgia survive. Always it survives. We get new president, will be new times, more like old times. So. Toast. New day for Georgia.”

He raised his glass another inch, touched it against Hammer's, shouted “Gaumarjos!” and downed the chacha in a gulp, keeping his eyes on Hammer's throughout. When he was done he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and beamed. “Come. Drink!”

Hammer hesitated. Koba, he was beginning to understand, was an angry man, and by drinking he would be complicit in his anger. But not to drink would be the deepest insult, and really he had no cause. He had drunk with worse people, after all. And he wanted the drink.

He knocked it back. It was rougher than the chacha Natela had given him, and scorched the back of his throat on its way down.

“Ha!” said Koba. “Good, ya? One more.”

He poured again, slightly less carefully than before.

“Here. Take.” They raised their glasses. Koba leaned forward across the table, took Hammer's glass from his left hand, and transferred it to his right. Then, not quite happy, he gripped Hammer's elbow and lifted it until it was level with the glass. Feeling like a marionette, Hammer let himself be manipulated.

“Now. Is good.” Adopting a serious expression, Koba resumed. “You are good friend. First time in Georgia. Good man. You look for your friend. This is honor. You are man of honor. Your friend, maybe not. But you, yes. I hope you find your friend. Here, I think, we will not find him, but somewhere, yes. So, toast. To friendship.” He brought the glass to his lips, then “Gaumarjos!” and down it went.

“Gaumarjos,” said Hammer, and drank. The day began slowly to slip from him.

Koba drew his sleeve across his mouth. “Your friend, he is like you?”

“What am I?”

“Good man.” Koba clenched his fist and held it to his breast, filling their glasses with his other hand. “True friend.”

Before Hammer could answer, the third toast was made, to God, plain and simple, and the third glass drained.

“All friends let us down sometimes, Koba. No one's completely true.”

“Bullshit. Good friend is good friend. Always.”

“No one ever let you down?”

“Let me down?”

“Sure. Kept the money you loaned them. Stole your girl. Lied to you. Shared a secret you didn't want shared.”

Koba frowned a lopsided frown, somewhere between suspicious and confused. “Such person no friend.”

“You don't do forgiveness?”

“I forgive, I am weak.”

It was all about perspective, Hammer thought, and one's surroundings. Come as far as he had and it felt petty to blame Ben for anything, but that could change, if the two of them ever made it home.

By the time they were ready to eat, Irine had gone to bed, the room was full of smoking lamb fat, and they were on their sixth toast, which Hammer resolved should be the last. They would start early in the morning and he wanted to be alert. After a lengthy speech about his father, and his grandfather, and the great heroes of Georgia, Koba stood, with immense solemnity, and as Hammer did the same they toasted the dead.

He could cook, Hammer had to concede. The lamb came with raw onions and salad and everything was good. By now they were drinking wine, and Hammer could tell that another toast was coming, and when Koba moved to fill his glass he put his hand over the top of it and, smiling, shook his head.

“Koba, thank you, you're very kind, but that's enough for me. I need my wits tomorrow.” Koba frowned. “I need to be fresh, in the morning. You drink, go ahead.”

“No. Must drink.”

“When we find my friend, then I drink. But for now, no more.”

“You sleep well. Mountain air.”

“I hope so.”

Koba was beginning to be drunk, and his face made an exaggerated display of puzzlement, dismay, resignation. “OK. Is best for you, OK. We drink later. But now, one more. Important toast.”

Drunk enough himself, Hammer couldn't find the will to resist. He took his hand away.

“Very important toast. For you. We are men. We make work. We fight. We drink chacha. But,” Koba took his voice down low, “each man, he has mother. Yes? With no woman, he is nothing. They are mothers and wives and daughters. They are brave like ten men. And beauty. In Georgia, women are most beautiful in world. I think you know this, yes?” He winked at Hammer, who, even through the creeping haze, wondered what he meant by it. “Men come to Georgia, they never leave. Stay forever with Georgian
woman. You should do same, yes?” Another wink. “So. Drink, please. To mothers and wives. To women. Gaumarjos!”

 • • • 

H
ammer woke in the middle of the night to the noise of Koba's snores coming through his closed door. They had a growling quality, like a wild animal disturbed. He fumbled on the floor for his phone and checked the time. Almost two. His head hurt, and his limbs still felt as if someone had pulled taut all the tendons inside. He brought the heavy sheets and blankets up round his ears against the cold.

His first memory was of the road, and the drop beside it; his second, of Koba's great red face winking at him over the chacha. It had meant something, he was sure, but perhaps nothing more than a leering guess that Hammer's frequent walks had masked some sexual escapade.

A bare bulb was shining on the landing and he squinted past it as he shuffled quickly to the bathroom in the cold. On his way back, he went to close Koba's door, in the faint hope that it might cut out some of the noise, and for a moment watched him sleeping, the big sprawled frame vibrating noticeably with every breath. The room was already a mess: his clothes were on the floor where he had stepped out of them, the contents of his plastic bags emptied against the wall, his wallet and phones by the foot of the bed.

Two phones. The notion struck Hammer as odd, as the winking had struck him as odd. He looked at the phones, then at Koba, who appeared to be in the deepest imaginable sleep, and after briefly consulting his conscience stole inside.

A minute later he was back in the bathroom, examining his haul—ready to act if the snoring stopped but not sure what he would do. The phones were locked. Both were simple models, but to judge by their condition one had been used for a long time and one was almost new. The wallet was similarly anonymous. It was well made and well worn, and at one point must have held more than it currently did, because the leather sagged around its contents: nine hundred lari in cash, which was something like five hundred dollars—a large amount, especially given that he had refused to take any
of Hammer's money until the end of the job; and two receipts, one from the supermarket and one for the gas that Hammer had paid for that day. That was all. No credit cards, no driver's license, no loyalty cards, no notes, photographs, or tickets. Nothing that might identify him. Perhaps this was what a normal Georgian wallet looked like. Perhaps, when he traveled to the mountains, Koba kept things light and emptied his wallet of anything he didn't truly need.

From the next room the snores still came. Hammer crept in, left Koba's things as he had found them, gently closed the door, and almost tiptoed back to bed. As far as he knew, Koba hadn't stirred, but that made it no easier to get to sleep, and for a while he lay in the dark, wandering round this strange new world and trying to force it against its will to take on any kind of shape.