“I wasn’t climbing,” she said. “Just hiking.”
“I’ll try to have you out of here in a few days,” Beck said. “Geneva has records of missing persons and possible massacres. If there’s a match and we can date it to the thirties, we’ll hand it over to the Georgians and the Russians.” Beck wanted the graves to be old, and she could hardly blame him.
“What if it’s recent?” Kaye asked.
“We’ll bring in a full investigation team from Vienna.”
Kaye gave him a clear, no-nonsense look. “It’s recent,” she said.
Beck finished off his glass, stood, and clutched the back of his chair with his hands. “I agree,” he said with a sigh. “What made you give up on criminology? If I’m not intruding…”
“I learned too much about people,” Kaye said. Cruel, rotten, dirty, desperately stupid people . She told Beck about the Brooklyn homicide lieutenant who had taught her class. He had been a devout Christian. Showing them pictures of a particularly horrendous crime scene, with two dead men, three dead women, and a dead child, he had told the students, “The souls of these victims are no longer in their bodies. Don’t sympathize with them. Sympathize with the ones left behind. Get over it. Get to work. And remember: you work for God.”
“His beliefs kept him sane,” Kaye said.
“And you? Why did you change your major?”
“I didn’t believe,” Kaye said.
Beck nodded, flexed his hands on the back of the chair. “No armor. Well, do your best. You’re all we’ve got for the time being.” He said good night and walked to the narrow stairs, climbing with a fast, light tread.
Kaye sat at the table for several minutes, then stepped through the inn’s front door. She stood on the granite flagstone step beside the narrow cobbled street and inhaled the night air, with its faint odor of town sewage. Over the rooftop of the house opposite the inn she could see the snow-capped crest of a mountain, so clear she could almost reach out and touch it.
In the morning, she came awake wrapped in warm sheets and a blanket that hadn’t been laundered in some time. She stared at a few stray hairs, not her own, trapped in the thick gray wool near her face. The small wooden bed with carved and red-painted posts occupied a plaster-walled room about eight feet wide and ten feet long, with a single window behind the bed, a single wooden chair, and a plain oak table bearing a washstand. Tbilisi had modern hotels, but Gordi was away from the new tourist trails, too far off the Military Road.
She slipped out of bed, splashed water on her face, and pulled on her denims and blouse and coat. She was reaching for the iron latch when she heard a heavy knock. Beck called her name. She opened the door and blinked at him owlishly.
“They’re running us out of town,” he said, his face hard. “They want all of us back in Tbilisi by tomorrow.”
“Why?”
“We’re not wanted. Regular army soldiers are here to escort us. I’ve told them you’re a civilian advisor and not a member of the team. They don’t care.”
“Jesus,” Kaye said. “Why the turnaround?”
Beck made a disgusted face. “The sakrebulo, the council, I presume. Nervous about their nice little community. Or maybe it comes from higher up.”
“Doesn’t sound like the new Georgia,” Kaye said. She was concerned about how this might affect her work with the institute.
“I’m surprised, too,” Beck said. “We’ve stepped on somebody’s toes. Please pack your case and join us downstairs.”
He turned to go, but Kaye took his arm. “Are the phones working?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “You’re welcome to use one of our satellite phones.”
“Thanks. And — Dr. Jakeli is back in Tbilisi by now. I’d hate to make him drive out here again.”
“We’ll take you to Tbilisi,” Beck said. “If that’s where you want to go.”
Kaye said, “That’ll be fine.”
The white UN Cherokees gleamed in the bright sun outside the inn. Kaye peered at them through the window panes of the lobby and waited for the innkeeper to bring out an antiquated black dial phone and plug it into the jack by the front desk. She picked up the receiver, listened to it, then handed it to Kaye: dead. In a few more years, Georgia would catch up with the twenty-first century. For now, there were less than a hundred lines to the outside world, and with all calls routed through Tbilisi, service was sporadic.
The innkeeper smiled nervously. She had been nervous since they arrived.
Kaye carried her bag outside. The UN team had assembled, six men and three women. Kaye stood beside a Canadian woman named Doyle, while Hunter brought out the satellite phone.
First Kaye made a call to Tbilisi to speak with Tamara Miri-anishvili, her main contact at the institute. After several tries, the call went through. Tamara sympathized and wondered what the fuss was about, then said Kaye was welcome to come back and stay a few more days. “It is shameful, to push your nose into this. We’ll have fun, make you cheerful again,” Tamara said.
“Have there been any calls from Saul?” Kaye asked.
“Twice he calls,” Tamara said. “He says ask more about biofilms. How do phages work in biofilms, when the bacteria get all socialized.”
“And are you going to tell us?” Kaye asked in jest.
Tamara gave her a tinkling, sunny laugh. “Must we tell you all our secrets? We have no contracts yet, Kaye dear!”
“Saul’s right. It could be a big issue,” Kaye said. Even at the worst of times, Saul was on track with their science and their business.
“Come back, and I’ll show you some of our biofilm research, special, just because you are nice,” Tamara said.
“Wonderful.”
Kaye thanked Tamara and handed the phone back to the corporal.
A Georgian staff car, an old black Volga, arrived with several army officers, who exited on the left side. Major Chikur-ishvili of the security forces stepped out from the right, his face stormier than ever. He looked like he might explode in a cloud of blood and spit.
A young army officer — Kaye had no idea what rank — approached Beck and spoke to him in broken Russian. When they were finished, Beck waved his hand and the UN team climbed into their Jeeps. Kaye rode in the Jeep with Beck.
As they drove west out of Gordi, a few of the townspeople gathered to watch them leave. A little girl stood beside a plastered stone wall and waved: brown-haired, tawny, gray-eyed, strong and lovely. A perfectly normal and delightful little girl.
There was little conversation as Hunter drove them south along the highway, leading the small caravan. Beck stared thoughtfully ahead. The stiff-sprung Jeep bounced over bumps and dropped into ruts and swerved around potholes.
Riding in the right rear seat, Kaye thought she might be getting carsick. The radio played pop tunes from Alania and pretty good blues from Azerbaijan and then an incomprehensible talk show that Beck occasionally found amusing. He glanced back at Kaye and she tried to smile bravely.
After a few hours she dozed off and dreamed of bacterial buildups inside the bodies within the trench graves. Biofilms, what most people thought of as slime: little industrious bacterial cities reducing these corpses, these once-living giant evolutionary offspring, back to their native materials. Lovely polysaccharide architectures being laid down within the interior channels, the gut and lungs, the heart and arteries and eyes and brain, the bacteria giving up their wild ways and becoming citified, recycling all; great garbage dump cities of bacteria, cheerfully ignorant of philosophy and history and the character of the dead hulks they now reclaimed.
Bacteria made us. They take us back in the end. Welcome home.
She woke up in a sweat. The air was getting warmer as they descended into a long, deep valley. How nice it would be to know nothing about all the inner workings. Animal innocence; the unexamined life is the sweetest. But things go wrong and prompt introspection and examination. The root of all awareness.