It smelled of urine. Mark eyed the bed. It was unmade. “Where’d they find him?” he asked.
“On the tile floor, I gather. Outside the bathroom.”
Larry’s things were scattered around the room: a suitcase sat on a folding luggage rack; a sport coat, dress pants, and a collection of ties hung in an open armoire; his toiletry kit hung from a hook in the bathroom; his small laptop computer and camera sat on a small desk in front of the casement window.
Through the window, Mark could hear church bells, reminding him that it was Sunday morning.
Tbilisi was a city of memories for Mark, not all of them good. But one thing he’d always liked was the church bells. They’d sounded strange to his ear whenever he’d come up from Muslim Azerbaijan, where he’d lived for years and which lay just south of Georgia. Though not religious himself, he appreciated the tenacity that those bells represented. For over fifteen hundred years the Georgian Orthodox Church had survived, despite invasions from Islamist Arabs, Turks, and Persians, and then the atheist Soviets. The bells said we’re survivors, we outlasted you all, we’re still here.
Keal turned to the manager. Speaking Georgian, he said, “You may leave us. My friend here, he knew the deceased and may need some time to grieve. If we need further assistance we’ll call the reception desk.”
Rehearsing the words in his head before he spoke, Mark said, in barely passable Georgian, “I will only be a few minutes.”
He turned from the window. The scene in the hotel room looked depressingly normal. Larry had worked for the CIA for over forty years; he’d run his own stations in Belarus and Moldova, and later had helped Mark conduct risky operations in Dubai and Bahrain. His life had been too colorful for him to die quietly of a heart attack in some unremarkable hotel room. Mark thought his friend should have passed out at a blackjack table in Monte Carlo, or while sipping vodka at a resort on the Black Sea, or in front of a firing squad in the bowels of some prison in the Middle East.
The first thing Mark inspected was Larry’s $2700 compact digital Sony camera — it looked like something a tourist might carry in his pocket, but took exceptionally high resolution photos. An 8-gigabyte SD memory card had been inserted into the memory slot; Mark removed it, then retrieved a black 128-gigabyte SDXC memory card that had been hidden in the false bottom of a small box of Band-Aids in Larry’s toiletry kit. He inserted it into the camera, then quickly clicked through photos of a Russian military base. As he did so, he looked for gaps in the numbers assigned to each photo — gaps which might indicate that some had been selectively deleted.
There were none.
He powered up Larry’s laptop computer, typed in the password, located a hidden file folder, entered another password, then clicked quickly through a series of still photos; they appeared to be exactly the same as the photos on the SDXC card.
The laptop — a small but powerful Lenovo — had also been programmed to wirelessly back up key files online. Mark would check those files against the files on the memory card and the laptop hard drive later. He snapped the laptop shut and slid it, along with the SDXC card and the camera, into his satchel.
Keal was staring at him with a curious expression. “Did you want to pack his belongings?”
“What was he wearing when he died?”
“Ah, I don’t know. The coroner will have noted it, probably saved the clothes, I would think. Would you like help packing?”
“No.”
Larry had come with one small suitcase and a garment bag. Mark started with the bathroom. In Larry’s toiletry kit, he found Coumadin, a blood thinner; Vasotec, a drug used to treat high blood pressure; and Lipitor, a cholesterol-lowering medication. Mark had known about the Vasotec and Lipitor, but not about the Coumadin.
He should have known about the Coumadin, though, because he’d recently grilled Larry about what drugs he was taking and his overall health. Throwing people into the field who were about to keel over from a heart attack was no way to run a company.
So apparently Larry had lied about his health.
Thanks for that.
Mark also found a lighter in the toiletry kit, so after packing up everything in the bathroom, he smelled Larry’s clothes in the armoire. The blue sport coat stank of smoke. Which meant either Larry had been hanging around smokers or sneaking smokes himself. Mark didn’t care about the smoking — he’d assumed Larry had been overly optimistic when he’d claimed to have quit a few weeks back.
“Where’s his passport?” Mark asked, forcing himself to ignore a sudden twinge of melancholy. “And wallet?”
“I have them here.” Keal patted the briefcase he’d been carrying.
Mark checked the pockets of all the hanging clothes and found another lighter and a handful of Georgian lari, less than twenty dollars’ worth. He pulled down the clothes, and then the garment bag, and dumped everything on the bed. It was when he was stuffing the clothes into the garment bag, thinking that Larry probably had just smoked and drunk himself into a heart attack, that he saw it.
On the wall opposite the door to the bathroom was a waist-high furniture piece designed to accommodate a minibar refrigerator and a microwave. On top of it sat a two-cup coffee maker and a basket filled with tea bags and individual-sized coffee packs.
Above the coffee maker, on the wall, was a painting. Mark gave it a brief look, turned away, then seconds later stopped short and began to stare at it. No, it couldn’t be, he thought. He had to be wrong. It was his mind playing tricks on him, just because he was back in Georgia.
At first glance it hadn’t looked so different from the rest of the cheap poster-quality photographic reproductions. But it was different. This was a real painting. The brush strokes were broad and a bit rough-textured, sharp lines had been softened, and the colors, they were bright and happy. Mark realized that he knew all those colors, knew them all by their proper names — cobalt blue, cadmium orange, yellow ochre, viridian…
Up close, the painting looked like a jumble of random brush strokes, but when Mark stepped back a few feet, it came into focus. It was, he was certain, an attempt — and not a terrible one — to paint in the impressionistic style of early Renoir.
He swallowed, blinked, then reached out and touched the frame. It was simple, made of stained pine. “You say they found the body here? Around where I’m standing?”
“I think. They told me they found him just outside the bathroom, so I’d say yeah.”
“Which way was he facing? Was he facing this wall?” Mark pointed toward the microwave and minibar.
“I don’t know.”
The painting depicted a woman sitting in front of an easel, palette in hand, painting a picture of a flower. Mark sucked in a quick breath as he focused on the flower — it was a cheerful Venetian red, a bright shade that might delight a child — and yes, the flower, it was definitely a poppy.
Of course it’s a poppy.
The woman’s face wasn’t visible, just the hint of a high cheekbone, so Mark focused on the way her long dirty-blond hair had been casually tucked behind her small ear. She wore a sleeveless white blouse that flattered her figure and a frilly orange-colored gypsy skirt. Beyond her lay what appeared to be a stand of bamboo and a neglected reflecting pool overgrown with lily pads.
“Are you OK, buddy?”