“I said”—Keal’s voice rose a notch—“shouldn’t we leave that there?”
“No.” Mark opened his leather satchel and wedged the painting in between his toiletry bag and Larry’s laptop. “Did the police inspect this room?”
“I believe so.”
“Did they find anything out of the ordinary?”
Keal looked as though he still wasn’t happy about Mark having taken the painting. “Not that I know of.”
“Did they dust for fingerprints?”
“I don’t think so. But when a US citizen dies here, they have to look into the cause of death pretty closely. Someone from the local and regional police inspected the room, along with a forensic expert — all this before they even moved the body. There was no sign of forced entry or foul play, though, so my understanding is that they didn’t treat it like a crime scene.”
“And the room has been unsecured ever since they found the body.”
Mark was having difficulty making sense of the idea that one of the last things that Larry had seen on this earth was a self-portrait of his old girlfriend. Katerina hadn’t even known Larry. Or had she? Had they ever met back then? He didn’t think so.
“Well, it’s been locked. But, yeah, like I said, it hasn’t been treated as a crime scene if that’s what you’re getting at. Because the Georgians didn’t think any crime has been committed.”
Mark finished packing Larry’s things into the garment bag and suitcase, then said, “All right, let’s go get the body.”
“You sure you’re OK? I mean, I get now that you two must have known each other pretty well.”
“I’m fine,” said Mark, but he wasn’t. He couldn’t get Katerina out of his head.
They’d met, he recalled, just a short ways away, at Tbilisi University, in a class on the history of medieval Georgia. The professor had been a mumbling septuagenarian…
7
The American Marko Saveljic was one of thirty-three students enrolled in the class entitled Medieval Georgia: A History, but even on the first day, only twenty-five showed up.
The problem was that the professor lectured in Russian, but with a virtually impenetrable Georgian accent, while chain smoking Troika cigarettes. Indeed, Marko himself might have dropped the class after that first day, had he not taken a seat near the back of the classroom, next to a young Russian woman.
Katerina Kustinskaya was her name — she’d given it when attendance had been taken at the beginning of the class — and at first, Marko had judged her to be out of his league.
He wasn’t ugly, but was self-aware enough to know that he wasn’t exactly a knockout either. He was of average height, strong but not outwardly muscular, and had an angular face that some women found attractive but that most found easy to ignore. So when he felt Katerina’s eyes on him as he sat down, his first thought was that he probably had something stuck to his shirt, or between his teeth; maybe the remains of the pork dumplings he’d eaten before class? Could she even see his teeth? He hadn’t been smiling.
He felt his teeth with his tongue, wiped his hand across his lips, and casually glanced at his shirtsleeves and pant legs. Nothing out of the ordinary.
And yet he could still feel her eyes on him. She was trying not to be obvious about it, but Marko had always been adept at noticing things in his peripheral vision.
The professor lectured with his head down, his eyes focused on his prodigious notes, which he’d placed on a podium in the front of the room. Every so often, in between taking a drag off his cigarette, he’d rub his nose. Behind him hung a blackboard and several musty old maps of medieval Georgia.
Marko turned toward Katerina, and met her gaze. She registered surprise, then embarrassment, and turned away.
Marko wasn’t as enamored with beautiful women as some men were. He’d discovered that, when naked, he was as attracted to plain women nearly as much as he was to the beauties, and often the plain women were just nicer people. Still, for the rest of the class he was aware of her to his side, aware of her movements. Her eyes were blue, her Slavic cheekbones high, and when she pursed her lips, as though privately questioning something that the professor had said, Marko found it hard not to turn and stare. Every so often he got a whiff of something that smelled like lilacs. He wasn’t sure whether it was her perfume or her shampoo, but he wasted quite a bit of time trying to sort it out.
Halfway through the class, he realized that all of his fellow students were scribbling madly in their composition books. All except for himself, and Katerina.
She was dressed in layers of loose bohemian clothing; it was a look that, along with her drowsy eyes, Marko found intriguing.
But she’s a Russian, he thought; that much he could tell from her name.
He didn’t have anything against Russians. Ethnically, he was a quarter Russian himself. But when it came to communists — many of whom happened to be Russian — that was another matter.
At the end of class, the students began to stand. Marko hesitated, then stood himself. Katerina closed her composition book, prompting Marko to glance at it. It was the same thin-papered hundred-page bound book that most students carried, that Marko himself was carrying. They sold for a single ruble down at the university store. Katerina had drawn some frivolous doodles on the gray cover — flowers and trees and a horse carrying a long-haired girl that bore some resemblance to Katerina herself. But in the left-hand corner she’d taped a picture of Saint Ilia, a man revered by modern Georgians because, in the 1800s, he’d pushed for Georgian independence from the Russian Empire. Now, with the Soviet Union teetering, Saint Ilia had become a symbol of modern resistance against the communists.
Considering that sufficient evidence that she wasn’t a communist, Marko turned to face her. At first she turned away, but when he persisted, she met his gaze.
“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
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.