The Benz, parked where we always parked it, was a burnt-out husk.
I got out of the car, into air bitter with smoke and the aftertaste of gasoline, the stench mixing with the new moisture falling from the sky. The rain was cold, but I didn't much feel it, because I'd seen something on the ground, glittering in headlights.
Shell casings.
Then I saw the discolored earth, and I knelt and touched it, brought my hand back so I could see my fingers in the light, a thin film of bloody mud on them now. I wiped my hand on my pants leg, standing up again.
Now that I knew what to look for, I was seeing a lot of shell casings, and at least one other patch of ground that might've been a blood spill. This one was much closer to what had once been our front door, and maybe it had come from someone trying to get inside.
And maybe it had come from someone trying to get out.
The Benz was a diesel, after all, and that wasn't what I was smelling. I was smelling petrol. I was smelling Molotov cocktails.
Gasoline burns exceptionally fast, and it burns incredibly hot. Fast enough that two or three or four thrown in the right places would create an instant inferno. Hot enough to bring a building to its foundation. If Miata and Alena had been inside, they wouldn't have had time to do anything much more than flee.
And then shell casings.
It was the Benz that scared me most of all, because it was still here. Whoever had burned our home had lit the car, too, stealing that avenue of escape. Probably had lit it at the same time they'd set fire to the house. So Alena had been here when they came.
It was now almost forty hours since we'd been meant to check in with each other, and still Vladek Karataev's BlackBerry gave me nothing but silence.
I was going to have to look through the ruins, I realized.
I was going to have to look for Alena's body. After seeing the SUV on its way, I'd headed back inside and, as quickly as I could manage, gone through the rest of the building, looking for anything that might point to Tiasa's whereabouts. It was a fool's errand, and I was rewarded like a fool for it, coming away with nothing. One of the beds in one of the rooms actually had a sheet on it, and I used that to fashion a makeshift sack, loading it with every weapon I'd touched.
The keys to the new BMW sedan had been in the pocket of the last man I checked, the last man I'd killed. No more than ten minutes after seeing the SUV depart, I pulled out, cramming as much distance between myself and the work camp as quickly as I could, speeding back toward Dubai. Given the way most of the drivers handled the road, you couldn't tell I was in a hurry.
Back in the city, I continued past the hotel, turning off Sheikh Zayed and taking Umm Hurair to the Al-Maktoum Bridge, across the Dubai Creek. I turned off again, parking near the Dhow Wharfage. Despite its name, the Dubai Creek is not, in fact, a creek, but rather a major inlet from the Arabian Gulf, deep and wide enough that it effectively cuts the city in half. Traversing it requires the use of one of two bridges, a tunnel, or a ride on an abra, one the local water taxis.
I left the keys in the BMW, but took my sack with me, then found a waiting abra, piloted by a long, thin, and sandblasted old man. None of my languages worked on him, but he understood both my gestures and the sixty dirham I gave him well enough. We started out, angling more northward, toward the mouth to the Gulf. Once we were about midway across, I dropped the sack overboard. The old pilot watched me without a change of expression or a word. When we made the other side, I gave him another hundred dirham. He said something in Arabic, laughed, and pulled away.
I caught a cab back to the Marina, stopped at the concierge desk on the way through the lobby, and told the impeccably coiffed man working there that I needed the soonest flight I could get back home to Georgia, which was hardly a lie. Then I told him I'd be down within twenty minutes to check out, and he promised me he'd have something by then.
The room was as I'd left it, except that the maid service had come, and all of Kekela's things were gone. None of my belongings looked to have been disturbed, and it surprised me a little bit. It wasn't that I'd expected Kekela to rob me; but given how we'd parted company, and how bad the situation had looked for me, at least to her eyes, I wouldn't have blamed her if she had. Dead men don't need laptops, after all.
Whether she'd left my things alone out of respect for the departed or in the hope that I'd come to collect them, I had no way of knowing. It was unlikely I ever would. I wouldn't be seeing her again.
While I was settling the bill, the concierge presented me with the reservations he'd been able to find, apologizing profusely. The best he'd come up with was a flight from Dubai to Tbilisi, via Istanbul. That was workable, though not ideal. What was even less ideal was that the flight departed Dubai at a quarter of three in the morning. I thanked him, headed to the airport, where I confirmed that the earliest I'd be leaving the UAE for Turkey was at two forty-five. I booked a new connection from Istanbul, this time directly to Batumi. I spent the next eight hours checking my phone for messages and worrying, which had turned into the same thing.
I managed about an hour of sleep on the flight to Turkey. I didn't manage any on the flight to Georgia.
The journey from Dubai to what had once been my home took nineteen hours. It wouldn't have mattered if it had taken nineteen minutes.
I had arrived too late. For a long time, I don't know how long, I stood in the rain, trying to get myself to move, to do what had to be done.
I just couldn't do it.
At some point, I found myself standing in what remained of the studio, looking at myself in the blurry and broken mirror. The heat had made fractures in the glass, including a major one that bisected my reflection, splitting my head into two broken pieces, out of alignment, out of proportion. The fissure ran down, tearing off a portion of my neck before jinking again, cutting neatly across my chest. As a visual metaphor, I thought it was spot-on.
Vladek Karataev's phone was ringing.
I took it from my pocket, stared at the display telling me that some Unknown Caller wanted me to answer. One of Vladek's business associates, maybe, calling to gloat. A wrong number.
I keyed the phone to answer, put it to my ear.
Her voice came soft and anxious, her strange mutt accent of all the languages the Soviets had made her learn. She was speaking English.
"Are you all right?" I had no voice to answer, and she asked it again. "Atticus? Are you all right?"
"I am now," I told Alena.
CHAPTER
Eighteen Kobuleti's chief of police, Mgelika Iashvili, lived by himself in a sweet-looking cottage off the town's main street, facing the beach and the Black Sea. In daylight, it was a brightly painted, almost garish, domicile, in baby blue and pine green with bright orange trim, colors meant, I presumed, to foster a sense of joyful beach festivities. At night, in the rain, it was monochrome and ugly, a gingerbread house that had been robbed of its treats.
I parked my rental across the street, killed the engine, and eyeballed the block. Most of the houses along the beach were rented to tourists during the summer season, now at its height. Lights burned in a few of them, including at least one in Mgelika Iashvili's home. By the clock in the car, it was three minutes to one in the morning, and the rain had finally stopped.
I got out, made my way across the street. There was nobody about, and the only thing I was hearing was the rustle of the Black Sea. A weak dome of light rose up from the south, where the clubs and cafes kept their doors open all hours. When I strained for it, I could catch an occasional thread of music through the noise of the tide coming in. With the departure of the rain, the summer warmth tried to return. If I hadn't been soaked to the skin, I might've been comfortable.