His car was parked out front of the house, rainwater dripping slowly off the fenders. I squatted down and took a look beneath, and the ground below seemed as wet as everywhere else. I put a hand to the hood, felt it cool, though it might've been the rain as much as time that was responsible for that.
I went to the door and raised my hand to knock, then saw it was already slightly ajar. I checked the street again, and nothing had changed, and I didn't see any vehicles parked nearby other than my own, and I didn't know what to make of it. Paranoia and common sense began to wrestle around in my skull.
Paranoia won, and I prodded the door open further with my foot, then slipped through as quietly as I could. The entrance dumped straight into a small living room, the layout not dissimilar to what my house had been. Nothing looked to be out of place, and it was clear that Iashvili had a taste for both the modern and the expensive.
I moved forward, passing the open door to the bedroom. Music was playing softly inside, some jazz fusion. When I looked I saw that the bed was unmade and empty. I held there for a second, listening for movement that wasn't my own, anything that would tell me if there was another body present, and nothing came back. He'd been here, had been here recently, but there was no sign of the man.
At the far end of the kitchen was the back door, ajar the way the front had been. An empty bottle of wine stood in the sink, along with a set of dirty dishes. Nothing was broken, nothing was stained with blood.
I went out the back, down a short run of stairs and onto the rocky beach, wondering if the chief of police had been expecting me to come calling. "Where are you?" Alena had asked.
"Kobuleti."
Her inhale was sharp in my ear. "It's not safe. Get out of there."
I tried not to laugh, but the relief at simply hearing her voice made it impossible. I'm sure I sounded just shy of hysterical. "No kidding. Where are you?"
"Sochi."
"Russia."
"I had to take the ferry from Poti. I'm heading west tomorrow, I have a room booked at the Londonskaya, in Odessa, name Angelika Radkova." She paused for breath, and I realized that tension was releasing for her much as it had for me. "Meet me there."
"I will," I said.
For a few seconds, we listened to the sound of each other breathing, the proof of life.
"What happened?" I asked.
"Men came. Three of them, just after sunrise yesterday. Iashvili called to warn me. He woke me up. Miata and I would have died in the fire if he hadn't."
"He warned you?"
"Yes."
"They weren't looking for you," I said.
"Whether for me or for you, it doesn't matter. They came to kill whoever they found."
"Either I owe Mgelika thanks, or he owes me an explanation."
"Or both."
I had stepped out of the ruined studio as we'd been speaking, now took another look around the place that had been our home for almost six years. I'd liked Georgia; I'd liked Kobuleti; I'd liked it enough that I'd been willing to spend the rest of my life here with Alena.
We'd never come back, I realized.
"I'll want an explanation before I consider gratitude," I said. "He knew they were coming. He just as likely pointed them at you."
"The Londonskaya," Alena said. "In Odessa."
"Tomorrow night."
"Did you find her? Was she in Dubai?"
"No."
"I'm sorry."
"I'll see you tomorrow night," I said.
"Yes," she said. "Please." He was on the beach, maybe twenty meters from his home, and when I first saw him I thought he was dead, facedown near the edge of the tide.
Then I saw he was moving.
Then I saw the woman he was moving with.
She saw me first, but that was mostly because she was on her back, and by the time she noticed me, I was practically standing on top of them. When she saw me, she screamed.
Iashvili stopped mid-stroke, looking down at her, confused, then up to see me. It was hard to make out his expression, but I was pretty sure alarmed was a good place to start. He scrambled backward, onto his haunches and then onto his backside. He still had the muscles of a weight lifter, the solid core, barrel chest, and girder-thick arms. The woman rolled, gathering the blanket she'd been lying on around her.
"Hi, Chief." I spoke in Georgian. "We need to talk."
"David! Jesus Christ!"
I turned to the woman, who'd succeeded in concealing most of herself with the blanket. It was hard to tell, but I put her in her forties, attractively so.
"Mgelika and I have some things to discuss," I told her. "Why don't you go wait for him in the house?"
She looked at Iashvili, still sitting on his ass on the rocky beach. He hadn't taken his eyes off me. "'Lika?"
The chief and I stared at each other, and then he reached for his shorts, discarded nearby, saying, "Yeah, go back inside, Vicca. Open another bottle of wine, okay? I won't be long."
Vicca looked at me doubtfully, then back to Iashvili. "You're sure?"
He was standing now, shorts firmly in place. He held out his hand to her, and she took it, allowed him to help her to her feet.
"I'm sure," he said, and he kissed her cheek for good measure. "Won't be long," he promised.
We watched as she worked her way back to the house, saw her silhouette pass through the doorway. She looked back at us once more before going inside, and Iashvili gave her a reassuring wave.
Only when she was out of sight did he turn his attention back to me.
"You going to kill me now?" Mgelika Iashvili asked me.
"You going to give me a reason to?"
He considered, then shook his head. After a half second, he gestured along the edge of the water, and I nodded, and we began walking, side by side.
"Before you went down to Batumi, I never had reason to fear you," the chief said.
"And now you do?"
"I know what you did there. I know it was you. I can't prove it, I wouldn't even if I could. But I know you killed that fuck Karataev."
"It was Karataev who bought you off?" I asked. "Paid you to say that Bakhar had killed himself and his family?"
"He gave me a choice." Iashvili stooped, scooping up one of the wave-worn rocks from the beach without breaking stride. He threw it overhand out at the water. "I could take their money. Or they could kill me and make it look like I did it."
"You're the police."
"And who the fuck are you?" He glared at me. "Who the fuck are you telling me that? You killed four men in Batumi and fuck knows how many more wherever you've been. And you killed that other one, too, right? That one of Karataev's we found at Bakhar Lagidze's home when we found his family."
I shrugged.
"So don't fucking condescend to me, David-Mercer-whoever-the-fuck-you-really-are. You're not from this place; you think you know, but you don't. People who do the right thing, you've seen what happens to them. People like Bakhar."
The logic seemed circular to me, but I kept myself from saying so. We resumed walking.
"I did you a favor," Iashvili told me. "They showed up, fucking put a gun in my mouth, asked where the fuck you lived, where David Mercer fucking lived. You don't lie to people like that. You lie to people like that, they come back and make sure you take a long time dying."
"I know."
"As soon as they left me, I called your wife, I called Yeva, to warn her. You know why I did that?"
"So you could sleep at night?"
"So this wouldn't happen, this thing right here, right now! You understand what I'm telling you? I did you a fucking favor!"
"For all the wrong reasons."
"Jesus on the cross, you judge me? She's still alive, right? Yeva's still alive!"
"Who were they?"
"The ones your wife fucking killed?" He shook his head, morbidly amused. "Is that what you two do? Between teaching ballet and jogging through town, I mean, is that it? You go around killing people?"