‘I’ve got to sleep,’ Kirov told her. He could feel his mind becoming dissociated from his body. The fight and the fire at the factory, the discovery of the woman’s corpse, the risks of checking Gvishiani’s villa — he had been storing up the effects of shock and was coming apart under the strain. ‘Do you have any friends in Tbilisi?’
‘No.’
‘We can’t use the hotels,’ he said abstractedly.
‘No.’
He looked around for answers in the glittering sky and the pinpricks of light on the city’s hills. ‘Let’s walk,’ he suggested and offered her his arm.
They walked. They took a tramcar and stood among the sleepily nodding passengers like a married couple returning home from the theatre. They strolled along the Kura Embankment and stared at the puddles of light in the darkly rolling river. ‘Where do we go?’ she asked again.
‘I need to sleep,’ he repeated. They entered one of the parks along the embankment and found a sheltered spot in the darkness of the trees and Kirov beckoned her to sit close to him for warmth.
‘You’re hurt,’ she told him with surprise in her voice as though she had not believed it.
He nodded and explained that he intended to sleep; he was trusting her to keep an eye out for any militia patrols.
‘I have to trust you,’ he told her again, reminding himself that at another time she had betrayed him to Georgi Gvishiani.
‘That’s all right,’ she said, and she allowed him to rest his head on her treacherous shoulder.
‘Why Batumi?’ she asked when he told her his plan.
‘Because they expect us to head north to try to return to Moscow.’ Batumi lay on the coast to the west. It would be possible to pick up a train there.
‘And how do we travel?’
‘We hitch.’
At the third attempt they stopped a truck going to the city. The driver accepted the bottle of samogon in payment. He was carrying spare parts for a tea factory; the wagon was only half loaded and it suited him that his passengers slept out of sight in the back.
Ten miles from Tbilisi there was a road block on the highway, a car and four militiamen who checked the driver’s papers and made a cursory examination of the outside of the vehicle without any sense of purpose. Two miles further down the road the driver stopped again and opened the back of the truck, letting in the bright daylight.
‘Was it you they were looking for?’ he asked.
‘No,’ Kirov told him.
The driver weighed up the answer sceptically. ‘Fuck them,’ he said finally, and closed up the truck again.
The road descended from the Georgian highlands towards the coast through hills covered in hornbeam and oak, grey in the winter sun. They drove through kilometres of tea plantations and, as evening fell, the land gave way to orchards and the smell of fruit trees pushing through the damp yellow earth, then the fragrance of camphor and eucalyptus and the strange unintelligible shoutings of a road gang working along the highway.
It was night-time when the truck dropped them in the city just outside the port area. The sky was black and cloudy and patched with flashes from the flare stacks of the oil refineries. A mild breeze blew from the direction of the sea, ruffling the palm fronds.
‘Tomorrow we take a train to Moscow,’ said Kirov. To lift her morale he added, ‘For now we’ll find a hotel and a bed for the night.’
‘Is that safe on my papers?’
‘I have papers,’ Kirov answered. He didn’t mention that the papers carried the security of a money-back guarantee from Yuri the Bazaar. Instead he said, ‘I’ll smuggle you into my room,’ which made them both laugh since it sounded like a student stunt. And with the laughter, Nadia Mazurova seemed to him for a second to become totally beautiful as her unemphatic blue eyes shone openly instead of with evasion. But as soon as she recognised this dangerous intimacy it was gone, leaving a space between them across which he offered his hand. Together they set out into the warm night, the palms and the eucalyptus, through the streets of a city that was another Russia.
After a couple of tries and some negotiation Kirov found a room at a small hotel. It was shabby and smelled of fish and bad plumbing, and held a single bed with grimy coverings. Nadia sat on it and looked bleakly at the wall while Kirov smoked and studied her and smoked while ideas and reflections drifted in and out of his consciousness. Where had Craig come by his clove-scented cigarettes? Was it important? Who would know the answer? He could still smell the room where the murder had occurred, and see the body of the woman with her blood-smeared pubis and the ligature around her neck. Nadia Mazurova still clearly thought he was a dangerous man. Strange. He hadn’t eaten for twenty-four hours. Hunger was making him light-headed. He considered going out to find some food but decided against taking the risk. She had said nothing though he supposed that her hunger must be nearly as acute. Tell me you are hungry, he thought, allow me even so far into your world. He filled his belly with smoke and stared at their reflections in the window.
‘Batumi,’ he mused aloud. Something stirred dimly in his memory. ‘You seemed surprised when I mentioned it.’
‘I thought we would go directly to Moscow,’ she responded dully.
‘It wasn’t that.’ Kirov pictured the look on her face.
‘Not that. Have you been here before? Was Viktor here?’
‘Last year.’
‘How — why?’
‘Georgi liked to come here for his health. He stayed at the sanatorium in Kobuleti.’
‘And Viktor?’
‘Georgi invited us both to visit at his expense.’
‘That was when Georgi and Viktor were still friends?’
‘They were always friends.’
‘No,’ Kirov reminded her. ‘Viktor changed, didn’t he? After Zagranichny beat up your girlfriend, Vera, at Viktor’s dacha, Viktor became unpredictable. He burst into tears one night at the Aragvi — you know because you were there. Georgi didn’t like that. No more friendship after that. Strictly business — and business demanded that Viktor be thrown to the wolves.’
‘I had hoped —’ she didn’t finish. She buried her face in her hands and her body was racked by sobbing. Kirov found himself watching her and thinking that this was how it would look if he had struck her a blow in the face and that her body and the expression in her eyes were keyed for it, for the expectation of violence. He wanted to tell her that it was not like that, step across the room, take her in his arms and shake her until she understood.
‘Batumi,’ he resumed to put his other thoughts away. ‘Did Viktor ever come here on business?’
‘Sometimes,’ she answered, wiping her eyes.
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What was Georgi’s involvement with the Pharmprodsoyuz factory?’
‘He provided transport.’
‘When they shipped the goods out of Tbilisi to put them on the black market?’
‘Yes.’
‘But Batumi? What business could they have in Batumi?’
‘I don’t know. Georgi also supplied things which the plant needed. Perhaps they came from Batumi.’
‘Things?’
‘Things — I don’t know.’
Kirov believed her. Behind her fear and distrust she was trying to co-operate with him. And if her answers were obscure it was because the Great Jewish Antibiotics Ring was obscure. Conspiracies are not meant to be understood. He should not be surprised if this one yielded its truth slowly. It was enough that he had another piece of the puzzle. The plant at Tbilisi received supplies from Batumi, unrecorded deliveries: Kirov had seen one of the trucks at the factory. What were they? Why from Batumi?