I found him having dinner in a restaurant on the Batumi waterfront, maybe half a klick from the working part of the port, at a place called Sanapiro. Dinner appeared to consist of khinkali-high-density meatballs-and several bottles of beer. Khinkali is something of a national dish, and I knew from experience that one or two were enough to fill the stomach like fresh-poured concrete. If I was reading his table right, he'd already gone through half a dozen already, and showed no signs of slowing down.
“I'm looking for a girl,” I told him.
He didn't look up from his meal, giving me an excellent view of the top of his head. His hair was thinning, stringy, black, and long, and the fat at the back of his neck swelled and spilled where his collar failed to contain it.
“Later,” Zviadi said. “I'm eating.”
I resisted an urge to sigh, took in the restaurant around us instead. It was busy and loud, as almost every Georgian restaurant is wont to be, and nobody was paying us any attention at all. Floor-to-ceiling windows formed the wall along the front of the establishment, and the sunset ricocheting off the Black Sea bathed everything and everyone within in golds and reds. When I looked back to Zviadi, he'd taken up his bottle of beer, gulping from it as he studied the pedestrians and the traffic, resolutely ignoring my presence.
“You're Zviadi?” I asked, though there was no doubt that I had the right guy.
He brought the bottle back down to the table, empty, then renewed his assault on his plate, all without looking at me. His hands were stubby and broad, but surprised me by being clean.
“I'm. Eating.”
I dropped a fifty-euro bill onto his plate. It stopped his fork short, and his other hand darted forward, snatching the bill up. He put it to his mouth, sucking the oil and sauce that had begun to collect on it, and as he did so he finally turned his attention to me. Then he nodded, folding the bill one-handed and shoving it into a pants pocket, before gesturing for me to take the chair opposite him. He never let go of the fork in his other hand.
After I'd taken a seat, he resumed eating, asking around a mouthful, “For how long?”
“Depends on if it's the right girl. I'm looking for a specific one.”
“I don't remember you. I've never seen you before.”
“I don't think she's one of yours.” Actually, I was praying she wasn't one of his. “You were pointed out to me as someone who could help me find her.”
His chewing slowed, and the fork came down and a napkin came up, and he cleaned his mouth and his chin, again watching me. He was rightly suspicious, but curious, too, though I suspect he was mostly wondering how many more of those euros I was carrying, and what the most efficient means of parting me from them might be.
I answered without his asking. “I've got money. I'll pay for the help.”
A slight nod, followed by a pull from a fresh bottle of beer. “Who gave you my name?”
“I asked around.”
“Asked around. Where did you ask around?”
I used my head to indicate the harbor, out the window.
“People talk too fucking much,” he muttered. “Tell me about this girl.”
In my pocket, I was carrying a printout, a picture of Tiasa that I'd pulled from old security video at the house, and for a moment I thought about showing it to him. But already I wasn't liking where things were heading, what I'd stepped into the moment I'd arrived in Batumi, begun searching for Zviadi around the port. It hadn't taken long to learn that the man was a pimp, and the women who'd pointed me to him had done so only with great reluctance, and only after I'd crossed their palms, their apprehension visible. The girl who had finally told me to check Sanapiro was maybe-maybe-sixteen.
“Young,” I told him. “Black hair, blue eyes. Tall and slim. Local girl. Pretty.”
“How young?”
“Fourteen.” I was careful to not betray any revulsion when I said it.
“Sounds like you know her pretty well. You've been with her before?”
“Can you help me find her or not?”
“I got a girl, almost as young. Blonde. Ukrainian.”
“I told you, local. If you can't help me find her, then I'll take my money somewhere else.”
He waggled his fingers at me, telling me to calm down, grinning. Bits of dinner were visible between his teeth. “Just checking. I tell you what, I'll make a couple of calls, you give me an hour or two, then meet me at Lagoon. You know Lagoon, just down the street, at the corner of Portis Shesakhevi?”
“I can find it.”
“One hour, two hours most, okay?” He finished his beer, wiped his hands and face again with his napkin. “Two hundred euros. In advance.”
“You've got fifty,” I said, not because I wasn't willing to pay that much, but because if I did, he'd have known I was a fool. “You get another fifty if you've got information for me when I see you again.”
“Maybe I can't find you this girl,” he said, shrugging.
“Then you've already been paid for doing nothing.”
Zviadi used a fingernail to clean his teeth, then got out of his chair. His lower body was a surprise, compared with his upper, his legs so relatively slender I wondered how they managed to support him. He trundled out of the restaurant without another word, leaving me to pay for his meal.
The Dnepr wasn't in any condition to drive, so I'd had to take a bus down from Kobuleti, a modified minivan the locals referred to as a marshrutka. By the time I'd left Iashvili in his office, gone home, gotten my things together, printed off the best picture of Tiasa I could find, squared Miata away, and actually come back into town to arrange the ride, it had already been late afternoon. It was just before six when I reached Batumi.
I'd taken enough time before leaving home to check Bakhar's address book for anyone named Zviadi, but of course, nothing was going to be that easy, and there'd been no one by his name, let alone an entry with a Batumi number. Ultimately, though, the search for Zviadi hadn't taken long at all.
I'd headed north up Zubelashvilis Kucha from where the battered minivan had dropped me outside the old train station, and made for the port. It was a twenty-minute walk, and I'd actually passed Lagoon along the way. Once I'd reached the harbor, I'd started asking around.
The trick hadn't been in finding someone who actually knew Zviadi. The trick had been in convincing one of his girls that it was safe for her to take my money and to then tell me where I could find him.
Tonight would mark the third night since Tiasa had been taken, and the thought of her having had to spend any of it in the company of men like Zviadi wound my spine tight. That the man would sit in a restaurant-could sit in a restaurant-and so casually discuss his business in full view of the world made it all the more grotesque, and it made me feel as if I was the only one who actually gave a damn about his business at all.
I'd wasted time, and Tiasa Lagidze was suffering for it, and I kept telling myself that if I could find her, I could make my inaction up to her. I could free her from the nightmare that had started three days ago in Kobuleti.
If I could just find her in time.
Zviadi surprised me. He was actually at Lagoon when I arrived before ten, and, just as he'd been at Sanapiro, he was easy to spot. The restaurant had a naval theme going, old Russian submarine clocks and ship wheels on the wall, and I thought it was surprisingly busy for a Thursday night. I waited just inside until I was sure he'd seen me, then stepped back out onto the street. The humidity had died down with the sunset, and the air was pleasantly cool. After half a minute, he emerged and began walking toward the water, motioning me to accompany him.
“You're not from here,” Zviadi said, checking the traffic as we crossed the road to the waterfront. “Your Georgian is very good, but you're not from here.”
“Does it matter?”
“Maybe, maybe not. You an American?”
I shook my head. “I have money. Do you have the girl I want?”
“I think maybe I found her, yeah. Maybe not her, maybe one like her.”
“I'll need to see her.”
“You need to pay me.”
I peeled off another fifty-euro bill and handed it over to his waiting palm. He didn't look at it, just stared at me.
“I told you two hundred,” he said. “Two hundred, I take you to the girl.”
“You get the rest when I see her. Maybe it's not the right girl.”
“But maybe it is the right girl,” Zviadi said.
I handed over another fifty. When he saw I wasn't giving him any more, he grunted and crammed both bills into the front pocket of his tightly stretched pants, where he'd stowed the other fifty I'd paid him earlier. Then he pulled out a mobile phone and brought up a number, turning away from me as he dialed it.
“We're coming,” he told whoever answered. He listened to the response, grunted, then hung up and replaced the phone on his hip.
“Who was that?” I asked.
“We can walk from here,” Zviadi said. He began heading in the direction of the harbor, where the big ships were loading cargo in the sodium lights, not bothering to look back.
I followed him, thinking it was probably a very good thing I'd brought a gun with me to Batumi.
It was creeping past eleven by the time we reached our destination. We could probably have covered the distance quicker, but Zviadi's anatomy made that unlikely. Spindly loading cranes moved containers of cargo overhead, and the sound of the cranes, forklifts, lorries, and men at work was constant and loud. Perhaps a kilometer to the south was a rail yard, and every now and again I could hear the whistle from an engine, pulling out or pulling in, another part of the never-ending supply convoy feeding goods south into Turkey and Armenia.
We pushed further into the docks, passing a line of four giant fuel tanks to the east. The harbor here had been built like an inverted C, opening to the west, with a breakwater formed along the northern side, then mirrored to the east in a similar, though less trafficked, setup. We passed several outbuildings, port offices, more storage, more containers. Sweat shone on Zviadi's face, glistening orange in the lights, and as we moved further away from the main business of the port, as the noise dropped away, I could make out his breathing, labored from the walk.
Our destination was the third of three blue-roofed, Soviet-era structures, what looked to be warehouses from the outside, all of them windowless. The last of the lighting had dropped away some hundred meters back, and most of the illumination now came from the canopy thrown up over the main harbor, magnified by the water vapor constantly in the air. To the north, barely silhouetted against the eastern edge, I could make out the hulks of abandoned ships, beached and corroded. I could taste sea salt and rust.
Zviadi stopped, looking at the buildings, and I watched his tongue creep out over his lips, wetting them as he tried to catch his breath. Then he thrust out his hand to me, palm up. “The rest of the money,” he said.
“You think they won't let you have my wallet after they're done with me?”
He blinked. “What? I-”
He was to my left, so I used that leg, brought my foot up and swept his right knee. He tumbled forward, managed to barely get his hands out in time to keep from planting himself face-first into the broken concrete beneath our feet. I used my right to kick him in the side once, and then to flip him onto his back.
Then I put the heel of my boot on his sternum and pressed down, to make certain he understood.
He got the message quickly, and didn't make a sound.
“What am I walking into?” I asked him, and when he didn't answer, I gave him some of my weight. He grunted, more in fear than in pain, I thought. “Who's in there?”
“Nobody!” It came out choked. “Nobody!”
“You're supposed to signal them, is that it? How?”
He stared up at me, then nodded. “I was going to text them.”
“Who are they?”
“Some guys. They just want to talk to you, that's all they want.”
“Why do they want to talk to me, Zviadi?”
“I don't know.”
I moved my right foot from his sternum to his groin and applied pressure. He brought his hands down to try and push my leg away, but he had no leverage, and he wasn't strong enough, and when he did it, I pushed down harder. His inhale was sharp and accompanied by a whimper. I put a finger to my lips to indicate that he wanted to keep it down.
“I called around!” He sounded like he was choking, either on his pain or his fear, both of which would've been fine by me. “For your girl, the one you were looking for! And they asked who wanted to know, and I told them, I told them this foreigner was asking! They said bring you here!”
“Why?”
He shook his head, wincing, cheeks inflating. I wondered how many of his dumplings were threatening to come up the direction they'd entered.
“Why?”
“I don't know! They just said bring you here!”
I looked up from him, at the building. No idea what was inside. Alena would've shat a brick if she knew I was considering walking in there alone.
“How many of them?” I asked Zviadi. “How many are coming?”
“Two, three, I don't know.”
So double that, and the high estimate became six. There was no way I was going to take six guys, certainly not if they were who I thought they might be. Low estimate would be four, and even that was too many. Taking four by myself would require a minor miracle.
Nothing in what I had been taught, in what I had learned, either in my first career or my present one, told me that meeting these guys head-on was a good idea. Everything I knew told me that I should walk away, walk away now, and not look back.
Except there was a chance that whoever they were, they knew where Tiasa Lagidze was.
I drew my weapon and Zviadi flinched, hands flying to his face. I let his nuts go free from my boot.
“Get up,” I told him. “You're coming with me.”