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  The ball took a bounce at the last second, nearly hitting me square in the crotch, but I got my thigh up and managed to trap and land it.

  “I want to play in England,” Koba told me, by way of confession. “I'll have to know how to speak it.”

  I tried to remember what it had been like to be seven and fearless and a dreamer.

  “Sure,” I told him. “If it's okay with your parents.”

  I left Ia and Bakhar in their bedroom as I'd found them, turned the corner, passing the bathroom. Koba's room was on my left, but I didn't need to look inside it to find him.

  He was lying in the hallway, facedown, just outside his sister's room, one hand extended, as if reaching out to her. His glasses, broken at their bridge, rested a few inches from his head.

  He'd been shot in the back.

  Eight years old, and they'd shot him in the back.

  They'd shot him in the back six times.

  “Yeva says you dance, too,” Tiasa said to me, some six months after she'd begun her lessons.

  Unlike most of the other kids who took dance from Alena, Tiasa had demonstrated that rarest of all commodities, commitment. Twice a week, rain or shine, she came for her lessons, while the other students often seemed to find the obligation of showing up just once a week to be a superior challenge. Some days after school she would simply appear with her ballet slippers in hand, asking if she could use the studio to practice. We always said yes, and if Alena was around, she'd stand by and observe, granting the equivalent of a free lesson.

  Today, Tiasa had come while Alena was in town seeking fish for our dinner. I'd let Tiasa into the studio-slash-gym, turned to leave, when she'd spoken.

  “Alena said that?” It surprised me. It wasn't like her to offer anything personal, or at least, nothing that was both personal and accurate.

  “She says she taught you.”

  “I wouldn't call what I do dancing.” It wasn't false modesty. I'd been practicing ballet for almost six years at that point, and while the physical conditioning and control it had granted me were certainly worthwhile, I'd yet to achieve anything that I would, even at my most charitable, describe as art.

  Tiasa began stretching at the barre. Like her brother, she was tall, but unlike him, she was growing into it, beginning to form the body of the woman she would be. Her hair was black, and she'd neglected to tie it back today, and it flopped about as she bent and twisted, loosening up. I realized that she was styling it the same way Alena did, and wondered when that had happened.

  “We don't have any boys who dance,” Tiasa said to me, as she started practicing her positions. “Only girls take lessons.”

  “There's Jarji,” I said.

  “He stopped coming.” She fixed me with a stare, then looked away. Like her father, her eyes were blue.

  “You want me to dance with you?” I asked.

  Suddenly shy, she mumbled her response.

  “All right,” I said. “I'll dance with you.”

  Like all the others, the door to Tiasa's room was ajar, and once again, I saw only darkness within. I used the barrel of the AK to push it further open, stepped inside, reaching out for the switch and finding it.

  I didn't want to see what they'd done to her.

  I didn't think I had a choice.

  I threw the light, and, in its way, it was worse than everything I'd seen before.

  There was no blood. There was no body.

  Tiasa Lagidze was gone.

  They'd taken her.

  CHAPTER

  Three

  The regional head of the police in Kobuleti, Mgelika Iashvili, was in his late forties, tall and broad and thick through the neck and shoulders. Georgian pride runs to many things: their wine, their tea, their nearly four-thousand-year history. Stalin. They're also very proud of their weight lifters, and the rumor was that Iashvili had trained as a powerlifter for the Soviets back in the day, before everything had changed. Whether he still kept with it was unknown, but it did nothing to detract from his thuggish air, one that was well earned.

  “And neither of you heard anything last night?” he asked. “Anything at all?”

  Alena, at the stove and preparing tea, shook her head. She let her lower lip jut just enough beneath her upper to indicate both sincerity and bewilderment.

  “I sleep very deep,” she lied. “Just ask David.”

  “Like a log,” I agreed. In fact, the previous night had been the only one I could ever remember when I'd had difficulty waking her. “Are you going to tell us what this is about, Chief? Did something happen?”

  Iashvili kept his eyes on Alena, watching her. He did it not so much because he suspected she might be lying, I thought, but rather because he liked looking at her. It wasn't unusual. A lot of people did, and if they noticed that she was sometimes a little slow, sometimes seemed to favor her right leg over her left, they still watched. Given that once upon a time, she had excelled at being someone who was barely noticed, I think Alena had come to even enjoy it.

  The chief turned his attention reluctantly to me. After a moment for thought, he said, “You'll hear soon enough. Bakhar Lagidze, his whole family—they were murdered last night.”

  Alena dropped the teacup she was about to fill. The crash of it shattering in the sink was enough to turn Iashvili's attention back to her. I was grateful for the misdirection. It gave me an extra handful of seconds to set my reaction.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said.

  “The children?” Alena asked softly, her voice thickening.

  “All of them,” Iashvili replied. “I'm very sorry. They were your friends?”

  I thought about the word. In Georgian, “friend” was megobari, which, loosely translated, meant, I will take your place in times of danger.

  “Yes,” I told him. “They were.”

  “I was teaching her to dance,” Alena said. “Tiasa.”

  “I have to ask,” the chief said. “Did you notice anything unusual? Strangers in the area? A change in Bakhar's behavior?”

  “No, nothing,” I said. “Everything was… everything was fine. I talked to Bakhar the day before yesterday, we were going to take Koba to the football game in Batumi next week.”

  “Do you know if he'd bought the tickets?”

  “I was going to buy them. I was going to get them today.”

  The chief frowned. At the sink, Alena began gathering pieces of broken crockery.

  “I'm sorry to say this,” Mgelika Iashvili said. “It looks like Bakhar killed his family, then himself.”

  Alena walked him to the door when he left, waiting there to watch as he drove away. I stayed in the kitchen. Miata trotted over from where he'd been taking the sun through the windows, and I gave him a scratch beneath the chin, stroked his neck. Alena returned and fixed me with a stare that was almost accusatory.

  “He's lying,” I said.

  “Of course he's lying,” Alena said. “He's been bought.”

  “Then he knows who killed them. Maybe he even knows why.”

  “He certainly knows who paid him.”

  “And maybe where Tiasa is.”

  “It's not our problem.”

  We stared at each other. I understood her anger, though the intensity of it surprised me. I knew what she was thinking. I knew why she was thinking it. I didn't like it, and I didn't go to any great length to hide that fact.

  “What you did last night was foolish,” she said.

  “I didn't go over there planning to find the house soaked in blood. I went to help.”

  “I know that. I know why you went. Just as you know you shouldn't have.”

  “I'm not going to apologize,” I said.

  “I don't want an apology. An apology does us nothing. We have a home here, we have built a life. Do you want to have to leave, to run, to find somewhere new and to start again? To spend the years it will take us to rebuild? Do you want to lose all of this?”

  “The only thing I fear losing is you,” I said.

&n
bsp; That stopped her, at least for the moment. Affection was still difficult for her, probably always would be, the way it dogs most survivors of abuse. Even though she knew my sincerity, believed it, speaking of it could bring her to moments of confused silence. Love was still a fragile thing for her, despite all its strength.

  “You should never have gone over there at all.”

  “I didn't know what I would find,” I said.

  “It's not a question of what you found! You shouldn't have done it, Atticus!”

  The mere fact that she'd used my real name was proof of how upset she was. I got out of my chair, went over to her, rested my hands on her arms. When I kissed her forehead, she closed her eyes and put her arms around me.

  “They were our friends,” I said, holding her.

  “Yes, they were,” she whispered. “And now they're gone.”

  We spent the rest of the day going about our routines. I made my daily check of the security arrangements, the alarms, did yoga for an hour with Alena, then went for my run, leaving her to work out in the studio.

  I covered eight miles, down to the water, along the beach. It was hot and growing humid, even by the waterfront, and the beach was beginning to fill. It was tourist season, and the influx had easily doubled Kobuleti's population, though that was down from the previous years. Another by-product of Russian pressure on the economy.

  I passed the Gio, a café that, like so many others in town, turned into a bar-slash-nightclub after dark during the summer months. One night, the summer after we'd returned to Kobuleti, Iashvili had been dining there with a couple off-duty members of the force, celebrating a junior officer's impending marriage. A group of laughing teenagers attracted the policemen's attention. Iashvili thought he and his fellows were the source of amusement. The fight that followed ended with the chief shooting three of the boys in the foot. There was no official record of the event. Even the hospital where the boys had been treated refused to document the case.

  Democracy was wheezing its way into the Republic of Georgia, but it still had a very long way to go. The Russian Army still maintained a presence in both Poti, further north on the coast, and in Gori, restricting traffic to Tbilisi. In the open land between the Black Sea and the capital, brigands still lurked the roads. The declaration of independence in both South Ossetia and Abkhazia made Moscow's shadow fall long and cold throughout the country.

  I looped back, this time following the main street, waving at the people I knew and exchanging brief good-mornings as I went past. I no longer got the stares I once did, but the amusement at my commitment to exercise still remained. I made my way back up the road toward the house, digging down for extra speed, feeling my lungs starting to burn. At the fork in the road, I went right, heading toward home, telling myself there was nothing in Bakhar Lagidze's house that I needed to see again.

  The rest of the day passed in tight silence. Late in the afternoon, when Tiasa would've come for her lesson, Alena went out to the studio again. I was working in the yard on an old Dnepr motorcycle I'd bought a couple of months earlier, Miata lazily watching me as I tried to make sense of the schematics I'd downloaded from the Internet. Alena and I had only the one car for the two of us, a forty-year-old Mercedes-Benz diesel sedan that took five minutes to start during the winter, and that could easily double as a light tank in an emergency. The Dnepr, once repaired, would hopefully serve as more reliable, if smaller, transportation.

  The music in the studio came on, one of the more energetic pieces that Alena used for warming up. She'd left the door open, and the noise kept Miata and me company. After a few minutes there was a quick silence, and then the sound of John Lennon's voice as she switched to her Beatles playlist. Alena had loved the Beatles for as long as I'd known her, and she frequently danced and taught to their catalogue.

  So when “Golden Slumbers” came on, I barely noticed, occupied as I was with trying to remove the dead battery from the bike without tearing my knuckles open. It's a short song, hardly a minute and a half long, and so when it repeated, I missed that, too. But somewhere around the fifth time through I registered what I was hearing, and when the song ended, and then began again almost without pause, I got to my feet, wiping my hands on my jeans. Miata lifted his head to see what I was doing, then went back to watching the squirrels.

  The song had ended and begun again when I stuck my head through the doorway. Most of the space was cleared for dancing, mirrors on the barre wall. At the far end was our heavy bag, the stack of weight plates and barbells. The stereo sat in the opposite corner.

  Alena was on the floor, her back to the mirror, facing the stereo. She sat with her knees drawn to her chest, arms holding them close, head buried, and now that I was inside, I could hear it. In all the time I'd known her, I'd seen her cry only once. Tears weren't something she cared for, nor were they something she offered readily. And even when I had seen her cry, it had been nothing like this.

  The sobs wracked her, making her shake, and it was obvious she was trying to control them, to control herself, and that she was failing, but yet unwilling to surrender. It was so utterly unexpected, so unlike her, that I spent an instant unsure of how to react. Then I went to her side, and she heard me coming, and tried harder to hide her face away. I sat on the floor beside her, the mirror glass cold against my back, and carefully put my arms around her, waiting to see if she'd resist. She didn't; she slumped against me, her whole body shaking.

  She continued to cry, and I continued to hold her, and Paul continued to sing, and I wondered if this was grief, or something more.

  I couldn't leave it alone.

  The next morning, when I reached the fork in the road, I went left instead of right.

  There wasn't much sign of crime scene investigation as I approached the house. The front door still hung open, the splintered and burst wood from the rounds that had torn through it all the more garish. Bakhar's car remained where it had been the other night. I slowed to a walk, feeling sweat dripping off me into the dust. A dark brown puddle had dried on the dirt road, where the man I'd shot had bled out. When I listened, I could hear the buzzing of flies from inside.

  There was no police tape, nothing saying that I could not enter, not that the presence of an official sign would've stopped me. There was a curious sense of déjà vu when I stepped inside, triggered, perhaps, by the shift in the illumination, the transition from bright sunlight without to the shadows within. A cloud of flies, swarming over the still-tacky puddle in the entry-way, scattered and then almost as quickly re-formed, ignoring me.

  The house had already had one full day to cook in the summer heat, and it reeked. Whatever tracks I may have made had been obliterated by the multiple police boots that had tromped up and down the hall since the discovery of the bodies. I wondered, idly, who had called the crime in to the police, how they had been notified. Conceivably, it could've taken days before anyone noticed what had happened here.

  Unsure of what exactly all my questions were, I started searching for answers in the kids' rooms first.

  I spent nearly five hours on the search, with a couple of breaks in between to grasp some fresh air and clear my head. In Koba's and Tiasa's rooms I found nothing extraordinary, only sad. Koba had an eight-year-old's collection of detritus, scraps of paper covered with drawings of spaceships and football players. He'd taped a crude family portrait he'd drawn on the inside of his bedroom door, the house small in comparison to the figures. In it, he'd drawn himself biggest of all, smiling with lots of teeth. His sister had been smallest, but not by much, almost as tall as he'd drawn Ia.

  Tiasa's room was harder. Books, schoolwork, magazines. A DVD Alena had lent her of a Savion Glover tap performance. A bottle of cheap perfume, and a brand new lipstick. I didn't find a diary. If I had, I doubt I could've brought myself to read it.

  It was in the master bedroom that I began to concentrate my efforts. There was nothing in the clichés—no documents taped to the back of the furniture, nothing beneath the
mattress or submerged in the toilet tank. In the back of the closet I found a nylon carry-all, the kind of thing to hold towels and swimsuits for a day at the beach. This one held three pairs of underwear, three clean shirts, three pairs of socks, a pair of pants, and a toothbrush. It also held just shy of five thousand euros, a loaded 9mm Makarov, and two passports, one Russian, the other Romanian. The pictures inside each matched Bakhar, even if the names didn't.

  There was also a small, tattered address book. When I flipped through it, the entries were all in Georgian, first names and phone numbers. Some of the country codes I recognized-Ukraine, Romania, Turkey, Russia, Germany, England—and some I didn't.

  I put it aside, wondering why it was Bakhar Lagidze needed a go-bag.

  The only other item of interest I found was in Bakhar's tackle box, the same one he always took with him fishing. Beneath the top compartment, wrapped in an oily rag, was another pistol, this one a small Czech semi-auto. The gun was a cheap one, poorly maintained, and nothing I would have trusted my life to in a pinch. Bakhar clearly seemed to have thought otherwise.

  That was all I found.

  Alena was in the kitchen when I got home, putting together a salad, and I let her know I was back, though she'd already determined that from Miata's reaction the moment I'd come onto our property. I dropped the go-bag on our bed, stripped and took a quick shower. When I returned, Alena had the contents dumped out, examining them. She shot me an accusing glare as I passed her but said nothing until after I'd finished getting dressed, and then, when she did, failed to deliver the admonishment I'd expected from her expression.