There was a lot more.
He'd been shot in the hall, through the front door, perhaps as he'd come to answer it. I hadn't seen a gun anywhere on the floor and I wasn't seeing one in the bedroom, so if he'd been expecting trouble and had come to answer it with some of his own, the men who'd killed him had taken the weapon. They'd hit Bakhar in the chest, perhaps as many as four times from what I could see. Then they'd entered and taken hold of him, likely by his hair, and dragged him to the master bedroom, where they'd propped him on his bed.
At that point they'd gone to work on him with a knife.
He was still recognizable to me, but barely. Stabs and slashes covered his face, chest, and groin, though I couldn't see any on his arms or hands, nothing that resembled a defensive wound. It would have been nice to believe that meant he'd already died before they brought out the blade, that he hadn't tried to defend himself because there'd been nothing left of him to defend. But it was just as likely that he'd been dying instead of dead, and from the two Land Cruisers I knew there had been at least four of them who had come for the killing, and certainly two could've held his arms while a third set to carving.
The knife had been entirely unnecessary, and the savagery of it spoke clearly of cruelty and rage. His neck had been cut so
badly it seemed now barely able to keep his head with his body. Blood, brain, and flecks of bone glistened in the macabre light. I could see the pearl gray of his cervical vertebrae in the mass of red meat that had been his throat.
This wasn't simply murder.
This was looking at hatred, pure and plain.
“Dancers,” Ia Lagidze said mildly. “Very flexible.”
This was perhaps a year ago, sitting in the small kitchen of our house, the tail end of winter outside, rain pelting the windows. We'd built a freestanding gym about fifty feet from the house to suit our own needs, but it doubled as a dance studio, and that was where Alena gave lessons. She was in there now with Tiasa and maybe two or three other girls from town.
I tried to keep from spit-taking my tea, instead forced it down without choking, and stared at Ia, sitting across the kitchen table from me. She gauged my reaction with a smirk that blossomed into a self-congratulatory grin.
“Don't tell me she isn't, David,” Ia said, giggling. “You and Yeva must be at it all the time, just the two of you here.” She glanced over at her son, Koba, who was sitting by the cast-iron stove, playing pinball on my laptop as a reward for finishing his homework while they waited for Tiasa to finish. The boy didn't acknowledge that he'd heard his mother, and even if he had, being seven, he was hopefully oblivious to such innuendo.
Ia leaned closer, putting a friendly hand on my arm, adding conspiratorially, “Baki and I used to be like that all the time, before the children came.”
“Flexible?” I asked.
Ia laughed, sitting back, taking her tea up again. “That and other things.” She sipped through a smile, memory perhaps, and then her face lit again. “Oh! Bakhar has tickets for
the Dinamo game this weekend in Batumi, he's taking Koba and he has an extra, he wanted me to ask if you cared to join them.”
“Who're they playing?” I asked, more out of reflex than interest.
Koba answered without pausing from his game. “Spartaki!”
“We're all going down,” Ia said. “Tiasa and I are going shopping, then we'll meet my boys after the game for dinner. You should come! Yeva should come! She could go shopping with us!”
“I'm sure she'd like that,” I said, thinking that it was the last thing Alena would want to do.
The bed Bakhar and Ia slept in would've been called a super king if it'd been in the UK, just a king if it'd been in the U.S. It sat with its foot to the door, headboard against the wall opposite, with enough space on each side for a dresser. On the left side, as you faced it, was a nightstand, and the lamp had fallen from there. On the right there was nothing, and when I finally could bring myself to look up from Bakhar, I saw his wife, or rather the top of her head, the streaked blonde hair that she paid twice a month to be carefully dyed and styled in one of the salons near the beach. She was slumped in the corner, between what had been her side of the bed and her dresser.
Ia had fallen on her knees, or perhaps been forced to them. She was wearing pajamas, a billowy satin top and companion pants, turquoise and violet beneath a pattern of red roses, as gregarious as she had been. The three buttons on her top were missing, though the shirt had fallen closed when she'd collapsed, a comic nod to modesty in the obscenity of the room.
The entry wound was behind her right ear, the pale skin
blackened and puckered from the point-blank shot. Pieces of her stuck to the wall from the exit wound.
They'd made her watch, I realized. They'd made her watch as they mutilated her husband.
Then they'd forced Ia Lagidze to her knees, and taken her fear, and everything else, away from her.
Koba asked me to teach him English.
“You're not learning it in school?” I asked.
He bobbed his head from side to side, not quite shaking it to say no. His shoulders raised and lowered in time, making him look like a gangly marionette. He was tall for his age, or at least I supposed he was, and very thin, and at the age of seven he already needed glasses, which we both took as a symbol of unity.
“Not much.”
He kicked a pass to me, sending the soccer ball bounding over the uneven ground of what passed for our backyard. It was summer, and I'd been surprised when he'd shown up, accompanying his sister for her biweekly lesson. This time of year, this time of day, most of the kids his age would be down at the beach, playing in the water or trying to scam treats from the tourists. But the request served as the explanation.
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?”
