trousers, and big practical boots. If it hadn’t been for the green flowery BP logos on the tags hanging from their laptop bags, I’d have assumed they might be here to open an adventure centre or run a management bonding seminar.
I turned back. At the head of the line, two immigration officers were too busy smoking and chatting to bother helping anyone get the paperwork necessary to pass through immigration and possibly be reunited with their bags.
The Turks were really getting pissed off. I wasn’t sure if it was because of the wait, or the fact that the immigration guys were hammering through the Marlboros while they couldn’t. At last, fag break over but still waffling to each other, the uniforms starting picking up passports and glowering at their owners. Charlie wouldn’t have had to go through this yesterday; he’d been waiting in Istanbul to arrange his visa in advance. He’d wanted to leave nothing to chance; unlike me, he hadn’t fancied the idea of leaving himself to the mercy of the Chuckle Brothers and the Spice Girls up ahead.
I finally reached the front of the line. The immigration guys sat behind a glass screen, at a Formica-covered desk about level with my waist. The younger of the two grabbed my blue US passport and arrivals form without even giving me a glance. He thumbed through the passport and finally raised his head. His face was completely expressionless. ‘No visa?’
Why the fuck else would I bother standing in the visa line? I smiled. ‘I was told to get one from you.’
If I’d had the time to go and queue up all day and get one from the consulate in Istanbul, it would have cost me forty US dollars. Now that I was here, the price had gone up to eighty. That was the theory, anyway. I couldn’t wait to hear how far these boys thought they could push their luck.
He didn’t smile back. ‘Hundred twenty dollar.’
‘One twenty?’ I toyed with the idea of aiming him at the website, but immediately thought better of it.
‘Hundred twenty dollar.’
I pulled the cash from my wallet and handed it over. It wasn’t the extra dollars I begrudged, so much as the principle of the thing. He looked at me for a couple of seconds, his gaze level. ‘Hey… Why you come?’
‘To find my friend.’ The best cover stories are always based on the truth. ‘He has left his wife and is travelling here. I’ve come to take him home.’
He leaned across to his mate, who was still gobbing off to him about something or other. The old guy nodded and smiled; he’d probably clocked the fact that he could now afford to stop by a hooker on the way home.
My guy counted out the hard currency, stuck the visa into my passport, and even fixed me a receipt. It was only for eighty dollars, but at least the visa was full-page. I gave him a grin to show him I thought I was getting my money’s worth.
I picked up my carry-on and headed for passport control. The Spice Girls all wore shiny brown uniforms. Their new national flag was emblazoned on each arm: the cross of St George, with a smaller cross in each of the white quadrants. It looked like something Richard the Lionheart would have daubed on his shield before storming Jerusalem.
3
I wandered outside. A huge concrete awning spanned the area, probably built in the ’50s to celebrate a bumper Soviet wheat harvest. Beneath it, people were jockeying for position, trying to coax their pre-Stalin-era trolleys in the direction of the taxi rank. Across the road, taxi drivers stood drinking coffee outside a row of brightly lit wooden sheds while they waited for their fares.
As I stood there trying to get my bearings, the management bonding crew climbed aboard a gleaming white Land Cruiser that I imagined was all set to whisk them away to a hot mug of tea and a full English.
I wandered over to join the ever-lengthening taxi queue. A haphazard procession of square, boxy Ladas swung towards us, their signs fastened precariously to their roofs with a couple of bungees, the same trick Silky pulled with surfboards.
The Georgian women in front of me all seemed to be either skinny as rakes, or built like bowling balls. Thirty seemed to be the point when the one turned into the other, though it was quite difficult to tell; all of them, even the ones who should have been grey, had hair that was dyed jet-black, or as dark red as a plum.
My turn came for a Lada, and a very nice mustard-and-rust one it was too. I got into the back. The windows were steamed up and the radio was going full blast in an attempt to drown out the noise of the wipers scraping across the smashed windscreen.
‘The Marriott, mate. Marriott Hotel.’
The cigarette stuck to the driver’s bottom lip bobbed up and down as he nodded. But the taxi didn’t move.
‘The Marriott. MA-RRI-OTT?’
‘Marriott! Marriott!’
The penny dropped and the Lada lurched off at a rate of not that many knots, possibly because the windscreen looked like it had been on the receiving end of a burst of semi-automatic and he was trying to see through the web of cracked glass.
The meter was covered in grease and fag ash, and had probably never been turned on. I leaned forward. The driver was in his sixties, with a bushy grey moustache and grey, slicked-back hair that curled around the collar of a black polo-neck jumper.
I rubbed my thumb and forefinger together. ‘How much?’
He gobbed off at me and of course I didn’t understand a word. Most of it sounded like Swahili, with the odd click and guttural embellishment here and there.
He remembered to turn on his headlights while he was talking, and we picked out a 110 hardtop Land Rover parked at the roadside. It was unmistakably Brit military; dull green, with MoD plates.
The driver had left his wagon and was leaning against the wing. Bulked out with a blue waterproof jacket, shaved head, stonewashed jeans and very smart, still sparklingly clean Nikes, he had to be American. Maybe he was dropping off or collecting ‘advisers’ for the Partnership for Peace programme.
I was still none the wiser about the fare as we followed a wide dual carriageway towards the city centre, just over ten miles away. I only knew that because of what I picked up off the web. There were no road signs at all, just billboard scaffold over the road that had probably once carried posters celebrating the wonders of communism. Now they seemed to be saying the same sort of thing about Coke and Sony.
As we reached the outskirts of the city, drab concrete apartment blocks sprang up on each side of the road. They’d been given a recent lick of paint, but not in any colour you’d have chosen sober. Some of the giant cubes were green, some purple. One was yellow.
This wasn’t what I’d been expecting, good roads and fresh paint. To cap it all, even at this time of the morning, in the dark, there were women out sweeping the road with the sort of brooms that Harry Potter played Quidditch on.
A convoy of olive-green military trucks towing artillery pieces passed us, going the other way, as we came into the city proper. I knew Tbilisi lay at the foot of three massive, steeply inclined hills. The river Mtkvari ran through it, north to south. We were entering from the flatter ground to the east.
As it became more built up, so did the number of dogs. They were everywhere, if not loose and pissing against every car within reach, then on a leash and being treated to their early morning walkies.
A blue-and-white was blocking the way. The two guys inside the shiny new VW Passat had their heads down for a nap; by the look of things, they’d got a bit tired running stripy police tape from each wing mirror to the wall on either side. My grey-haired friend peered through his screen, cursed and hung a right.
The smoothly surfaced road immediately gave way to a minefield of water-filled potholes big enough to hide a bus in. My driver joined all the others slaloming from side to side to avoid them. I wasn’t sure how some of them managed it, without any headlights.
This was more like the Georgia I’d been expecting. Maybe the tourist board didn’t want to deprive the punters of the authentic gulag experience, and the police were there to make sure there was no chance of us
