The very last shop sold food. I stopped and bought a bottle of water. It was the same stuff as they had in the Marriott minibar and on top of the TV, the pride of Georgia.
At least Charlie had remembered one thing correctly. The cemetery really was no more than ten minutes away, and it was simple to find. All I had to do was follow the old folks hobbling there on their sticks, against the flow of a funeral procession heading home.
Cars that looked more abandoned than parked filled a large open area of hard-packed mud on the opposite side of the road. Maybe they were waiting to fill up at the brand new, jazzily lit petrol station to the right, so freshly opened the concrete forecourt was still white. I entered the cemetery through a knackered iron gate attached to the remains of a broken-down wall and ran the gauntlet of the dozen old women selling flowers and long skinny candles.
The cemetery itself was as busy as a mall, and unlike anything I was used to in the West. Instead of neat lines of headstones, this place was a labyrinth of large family burial areas, each fenced off with wrought iron or low brick walls.
Men and women sat chatting away to each other, cradling flasks of tea or coffee, at tables fixed to the ground close by the graves. One old guy was drunk, even this early in the day, and ranted at one of the stones. I had the feeling he was getting his own back for a lifetime of nagging.
Water taps were sited every twenty metres or so along the central path, and people were either washing out their cups or refilling vases at most of them.
A woman sitting at a table full of candles tried to sell me a few when she saw me empty-handed, but I kept on walking, keeping to the central path. The most luxurious areas, I noticed, were immediately adjacent to the pathway. You obviously paid a premium in this country to keep your shoes clean. Off the pathway, people had to squeeze between other family plots to get to their own. One had a glass-covered oil painting of a dancing clown set into it. A fine, black granular substance was spread on the ground between the plots, and it obviously worked. There wasn’t a weed in sight.
I tried to look like I was doing the same as everyone else, browsing at other people’s tombstones as I made my way slowly to my family plot. I was looking for Tengiz’s final resting place. All Charlie had been told was that it was along the main path. I had no idea if I was looking for a man or a woman, not that it was going to matter. We’d be fucked either way if the inscription was in Paperclip.
Our luck was holding. I came to a large black marble headstone in a square plot covered with white stone chippings, cordoned off by a newly painted white wrought-iron fence about two feet high. I saw now why Whitewall had chosen it. Engraved portraits of four defiant-looking men stared out at me, with the single English word Tengiz chiselled beneath a whole load of Russian and Paperclip.
There was a black marble two-seater bench with a solid-looking base, and a rusting, galvanized rubbish bin, full of dead flowers, set off the pathway to one side. If it was left there permanently, I’d use it as a marker.
A line of women were sitting by the next plot, knitting and chewing sunflower seeds. They were gobbing off at warp speed, and there was a fair amount of tutting and eyes raised to the clouds as I passed. I wondered if it had anything to do with the jumper.
I checked the rest of the main path just in case there were another five Tengiz plots to choose from, but there weren’t. It was time to see if there was a vantage point up here from where I could look down into the target yard. If there wasn’t, we’d be going in blind.
I spotted a place, right on the edge of the cemetery, where a lone wooden bench faced out over the ghetto. There was a sheer drop of about twenty feet down to the road below; the main gate would be along the road to the left somewhere. To get there, I had to pass rows and rows of quite recently installed headstones, each engraved with a picture of a young man or woman who seemed to have died in 1956. It looked as though, after the fall of communism, the bereaved had at last had a chance to commemorate some of Stalin’s million or so victims.
I reached the bench and sat down. All I had to do now was try and work out which house belonged to Baz.
I called Charlie, who was still shopping for binoculars. ‘I’ve found a possible on the path. We just need to check that the block supporting the slab isn’t solid, otherwise I’ve got the wrong one. If you follow the perimeter left from the main, mate, I’m up on the high ground.’
3
Charlie joined me on the bench about twenty minutes later. By then, I had worked out where the target was, and could just about make out the blue vehicle in the yard and most of the front of the house that faced the yard, and us. There was a front door with a window each side and another two directly above them on the first floor. But from this distance, we’d need binos to see any detail.
He had a carrier bag in his hand. ‘Fucking hell, I thought graveyards were supposed to be havens of tranquillity. It’s like a fairground here.’
‘What do you reckon on the DLB, old one?’
‘The four guys eyeballing God by the flower bin? It’s got to be the one. The bench support is a square of four sections. It’s got to be hollow inside. Anyway, I’ll find out tonight, won’t I?
‘I picked up a comic for you at the hotel. Something to keep you occupied while I do all the work.’ He fished a newspaper out of the bag, followed by a pair of green miniature binos, still in their packaging.
It was the
George Bush was to visit Tbilisi on 10 May, on his way back from the VE Day celebrations in Moscow.
It seemed the locals were honking about the yellows and pinks being splashed all over buildings to cover the grime.
‘It all makes sense now. Dubya on his way, new tarmac roads. I bet he’s like the Queen, thinks the whole world smells of fresh paint and floor polish.’
Charlie snorted with laughter. ‘Thought you’d like it. Maybe the rush on this job has something to do with his visit. You know, sort out any local difficulties before the main man shows up.’ He shifted the binos up to his face and got busy focusing them.
I flicked through the rest of the paper. It didn’t seem to go a bundle on world news. Most of the spreads were devoted to groups of smiling people shaking hands outside some local company’s HQ, with a caption saying wonderful things about partnership in enterprise, and the importance of spreading the message of Georgian business worldwide. One small article announced that the government had demanded yet again that the Russians pull back their forces. But yet again the Russian answer was yeah, yeah, like we said, wait until 2008 — or words to that effect.
I scanned the rest of the page. ‘Hot pipeline news,’ I said. ‘Says here it’s coming in on time. It’ll start pumping by the end of May.’
‘Not my cup of tea, lad.’ The binos were lined up on the target. ‘I went straight to page three. Check it out — lovely pair of peaks.’
I turned back. ‘Oh yeah, good one.’ I was looking at a picture of the hills of Borjomi National Park. ‘That’s where the water comes from.’ I read the piece more closely. ‘Oh dear, seems somebody’s fucked up. The pipeline goes straight through here, and a fuck sight too close to the natural springs. Georgia’s biggest export will be history if there’s a landslide and the pipeline fractures. There’s shit on in the government. “Pressure groups demanding an inquiry,” it says here. The World Wildlife Fund are leaping up and down. There’s all sorts going on. Did you find the horoscopes?’
Charlie was still studying the target. ‘Fuck, Nick.’ The binoculars trembled in his hands. ‘Looks like there’s proximity lighting — and a couple of cameras covering the inside of the courtyard. Here, what do you think?’
I swapped him the paper for the binos. A group of old women passed behind us, each with a burning candle in one hand and a bunch of flowers in the other. They were all dressed in black and bundled up in headscarves.
I looked down at the house.
