Death of a Spy Read Online Free PDF

front of the painting at the Dachi hotel, recalling his first visit to the city when he was twenty-two years old.
    He’d loved Tbilisi back then; had loved the cliffs along the Kura River, the foothills of the green mountains that rose up on the west side of the city, the majestic art nouveau buildings that lined the bustling Rustaveli Prospekti, the opera house where he’d seen Verdi’s La Traviata and Wagner’s Tannhäuser for four rubles…he’d never been to the opera before, but for that price, why not?
    He’d lived alone in a one-bedroom apartment with a rickety wood balcony covered with brilliant purple wisteria vines.
    “Hey, are you all right?” asked Keal.
    Mark took another look at the painting on the wall. Yes, he was certain that was Katerina, a woman he’d once known, and cared quite a bit about. He had never seen the painting before, but the scene it depicted was intimately familiar to him. And furthermore, he was sure that it was a self-portrait. Even after all these years, he recognized her style.
    “I’m fine,” said Mark. There was no signature on the painting. Mark pulled it down and checked out the back side. Just blank canvas.
    “Shouldn’t we leave that there?”
    Mark hadn’t seen or heard from Katerina in twenty-four years. And as far as he knew, Larry had never even met her—although Larry had been in Tbilisi back in the 1990s, lurking in the shadows. He’d certainly been there when everything had gone to hell. But that was all so long ago. Mark tried to think of some link between that dark past and the present, and drew a complete blank.
    “I said”—Keal’s voice rose a notch—“shouldn’t we leave that there?”
    “No.” Mark opened his leather satchel and wedged the painting in between his toiletry bag and Larry’s laptop. “Did the police inspect this room?”
    “I believe so.”
    “Did they find anything out of the ordinary?”
    Keal looked as though he still wasn’t happy about Mark having taken the painting. “Not that I know of.”
    “Did they dust for fingerprints?”
    “I don’t think so. But when a US citizen dies here, they have to look into the cause of death pretty closely. Someone from the local and regional police inspected the room, along with a forensic expert—all this before they even moved the body. There was no sign of forced entry or foul play, though, so my understanding is that they didn’t treat it like a crime scene.”
    “And the room has been unsecured ever since they found the body.”
    Mark was having difficulty making sense of the idea that one of the last things that Larry had seen on this earth was a self-portrait of his old girlfriend. Katerina hadn’t even known Larry. Or had she? Had they ever met back then? He didn’t think so.
    “Well, it’s been locked. But, yeah, like I said, it hasn’t been treated as a crime scene if that’s what you’re getting at. Because the Georgians didn’t think any crime has been committed.”
    Mark finished packing Larry’s things into the garment bag and suitcase, then said, “All right, let’s go get the body.”
    “You sure you’re OK? I mean, I get now that you two must have known each other pretty well.”
    “I’m fine,” said Mark, but he wasn’t. He couldn’t get Katerina out of his head.
    They’d met, he recalled, just a short ways away, at Tbilisi University, in a class on the history of medieval Georgia. The professor had been a mumbling septuagenarian…

7
    Tbilisi, Georgia
January 1991, eleven months before the dissolution of the Soviet Union

    The American Marko Saveljic was one of thirty-three students enrolled in the class entitled Medieval Georgia: A History, but even on the first day, only twenty-five showed up.
    The problem was that the professor lectured in Russian, but with a virtually impenetrable Georgian accent, while chain smoking Troika cigarettes. Indeed, Marko himself might have dropped the class after that first day, had he not taken a seat near the