Darwin’s Radio

‘How long since you last came here?’ Mitch asked. He wondered why he hadn’t asked before. Perhaps until now he hadn’t really believed. They had come this far, no sign of pulling a joke on him, something he doubted Tilde was constitutionally capable of anyway.

‘A week, eight days,’ Franco said. The passage was wide enough that Franco could push himself up beside Mitch’s legs, and Mitch could shine the torch back into his face. Franco gave him a toothy Mediterranean smile.

Mitch looked forward. He could see something ahead, dark, like a small pile of ashes.

‘We are close?’ Tilde asked. ‘Mitch, first it is just a foot.’

Mitch tried to parse this sentence. But Tilde spoke pure metric. A ‘foot,’ he realized, was not distance, it was an appendage. ‘I don’t see it yet.’

‘No, there are ashes first,’ Franco said. ‘That may be it.’ He pointed to the small black pile. Mitch could feel the air falling slowly just in front of him, flowing along his sides, leaving the rear of the cave undisturbed.

He moved forward with reverent slowness, inspecting everything with the torch. Any slightest bit of evidence that might have survived an earlier entry – chips of stone, pieces of twig or wood, markings on the walls …

Nothing. He got on his hands and knees with a great sense of relief and crawled forward. Franco became impatient.

‘It is right ahead,’ Franco said, tapping his crampon again.

‘Damn it, I’m taking this real slow, not to miss anything, you know?’ Mitch said. He restrained an urge to kick out like a mule.

‘All right,’ Franco said amiably.

Mitch could see around the curve. The floor flattened slightly. He smelled something grassy, salty, like fresh fish. His neck hair rose again, and a mist formed over his eyes. Ancient sympathies.

‘I see it,’ he said. A foot pushed out beyond a ledge, curled up on itself, small, really, like a child’s, very wrinkled and dark brown, almost black. The cave opened up at that point and there were scraps of dried and blackened fiber spread on the floor – grass perhaps. Reeds. Ötzi, the original Iceman, had worn a reed cape over his head.

‘My god,’ Mitch said. Another white oblong in his eye, slowly fading, and a whisper of pain in his temple.

‘It’s bigger up there,’ Tilde called. ‘We can all fit and not disturb them.’

‘Them?’ Mitch asked, shining his light back between his legs.

Franco smiled, framed by Mitch’s knees.

‘The real surprise,’ Franco said. ‘There are two.’

CHAPTER TWO Republic of Georgia

Kaye curled up in the passenger seat of the whining little Fiat as Lado guided it along the alarming twists and turns of the Georgia Military Highway. Though sunburned and exhausted, she could not sleep. Her long legs twitched with every curve. At a piggish squeal of the nearly bald tires, she pushed her hands back through short-cut brown hair and yawned deliberately.

Lado sensed the silence had gone on too long. He glanced at Kaye with soft brown eyes in a finely wrinkled and sun-browned face, lifted his cigarette over the steering wheel, and jutted out his chin. ‘In shit is our salvation, yes?’ he asked.

Kaye smiled despite herself. ‘Please don’t try to cheer me up,’ she said.

Lado ignored that. ‘Good on us. Georgia has something to offer the world. We have great sewage.’ He rolled his r’s elegantly, and ‘sewage’ came out see-yu-edge.

‘Sewage,’ she murmured. ‘Seee-yu-age.’

‘I say it right?’ Lado asked.

‘Perfectly,’ Kaye said.

Lado Jakeli was chief scientist at the Eliava Phage Institute in Tbilisi, where they extracted phage – viruses that attack only bacteria – from local city and hospital sewage and farm waste, and from specimens gathered around the world. Now, the West, including Kaye, had come hat in hand to learn more from the Georgians about the curative properties of phage.

She had hit it off with the Eliava staff. After a week of conferences and lab tours, some of the younger scientists had invited her to accompany them to the rolling hills and brilliant green sheep fields at the base of Mount Kazbeg.

Things had changed so quickly. Just this morning, Lado had driven all the way from Tbilisi to their base camp near the old and solitary Gergeti Orthodox church. In an envelope he had carried a fax from UN Peacekeeping headquarters in Tbilisi, the capital.

Lado had downed a pot of coffee at the camp, then, ever the gentleman, and her sponsor besides, had offered to take her to Gordi, a small town seventy-five miles southwest of Kazbeg.

Kaye had had no choice. Unexpectedly, and at the worst possible time, her past had caught up with her.

The UN team had gone through entry records to find non-Georgian medical experts with a certain expertise. Hers was the only name that had come up: Kaye Lang, thirty-four, partner with her husband, Saul Madsen, in EcoBacter Research. In the early nineties, she had studied forensic medicine at the State University of New York with an eye to going into criminal investigation. She had changed her perspective within a year, switching to microbiology, with emphasis on genetic engineering; but she was the only foreigner in Georgia with even the slightest degree of training the UN needed.

Lado was driving her through some of the most beautiful countryside she had ever seen. In the shadows of the Central Caucasus they had passed terraced mountain fields, small stone farmhouses, stone silos and churches, small towns with wood and stone buildings, houses with friendly and beautifully carved porches opening onto narrow brick or cobble or dirt roads, towns dotted loosely on broad rumpled blankets of sheep- and goat-grazed meadow and thick forest.

Here, even the seemingly empty expanses had been swarmed over and fought for across the centuries, like every place she had seen in Western and now Eastern Europe. Sometimes she felt suffocated by the sheer closeness of her fellow humans, by the gap-toothed smiles of old men and women standing by the side of the road watching traffic come and go from new and unfamiliar worlds. Wrinkled friendly faces, gnarled hands waving at the little car.

All the young people were in the cities, leaving the old to tend the countryside, except in the mountain resorts. Georgia was planning to turn itself into a nation of resorts. Her economy was growing in double digits each year; her currency, the lari, was strengthening as well, and had long since replaced rubles; soon would replace Western dollars. They were opening oil pipelines from the Caspian to the Black Sea; and in the land where wine got its name, it was becoming a major export.

In the next few years, Georgia would export a new and very different wine: solutions of phage to heal a world losing the war against bacterial diseases.

The Fiat swung into the inside lane as they rounded a blind curve. Kaye swallowed hard but said nothing. Lado had been very solicitous toward her at the institute. At times in the past week, Kaye had caught him looking at her with an expression of gnarled, old world speculation, eyes drawn to wrinkled slits, like a satyr carved out of olive wood and stained brown. He had a reputation among the women who worked at Eliava, that he could not be trusted all the time, particularly with the young ones. But he had always treated Kaye with the utmost civility, even, as now, with concern. He did not want her to be sad, yet he could not think of any reason she should be cheerful.

Despite its beauty, Georgia had many blemishes: civil war, assassinations, and now, mass graves.

They lurched into a wall of rain. The windshield wipers flapped black tails and cleaned about a third of Lado’s view. ‘Good on Ioseb Stalin, he left us sewage,’ he mused. ‘Good son of Georgia. Our most famous export, better than wine.’ Lado grinned falsely at her. He seemed both ashamed and defensive. Kaye could not help but draw him out. ‘He killed millions,’ she murmured. ‘He killed Dr Eliava.’

Lado stared grimly through the streaks to see what lay beyond the short hood. He geared down and braked, then careened around a ditch big enough to hide a cow. Kaye made a small squeak and grabbed the side of her seat. There were no guard rails on this stretch, and below the highway yawned a steep drop of at least three hundred meters to a glacial melt river. ‘It was Beria declared Dr Eliava a People’s Enemy,’ Lado said matter-of-factly, as if relating old family history. ‘Beria was head of Georgian KGB then, local child-abusing sonabitch, not mad wolf of all Russia.’

‘He was Stalin’s man,’ Kaye said, trying to keep her mind off the road. She could not understand any pride the Georgians took in Stalin.

‘They were all Stalin’s men or they died,’ Lado said.

He shrugged. ‘There was a big stink here when Khrushchev said Stalin was bad. What do we know? He screwed us so many ways for so many years we thought he must be a husband.’

This Kaye found amusing. Lado took encouragement from her grin.

‘Some still want to return to prosperity under Communism. Or we have prosperity in shit.’ He rubbed his nose. ‘I’ll take the shit.’

They descended in the next hour into less fearsome foothills and plateaux. Road signs in curling Georgian script showed the rusted pocks of dozens of bullet holes. ‘Half an hour, no more,’ Lado said.

The thick rain made the border between day and night difficult to judge. Lado switched on the Fiat’s dim little headlights as they approached a crossroad and the turn-off to the small town of Gordi.

Two armored personnel carriers flanked the highway just before the crossroads. Five Russian peacekeepers dressed in slickers and rounded piss-bucket helmets wearily flagged them down.

Lado braked the Fiat to a stop, canted slightly on the shoulder. Kaye could see another ditch just yards ahead, right in the crotch of the crossroad. They would have to drive on the shoulder to go around it.

Lado rolled down his window. A Russian soldier of nineteen or twenty, with rosy choirboy cheeks, peered in. His helmet dribbled rain on Lado’s sleeve. Lado spoke to him in Russian.

‘American?’ the young Russian asked Kaye. She showed him her passport, her EU and CIS business licenses, and the fax requesting – practically ordering – her presence in Gordi. The soldier took the fax and frowned as he tried to read it, getting it thoroughly wet. He stepped back to consult with an officer squatting in the rear hatch of the nearest carrier.

‘They do not want to be here,’ Lado muttered to Kaye. ‘And we do not want them. But we asked for their help … Who do we blame?’

The rain stopped. Kaye stared into the misting gloom ahead. She heard crickets and birdsong above the engine whine.

‘Go down, go left,’ the soldier told Lado, proud of his English. He smiled for Kaye’s benefit and waved them on to another soldier standing like a fence post in the gray gloom beside the ditch. Lado engaged the clutch and the little car bucked around the ditch, past the third peacekeeper, and onto the side road.

Lado opened the window all the way. Cool moist evening air swirled through the car, lifted the short hair over Kaye’s neck. The roadsides were covered with tight-packed birch. Briefly the air smelled foul. They were near people. Then Kaye thought maybe it was not the town’s sewage that smelled so. Her nose wrinkled and her stomach knotted. But that was not likely. Their destination was a mile or so outside the town, and Gordi was still at least two miles off the highway.

Lado came to a streamlet and slowly forded the quick-rushing shallow water. The wheels sank to their hubcaps, but the car emerged safely and continued on for another hundred meters. Stars peeked through swift-gliding clouds. Mountains drew jagged dark blanks against the sky. The forest came up and fell back and then they saw Gordi, stone buildings, some newer two-story square wooden houses with tiny windows, a single concrete municipal cube without decoration, roads of rutted asphalt and old cobble. No lights. Black, sightless windows. The electricity was out again.

‘I don’t know this town,’ Lado muttered. He slammed on the brakes, jolting Kaye from a reverie. The car idled noisily in the small town square, surrounded by two-story buildings. Kaye could make out a faded Intourist sign over an inn named the Rustaveli Tiger.

Lado switched on the tiny overhead light and pulled out the faxed map. He flung the map aside in disgust and heaved open the Fiat’s door. The hinges made a loud metal groan. He leaned out and yelled in Georgian, ‘Where is the grave?’

Darkness was its own excuse.

‘Beautiful,’ Lado said. He slammed the door twice to make it catch. Kaye pressed her lips together firmly as the car lurched forward. They descended with a high-pitched gnash of gears through a small street of shops, dark and shuttered with corrugated steel, and out the backside of the village, past two abandoned shacks, heaps of gravel and scattered bales of straw.

After a few minutes, they spotted lights and the glow of torches and a single small campfire, then heard the racketing burr of a portable generator and voices loud in the hollow of the night.

The grave was closer than the map had showed, less than a mile from the town. She wondered if the villagers had heard the screams, or indeed if there had been any screams. The fun was over.

The UN team wore gas masks equipped with industrial aerosol filters. Nervous Georgian Republic Security soldiers had to resort to bandannas tied around their faces. They looked sinister, comically so under the circumstances. Their officers wore white cloth surgical masks.

The head of the sakrebulo, the local council, a short big-fisted man with a tall shock of wiry black hair and a prominent nose, stood with a doggishly unhappy face beside the security officers.

The UN team leader, a US army colonel from South Carolina named Nicholas Beck, made quick introductions and passed Kaye one of the UN masks. She felt self-conscious but put it on. Beck’s aide, a black female corporal named Hunter, passed her a pair of white latex surgical gloves. They gave familiar slaps against her wrists as she put them on.

Beck and Hunter led Kaye and Lado away from the campfire and the white jeeps down a small path through ragged forest and scrub to the graves.

‘The council chief out there has his enemies. Some locals from the opposition dug the trenches and then called UN headquarters in Tbilisi,’ Beck told her. ‘I don’t think the Republic Security folks want us here. We can’t get any cooperation in Tbilisi. On short notice, you were the only one we could find with any expertise.’

Three parallel trenches had been re-opened and marked by electric lights on tall poles, staked into the sandy soil and powered by a portable generator. Between the stakes lengths of red and yellow plastic tape hung lifeless in the still air.

Kaye walked around the first trench and lifted her mask. Wrinkling her nose in anticipation, she sniffed. There was no distinct smell other than dirt and mud.

‘They’re more than two years old,’ she said. She gave Beck the mask. Lado stopped about ten paces behind them, reluctant to go near the graves.

‘We need to be sure of that,’ Beck said.

Kaye walked to the second trench, stooped, and played the beam of her flashlight over the heaps of fabric and dark bones and dry dirt. The soil was sandy and dry, possibly part of the bed of an old melt stream from the mountains. The bodies were almost unrecognizable, pale brown bone encrusted with dirt, wrinkled brown and black flesh. Clothing had faded to the color of the soil, but these patches and shreds were not army uniforms: they were dresses, pants, coats. Woolens and cottons had not completely decayed. Kaye looked for synthetics; they could establish a maximum age for the grave. She could not immediately see any.

She moved the beam up to the walls of the trench. The thickest roots visible, cut through by spades, were about half an inch in diameter. The nearest trees stood like tall thin ghosts ten yards away.

A middle-aged Republic Security officer with the formidable name of Vakhtang Chikurishivili, handsome in a burly way, with heavy shoulders and a thick, often-broken nose, stepped forward. He was not wearing a mask. He held up something dark. It took Kaye a few seconds to recognize it as a boot. Chikurishivili addressed Lado in consonant-laden Georgian.

‘He says the shoes are old,’ Lado translated. ‘He says these people died fifty years ago. Maybe more.’

Chikurishivili angrily swung his arm around and shot a quick stream of words, mixed Georgian and Russian, at Lado and Beck.

Lado translated. ‘He says the Georgians who dug this up are stupid. This is not for the UN. This was from long before the civil war. He says these are not Ossetians.’

‘Who mentioned Ossetians?’ Beck asked dryly.

Kaye examined the boot. It had a thick leather sole and leather uppers, and its hanging strings were rotted and encrusted with powdery clods. The leather was hard as a rock. She peered into the interior. Dirt, but no socks or tissue – the boot had not been pulled from a decayed foot. Chikurishivili met her querulous look defiantly, then whipped out a match and lit up a cigarette.

Staged, Kaye thought. She remembered the classes she had taken in the Bronx, classes that had eventually driven her from criminal medicine. The field visits to real homicide scenes. The putrescence protection masks.

Beck spoke to the officer soothingly in broken Georgian and better Russian. Lado gently re-translated his attempts. Beck then took Kaye’s elbow and moved her to a long canvas canopy that had been erected a few yards from the trenches. Under the canopy, two battered folding card tables supported pieces of bodies. Completely amateur, Kaye thought. Perhaps the enemies of the head of the sakrebulo had laid out the bodies and taken pictures to prove their point.

She circled the table: two torsos and a skull. There was a fair amount of mummified flesh left on the torsos, and some unfamiliar ligaments on the skull around the forehead, eyes and cheeks, like dark straps, quite dry. She looked for signs of insect casings and found dead blowfly larvae on one withered throat, but not many. The bodies had been buried within a few hours of death. She surmised they had not been buried in the dead of winter, when blowflies were not about. Of course, winters at this altitude were mild in Georgia.

She picked up a small pocket knife lying next to the closest torso and lifted a shred of fabric, what had once been white cotton, then pried up a stiff, concave flap of skin over the abdomen. There were bullet entry holes in the fabric and abdominal skin overlying the pelvis. ‘God,’ she said.

Within the pelvis, cradled in dirt and stiff wraps of dried tissue, lay a smaller body, curled, little more than a heap of tiny bones, its skull collapsed.

‘Colonel.’ She showed Beck. His face turned stony.

The bodies could conceivably have been fifty years old, but if so, they were in remarkably good condition. Some wool and cotton remained. Everything was very dry. Drainage swept around this area now. The trenches were deep. But the roots –

Chikurishivili spoke again. His tone seemed more cooperative, even guilty. There was a lot of guilt to go around over the centuries.

‘He says they are both female,’ Lado whispered to Kaye.

‘I see that,’ she muttered.

She walked around the table to examine the second torso. This one had no skin over the abdomen. She scraped the dirt aside, making the torso rock with a sound like a dried gourd. Another small skull lay within the pelvis, a fetus about six months along, same as the other. The torso’s limbs were missing; Kaye could not tell if the legs had been held together in the grave.

Neither of the fetuses had been expelled by pressure of abdominal gases.

‘Both pregnant,’ she said. Lado translated this into Georgian.

Beck said in a low voice, ‘We count about sixty individuals. The women seem to have been shot. It looks as if the men were shot or clubbed to death.’

Chikurishivili pointed to Beck, and then back to the camp, and shouted, his face ruddy in the backwash of flashlight glow. Jugashvili, Stalin. The officer said the graves had been dug a few years before the Great People’s War, during the purges. The late 1930s. That would make them almost seventy years old, ancient news, nothing for the UN to become involved in. Lado said, ‘He wants the UN and the Russians out of here. He says this is an internal matter, not for peacekeepers.’

Beck spoke again, less soothingly, to the Georgian officer. Lado decided he did not want to be in the middle of this exchange and walked around to where Kaye was leaning over the second torso. ‘Nasty business,’ he said.

‘Too long,’ Kaye spoke softly.

‘What?’ Lado asked.

‘Seventy years is much too long,’ she said. ‘Tell me what they’re arguing about.’ She prodded the unfamiliar straps of tissue or leather around the eye sockets with the pocket knife. They seemed to form a kind of mask. Had they been hooded before being executed? She did not think so. The attachments were dark and stringy and persistent.

‘The UN man is saying there is no limit on war crimes,’ Lado told her. ‘No statue – what is it – statute of limitations.’

‘He’s right,’ Kaye said. She rolled the skull over gently. The occipital had been fractured laterally and pushed in to a depth of three centimeters.

She returned her attention to the tiny skeleton cradled within the pelvis of the second torso. She had taken some courses in embryology in her second year in med school. The fetus’s bone structure seemed a little odd, but she did not want to damage the skull by pulling it loose from the caked soil and dried tissue. She had intruded enough already.

Kaye felt queasy, sickened not by the shriveled and dried remains, but by what her imagination was already reconstructing. She straightened and waved to get Beck’s attention.

‘These women were shot in the stomach,’ she said. Kill all the firstborn children. Furious monsters. ‘Murdered.’ She clamped her teeth.

‘How long ago?’

‘He may be right about the age of the boot, if it came from this grave, but that doesn’t look right to me. The roots around the edge of the trenches are too small. My guess is the victims died as recently as two or three years ago. The dirt here looks dry, but the soil is probably acid, and that would dissolve any bones over a few years old. Then there’s the fabric; it looks like wool and cotton, and that means the grave is just a few years old. If it’s synthetic, it could be older, but that gives us a date after Stalin, too.’

Beck approached her and lifted his mask. ‘Can you help us until the others get here?’ he asked in a whisper.

‘How long?’ Kaye asked.

‘Four, five days,’ Beck said. Several paces distant, Chikurishivili shifted his gaze between them, jaw clenched, resentful, as if cops had interrupted a domestic quarrel.

Kaye caught herself holding her breath. She turned away, stepped back, sucked in some air, then asked, ‘You’re going to start a war crimes investigation?’

‘The Russians think we should,’ Beck said. ‘They’re hot to discredit the new Communists back home. A few old atrocities could supply them with fresh ammunition. If you could give us a best guess – two years, five, thirty, whatever?’

‘Less than ten. Probably less than five. I’m very rusty,’ she said. ‘I can only do a few things. Take samples, some tissue specimens. Not a full autopsy, of course.’

‘You’re a thousand times better than letting the locals muck around,’ Beck said. ‘I don’t trust any of them. I’m not sure the Russians can be trusted, either. They all have axes to grind, one way or the other.’

Lado kept a stiff face and did not comment, nor did he translate for Chikurishivili.

Kaye felt what she had known would come, had dreaded: the old dark mood creep over her. She had thought that by being away from Saul and traveling, she might shake the bad times, the bad feelings. She had felt liberated watching the doctors and technicians working at the Eliava Institute, doing so much good with so few resources, literally pulling health out of sewage. The grand and beautiful side of the Republic of Georgia. Now … Flip the coin. Papa Ioseb Stalin or ethnic cleansers, Georgians trying to move out Armenians and Ossetians, Abkhazis trying to move out Georgians, Russians sending in troops, Chechens becoming involved.