The Searcher by Christopher Morgan Jones Page A

enough to accomplish good things. He was a big man. A “big macher,” his mother would have said, with pride, though she hadn’t lived to see him become it.
    That was at home. And there not for much longer, perhaps. Here, all she would have seen was a Jew without papers, in a police cell somewhere very close to Russia, doing his best not to catch the eye of a thug who looked like a neo-Nazi and seemed to want for entertainment. I predicted this, she would have said. You court this sort of thing, always have. This once, she would have been right.
    The staring had become continuous, he could feel it. Maybe this man had been put here to scare him, or worse. A thought that he should have hadlong before came and rattled him: if neither Ben nor I make it back, who will look after Elsa?
    So absurd, this situation. To be arrested for being beaten up, on a quest to avoid prison.
    A strong hand gripped his upper arm. Hammer looked down at it and then up into the eyes of the man with the shaved head. The whites were a filmy red in a face of deadened gray that looked as if it hadn’t seen the light in months; a waxen scar stretching back an inch from the corner of his mouth was the only relief. He seemed at once barely alive and animated by some terrible energy. Strengthening his grip, he reached for Hammer’s wrist with his free hand and roughly pulled at the cuff, revealing the gold watch underneath. In this place it seemed pointedly flawless. He said something slowly in Georgian, a question, looking into Hammer’s eyes.
    It was important not to show fear, no matter how much he might feel it. This just wasn’t in the normal realm of his experience. Other people fought with their fists; Hammer did his fighting from behind a desk, and until recently on others’ behalf. This guy could do him some damage, no question, and if he had a knife in his pocket it could be worse than that. But he didn’t want to give up his watch. It was a nice watch, fancy by the standards of a Georgian jail, pretty modest for a man of Hammer’s wealth, that he had bought for himself twenty years before at the conclusion of a favorite case, which had also been his first and only real murder investigation. And the thought of this punk pawning it for a few lari and spending the proceeds on junk just didn’t sit with him.
    With the hand of his free arm he took the man’s little finger and firmly bent it up and back, until he felt the tendons tighten and the resistance grow. Hammer was strong, under his jacket, and fit; every day he exercised hard to allow his body to take all the running he put it through. Small he might be, but he was not without power. Sinewy is the word a lazy journalist would use.
    He kept the finger just on the edge of pain and held his cell mate’s eye.
    â€œI’d like you to let go of my arm,” he said, glancing down at the hand on his sleeve.
    Confusion and then anger registered in the man’s face. He kept his handwhere it was and with the other reached for Hammer’s neck, driving his thumb up into the soft flesh under the jaw. Hammer felt his throat tighten and his breath weaken, and in among the pain was aware that his opponent had the advantage not only of size but of position: he was a foot above him on the bunk, and his weight pressed down. Calmly and swiftly Hammer wrenched the little finger back as far as it would go; felt something give inside. The man roared and jerked backward, releasing Hammer and clutching his hand.
    â€œShevetsi!” he shouted. “Shevetsi!”
    Hammer was up instantly, his feet set like a boxer in among the bodies and his hands in fists, prepared for a knife or a piece of broken glass.
    Wrong-footed, in pain and in shock, Hammer’s opponent looked up at him, his expression curiously empty, as if he had no idea what to do next. He scanned the room, saw the drowsy faces taking in his humiliation, brought his eyes back to Hammer, and