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Tbilisi plenty of times since his student days, during the bitter civil wars that had followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, then later—after he’d left the CIA—as an academic.
    He hadn’t brooded much on the past on those return trips, but seeing the painting caused him do so now, so that when he and Keal drove through the square at the southern end of Rustaveli Avenue in downtown Tbilisi, he didn’t see Saint George atop the massive pedestal in the center of the square, he saw Lenin, the man who used to be there. When they passed the old Parliament building, he didn’t see floppy-haired teenagers doing backflips off the steps, he saw Soviet paratroopers beating Georgian protestors to death. And instead of the little beggar babies he now saw sleeping in front of al fresco cafés and high-priced perfumeries, he saw swept sidewalks and lines snaking out from government-run stores.
    “Where’s this hospital?” Mark asked, after they passed the Tbilisi Concert Hall, which now also housed an Elvis-themed American diner that sold cheeseburgers and sushi.
    “Vazha Pshavela Avenue.”
    Which meant they would pass near Tbilisi State University. Mark pictured the old cypress trees out front, the overlook out back where he and Katerina used to build campfires at night, the wide museum-like steps in front leading up to building #1. How many times had he sat on those steps with Katerina?
    Katerina. What the hell had that painting been doing in Larry’s hotel room?
    Although her late father had been a Russian apparatchik who’d been transferred from Moscow to Tbilisi, and her mother a Moscow-born Russian who’d lived on the outskirts of Tbilisi, she hadn’t cared much one way or the other about politics of the day, or what had been the sour state of Russian-Georgian relations at the time. She’d only taped old Saint Ilia to her notebook because a few of her Georgian friends had been devoted to the cause of independence and she liked to go along to get along. Art was what really interested her. She liked to paint flowers, children, old people, her friends...and over tea she’d asked Mark if she could paint him. She’d never painted an American before!
    Russians had a reputation for being dour and complicated and brooding, a reputation that Mark had thought then—and still thought—was well-earned. But from the day they met until the day they parted, Katerina had been anything but. Her glass had always been half full.
    They’d walked back to his apartment that first afternoon. He’d felt awkward, sitting there as she studied him as though he were some kind of exotic zoo animal. Commanding him to turn his head left, then right…she painted mercifully fast, though, and the portrait she’d done of him had been an adequate representation. He’d been sitting on his balcony, wearing jeans and a black sweater, in front of an overgrown wisteria vine that had crept up the side of the building. It had been twilight in January, and cold; the wisteria vine had looked like a cluster of twigs.
    In her painting, though, it was sunny and the wisteria was in full purple bloom, cascading around him. And instead of the cheap Russian beer he’d been drinking, she’d painted him grasping what looked like a crystal goblet—filled with what Katerina said was lemonade.
    Mark had thought he’d looked a bit like a French dandy, but he’d kept that opinion to himself. He was so mesmerized by the way she spoke, by the way her lips opened when she said ya . Russian was so much softer, so much more interesting, coming out of her mouth than when spoken by bureaucrats with bad teeth and worse breath.
    They’d had dinner in his apartment that first night—just khachapuri , thin bread with melted cheese on top—and a couple of bottles of Georgian wine. They’d listened to The Rolling Stones’ Let It Bleed , through a little speaker off his Sony Walkman.
    God, what a wonderful time that had been. He remembered the smell of beeswax