Hammer’s new driver, twitching the wheel, didn’t seem to mind—the lanes were a loose guide, and overtaking a lazy drift across and a lazier drifting back. They spent half their time on the white line. But Hammer saw no point in protesting. As a taxi driver in Istanbul had once explained to him, it was all in God’s hands. Koba was genial, at least, knew where he was going, and clearly wanted the work; he had been at the Kopala within twenty minutes, helping Hammer with his bags, promising to take him to all the most ancient sites in Georgia, and generally behaving with great hustle and verve. Hammer was grateful to be distracted. “Ha!” Koba had said, on meeting his client, “We are brothers, yes?”—making great show of the discovery that they were the same height and roughly the same age and had less hair than had once been the case. Hammer was five years his junior, probably, but in every other respect they would have made strange brothers indeed.
