Wolves Eat Dogs

10

As a rule, fresh bodies hang facedown underwater, with their arms and legs dangling in a shallow dive. This one was suspended against the bars of the inlet that fed water from the cooling pond to the smaller holding ponds of the station. Emergency water was still needed; the reactors were full of fuel, and in some ways they weren't so much dead as in hibernation.

Two men with gaffs were trying to pull the body closer without falling in themselves. Captain Marchenko watched from the wall of the pond with a group of useless but curious militia officers, the Woropay brothers in front. Eva Kazka stood by her car, as far from the proceedings as possible. Arkady noticed that she looked, if possible, wilder and more unkempt than usual. Probably she had just gone home and dropped, in a samogon stupor. She seemed to be drawing the same conclusion about him.

As Marchenko joined Arkady, a shadow broke the surface of the water to display a slick gray head with rubbery lips, then slid back toward the bottom to stir with even larger catfish in the murk.

The captain said, "Taking into account the bad weather yesterday and the dimensions of the cooling pond, I think you'll agree that it was wise to wait before looking for a body. The way the ponds circulate, everything ends up here at the inlet. Now it's right in our hands."

"And now it's ten in the morning a day later."

"A fisherman falls off his boat and drowns, it really doesn't matter whether you find him one day or the next."

"Like the tree that falls in the forest, does it make a noise?"

"Lots of trees fall in the forest. They're called accidental deaths."

Arkady asked, "Is Dr. Kazka the only doctor available?"

"We can't pull the station doctors. All Dr. Kazka has to do is sign a death certificate."

"You couldn't call for a pathologist?"

"They say Kazka was in Chechnya. If that's the case, she's seen plenty of dead bodies."

Eva Kazka tapped out a cigarette. Arkady had never seen such a nervous individual.

"By the way, I meant to ask you, Captain, did you ever find out whose icon we saw stolen the other day?"

"Yes. It belonged to an old couple named Panasenko. Returnees. The militia keeps a record. I understand it was a beautiful icon."

"Yes."

So a thief on a motorcycle had stolen the icon of Roman and Maria Panasenko's, a crime officially recorded, and yet the icon had returned to its corner perch in the Panasenko cabin. Which was, to Arkady, the opposite of a tree falling without a sound.

From the inlet Arkady had a view of half-completed cooling towers that resembled, with the brush that flourished under and around them, temples half-built. The towers had been meant for the planned Reactors Five and Six. Now power went the other direction, at a trickle, to keep lightbulbs and gauges alive.

An ironic cheer went up when the body was finally grappled. As it was lifted, water drained from its pants and sleeves.

"Don't you have a tarp or plastic to lay the body on?" Arkady asked Marchenko.

"This is not a murder investigation in Moscow. This is a dead drunk in Chornobyl. There's a difference." Marchenko cocked his head. "Don't be shy, take a look."

The captain's men moved truculently out of Arkady's way; the Woropays snickered at the recorder in Arkady's hand.

"Speak up," Marchenko said. "We can all learn."

"Pulled from the water at the inlet of Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant at 1015 hours on July 15, a male apparently in his sixties, two meters tall, dressed in a leather jacket, blue work pants and construction boots." An ugly man, in fact, his thick features bleached by immersion, brown teeth badly sorted, clothes sodden as a wet sheet. "Extremities are rigid, exhibiting rigor mortis. No wedding ring." Arms and legs yearned for the sky, fingers open. "Hair brown." Arkady peeled an eyelid back. "Eyes brown. Left eye dilated. Fully clothed, the body presents no tattoos, moles or other identifying marks. No immediately evident abrasions or contusions. We'll continue at the autopsy."

"No autopsy," Marchenko said.

"We know him," Dymtrus Woropay said.

Taras said, "He's Boris Hulak. He scavenges and fishes. He squats in apartments in Pripyat, always moving around."

"Do you have latex gloves?" Arkady asked.

Marchenko said, "Afraid of getting your hands wet?"

At a nod from the captain, the Woropays unzipped the dead man's jacket and dug out his booklet of identification papers.

Marchenko read them: "Boris Petrovich Hulak, born 1949, residence Kiev, occupation machinist. With his picture." The same ugly face with a living glower. This was the Plumber, Arkady was sure of it. Marchenko threw the ID at Arkady. "That's all you need to know. A social parasite fell off his boat and drowned."

"We'll check his lungs for water," Arkady said.

"He was fishing."

"Where's the rod?"

"He caught a catfish. He had consumed an entire bottle of vodka, he was standing in his boat, a catfish bigger than him pulled the rod out of his hands, and he lost his balance and fell in. No autopsy."

"Maybe the bottle was empty to begin with. We can't assume he was drunk."

"Yes, we can. He was a well-known drunk, he was alone, he fished, he fell in." From his tunic Marchenko pulled the hunting knife he had shown Arkady before, the boar knife. "You want an autopsy? Here's your autopsy." He drove the knife into Boris Hulak's stomach, spewing the sweet gas of digested alcohol. The samogon in Arkady's own stomach rose to his throat. "That's drunk."

Even the Woropays took a step back from the hanging mist. Marchenko wiped his blade on the dead man's jacket.

Arkady said between shallow breaths, "There's still the eye."

"What eye?" the captain asked, his satisfaction interrupted.

"The right eye is normal, but the left eye is fully dilated, which indicates a blow to the head."

"He's decomposing. The muscles relax. His eyes could go different directions. Hulak hit his head on the boat as he went over, what does it matter?"

"He's not a pig. We have to see."

"The investigator is right," Eva Kazka said. She had wandered over from her car. "If you want me to sign a death certificate, there should be a cause of death."

"You need an autopsy for that?"

"Before you stick the body again, I think so," Eva said.

She wasn't talkative. Boris Hulak was laid out naked on a steel table with his head propped against a wooden block, and he said about as much as Eva did while she opened his body, first with an incision from his collar to his groin and then in handfuls, moving organs into separate bedpans, all with the brisk dispatch of someone washing dishes. The room was meanly furnished, with little more than the essentials of scales and pails, and she had already spent an hour washing the body and examining it for bruises, tattoos and needle tracks. Arkady had checked Hulak's clothes at a sink, finding nothing more remarkable in the dead man's pockets than a purse of loose change and a door key, and nothing in his billfold except a damp twenty-hryvnia note, a photo-booth picture of a boy about six years old and an expired video-club card. Arkady had cut off Hulak's boots and found hidden under the sole almost two hundred American dollars-not bad for a scavenger of radioactive electrical wiring. While Eva Kazka worked on one side of the table, Arkady worked on the other, drying out fingers wrinkled by immersion and then plumping them with injections of saline to lift the ridges and produce usable prints to compare with those he had lifted from the bottle found in the boat.

Fluorescent lights turned cadavers green, and Boris Hulak was greener than most, a fleshy body wrapped in fat through the middle, hard through the legs and shoulders, exuding a bouquet of ethanol. Eva wore her lab coat, cap and professional demeanor, and she and Arkady smoked as they worked to mask the smell. There were few enough benefits to smoking; this was one.

"Ever wish you hadn't asked for something?" Eva said. She saw through him, which didn't make him feel any better. She consulted her autopsy chart. "All I can tell you so far is that between cirrhosis of the liver and necrosis of the kidney, Boris had perhaps two more years to live. Otherwise, he was a hardy specimen. And no, there was virtually no water in the lungs."

"I think I chased Hulak through Pripyat a few nights ago."

"Did you catch him?"

"No."

"And you never would have. Scavengers know the Zone like a magician knows his trapdoors and top hats and radioactive bunnies." She tapped the scalpel on the table. "Captain Marchenko doesn't like you. I thought you were great friends."

"No. I've ruined his perfect record. A militia station commander wants no problems, no homicides and, most of all, no unsolved homicides. He certainly doesn't want two of them."

"The captain is a bitter man. The story is that he got in trouble in Kiev by turning down a bribe, which embarrassed his superiors, who had taken their share of the money in good faith. He's been stationed here to give him a glimpse of hell in case he ever thinks of making that mistake again. Then you arrive from Moscow, and he feels more trapped than ever. You were comparing Hulak's fingerprints to some on a card."

"From the vodka bottle I found in the boat."

"And?"

"They're all Hulak's."

"Wouldn't you say that was fairly strong evidence Hulak was alone? Have you ever known a Russian or a Ukrainian to not share a bottle? He didn't drown, but I have to tell you that apart from being posthumously stabbed by the captain, I see no signs of recent violence. Maybe he did hook a big fish and hit his head on the boat as he went over. Either way, you made the wrong enemy in Captain Marchenko. It might make him happy if we stopped right here."

Arkady leaned over the body. Boris Hulak had a pugnacious head with heavy brows, a broad nose mapped in erupted veins, brown hair thick as otter fur and cheeks covered in stubble, no bruising or swelling, no ligature marks around the neck, no defensive wounds on the hands, not a scratch in the scalp. However, there was that dilated iris of the left eye, as open as the stuck shutter of a camera. Also, Arkady had worked his way out of his samogon stupor.

Arkady said, "Then it will make the captain even happier if we prove I'm wrong."

Most doctors never encountered a cadaver after anatomy class, and forgot the reeking totality of death. But Eva coolly repositioned the block farther down under Hulak's neck.

He said, "You've seen men shot in the head before."

"Shot in the head with a pistol and shot in the back with a rifle, supposedly in the middle of combat. Either way, there's usually an entry wound, which your man appears to lack. Last chance to stop."

"You're probably right, but let's see."

Eva sliced the back of Hulak's scalp from ear to ear. She folded the flap of skin and hair forward over the eyes to work with a circular saw. A power saw was always heavy and, what with the cloud of white dust it produced, hard to manage in delicate work. She popped the top of his skull with a chisel, reached in with a scalpel to free the brain from the spinal cord and laid the soft pink mass in its glistening sac beside the empty head.

"The captain is not going to like this," Eva said.

A red line ran across the top, the trail of a bullet that had traversed the brain and then, bouncing off angles, scoured the cranium. Hulak must have gone down instantly.

"Small-caliber?" Eva asked.

"I think so."

She turned the brain in every direction before choosing one pomegranate-red clot to attack. She cut the sac, sliced into gray matter and squeezed out a bullet like a pip. It pinged as it dropped onto the table. She wasn't done. She shone a penlight around the inside of the skull until a beam came out the left ear.

"Who is this good a shot?" she asked.

"A sniper, a sable hunter, a taxidermist. I would guess the bullet is five-point-six-millimeter, which is what marksmen use in competitive shooting."

"From a boat?"

"The water was still."

"And the sound?"

"A silencer, maybe. A small-caliber doesn't make that much noise to begin with."

"So, now, two murders. Congratulations, Chornobyl has killed a million people, and you have added two more. I would say that at death, you're very good."

While she was impressed Arkady asked, "What about the first body, the one from the cemetery? Besides the nature of the wound on the throat, was there anything else you could have added to your note?"

"I didn't examine him. I simply saw the wound and wrote something. Wolves tear and yank, they don't slice."

"How bloody was his shirt?"

"From what I saw, very little."

"Hair?"

"Clean. His nose was bloody."

"He suffered from nosebleeds," Arkady said.

"This would have been quite a nosebleed. It was packed."

"How do you explain that?"

"I don't. You're the magician-only you pull up the dead instead of rabbits."

Arkady was wondering how to respond when there was a knock at the door and Vanko stuck in his head.

"The Jews are here!"

"What Jews?" Arkady asked. "Where?"

"In the middle of town, and they're asking for you!"

The afternoon sun detailed Chernobyl 's drab center: café, cafeteria, statue of Lenin amid candy wrappers. A pair of militia stepped out of the cafeteria to look up the road; they stared so hard, they leaned. Vanko ran off, to what purpose Arkady didn't know. All he saw was a man walking with familiar flat-footed arrogance ahead of a car. He was dressed in a Hasidic Jew's black suit, white shirt and fedora, although in place of a full beard was red stubble.

"Bobby Hoffman."

Hoffman looked over his shoulder. "I knew I'd find you if I just kept walking. This is the second day I've been marching up and down."

"You should have asked people where I was."

"Jews do not ask Ukrainian cannibals. I asked one, and he disappeared."

"He said the Jews were coming. It's just you?"

"Just me. Did I scare them? I wish I could fry the whole fucking lot of them. Let's keep walking. My advice to Jews in the Ukraine is, always present a moving target."

"You've been here before."

"Last year. Pasha wanted me to look into the spent-fuel situation."

"There's a profit in spent radioactive fuel?"

"It's the coming thing."

The car was a mud-spattered Nissan, a comedown from the Mercedes Arkady had last seen Hoffman in. Hoffman's clothes, too, were a change.

"Is this a new you?"

"The Hasidic gear? Hasidim are the only Jews they see around here. The idea is, this way I draw less attention." Hoffman looked at Arkady's camos. "Join the army?"

"Standard wear for a citizen of the Zone. Does Colonel Ozhogin know you're here?"

"Not yet. You remember that disk the colonel was so proud of finding? It was more than just a list of foreign accounts. It was an order to reroute them to a little bank of my own. I could have stayed in Moscow, but when Pasha died and Ozhogin locked me out of NoviRus, out of my own office, I said, 'Fuck them! Them or me!' But I had to get the asshole to want the disk and feed it into the system. Remember how the colonel pinched my nose until he got blood? Well, I'm doing the pinching now, buddy, and it's not by the nose."

"So you should be on the run. Why are you here?"

"You need help. Renko, you've been here over a month. I talked to your detective Victor."

"You talked to Victor?"

"Victor does e-mail."

"He hasn't communicated with me. I call and he's out of the office, I call his mobile phone and there's no answer at all."

"Caller ID. You're not paying him, and I am. And Victor says you didn't send any reports to Moscow worth shit. Have you made any progress?"

"No."

"No progress at all?"

"Nothing."

"You're drowning here. You're on dream time."

They had walked past the café to a neighborhood of acacias and two-story wooden houses where once lived Chernobyl 's socialist gentry: mayor and militia commander, local Party secretary and assistants, prosecutor and judge, port and factory managers. Some walls rotted and dragged down the roof; some roofs collapsed and buckled the walls. Trees groped into one window and pushed open the shutters of the next. A doll with a bleached-out face stood in the yard.

"How are you going to help?" Arkady asked.

"We'll help each other."

Hoffman motioned for the car to draw forward and pushed Arkady inside. The driver offered a glance of indifference. He had sunken eyes and a skullcap pinned to a wisp of hair. He rested busted knuckles on the steering wheel.

Hoffman said, "Don't worry about Yakov. I selected him because he's the oldest Jew in the Ukraine, and he doesn't speak a word of English." The space in back was tight and became more cramped when Hoffman opened a laptop computer. "I'm going to give you a chance to shine, Renko. I'm not saying you're a complete incompetent."

"Thanks."

"I'm just saying you need a little assistance. For example, you had an idea about collecting surveillance videotapes not only from Pasha's apartment building but also from the buildings on either side. In fact, Victor did what you told him. The problem was that you caved. You called Pasha's death a suicide."

"It was a suicide."

"Driven to killing himself is not what I call suicide. Don't get me started. Okay, Pasha was called a suicide, and no more investigation, and Victor had read somewhere about vodka protecting against radiation. He got real protected. By the time he got sober, he had forgotten all about the tapes. Then Timofeyev got his throat cut, and Prosecutor Zurin sent you here." Bobby looked out the car window at the houses. "Eskimos are kinder: they just set you on a fucking ice floe."

"The tapes?"

"I reached Victor. Know what his e-mail address is? You can buy it on the Internet; it's illegal, but you can do it. Apparently, like all Russians, he once had a dog named Laika. So I reached 'Laika 1223' and offered Victor a reward for any notes or evidence left over. I caught him at a sober moment, because he even transferred the tapes to a disk for me."

"You and Victor, what a pair."

"Hey, I feel bad about the way I left you in Moscow, I do. Maybe this will make up for it." Hoffman's fingers played the laptop keyboard, and on the screen appeared a daytime view of a driveway and Dumpsters. A clock in the corner of the tape read 1042:25. "Do you recognize this?"

"The service alley behind Pasha Ivanov's apartment house. But this is taken from the apartment house on the right."

"You saw the tape from Pasha's building?"

"It was taped over; it was on a short loop. We saw Pasha arrive and fall, and we saw about two hours before that, but nothing from before."

"Watch," Hoffman said.

The camera froze images with a five-second lag to stretch tape time. Also, it was on a motorized pivot that swung 180 degrees. The result was a curious collage: a cat was caught in the act of entering from the street; seen next balanced on the rim of a Dumpster; and then, in a sideways view, approaching the Dumpster next door, at Ivanov's building.

Hoffman said, "According to Victor, you thought there was a security breach about now."

"We know that the staff went up and down the building knocking on doors. There was some sort of event."

At 1045:15 the cat was caught in acrobatic midleap from the Dumpster as a white van entered the left side of the alley.

"When you're right, you're right," Hoffman said.

At 1045:30 the van had stopped beside Ivanov's Dumpster. At fifteen-second gaps, the camera returned to the Dumpster, and the screen showed what were essentially poor-quality black-and-white photographs of:

The van with the driver's door open and a dark figure at the wheel.

The van with the door shut and the driver's seat empty.

The same scene for one minute.

A bulky man in coveralls, gas mask and cowl that completely covered his head, shouldering a tank and hose and rolling a suitcase on casters from the van to Ivanov's building.

The van in the driveway.

The same scene for five minutes.

An encore by the cat.

The van.

For one more minute, the van.

The same man with the same gear returning to the rear of the van.

The van.

A figure in coveralls and mask climbing into the driver's seat.

The van moving away as the driver removed the mask, his face a blur.

The empty alley.

The cat.

The building's doorman, fists on his hips.

The empty alley.

The cat.

Time 1056:30. Time elapsed, eleven minutes. Seven minutes of risk for the driver.

"When you interrogated the staff, they never mentioned an exterminator, did they?" Hoffman said. "A fumigator? Bugs?"

"No. Can you enlarge the image of the man moving from the van to the building?"

Hoffman did. How he fit such fat fingers onto the keyboard, Arkady didn't know, but Bobby was quick.

"The head?" Arkady asked.

Hoffman circled the head and magnified a gas mask with goggles and two shiny filters.

"Can you enlarge it more?"

"I can enlarge it all you want, but it's a grainy picture. All you'll get is bigger grains. A fucking exterminator."

"That's not an exterminator's mask. That's radiation gear. Can you enlarge the tank?"

The tank bore what appeared to be fumigation warnings.

"The suitcase?"

The suitcase was covered with cartoon decals of dead rats and roaches. On the way in the suitcase was rolled. Arkady remembered that on the way out it had been carried.

"It's a delivery. The suitcase arrived heavy, it left light."

"How heavy?"

"I would guess-fifty or sixty kilos of salt, a grain of cesium and lead-lined suitcase-maybe seventy-five kilos in all. Quite a load."

"See, this is fun. Working together. This is a breakthrough, right?"

"Can you bring out the license plate?"

It was a Moscow plate. Hoffman said, "Victor checked it out. This van is from the motor pool of Dynamo Electronics. They install cable TV. Dynamo Electronics is owned by Dynamo Avionics, which is owned by Leonid Maximov. They reported it missing."

"Victor is on your payroll now?"

"Hey, I'm doing your work for you and paying for it. I'm giving you Maximov on a platter. While you've been stumbling around here, there's been a war in Moscow between Maximov and Nikolai Kuzmitch over NoviRus."

"I have been out of touch," Arkady granted.

"They both always wanted NoviRus."

Arkady remembered them at the roulette table. Kuzmitch was a risk taker who stacked chips on a number; Maximov, a mathematician, was a methodical, cautious player.

"The Ivanov case is closed," Arkady said. "Ivanov jumped. If Kuzmitch drove him to it, then Kuzmitch succeeded. I'm working on the Timofeyev case. Someone cut his throat. That's murder. And the evidence has not been paid for."

"How much do you want?"

"Much what?"

"Money. How much to drop Timofeyev and concentrate on Pasha? What's your number?"

"I don't have a number."

Hoffman closed the laptop. "Let me put it another way. If you won't help, Yakov will kill you."

Yakov turned and aimed a gun at Arkady. The gun was an American Colt, an antique with a silencer but nicely greased and cared for.

"You'd shoot me here?"

"Nobody would hear a thing. A little messy, that's why the old car. Yakov thinks of everything. Are you in or are you out?"

"I'd have to think about it."

"Fuck thinking. Yes or no?"

But Arkady was distracted by the sight of Vanko's face pressed against Hoffman's window. Hoffman recoiled. Up front, Yakov was swinging the gun toward Vanko when Arkady raised his hands to reassure him and told Hoffman to open his window.

Bobby demanded, "Who is this nut?"

"It's okay," Arkady said.

As the window slid down, Vanko shook a massive ring of keys. "We can start now. I'll let you in."

Hoffman and Arkady followed Vanko on foot back the way they had come as Yakov trailed behind. Away from the car, he was a small man dressed like a librarian, in a mended sweater and jacket, but his crushed brow and flattened nose gave him the look of a man who had been run over by a steamroller and not totally reassembled.

"Yakov's not afraid," Bobby said. "He was a partisan in the Ukraine during the war and in the Stern Gang in Israel. He's been tortured by Germans, British and Arabs."

"A walking history lesson."

"So where is our happy friend with the keys taking us?"

"He seems to think you know," Arkady said.

Vanko veered toward a solid building in municipal yellow that stood alone, and Arkady wondered whether they were headed to some sort of historical archive. Short of the building, Vanko stopped at a windowless bunker that Arkady had passed a hundred times before and always assumed housed an electrical substation or mechanics of some sort. Vanko unlocked a metal door with a flourish and ushered Hoffman and Arkady in.

The bunker sheltered two open cement boxes, each about two meters long and one wide. There was no electricity; the only light came through the open door, and there was barely enough overhead clearance for Bobby's hat. There were no chairs, no icon or pictures, instructions or decoration of any kind, although the rims of the two boxes were lined with votive candles burned down to tin cups, and the inside of each box was stuffed with papers and letters.

"Who is it?" Arkady asked.

Hoffman took so long to answer that Vanko, the tour guide, did. "Rabbi Nahum of Chornobyl and his grandson."

Hoffman looked around. "Cold."

Vanko said, "Holy places are often cold."

"A religious expert here." Hoffman asked Arkady, "What am I supposed to do now?"

"You're the Hasidic Jew. Do what a Hasidic Jew does."

"I'm just dressed like a Hasidic Jew. I don't do this stuff."

Vanko said, "One day a year the Jews all come in a bus. Not alone like this."

"What stuff?" Arkady asked.

Hoffman picked up a couple of papers from a tomb and held them to the light to read them. "In Hebrew. Prayers to the rabbi."

"Oh, yes." Vanko was emphatic.

"Do that many Jews live here?" Arkady asked.

"Just visitors," Vanko said.

"All the way from Israel." Hoffman looked at a third letter. "Crazy Jews. Somebody else wins the Super Bowl, and he says, 'I'm going to Disneyland!' A Jew wins, he says, 'I'm going to Chernobyl!' "

"They're pilgrims," Arkady said.

"I get the idea. Now what?"

"Do something."

Vanko had been following the conversation more with his eyes than his ears. He dug into his pockets and came up with a fresh votive candle.

Hoffman said, "You happen to have a tallith, too? Never mind. Thank you, thanks a ton. What do I owe you?"

"Ten dollars."

"For a candle worth a dime? So the tomb is your concession?" Hoffman found the money. "It's a business?"

"Yes." Vanko was eager for that to be understood. "Do you need paper or a pen to write a prayer?"

"At ten dollars a page? No, thanks."

"I'll be right outside if you need anything. Food or a place to stay?"

"I bet." Hoffman watched Vanko escape. "This is beautiful. Left in a crypt by a Ukrainian Igor."

There were hundreds of prayers in each box. Arkady showed two to Hoffman. "What do these say?"

"The usual: cancer, divorce, suicide bombers. Let's get out of here."

Arkady nodded to the candle. "Do you have a match?"

"I told you, I don't do that stuff."

Arkady lit the candle and set it on the edge of the tomb. A flame hovered on the wick.

Bobby rubbed the back of his head as if it didn't fit right. "For ten dollars, that's not much light."

Arkady found used candles with wax left and relit them until he had a dozen flames that guttered and smoked but together were a floating ring of light that made the papers seem to shift and glow. The light also made Arkady aware of Yakov standing at the open door. He was thin enough for Arkady to think of a stick that had been burned, whittled and burned again.

"Is something wrong?" Vanko asked from outside.

Yakov removed his shoes and stepped inside. He kissed the tomb, prayed in a whisper as he rocked back and forth, kissed the tomb a second time and produced his own piece of paper, which he laid on the others.

Bobby bolted out and waited for Arkady. "The visit to the rabbi is over. Happy?"

"It was interesting."

"Interesting?" Bobby laughed. "Okay, here's the deal. The deaths of Pasha and Timofeyev are related. It doesn't matter that one died in Moscow and one died here, or that one was an apparent suicide and the other was obviously murder."

"Probably." Arkady watched Yakov emerge from the tomb and Vanko lock it up.

Bobby said, "So, maybe you should concentrate on Timofeyev, and I'll concentrate on Pasha. But we'll coordinate and share information."

"Does this mean that Yakov isn't going to shoot me?" Arkady asked.

"Forget about that. That's inoperative."

"Does Yakov know it's inoperative? He might be hard of hearing."

"Don't worry about that," Bobby said. "The point is, I'm not leaving, so I'll either be in your way, or we'll work together."

"How? You're not a detective or an investigator."

"The tape we just looked at? It's yours."

"I've seen it."

"What are you offering in return? Nothing?"

Vanko had been hanging back out of earshot but reluctant to leave a scene where more dollars might appear. Sensing a gap in the conversation, he sidled up to Arkady and asked, as if helpfully suggesting another local attraction, "Did you tell them about the new body?"

Bobby's head swiveled from Vanko to Arkady. "No, he hasn't. Investigator Renko, tell us about the new body. Share."

Yakov rested his hand in his jacket.

"Trade," Arkady said.

"What?"

"Give me your mobile phone."

Bobby yielded the phone. Arkady turned it on, scrolled through stored numbers to the one he wanted and hit "Dial."

A laconic voice answered, "Victor here."

"Where?"

There was a long pause. Victor would be staring at the caller ID.

"Arkady?"

"Where are you, Victor?"

"In Kiev."

"What are you doing there?"

Another pause.

"Is it really you, Arkady?"

"What are you doing?"

"I'm on sick leave. Private business."

"What are you doing in Kiev?"

A sigh. "Okay, right now I'm sitting in Independence Square eating a Big Mac and watching Anton Obodovsky sip a smoothie only twenty meters away. Our friend is out of prison, and he just spent two hours with a dentist."

"A Moscow dentist wasn't good enough? He had to go all the way to Kiev?"

"If you were here, you'd know why. You've got to see it to believe it."

"Stay with him. I'll call you when I get there."

Arkady turned off the mobile phone and returned it to Bobby, who clutched Arkady's arm and said, "Before you go. A new body? That sounds like progress to me."