Wolves Eat Dogs

7

Chernobyl Ecological Station Three was a run-down garden nursery. A filmy light penetrated a plastic roof that had been torn and patched and torn again. Rows of potted plants sat on tables, suffering the music of a radio hanging on a post. Ukrainian hip-hop. Bent over a microscope, Vanko shifted with the beat.

Alex explained to Arkady, "Actually, the most important instrument for an ecologist is a shovel. Vanko is very good with a shovel."

"What are you digging for?"

"The usual villains: cesium, plutonium, strontium. We sample soil and groundwater, test which mushroom soaks up more radionuclides, check the DNA of mammals. We study the mutation rate of Clethrionomys glareolus, whom you'll meet, and sample the dose rates of cesium and strontium from a variety of mammals. We kill as few as possible, but you have to be 'Merciless for the Common Good,' as my father used to say." Alex led Arkady outside. "This, however, is our Garden of Eden."

Eden was a five-by-five-meter plot of melons sprawled lazily on the ground, red tomatoes fat on the vine and sunflowers blazing in the morning sun. Beet greens grew down one row and cabbage down another, a veritable borsch on the hoof. In the corners were orange crates propped on sticks.

Alex had a gardener's pride. "The old topsoil had to be scraped away. This new soil is sandy, but I think it's doing well."

"Is that the old soil?" Arkady pointed to an isolated bin of dark earth fifty meters off. The bin was half covered by a tarpaulin and surrounded by warning signs.

"Our particularly dirty dirt. It's worse than finding a needle in a haystack. A speck of cesium is too small to see without a microscope, so we dig everything up. Ah, another visitor."

One of the orange crates had fallen. As Alex lifted the trap, a ball of quills tipped in white rolled out, a pointed nose appeared and two beady eyes squinted up.

"Hedgehogs are serious sleepers, Renko. Even trapped, they don't like to be awakened quite so rudely."

The hedgehog got to its feet, twitched its nose and, with sudden attention, dug up a worm. An elastic tug-of-war ended in a compromise; the hedgehog ate half the worm while half escaped. More alert, the hedgehog considered going one way, then another.

"All he can think of is a new nest with soft, cool rotting leaves. Let me show you something." Alex reached down with a gloved hand, picked up the hedgehog and set it in front of Arkady.

"I'm in his way."

"That's the idea."

The hedgehog marched forward until it encountered Arkady. It butted his foot two, three, four times until Arkady let it through, spines bristling, the exit of a hero.

"He wasn't afraid."

"He's not. There have been generations of hedgehogs since the accident, and they're not afraid of people anymore." Alex pulled off his gloves to light a cigarette. "I can't tell you what a pleasure it is to work with animals that aren't afraid. This is paradise."

Some paradise, Arkady thought. All that separated the plot from the reactor was four kilometers of red forest. Even at that distance, the sarcophagus of Reactor Four and the red-and-white-striped chimney loomed above the trees. Arkady had assumed the garden was only a test site, but no, Alex said, Vanko sold the produce. "People will eat it, it's nearly impossible to stop them. I used to have a big dog, a rottweiler, to guard the place. One night I was working late, and he was outside barking in the snow. He wouldn't stop. Then he stopped. I went out ten minutes later with a lamp, and there was a ring of wolves eating my dog."

"What happened then?"

"Nothing. I chased them and fired a couple of shots."

A Moskvich with a bad muffler went by on the way to Pripyat. Eva Kazka shot Arkady and Alex a glance without slowing down.

"Mother Teresa," Alex said. "Patron saint of useless good works. She's off to the villages to tend the lame and the halt, who shouldn't be here in the first place." Black smoke poured out the tailpipe of the Moskvich like a bad temper.

"She likes you," Alex said.

"Really? I couldn't tell."

"Very much. You're the poetic type. So was I once. Cigarette?" Alex unwrapped a pack.

"Thank you."

"I had stopped smoking before I came to the Zone. The Zone puts everything in perspective."

"But the radioactivity is fading."

"Some. Cesium is the biggest worry now. It's a bone seeker; it heads to the marrow and stops the production of platelets. And you've got a radiation-sensitive lining in your intestines that cesium just fries. That's if everything goes well and the reactor doesn't blow again."

"It might?"

"Could. No one really knows what's going on inside the sarcophagus, except that we believe there's over a hundred tons of uranium fuel keeping itself very warm."

"But the sarcophagus will protect any new explosion?"

"No, the sarcophagus is a rust bucket, a sieve. Every time it rains the sarcophagus leaks and more radioactive water joins the ground-water, which joins the Pripyat River, which joins the Dnieper River, which is the water that Kiev drinks. Maybe then people will notice." From his camos, Alex produced two miniature bottles of vodka, the kind that airlines sold. "I know you drink."

"Not usually this early in the day."

"Well, this is the Zone." Alex unscrewed the caps and threw them away. "Cheers!"

Arkady hesitated, but etiquette was etiquette, so he took the bottle and tossed it down in a swallow.

Alex was pleased. "I find that a cigarette and a little vodka lends a perspective to a day in the Zone."

Although Alex said, "The general rule for moving around the Zone is to stay on the asphalt," he seemed to despise the road. His preferred route was across the mounds and hollows of a buried village in a light truck, a Toyota with extra clearance, which he steered like a boat.

"Turn off your dosimeter."

"What?" That was the last thing Arkady had in mind.

"If you want the tour, you'll get the tour, but on my terms. Turn off the dosimeter. I'm not going to listen to that chattering all day." Alex grinned. "Go ahead, you have questions. What are they?"

"You were a physicist," Arkady said.

"The first time I came to Chernobyl, I was a physicist. Then I switched to radioecology. I am divorced. Parents dead. Political party: anarchist. Favorite sport: water polo, a form of anarchy. No pets. Except for disorderly conduct, virtually no arrests. I am very impressed that I have drawn the attention of a senior investigator from Moscow, and I have to confess that you have my assistant Vanko almost soiling his pants about this poacher you're looking for. He thinks you suspect him."

"I don't know enough to suspect anyone."

"That's what I told Vanko. Oh, I should add, favorite writer: Shakespeare."

"Why Shakespeare?" Arkady held on as the truck climbed a slope of chimney bricks.

"He has my favorite character, Yorick."

"The skull in Hamlet?"

"Exactly. No lines but a wonderful role. 'Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well… a man of infinite jest…' Isn't that the best you can say about anyone? I wouldn't mind being dug up every hundred years so someone could say, Alas, poor Alexander Gerasimov, I knew him well."

"A man of infinite jest?"

"I do the best I can." Alex accelerated as if crossing a minefield. "But Vanko and I don't know much about poachers. We're only ecologists. We check our traps, tag this animal or that, take blood samples, scrape some cells for DNA. We rarely kill an animal, at least a mammal, and we don't have barbecues in the woods. I can't even tell you the last time I ran into a poacher or a squatter."

"You trap in the Zone, and poachers hunt in the Zone. You might have run into each other."

"I honestly don't remember."

"I talked to a poacher who was caught with his crossbow. He said another man whom he took to be a hunter had put a rifle to his head and warned him off. He described the man as about two meters tall; lean; gray eyes; short dark hair." That pretty much described Alex Gerasimov. Arkady leaned back for a better view of the rifle bouncing in the van's rear seat. "He said the rifle was a Protecta twelve-millimeter with a barrel clip."

"A good all-purpose rifle. These characters use crossbows so they can hunt without making a lot of noise, but they're hardly the marksmen they imagine they are. Usually they botch the job, the animal escapes and takes days of agony to bleed to death. To put the barrel of a rifle to someone's head, though-that is a little extreme. This poacher, will he prosecute?"

"How can he, without admitting he was breaking the law himself?"

"A real dilemma. You know, Renko, I'm beginning to see why Vanko is afraid of you."

"Not at all. I appreciate the ride. Sometimes activity prompts a memory. You might empty a trap today and remember that you ran into such-and-such a man right there."

"I might?"

"Or perhaps a person came to you with a moose he accidentally hit with his car, to ask whether it was safe to eat, the moose already being dead and food a shame to waste."

"You think so? There wouldn't be much car left after hitting a moose."

"Just a possibility."

"And I wouldn't advise going in those woods at all."

A wall of rusting pines stretched as far as Arkady could see, from left to right. Being dead, the branches held no cones and no squirrels; except for the flit of a bird, the trees were as still as posts. Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well. Arkady could picture a skull on each post. Something ghostly did a pirouette in front of the trees. It fluttered like a handkerchief and darted away.

"A white swallow," Alex said. "You won't see many of those outside of Chernobyl."

"Do poachers come here?"

"No, they know better."

"Do we?"

"Yes, but it's irresistible, and we do it anyway. In the wintertime you should see it, the ground covered with snow, like a belly dimpled with mysterious scars, and the trees bright as blood. People call it the red forest or the magic forest. Sounds like a fairy tale, doesn't it? And not to worry-as the authorities always say, Appropriate measures will be taken, and the situation is under control.' "

They moved along the face of the red forest to an area replanted with new pine trees, where Alex hopped out of the truck and brought back the end of a bough.

"See how stunted and deformed the tip is. It will never grow into a tree, only scrub. But it's a step in the right direction. The administration is pleased with our new pines." Alex spread his arms and announced, "In two hundred and fifty years, all this will be clean. Except for the plutonium; that will take twenty-five thousand years."

"Something to hope for."

"I believe so."

Still, Arkady found himself breathing easier when the red pines gave way to a mix of ash and birch. At the base of a tree, Alex brushed back high grass to reveal a tunnel leading to a cage of what looked to Arkady like squirming field mice.

"Clethrionomys glareolus," said Alex. "Voles. Or maybe super voles. The rate of mutation among our little friends here has accelerated by a factor of thirty. Maybe they'll be doing calculus next year. One reason voles have such a fast rate of mutation is that they reproduce so quickly, and radiation affects organisms when they are growing much more than it does when they're adult. A cocoon is affected by radiation, a butterfly is not. So the question is, How does radiation affect this fellow?" Alex opened the top of the cage to lift out a vole by its tail. "The answer is that he does not worry about radionuclides. He worries about owls, foxes, hawks. He worries about finding food and a warm nest. He thinks that radiation is by far the smallest factor in his survival, and he's right."

"And you, what is the largest factor in your survival?" Arkady asked.

"Let me tell you a story. My father was a physicist. He worked at one of those secret installations in the Urals where spent nuclear fuel was stored. Spent fuel is still hot. Insufficient attention was paid, and the fuel exploded, not a nuclear explosion but very dirty and hot. Everything was done secretly, even the cleanup, which was fast and messy. Thousands of soldiers, firemen, technicians waded through debris, including physicists led by my father. After the accident here, I called my father and said, 'Papa, I want you to tell me the truth. Your colleagues from the Urals accident, how are they?' My father took a moment to answer. He said, 'They're all dead, son, every one. Of vodka.' "

"So you drink and smoke and ride around a radioactive forest."

Alex let the vole drop into the cage and switched the full cage with an empty. "Statistically, I admit that none of these are healthy occupations. Individually, statistics mean nothing at all. I think I will probably be hit by a hawk of some kind. And I think, Renko, that you're a lot like me. I think you are waiting for your own hawk."

"Maybe a hedgehog."

"No, trust me on this, definitely a hawk. From here we walk a little."

Alex carried the rifle, and Arkady carried a cage that had a one-way gate baited with greens. Step by step, the woods around them changed from stunted trees to taller, sturdier beeches and oaks that produced a dappling of birdcalls and light.

Arkady asked, "Did you ever met Pasha Ivanov or Nikolai Timofeyev?"

"You know, Renko, some people leave their problems behind them when they go into the woods. They commune with nature. No, I never met either man."

"You were a physicist. You all went to the Institute of Extremely High Temperatures."

"They were older, ahead of me. Why this focus on physicists?"

"This case is more interesting than the usual domestic quarrel. Cesium chloride is not a carving knife."

"You can get cesium chloride at a number of labs. Considering the economic health of the country, you can probably persuade a scientist to siphon off a little extra for either terrorism or murder. People steal warheads, don't they?"

"To transport cesium chloride would take professional skill, wouldn't it?"

"Any decent technician could do that. The power plant still employs hundreds of technicians for maintenance. Far too many for you to question."

"If the person who used cesium in Moscow is the same person who killed Timofeyev here, wouldn't that narrow the field?"

"To those hundreds of technicians."

"Not really. The technicians live an hour away. They commute by train to the plant, work their shift and go directly home. They don't wander around the Zone. No, the person who cut Timofeyev's throat is part of the security staff, or a squatter or poacher."

"Or a scientist living in the Zone?" Alex said.

"That's a possibility, too." There weren't many of those, Arkady thought. There was no scientific glory work being done at Chernobyl. Everything was cleanup or observation.

"Cesium is a complicated way to kill someone or drive them crazy."

"I agree," said Arkady. "And hardly worth the effort, unless you're sending a message. The fact that neither Ivanov nor Timofeyev complained to the militia or their own security, in spite of a threat to their lives, suggests that some sort of message was understood."

"Timofeyev had his throat cut. Where's the subtle message in that?"

"Maybe it was in where he was found-at the threshold of a village cemetery. Either he drove all the way from Moscow just to go to that graveyard, or someone went to a great deal of trouble to put him there. Who noticed his throat was cut?"

"I suppose someone who went into the freezer. I can tell you that people were very unhappy there was a body inside. They had to clean everything else out."

"Then why go into the freezer except to look at the body?"

"Renko, I had never appreciated before how much detection work was groundless speculation."

"Well, now you know."

Trees continued to grow taller, shadows deeper, roots more ancient and interlaced. Arkady waded through fronds of bracken and had the illusion of spiders, salamanders, snakes scurrying ahead, a subtle ripple of life. Finally Alex stopped Arkady at the edge of blinding light, an arching meadow of wide-open daisies and, here and there, the red flags of poppies. Alex motioned him to crouch and be quiet, then pointed to the top of the meadow, where two deer stared back with dark liquid eyes. Arkady had never been so close to deer in the wild. One was a doe; the other had a wide rack of antlers, a hunter's prize. The tension in their gaze was different from the placid observation of zoo deer.

Alex whispered, "They are fat from grazing at the orchards."

"Are we still in the Zone?" Arkady found it hard to believe.

"Yes. What you can see from the road is a horror show-Pripyat, the buried villages, the red woods-but much of the Zone is like this. Now slowly stand."

Both deer went still as Arkady rose. They balanced more particularly but held their ground.

Alex said, "Like the hedgehog, they're losing their fear."

"Are they radioactive?"

"Of course they're radioactive, everything here is. Everything on earth is. This field is about as radioactive as a beach in Rio. There's a lot of sun in Rio. That's why I wanted you to turn off your Geiger counter so you would hear more than that little ticking. Use your eyes and ears. What do you hear?"

For a minute Arkady heard nothing more than the mass drone of field life or his hand slapping a bug on his neck. By concentrating on the deer, however, he started to pick up their thoughtful chewing, the individual transit of dragonflies amid a sunlit cross fire of insects, and in the background, a squirrel scolding from a tree.

Alex said, "The Zone has deer, bison, eagles, swans. The Chernobyl Zone of Exclusion is the best wild-animal refuge in Europe because the towns and villages have been abandoned, fields abandoned, roads abandoned. Because normal human activity is worse for nature than the greatest nuclear accident in history. The next greenie I meet who tells me how he wants to save the animals, I'll tell him that if he's sincere, he should hope for nuclear accidents everywhere. And the next poacher I find here, I will do more than break his toy crossbow. If you do find any poachers, will you please tell them that? Don't move. Be absolutely still. Look over your left shoulder, between the two pretty birches."

Arkady turned his head as slowly as possible and saw a row of yellow eyes behind the trees. The air grew heavy. Insects slowed in their spirals. Sweat ringed Arkady's neck and ran down his chest and spine. The next moment the deer bolted in an explosion of dust and flower heads, took the measure of the field in two bounds and crashed into the woods on the far side. Arkady looked back at the birches. The wolves had gone so silently that he thought he might have imagined them.

Alex unslung his rifle and ran to the birches. From a lower branch, he freed a tuft of gray fur that he carefully placed inside a plastic bag. When he had put the bag in a pocket and given the pocket a loving pat, he tore a strip of bark off the birch, placed the strip between his palms and blew a long, piercing whistle. "Yes!" he said. "Life is good!"

Eva Kazka had set up a card table and folding chairs in the middle of the village's only paved road. Her white coat said she was a doctor; otherwise, her manner suggested a weary mechanic, and she didn't tame her black hair back as much as subdue it.

On either side of this outdoor office, the village slumped in resignation. Window trim hung loose around broken panes, the memory of blue and green walls faded under the black advance of mildew. The yards were full of bikes, sawhorses and tubs pillowed in tall grass and bordered by picket fences that leaned in an infinitely slow collapse. All the same, set farther back from the main street were, here and there, repainted houses with windows and intricate trim intact, with a haze of wood smoke around the chimney and a goat cropping the yard.

A benchful of elderly women in versions of shawl-and-coat-and-rubber-boots waited while Eva looked down the throat of a round little woman with steel teeth.

"Alex Gerasimov is crazy, this is a well-known fact," Eva said as an aside to Arkady. "Him and his precious nature. He's a perfectionist. He is a man who would drive a car into a pole again and again until it was a perfect wreck. Close."

The old woman closed her jaw firmly to signify nothing less then complete cooperation. Arkady doubted that, from the shawl tied tight around her head to her boots hanging clear of the ground, she was over a meter and a half tall. Her eyes were bright and dazzling, a true Ukrainian blue.

"Maria Fedorovna, you have the blood pressure and heart rate of a woman twenty years younger. However, I am concerned about the polyp in your throat. I would like to take it out."

"I will discuss it with Roman."

"Yes, where is Roman Romanovich? I expected to see your husband, too."

Maria lifted her eyes to the top of the lane, where a gate swung open for a bent man in a cap and sweater, leading a black-and-white cow by a rope. Arkady didn't know which looked more exhausted.

"He's airing the cow," Maria said.

The cow trudged dutifully behind. A milk cow was an asset precious enough to be displayed for visitors, Arkady thought. All attention was fixed on the animal's plodding circuit up and down the street. Its hooves made a sucking sound in the wet earth.

Eva's fingers played with a scarf tucked into the collar of her lab coat. She wasn't pretty in an orthodox way; the contrast of such white skin and black hair was too exotic and her eyes had, at least for Arkady, an unforgiving gaze.

"There's no house here you could use for more privacy?" Arkady asked.

"Privacy? This is their entertainment, their television, and this way they can all discuss their medical problems like experts. These people are in their seventies and eighties. I'm not going to operate on them except for something like a broken leg. The state doesn't have the money, instruments or clean blood to waste on people their age. I'm not even supposed to be making calls, and Maria would never go to a city, for fear they wouldn't let her return here."

Arkady said, "She's not supposed to be here anyway. This is the Zone."

Eva turned toward the ladies on the bench. "Only someone from Moscow could say something as stupid as that." To judge by their expressions, they seemed to agree. "The state turns a blind eye to the return of old people. It has given up trying to stop them," Eva informed Arkady. "It has also stopped sending doctors to see them. It demands they go to a clinic."

Maria said, "At our age, you go into the hospital, you don't come out."

Eva asked Arkady, "You've seen those television shows with the bathing beauties dropped off on a tropical island to see if they can survive?" She nodded to Maria and to her friends on the bench. "These are the real survivors."

The doctor introduced them: Olga had a corrugated face and filmy glasses; Nina leaned on a crutch; Klara had the angular features of a Viking, braids and all. Their leader was Maria.

"An investigator of what?" Maria asked.

Arkady said, "A body of a man was found at the entrance of your village cemetery in the middle of May. I was hoping that one of you might have seen or heard someone, or noticed something odd or maybe a car."

"May was rainy," Maria said.

"Was it at night?" Olga asked. "If it was at night and it was raining, who would even go outside?"

"Do any of you have dogs?"

"No dogs," Klara said.

"Wolves eat dogs," said Nina.

"So I hear. Do you know a family called Katamay? The son was in the militia here."

The women shook their heads.

"Is the name Timofeyev familiar to you?" Arkady asked.

"I don't believe you," Eva said. "You act like a real detective, like you're in Moscow. This is a black village, and the people here are ghosts. Someone from Moscow died here? Good riddance. We owe Moscow nothing, they've done nothing for us."

"Is the name Pasha Ivanov familiar to you?" Arkady asked the women.

Eva said, "You're worse than Alex. He values animals above people, but you're worse. You're just a bureaucrat with a list of questions. These women have had their whole world taken away. Their children and grandchildren are allowed to visit one day a year. The Russians promised money, medicine, doctors. What do we get? Alex Gerasimov and you. At least he's doing research. Why did Moscow send you?"

"To get rid of me."

"I can see why. And what have you found?"

"Not much."

"How can that be? The death rate here is twice normal. How many people died from the accident? Some say eighty, some say eight thousand, some say half a million. Did you know that the cancer rate around Chornobyl is sixty-five times normal? Oh, you don't want to hear this. This is so tedious and depressing."

Was he in a staring contest with her? This had to be like a falconer's dilemma, holding a not completely trained bird of prey on the wrist.

"I did want to ask you a few questions, maybe someplace else."

"No, Maria and the other women can use a little amusement. We will all concentrate on one Russian stiff." Eva opened a pack of cigarettes and shared them with her patients. "Go on."

"You do have drugs?" Arkady asked.

"Yes, we do have some medicine, not much, but some."

"Some has to be refrigerated?"

"Yes."

"And some frozen?"

"One or two."

"Where?"

Eva Kazka took a deep draw on her cigarette. "In a freezer, obviously."

"Do you have one, or do you use the freezer at the cafeteria?"

"I have to admit, you have a single-mindedness that must be very useful in your profession."

"Do you store medicine in the cafeteria freezer?"

"Yes."

"You saw the body in the freezer?"

"I see a lot of bodies. We have more deaths than live births. Why not ask about that?"

"You saw the body of Lev Timofeyev."

"What if I did? I certainly didn't know who he was."

"And you left a note that he hadn't died of a heart attack."

Maria and the women on the bench looked to Eva, Arkady and back as if a tennis match had come to the village. Olga removed her glasses and wiped them. "Details."

Eva said, "There was a body dressed in a suit and wrapped in plastic. I'd never seen him before. That's all."

"People told you that he had had a heart attack?"

"I don't remember."

Arkady said nothing. Sometimes it was better to wait, especially with such an eager audience as Maria and her friends.

"I suppose the kitchen staff said he had a heart attack," Eva said.

"Who signed the death certificate?"

"Nobody. No one knew who he was or how he died or how long he had been dead."

"But you're fairly expert in that. I hear you spent time in Chechnya. That's unusual for a Ukrainian doctor, to serve with the Russian army on the battlefront."

Eva's eyes lit. "You have it backward. I was with a group of doctors documenting Russian atrocities against the Chechen population."

"Like slit throats?"

"Exactly. The body in the freezer had its throat cut with one stroke of a long sharp knife from behind. From the angle of the cut, his head was pulled back, and he was kneeling or seated, or the killer was at least two meters tall. Since his windpipe was cut, he couldn't have uttered a sound before dying, and if he was killed at the cemetery here, no one would have heard a thing."

"The description said he had been 'disturbed by wolves.' Meaning his face?"

"It happens. It's the Zone. Anyway, I do not want to be involved in your investigation."

"So he was lying on his back?"

"I don't know."

"Wouldn't someone whose throat was cut from behind be more likely to fall forward?"

"I suppose so. All I saw was the body in the freezer. This is like talking to a monomaniac. All you can focus on in this enormous tragedy, where hundreds of thousands died and continue to suffer, is one dead Russian."

The old man turned the cow in the direction of the card table. Despite the heat, Roman Romanovich was buttoned into not one but two sweaters. His pink, well-fed face and white bristles and the anxious smile he cast at Maria as he approached suggested a man who had long ago learned that a good wife was worth obeying.

Eva asked Arkady, "Do you know how Russia resolved the crisis of radioactive milk after the accident? They mixed radioactive milk with clean milk. Then they raised the permissible level of radioactivity in milk to the norm of nuclear waste and in this way saved the state nearly two billion rubles. Wasn't that clever?"

Roman tugged on Arkady's sleeve. "Milk?"

"He wants to know if you would like to buy some milk," Eva said. She twisted her scarf with her fingers. "Would you like some milk from Roman's cow?"

"This cow?"

"Yes. Absolutely fresh."

"After you."

Eva smiled. To Roman she said, "Investigator Renko thanks you but must decline. He's allergic to milk."

"Thank you," Arkady said.

"Think nothing of it," said Eva.

"He must come to dinner," Maria said. "We'll give him decent food, not like they serve at the cafeteria. He seems a nice man."

"No, I'm afraid the investigator is going back to Moscow soon. Maybe they'll send medicine or money in his place, something useful. Maybe they'll surprise us."