The Boy Who Stole from the Dead

CHAPTER 30

ON WEDNESDAY MORNING, Nadia hired a hotel car to drive her to the city of Korosten, Bobby’s hometown, ninety-eight miles northwest of Kyiv. Nadia mentioned that she was working on a sensitive business matter, feared being spotted by a member of the financial press, and didn’t want to exit via the front door. Instead, she preferred the driver pick her up in the hotel garage at 7:30 a.m.

She took an otherwise empty elevator directly to the garage. An attendant was driving a car out as she walked in. No other people in sight. There were only fifty-five parking spots. Forty-eight of them were taken. She weaved through the lot and glanced inside each vehicle. They were empty.

After the driver picked her up, Nadia dropped some papers in the foot well of the adjacent rear seat. She ducked beneath the front seats and hid from view as the car pulled onto the street. Didn’t rise for air until he’d made two turns. To her knowledge, no one had seen her in the hotel or the garage. She had no tangible reason to suspect someone was watching her but she assumed the worst. Last year her pursuers had planted a GPS device in her bag at the airport. From then on, paranoia served her well. If someone was watching the vehicles exiting the garage an empty car had pulled out.

Bobby’s hometown was an industrial city with a population of 66,000. It was famous for its potato pancake festival and its close proximity to Chornobyl. After the nuclear disaster on April 26, 1986, Korosten was declared a zone of voluntary evacuation.

Nadia had debated the prudence of going there. On the one hand, she knew little about Bobby’s background. Perhaps an inquiry would reveal some clue pertinent to his relationship with the Valentins. On the other hand, she didn’t want to encourage anyone else to start asking questions. She didn’t want to reveal herself.

Nadia decided to compromise. She would limit her inquiries to his school and the hockey coach who’d raised him. She would approach no one else. Furthermore, where the school was concerned, she would not reveal her true identity.

The driver dropped her off in front of Secondary School Number Four. Bobby had told her which school he’d attended, and Nadia had made an appointment with the administrator yesterday. She was a soft-spoken middle-aged woman named Hanna Figura. She sat behind a bare metal desk with a bouquet of wilting sunflowers. Nadia reminded herself they knew Bobby by his real name here. They knew him as Adam Tesla.

“What is your relation to Adam?” the administrator said.

“I’m his aunt.” She was actually his cousin but they shared a long-running joke that she was his aunt. She liked the idea of being an aunt, she’d told him. Aunts possessed authority with minimum responsibility.

“From?”

“Canada.”

Her eyes widened with surprise. She nodded. “I was going to guess western Ukraine. Or Poland. Not North America. Who taught you to speak?”

“My parents. The community in Toronto.”

“You’re an aunt on the mother’s or father’s side?”

“Father’s side,” Nadia said, sticking to the truth as much as possible. “Not that I ever met him. Or any other relatives in Ukraine. That’s why I’m here. I was researching my family tree. And it seems everyone’s gone. Except perhaps Adam. That’s why I was so disappointed when I called yesterday and you said he disappeared one day.”

Hannah’s smile vanished. “I called his guardian several times. He said the boy ran away. Vanished. I shouldn’t be surprised, I guess.”

“Why do you say that?”

“He’s a child of Chornobyl. You know that, right?”

“No,” Nadia said, feigning ignorance. “I don’t know anything about him.”

“Where to begin.” Hanna took a deep breath and exhaled. “I only met his guardian once. A surly old brute who played on the Russian Olympic hockey team. He told me some things about Adam’s parents.” Hanna softened her voice. “Did you know Adam’s father?”

“No,” Nadia said. In fact, she’d met him last year a week before he died. “I heard stories, though.”

“That he was…”

“A criminal. A thief. A con man.”

Hanna appeared relieved she wasn’t the one who’d had to use the words. “Adam never mentioned him. And the teachers knew not to ask about him. Some said he’d died. Others said he was in jail. But he must have ended up living off the grid in Chornobyl because that’s where he met Adam’s mother.”

“Who was his mother?” Nadia said. She knew the answer.

Hanna shrugged. “Again, what I’m giving you came from his guardian and I only spoke to him once. According to him Adam’s mother was an American woman who came to Russia to be a—how shall we say it—a professional hostess. The riches she was promised didn’t come to fruition. Instead she became addicted to drugs, moved to Kyiv, and ended up servicing the men who worked on building the shelter in the Zone. The shelter is what they call the sarcophagus built around the reactor that exploded. I’m told the pay was high because one never knew if a man had been exposed to too much radiation.”

“And my uncle was supposedly there at the time.”

“That’s what Adam’s guardian told me. Of course gossip spreads in school. It always does. Adam was born in a hospital, here, in Korosten. But the children spread rumors that he was actually born in Chornobyl. That his mother is the only person to give birth to a child within the Zone of Exclusion. Even worse, they said he was born inside the sarcophagus. Behind his back they called him ‘the boy from reactor four’.”

“That doesn’t surprise me.” Nadia remembered being bullied during grade school for having a Russian-sounding name. Kids didn’t care that she wasn’t Russian, and that her parents had escaped the Iron Curtain. “Where is his mother now?”

“She died during childbirth.”

That was consistent with what Nadia’s uncle had told her last year.

“Once, in seventh grade,” Hanna said, “a new student moved here from Zhytomyr. I was parking my car when I heard three boys telling him about Adam. They warned him not to get close to Adam, that he could get infected if he touched him, or even breathed the air surrounding him. They said no girl would come within three meters of him, and that he was destined to live and die alone. Right at that moment, Adam walked by with his military knapsack filled with rocks, as he always did. And the kids started chanting ‘Freak, freak, freak.’ When I ran out from behind the partition blocking the cars from stray footballs and made myself visible, the new boy was already chanting with them.”

“Wait. Why was his knapsack filled with rocks?”

“Training. To make his legs stronger. For hockey. The boy lived for hockey. It was his therapy. And his guardian—the brute. He had sadistic training methods.”

Which worked, Nadia thought to herself. “Did Adam have any friends?”

“Just Eva.”

“Eva?”

“His guardian’s niece. They lived under the same roof. Eva was two years older. She suffered from a thyroid affliction. It’s a common genetic disease among children whose mothers had radiation syndrome. He followed her like a puppy dog. She never seemed to mind. Another loner. Black hair and purple lipstick. She dressed like a witch every day. They were kindred spirits. They had only each other.”

This was the first Nadia had heard of a girl. “May I speak with her? Or did she graduate?”

“I’m afraid she passed away two years ago.”

“That’s awful.”

“It broke her uncle’s heart, too. Even brutes have feelings. He held on while Adam was still there, but once the boy disappeared loneliness got the better of him. He also died. About six months ago. Alcohol poisoning.”

Nadia’s spirits sank.

“I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news,” Hanna said.

“I was planning to pay him a visit next.”

“At least I’ve saved you the trip.”

“Is there anyone else I can speak to? Was Adam close to one of the teachers?”

“Adam wasn’t close to anyone. He rarely said a word if he wasn’t asked a direct question in class. The teachers developed a phobia for him, too. It’s sad, but true. No one was confident there was no risk of contamination from touching him, breathing the same air as him, being in his vicinity. People understood it was nonsense intellectually but they had trouble accepting it psychologically. The truth is some of the teachers weren’t keen on having him in their classes.”

“Is there anything else you can tell me about him? Anything at all?”

Hanna wet her lips and glanced at the door to her office, as though making sure it was closed. “Well there was that rumor about Eva and him.”

“What rumor?”

“That their guardian gambled and drank his pension away, and forced them to do something to supplement the family income.”

Nadia cringed. Prepared to hear something hideous. “What did he force them to do?”

“Steal from the dead.”

Nadia frowned. “What does that mean, steal from the dead? Rob graves?”

“That is what a teacher told me. She heard Eva utter the phrase to Adam in the hallway. Once. Only once. I demanded an explanation from Adam but he denied Eva ever said it.”

A wave of relief washed over Nadia. She’d feared the hockey coach—as Adam called him—had forced the kids to do something even more unsavory for money. Digging up a grave sounded illegal and immoral, but there were worse things.

“They must have been desperate,” Nadia said.

Hanna nodded. “People go to their graves with the craziest things. Rings, watches—I had an aunt who asked to be buried with her money in case the houses on the beach are cheaper on the other side.”

“Problem is,” Nadia said, “I’m not sure it’s a capitalist system on the other side. And even if it is there are no guarantees for anyone but the rich.”

Hanna smiled wearily. “Tell me about it.”

Nadia thanked her and left. She climbed into the car and asked the driver to take her back to Kyiv. Along the way she pictured Adam and a young witch with purple lipstick breaking into a casket in search of gold.

To open the casket, they used a screwdriver. To see inside it, they shined a flashlight.