The Boy Who Stole from the Dead

CHAPTER 51

SATURDAY MORNING DEVELOPED in slow motion for Johnny. The water in his shower took five minutes to heat up and the line for coffee at the gas station wound out the front door. Traffic snarled. The guards at Rikers kept joking around while he stood waiting for someone to sign him in. Nothing happened quickly enough. That was because today was the day. Today was the day the kid would fess up and give Johnny the ammo he needed to make Nadia’s dream come true.

As soon as the guard brought him into the room, Johnny could see the apprehension in Bobby’s face. Only the kid knew exactly what Johnny was about to hear. And by the tension in his eyes and the tightness in his lips, Johnny knew it was coming from a place he’d tucked away and hoped to never revisit. This was going to be some serious shit he was about to hear. Unlike anything he’d ever heard before in his life. He could feel it in his gut. And after eleven years of representing career criminals, his gut rarely deceived him.

They sat opposite each other at the table. Johnny put his briefcase beside his chair. Not on the table. He wanted nothing but clean slate between the two of them.

“To understand what happened on Hart Island,” Bobby said, “you have to understand what happened in Chornobyl first.”

He didn’t pronounce it the way Americans did. He didn’t call it Chornobyl. He softened the consonants. Put the accent on the third syllable. “Chor-no-BEEL.” Proper Ukrainian, Johnny thought. Ukrainian, Russian, English, didn’t matter. The word rolling off a person’s tongue never failed to creep him out. It was the name of a place where a lot of people died without any violence. Without ever seeing the enemy that killed them.

“What happened in Chornobyl?” Johnny said.

Bobby took a deep breath. “It was about two years ago. I was fourteen going on fifteen. My best friend and I were stealing from the dead. We did that sometimes. When we had to. For the money.”

“Stealing from the dead? What does that mean? You were robbing graves?”

“Yeah. But not the kind of graves you’re thinking of. Vehicle graves. Equipment graves. Buried houses.”

“What?”

“When reactor number four blew up in 1986, it snowed in Chornobyl and the villages beyond. The wind carried it all the way to Belarus. Except the white stuff wasn’t snow. It was radioactive dust. So the Soviet government evacuated the village and bulldozed everything. They buried cars, trucks, tractors, ambulances. They buried the bulldozers with new bulldozers. They even buried the houses closest to the power plant. Then they set up a perimeter thirty kilometers around the village and called it the Zone of Exclusion.”

“And you dug this stuff up? Radioactive stuff? What, car parts? Engine parts and stuff like that? Are you serious?”

“It was called scavenging. And it was a big business in Chornobyl. You see, by the year 2000, most of the radioactive particles were no longer dangerous. Except for strontium and cesium. They’re going to be a problem for another hundred years. They get blown around by the wind. End up mostly in wet areas. Which is why we avoided water.”

“But if these graveyards were sealed for twenty years, how do you know these two substances—what are they called again?”

“Strontium and cesium.”

“Right. How could you be sure the first thing you touched wasn’t covered with them back from the time they buried it?”

“You couldn’t be sure. You could never be sure. It’s a risk we took for the money. That’s how hard money was to come by. And me and my friend weren’t digging up the graves. The graves were already dug up.”

“What do you mean already dug up? By who?”

“Other scavengers. People were scavenging by the 1990s. They didn’t care if there were still twenty different particles that were still radioactive. Who knows how many hot parts made it to Kyiv, got fit on taxis, trucks, and cars. That’s how hard life was. We were scavenging what the other scavengers couldn’t get.”

“You said ‘we’. ‘We were stealing from the dead.’ Who’s ‘we’?”

Bobby’s eyes watered instantly. Johnny had never seen the kid show any emotion before. The sight unnerved him. Made him see his client for who he really was. Just a kid.

“My friend and me,” he said.

“Who was your friend?”

“Eva. She was sixteen going on seventeen. We both had the same guardian. Her uncle. I didn’t live with my father. You know the story. He lived alone off the grid. I lived with my hockey coach. Coach was Eva’s uncle. She lived with him, too. He would drive us to a hole in the perimeter fence and we would sneak into the village. When we were running low on money. He drank a lot. And gambled.”

“So what time of year was this?”

“It was late fall. Like spring only colder.”

“And the two of you were scavenging. In the daytime?”

“Never. Always at dusk. So there was some light to work but not so much we stood out. By the time it was pitch black out we’d be hiking back to the car with whatever we found.”

“So what happened?”

“We were in an open pit by the red forest. Farm equipment mostly. We were both thin but strong. We could get deeper into the graveyard and get into tighter places than the other scavengers. I crawled though the hood of a tractor—someone had scavenged the entire engine piece-by-piece—to get to the harvester that was buried beneath it. The harvester still had most of its engine. I thought I could get the starter. Starters are worth good money. But I had to invert myself to get in and I accidentally kicked the piece of wood holding the tractor’s hood up. It closed behind me. Locked me in. I had my screwdriver, my wrench, and my pliers in my pockets, but I dropped the screwdriver and I couldn’t get the latch open without it. I kept banging but Eva was gone. First I was worried I wouldn’t get out. Then I started worrying about her.”

“How did you get out?”

“Eva came back. She thought she’d seen someone in the forest and she went to higher ground to get a better look. She had a crowbar. We always took turns going in. Whoever stayed up top had the hacksaw and the crowbar.”

“So she pried it open?”

“Yeah.”

“And you got out?”

“Yeah.”

“And then what?”

Bobby took his eyes off Johnny and stared into space. “Then the gunshots started.”