Wolves Eat Dogs

11

Kiev was two hours by car from Chernobyl. Arkady made it in ninety minutes on the motorcycle by riding between lanes and, when necessary, swerving onto the shoulder of the road and dodging old women selling buckets of fruit and braids of golden onions. Traffic came to a halt for geese crossing the road, but it plowed over chickens. A horse in a ditch, men throwing sand on a burning car, stork nests on telephone poles, everything passed in a blur.

As soon as Arkady saw the gilded domes of Kiev resting in summer smog, he pulled to the side of the road, called Victor and resumed his ride at a saner pace. Anton Obodovsky was back in the dentist's chair and looked like he would be there for a while. Arkady rolled along the Dnieper and endured the shock of returning to a great city that spilled over both banks of the river. He climbed the arty neighborhood of Podil, rode around the Dumpsters of urban renovation and coasted to a halt at the head of Independence Square, where five streets radiated, fountains played and somehow, more than Moscow, Kiev said Europe.

Victor was at a sidewalk café reading a newspaper. Arkady dropped into the chair beside him and waved for a waiter.

"Oh, no," Victor said. "You can't afford the prices here. Be my guest."

Arkady settled back and took in the square's leafy trees and sidewalk entertainers and children chasing fountain water carried by the breeze. Soviet-classical buildings framed the long sides of the square, but at its head the architecture was white and airy and capped with colorful billboards.

Victor ordered two Turkish coffees and a cigar. Such largesse from him was unknown.

"Look at you," Arkady said. An Italian suit and silk tie softened Victor's scarecrow aspect.

"On an expense account from Bobby. Look at you. Military camos. You look like a commando. You look good. Radiation is good for you."

The coffees arrived. Victor took exquisite pleasure in lighting the cigar and releasing its blue smoke and leathery scent. " Havana. The good thing about Bobby is that he expects you to steal. The bad thing about Bobby is Yakov. Yakov is old and he's scary. He's scary because he's so old he's got nothing to lose. I mean, if Bobby thinks we're working together, he'll be pissed on one level but half expect it on another level. If Yakov thinks so, we're dead."

"That is the question, isn't it? Who are you working for?"

"Arkady, you're so black and white. Modern life is more complicated Prosecutor Zurin told me that I wasn't supposed to communicate with you under any circumstances. That it would insult the Ukrainians. Now the Ukrainians have a president who was caught on tape ordering the murder of a newspaper reporter, but he's still their president, so I don't know how you insult the Ukrainians. Such is modern life."

"You're on sick leave?"

"As long as Bobby is willing to pay. Did I tell you that Lyuba and I got back together?"

"Who is Lyuba?"

"My wife."

Arkady suspected that he had committed a gaffe. The struggle for Victor's soul was like catching a greased pig, and any mistake could be costly. "Did you ever mention her?"

"Maybe I didn't. It was thanks to you. I sort of screwed up with your little friend Zhenya the Silent, and I ran into Lyuba when I was coming out of the drunk tank, and I told her everything. It was wonderful. She saw a tenderness in me that I thought I had lost years ago. We started up again, and I took stock. I could carry on the same old life with the same crowd, mostly people I put in jail, or start fresh with Lyuba, make some real money and have a home."

"That was when Bobby e-mailed you?"

"At that very moment."

"At Laika 1223."

"Laika was a great dog."

"It's a touching story."

"See what I mean? Always black and white."

"And you're dry now, too?"

"Relatively. A brandy now and then."

"And Anton?"

"This is an ethical dilemma."

"Why?"

"Because you haven't paid. I'm not just thinking about me anymore, I have to consider Lyuba. And remember, Zurin said no contact. Not to mention Colonel Ozhogin. He said absolutely no contact with you. No one wants me to talk to you."

"Did Bobby Hoffman call you while I was coming here? What did he say?"

"To talk to you but keep my mouth shut."

"How are the new shoes?" Arkady caught sight of Victor's footwear.

"Beginning to pinch."

From time to time Arkady saw Victor glance two doors over at a building with an Italian leather-goods shop on the ground floor and professional offices above. Victor had an ice-cream sundae. Arkady picked at a crepe. Somehow, the Zone dampened hunger. Afternoon faded into evening, and the square only became more charming as spotlights turned fountains into spires of light. Victor pointed out a floodlit theater on the hill above the square. "The opera house. For a while the KGB used it, and they say you could hear the screams from here. Ozhogin was stationed here for a while."

"Tell me about Anton."

"He's having dental work done, that's all I can say."

"All day? That's a lot of dental work."

Arkady got up and walked to the Italian leather store, admired the handbags and jackets and read the plaques for the businesses upstairs: two cardiologists, a lawyer, a jeweler. The top floor was shared by a Global Travel agency and a dentist named R. L. Levin-son, and Arkady remembered the vacation brochures on Anton's bunk at Butyrka Prison. On the way back to Victor's table, Arkady noticed a girl, about six years old, with dark hair and luminous eyes, dancing to the music of a street fiddler dressed as a Gypsy. The girl wasn't part of the act, just a spontaneous participant making up her own steps and spins.

Arkady sat. "How do you know he's visiting the dentist and not getting tickets to go around the world?"

"When he arrived, all the offices but the dentist were shut for lunch. I'm a detective."

"Are you?"

"Fuck you."

"I've heard that before."

Victor sank into a bitter smile. "Yeah, it's like old times." He loosened his tie and stood to observe himself in the plate glass of the café window. He sat and waved for a waiter. "Two more coffees, with just a touch of vodka."

Anton Obodovsky, as Victor told it, was a bonus. Victor had been flying to Kiev two days before to meet Hoffman and only happened to see Anton on the same plane. Anton had traveled light, not even a carry-on, and on landing, Victor thought he had lost Anton for good, assuming that he would vanish into the nether regions of Kiev, where he still had a slice of some chop shops and convenience stores. He was like any businessman who maintained domiciles in two different cities, except no one knew where those domiciles were; in Anton's business, a safe night's rest required secrecy. But dentists couldn't pick up their drills and make house calls, and Victor had spied Anton crossing the square on the way to his appointment.

Victor said, "Now that you and Bobby looked at the surveillance tapes, he's convinced Obodovsky was the guy with the suitcase in the exterminator van. Anton was strong enough, he'd threatened Ivanov on the phone and he wasn't put in Butyrka until the afternoon. Motive, means and opportunity. Besides which, he's a killer. There he is."

Anton stepped out of the door and felt his jaw as if to say that all the muscles in the world were no protection from an abscessed tooth. As usual, he was in Armani black and, with his bleached hair, not a difficult man to spot. He was followed by a short, dark woman in her mid-thirties, wearing a trim, sensible jacket.

"The dentist is a woman? She's so good, he comes all the way from Moscow?"

"That's not the whole package. Wait until you see this," Victor said. Last out of the door was a tall woman in her twenties with swirls of honey-colored hair and a brief outfit in denim and silver buttons. She took a firm grip on Anton's arm. "The dental hygienist."

After the dentist had locked the door, she was joined by the dancing girl, who by every feature was her daughter. The girl gestured toward a figure on stilts farther up the square, where a public promenade of sorts had developed, drawing sketch artists and street acts. She appealed to Anton, who shrugged expansively and led the way, he and the hygienist striding ahead, the girl skipping around her mother a step behind. Arkady and Victor fell in thirty meters back, relying on that fact that Anton would not be looking for a Moscow investigator in Ukrainian camos and certainly would not expect to see Victor in an elegant suit and puffing a cigar.

Victor said, "Bobby thinks that Anton was paid by Nikolai Kuzmitch. The van came from a Kuzmitch company, so that much makes sense."

"Kuzmitch has an exterminator company? I thought he was into nickel and tin."

"Also fumigation, cable television and airlines. He buys a company a month. I think the airline and fumigation came together, one of those Asian routes."

"Well, Anton is a carjacker. He doesn't need help getting a van."

"You think the Kuzmitch van was a setup?"

"I think it's unlikely a smart man would use a vehicle that could be easily traced to him, and Kuzmitch is a very smart man.'

The stilt walker was flamboyant in a Cossack's red coat and conical hat; he blew up balloons that he twisted into animals. Anton bought a tubular blue dog for the girl. As soon as the gift was presented, the dentist gave Anton a polite good-bye handshake and pulled her daughter away. Victor and Arkady watched from a table selling CDs, and Arkady wondered whether it would be a lifelong trait of the little girl to be attracted to dangerous men. The hygienist obviously was.

"The hygienist wears a diamond pin with her name, Galina," Victor said. "She walked by with that bouncing pin and my erection nearly knocked over the table."

The dentist and daughter turned toward the metro stop while Anton and Galina continued into a brilliantly lit glass dome where an elevator carried passengers down to an underground shopping mall, a borehole of boutiques selling French fashion, Polish crystal, Spanish ceramics, Russian furs, Japanese computer games, aromatherapy. Victor and Arkady followed on the stairs.

Victor said, "Anytime I think Russia 's fucked up, I think about the Ukraine, and I feel better. While they were digging the mall, they ran into part of the Golden Gate, the ancient wall of the city, an archaeological treasure, and the city knew if it announced what it had found that work would stop. So they kept mum and buried it. They lost a little identity, but they got McDonald's. Of course, it's not as good as the McDonald's in Moscow."

A bow wave of fear preceded Anton in each store, and mall guards greeted him with such deference that Arkady considered the possibility that Anton might be a silent partner in a store or two. The beautiful Galina traded in her denim top for a mohair sweater. She and Anton slipped into the changing room at a lingerie shop while Arkady and Victor watched from a rack of cookware in the opposite store. The plate-glass transparency of the modern mall was a gift to surveillance.

"A whole day in the dentist's chair, and all Obodovsky can think of is sex. You've got to give him credit," Victor said.

Arkady thought that Anton's shopping spree had more the aspect of a public tour, a prince of the streets demanding respect. Or a dog marking his old territory.

"Anton was originally Ukrainian. I need to know from where. Let me know if he stays around. I'm going back to Chernobyl."

"Don't do it, Arkady. Fuck Timofeyev, fuck Bobby, it's not worth it. Since I got together with Lyuba again, I've been thinking: nobody misses Timofeyev. He was a millionaire, so what? He was a stack of money that blew away. No family. After Ivanov was dead, no friends. Really, I think what happened to him and Ivanov must have been a curse."

The ride back from Kiev was an obstacle course of potholes on an unlit highway and all he had looked forward to was sleep or oblivion; what he had not expected was Eva Kazka waiting at his door, as if he were late for an appointment. She drew sharply on her cigarette. Everything about her was sharp, the cutting attitude of her eyes, the edge of her mouth. She wore her usual camos and scarf.

"Your friend Timofeyev was dead white. You ask so many questions I thought you'd like to know."

"Would you like to come in?" Arkady asked.

"No, the hall is fine. You don't seem to have any neighbors."

"One. Maybe this is the low season for the Zone."

"Maybe," she said. "It's after midnight, and you're not drunk."

"I've been busy," Arkady said.

"You're out of step. You have to keep up with the people of Chornobyl. Vanko was looking for you at the café."

They were interrupted by Campbell, the British ecologist, who came out into the hall in an undershirt and drawers. He swayed and scratched. Eva had stepped aside, and he didn't appear to see her at all.

"Tovarich! Comrade!"

"People don't actually say that anymore," Arkady said. In fact, they rarely had. "In any case, good evening. How are you feeling?"

"Tip-top."

"I haven't seen you around."

"And you won't. I brought a lovely pair of nonradioactive balls here, and I will leave with the same number. Stocked for the duration. Whiskey, mainly. Pop in anytime, although I apologize in advance for the quality of Ukrainian television. Will fix that soon enough. You do speak English?"

"That's what we're speaking." Although Campbell 's Scottish burr was so thick that he was barely intelligible.

"You're so right. The joke's on me. A standing invite, any hour. We're Scots, not Brits, no formalities with us."

"You're very generous."

"Seriously. I'll be badly disappointed if you don't." Campbell seemed to count to ten before adding, "Then it's settled," and disappearing back into his room.

Eva let the air clear for a moment. "Your new friend? What did he say?"

"I think he said that whiskey was better than vodka for protection against radioactivity."

"You can't help some people."

"What do you mean, he was white?"

"It was only an impression I had because Timofeyev was clothed and refrigerated. Even so, he seemed bloodless, drained. I didn't think about it at the time. I've seen wounds like his among the dead in Chechnya. Cut the major arteries of the throat, and there's an effusion of blood. Not your dead friend, though. His shirt was clean, taking into account the mud and rain. His hair was clean, too. However, his nostrils were plugged with clotted blood."

"He had nosebleeds."

"This would have been more than a nosebleed."

"A broken nose?"

"There was no bruising. Of course, the local wolf pack had tugged him this way and that, so I couldn't be sure."

"Throat slit and an appearance of bloodlessness, but no bloodstains on the shirt or hair, only in the nose. Everything is contradictory."

"Yes. Also, I should apologize again for the comment about your wife. That was stupid of me. I'm afraid I've lost all sensitivity. It was unforgivable."

"No, her dying was unforgivable."

"You blame the doctors."

"No."

"I see. You're the self-elected captain of the lifeboat; you think you're responsible for everyone." She sighed. "I'm sorry, I must be drunk. On one glass, even. I usually don't get obnoxious quite so fast."

"I'm afraid there's no one left in the lifeboat, so I didn't do a very good job."

"I think I should be going." She didn't, though. "Who was the boy you were talking to on the phone? Just a friend, you said?"

"For reasons beyond my comprehension, I seem to have become responsible for an eleven-year-old boy named Zhenya who lives in a children's shelter in Moscow. It's a ridiculous relationship. I know nothing about him because he refuses to speak to me."

"It's a normal relationship. I refused to speak to my parents from the age of eleven on. Is he slow?"

"No, he's very bright. A chess player, and I suspect he might have a mathematical mind. And courage." Arkady remembered the times Zhenya had run away.

"Spoken like a parent."

"No. His real father is out there, and that's who Zhenya needs."

"You like helping people."

"Actually, when people get to me, they're generally beyond help."

"You're laughing."

"But it's true."

"No, I think you help. In Chechnya they always tried to drag the bodies back, even under fire. It was more important not to be abandoned. Did you feel abandoned when your wife died?"

"What does Chechnya have to do with my wife?"

"Did you?"

"Yes."

"That's how I am with Alex, except that he hasn't died, he just changed."

"How did we get on this subject?"

"We were being honest. Now you ask a question."

Arkady gently tugged her scarf so that it hung free. The hallway light was poor but when he raised her chin he saw a lateral scar like a minus sign at the base of her neck. "What's that?"

"My Chornobyl souvenir."

He realized that his hand hadn't moved, that it lingered on the warmth of her skin, and that she hadn't objected.

The door downstairs opened, and a voice called up, "Renko, is that you? I have something for you. I'm coming up."

"It's Vanko." Eva retied her scarf in a rush.

"I'll show you." Vanko started up.

"Wait, I'm coming down," Arkady said.

Eva whispered, "I wasn't here."

The café was Chernobyl 's evening social club and senate, and Arkady's stature had risen since the discovery of Boris Hulak in the cooling pond. He was afforded elbow room and a table while Vanko bought him a beer. The music was Pink Floyd, which some people thought they could dance to.

"Alex says you attract murders the way a magnet attracts iron filings."

"Alex says the nicest things."

"He'll be by. He's looking for Eva."

Arkady did not say that he had just left her. Interesting, he thought. Our first collusion. "You said you had something for me?"

"For the Jews." Vanko opened up a backpack and handed Arkady a videotape, unlabeled except for a price of fifty dollars.

"How did you come up with that price?"

"It's a valuable keepsake. We could sell this to your American friend and share the profit. What do you think?"

"A videotape of a tomb? This is the gravesite we saw yesterday? You really have made a business out of it."

"I can be a guide, too. I know where everything is. I was here during the accident, you know, just a boy."

"Considering the exposure you had then, isn't the Zone the last place you should be?"

"The Zone is the last place for anyone to be. Anyway, we rotate, as many days off as on."

"What do people do in their free time?"

"I don't do much. Alex makes good money; he says he works in the belly of the beast. That's what he calls Moscow. Eva works in a clinic in Kiev." Vanko nudged the tape closer to Arkady. "What do you think?"

Arkady turned the cassette over. "A Jewish tomb? I haven't noticed many Jews here."

"Because of the Germans and the war. Although many people suffered from the Germans during the war, not just Jews. You always hear about the Jews."

Arkady nodded. "The genocide and all."

"Yes."

"But you seem to be the unofficial welcoming party for visiting Jews."

"I try to help. I found accommodations for your friend and his driver in a decontaminated house."

"Sounds charming." Arkady knew that this was against Zone regulations; he also knew that dollars worked miracles. "So do you have a tape player? I can't sell the tape to the American unless I know what's on it."

"Mine is broken. Some of the militia had personal machines in their rooms, but they got stolen. But no problem, this can be organized. Hold on to the tape."

"You can count on Vanko." Alex pulled a chair up to the table. "He can organize anything. And congratulations to you, Senior Investigator. Another dead body, I understand. You bring out the murder in people. I suppose in your line of endeavor that is a talent. Where is Eva?"

Vanko shrugged and Arkady said he didn't know, even as he asked himself why he had now lied twice about her.

"You're sure you haven't seen her?" Alex asked Arkady.

"I just returned from Kiev."

"That's right," Vanko said. "His bike was warm."

"Maybe we should issue a missing-persons bulletin for her," Alex said. "What do you think, Renko?"

"Why are you worried?"

"A husband worries."

"You're divorced."

"That doesn't matter, not if you still care. Vanko, can you get us a round of beers?"

"Sure." Vanko, happy to attend, pushed his way through dancers toward the crowd at the counter.

Arkady didn't want to talk about Eva with Alex. He said, "So, your father was a famous physicist, and you were a physicist. Why did you change to ecology?"

"You keep asking."

"It's an interesting switch."

"No, what's interesting is that there are two hundred nuclear power plants and ten thousand nuclear warheads around the world and all in the hands of incompetents."

"That's a sweeping statement."

"It only takes one. I think we can count on it." Alex lowered his voice to a confidential level. "The thing is, Renko, that Eva and I are not really divorced. On paper, yes. However, in my heart, no. And of course it's so much worse if you've been married. That kind of intimacy never ends."

"A former husband doesn't have claims."

"Outside the Zone, maybe. The Zone is different, more intimate. You're an educated man: do you know what smell is?"

"A sense."

"More than that. Smell is the essence, the attachment of free molecules of the thing itself. If we could really see each other, we would see clouds of loose molecules and atoms. We're dripping with them. Every person you meet, you exchange some with. That's why lovers reek of each other, because they've joined so completely that they're virtually the same person. No court, no piece of paper can ever separate you." Alex took Arkady's hand in his and began to squeeze. Alex's hand was broad and strong from setting traps. "Who knows how many thousands of molecules we're exchanging right now:

"This is something you learned in ecology?"

Alex squeezed harder; his hand was a vise with five fingers. "From nature. Smell, taste, touch. You have pictures in your mind of her with another man. You know every inch of her body, inside and out. Every single feature. The combination of experience and imagination is what drives you crazy. Because you've slept with her, you even know what gives her pleasure. You hear her. To picture someone physically with her is too much. A wolf wouldn't put up with it. Would you say you are a wolf or a dog?"

Arkady pulled his hand into a fist for self-protection. "I'd say I'm a hedgehog."

"See, that's exactly the sort of answer Eva would enjoy. I know the kind of man she's attracted to. I knew when she said she disliked you."

"It was that obvious?"

"You even look alike, the same dark hair and soulful pallor, like brother and sister."

"I hadn't noticed."

"I'm just saying that even if the opportunity presents itself, for Eva's sake you shouldn't take advantage. I ask as a friend, your first friend in the Zone, is anything going on between you and Eva?"

"No."

"That's good. We don't want to get territorial, do we?"

"No."

"Because all you came to the Zone for was your investigation. Stay focused on that." Alex let go. Arkady's hand looked like wadded clay, the blood driven out, and he resisted the temptation to flex it to see what worked. "Go ahead, did you have any questions?"

"I understand that for safety's sake, you only do research in the Zone every other month. What do you do during your month in Moscow?"

"That kind of question: good."

"What do you do?"

"I visit various ecological institutes, pull together research I did here, lecture, write."

"Is that lucrative?"

"Obviously you have never written for a scientific journal. It's for the honor."

Alex described amusingly a scientific conference on the tapeworm where hungry scientists stayed near the canapes, and he and Arkady went on talking in a normal fashion about everyday subjects-films, money, Moscow-but on another, silent level Arkady had the feeling that he had been knocked down and straddled.

On his way back to the dormitory, Arkady heard the muffled flight of a nightjar scooping up moths. He had retreated from the café when he became aware that Alex was watching for Eva's arrival and realized that Alex was waiting only to see how she and Arkady would act, to look for social uneasiness, to discover the telltale clues a former husband couldn't miss. The clinging molecules and atoms. The streetlamp had gone out since Arkady had crossed under it with Vanko. The only light at the dormitory was a weak bulb at the front step, and where trees crowded out the moon, the street disappeared in the dark. Arkady didn't mind darkness. The problem was that he didn't feel alone. Not another bird or a cat slinking for cover but something else glided by him, first on one side and then the other. When he stopped, it circled him. When he walked, it kept pace. Then it stopped, and he felt ridiculous even as his neck grew cool.

"Alex? Vanko?"

There was no answer but the sifting of leaves overhead, until he heard a laugh in the dark. Arkady clutched Vanko's videotape under his arm and started to trot. The dormitory light was a mere fifty meters off. He wasn't afraid; he was just a man taking midnight exercise. Something flew by, scooped up his leg in midstride and planted him on his back. Something from the other side speared him in the stomach and knocked the air out of him. Oxygen floated over him just out of reach, and his chest made the sound of a dry pump. The best he could do was roll to the side as a blade dug into the street by his ear, which earned him a slap on the head from the other direction. The gliding sound went on. Face on the pavement, he sucked his first breath and saw, silhouetted against the distant light of the café, a figure in camos on inline skates and carrying a hockey stick. It rolled forward, stick poised for a winning goal. Arkady tried to get to his feet and immediately went down on a numb leg, his reward a blow across the back. Facedown again, he noticed that what made them such excellent shots were night-vision goggles strapped to their heads. Since he was going nowhere, they circled, darting in and out, letting him twist one way and then the other. When he kicked back, they slashed his legs. When he tried to grab a stick, they feinted and hit him from the other side. The last thing he was prepared for was a man stepping in between with a flashlight that he shone directly into the eyes of the nearest skater. While the skater blindly staggered back, the man put a large gun under the skater's chin and directed the light on it so that the second skater could see the relationship of gun barrel to head.

A voice croaked, "Fascists! I will shoot, and your friend will blow up like a grapefruit. Get back, go home or I'll shoot both of you goyischer boot shit. Go on, go!"

It was Yakov, and although he was half the size of the skater in his grasp, Yakov gave him a kick to send him on his way to the other skater. They huddled for a moment, but the click of the gun hammer being cocked discouraged them, and they rolled off into the shadows on the far side of the street.

Arkady got to his feet and located, in order, his head, shins and the videotape.

"If you're standing, you're okay," Yakov said.

"What are you doing here?"

"Following you."

"Thank you."

"Forget it. Let me see again." Yakov played the flashlight beam around Arkady's head. "You look fine."

Yakov is now the arbiter of damage? Arkady thought. This was trouble.