Wolves Eat Dogs

12

Yakov set up a camp stove on the dock of the Chernobyl Yacht Club and made a breakfast of smoked fish and black coffee for Hoffman and Arkady. The gunman cooked in shirtsleeves, his shoulder holster showing, and he seemed to take pleasure in the vista of rusted ships heaped against a gray sky.

Hoffman beat his chest like Tarzan. "This is like going down the Zambezi River. Like The African Queen. Except all the cannibals here are blond, blue-eyed Ukrainians."

"You're not prejudiced?" Arkady asked.

"Just saying that the house your pal Vanko got us was as cold and dark as a cave. Forget kosher kitchen."

"Is the house radioactive?"

"Not particularly. I know, I know, in Chernobyl that's four-star accommodations."

Arkady looked Hoffman over. The red stubble on the American's jowls was filling in. "You stopped shaving?"

"They want Hasidim, I'll give them Hasidim. You, on the other hand, look like you've been fucked by a bear."

"Yakov says I'll be fine." Arkady had checked himself when he woke. He was crosshatched with bruises from his shins to his ribs, and his head throbbed every time he turned it.

Hoffman was amused. "With Yakov, unless broken bones are sticking through the skin, you're fine. Don't ask for any sympathy from him."

"He's fine," Yakov said. He picked crust off the pan to throw in the water. Fish rose to take it in gulps. "He's a mensch."

"Which means?" Arkady asked.

"Schmuck," Hoffman said. "Get close to people, help them, trust them, it just makes you vulnerable. Do you know who jumped you?

"I'm pretty sure they were two brothers named Woropay. Militia. Yakov scared them off."

"Yakov can do that."

Yakov squatted by the stove and-except for the cannon hanging from his shoulder-resembled any pensioner at peace with the slow-moving water, the array of wrecks going nowhere, the mounting thunderheads. Arkady couldn't tell how much Yakov understood or cared to understand. Sometimes he responded in Ukrainian, sometimes Hebrew, sometimes nothing, like an ancient radio with a varying signal.

Hoffman said, "Yakov did the right thing by letting the creeps go. Ukrainians are not going to take the word of a Russian and a Jew over two of their own police. Besides, I don't want Yakov tied up. I'm paying him to protect me, not you. If they really start digging around, they've got warrants out for Yakov that go back to the Crimean War. You notice he wears a yarmulke. He puts the goyim on notice enough."

"Have you been here before?" Arkady asked, but Yakov busied himself turning the fish, which was smoked, grilled and charred. What more could be done to it? Arkady wondered.

"So you saw our friend Victor in Kiev yesterday," Hoffman said.

"Didn't he look prosperous?"

"Transformed."

"Better, let's leave it at that. The main thing is, the two of you saw that ape Obodovsky with his dentist."

"And dental hygienist."

"Dental hygienist. Why don't you and Victor steal a page from the Woropay brothers and take a couple of hockey sticks to Obodovsky? Get him to tell you where he was when that van showed up in the alley behind Pasha's apartment house. If you don't know how, Yakov can help you. This happens to fall into his field of expertise. You must have questions."

"I do. You said you were here last year, on instructions from Pasha Ivanov, to look into a commercial transaction involving spent nuclear fuel."

"They're stuffed to the gills here. No working reactor, but tons of dirty fuel. Insane."

"It didn't make business sense?"

"Right. What does this have to do with Obodovsky?"

"Who did you talk to here? What officials?" Arkady asked.

"I don't know. I don't remember."

"That would have involved an investment of millions of dollars. You talked to the plant manager, the engineers, the ministry in Kiev?"

"People like that, yes."

"You had to come disguised for that?"

Hoffman's eyes got smaller as he got angry. "What are these questions? You're supposed to be on my side. The fuel deal never happened. It had nothing to do with Pasha or Timofeyev dying. Or Obodovsky, for that matter."

"Eat, eat." Yakov handed out camp plates of grilled fish.

Hoffman asked, "How about Yakov and I just go back to Kiev, have Victor lead us to Obodovsky and blow his head off?"

"Coffee." Yakov passed metal cups of something black and syrupy. "Before it rains."

The fish had the texture of underwater cable. Arkady sipped the coffee and, now that he had time, admired Yakov's American gun, a.45 with bluing worn to bare steel.

"Reliable?"

"For fifty years," Yakov said.

"A little slower than a modern gun."

"Slow can be good. Take your time and aim, is what I say."

"Wise words."

"Why not beat on Obodovsky?" Hoffman insisted.

"Because Anton Obodovsky is very much an outside person, and whoever arranged the delivery of cesium chloride to Pasha's apartment was inside. They didn't break in; they had the codes and somehow got around the cameras."

"Colonel Ozhogin?"

"He certainly is inside NoviRus Security."

"I can have him killed. He killed Timofeyev and Pasha."

"Only, Ozhogin has never been here. You are the one who has been, and you won't tell me why. How long are you going to stay?"

"I don't know. We're enjoying ourselves, camping out, what's the rush?"

There didn't seem to be one for Hoffman. He sat on the car fender and picked his teeth with a fish bone. He looked like a man with a sudden abundance of patience.

"Thank you for the coffee." Arkady started off the dock.

"My father was here," Yakov said.

"Oh?" Arkady stopped.

Yakov felt in his shirt pocket and lit half of a cigarette he had saved. He spoke in an offhand way, as if a detail had come to mind. " Chernobyl was a port town, a Jewish center. When the Reds were taking over Russia, the Ukraine was independent. So what did they do? The Ukrainians put all the Jews in Chernobyl into boats and sank them, drowned them and machine-gunned anyone who tried to swim for shore."

"Like I told you," Hoffman told Arkady, "don't ask for any sympathy from Yakov."

As soon as Arkady rode to the street above the river he called Victor, who admitted that he had lost Anton Obodovsky at a casino the night before.

"You have to buy a hundred-dollar membership before they let you in. And they really liked sticking it to a Russian. Anton games all night while I'm jerking off in front. He's up to something. I just feel sorry for Galina."

"Galina?"

"The hygienist. Miss Universe? She seems like a sweet kid. Maybe a tad materialistic."

"How was Anton's tooth?" Arkady asked.

"He seemed normal."

"Where are you now?"

"Back at the café, in case Anton returns. It's pouring here. You know what Europeans do in the rain? They spend all day over a cup of coffee. It's very chic."

"You sound like you're having a wonderful vacation. Go to the travel agency across from the dentist and see whether Anton bought tickets anywhere. Also, I know we checked before to see what Ivanov and Timofeyev were doing during the accident here at Chernobyl, but I want you to do it again."

"We already know. Nothing. They were two prodigies in Moscow doing research."

"On what, for whom?"

"Ancient history."

"I'd appreciate it if you would do it anyway." Through the trees Arkady could make out Hoffman and Yakov on the dock. Yakov meditated by the water and Hoffman was on a mobile phone. "How much of this information are you passing to Bobby?"

After momentary embarrassment, Victor said, "Lyuba called. I explained the situation to her, and then she explained the situation to me. As she says, Hoffman is paying me."

"You're giving him everything?"

"Pretty much. But I'm giving the same to you, and I'm not charging you a kopek."

"Bobby is using me as a hunting dog. He's going to sit around and wait until I flush something into the open."

"You do the work and he cashes in? I think that's called capitalism."

"One more thing. Vanko admires the way Alex Gerasimov makes money during his off-time from Chernobyl by interpreting and translating at a Moscow hotel. No shame in that. But Alex says he does nothing but academic work that pays little or nothing at all. A small discrepancy, and probably none of my business."

"That's what I was thinking."

Arkady caught a raindrop in his palm. "Start by calling Moscow hotels that cater to Western businessmen-the Aerostar, Kempinski, Marriott-and work your way down. This will be expensive. Call from your hotel on Bobby's account."

"Magic words."

Before the rain hit, Arkady rode to the black village where Timofeyev had been found. He had visited the site twenty times before, and each time he had tried to imagine how a Russian millionaire could have arrived at the gate of a cemetery in the Zone. Arkady also tried to picture how Timofeyev's body had been discovered by Militia Officer Katamay and a local squatter. Did that description fit the scavenger hauled from the cooling pond? Now all three were gone, Timofeyev and Hulak dead and Katamay vanished. The facts made no sense. The atmospherics, on the other hand, were perfect, a spatter of raindrops from an ominous sky and an approaching fanfare of thunder, the same as Timofeyev's last day.

Arkady got off the bike in the clearing where Eva Kazka had held her outdoor medical clinic. In a way, there were two cemeteries. One was the village itself, with its punched-in windows and falling roofs. The other was the graveyard of simple crosses of metal tubing painted blue or white, some with a plaque, some with a photograph sealed in an oval frame, some decorated with bright bouquets of plastic flowers. Keep your eternal flame, Arkady thought, bring me plastic flowers.

Maria Panasenko popped up from a corner of the cemetery. Arkady was surprised, because a diamond marker by the gate indicated that the cemetery was too hot to trespass on, and visits were limited to one a year. Maria wore a heavy shawl in case of rain; otherwise, she was the same ancient cherub who had provided the drunken samogon party two nights before. Maria held a short scythe and, over her shoulder, a burlap sack of brambles and weeds she refused to let Arkady relieve her of. Her hands were small and tough, and her blue eyes shone even in the shadows of heavy clouds.

"Our neighbors." She looked around the graveyard. "I'm sure they'd do the same for us."

"It's nicely kept," Arkady said. A cozy anteroom to heaven, he thought.

She smiled and showed her steel teeth. "Roman and I were always afraid there wouldn't be a good cemetery plot for us. Now we have our choice."

"Yes." The silver lining.

She cocked her head. "It's sad, all the same. A village dies, it's like the end of a book. That's it, no more. Roman and I may be the last page."

"Not for many years."

"It's long enough already, but thank you."

"I was wondering, what are the militia like around here?"

"Oh, we don't see much of them."

"Squatters?"

"No."

"There don't happen to be any Obodovskys in the cemetery?"

Maria shook her head and said she knew all the families from the surrounding villages. No Obodovskys. She glanced up at the sack. "Excuse me, I should get these in before they get wet. You should stop for a drink."

"No, no, thank you." The very threat of samogon made him sweat.

"You're sure?"

"Yes. Another day, if I may."

He waited until she was gone before he brought his mind back to Lev Timofeyev's death. Arkady was sure of so little: basically that the body had been found faceup in the mud at the cemetery gate, his throat slit, his left eye a cavity, neither his hair nor his shirt bloody but blood packed in his nose. Arkady was nowhere near to asking why; it was all he could do to ask how. Had Timofeyev driven himself to the village or been brought by someone else? Searched out the cemetery or been led to it? Dragged to it dead or alive? If there had been a competent detective at the scene, would he have found tire tracks, a trail of blood, the twin shoe marks of a dragged body or mud inside the dead man's shoes? Or at least footprints; the report cited wolf prints, why not shoes? If it came to why, was Timofeyev the target of a conspiracy, or a plum that happened to fall into the hands of Officer Katamay?

Arkady started again in the village clearing as the most likely place for a car to stop. From there, the way to the cemetery narrowed to a footpath. A curtain shifted at one of the few occupied houses, and before the curtain closed, he caught a glimpse of Maria's neighbor Nina, on a crutch. How could anything have occurred within eyesight of these wary survivors and not be spied? Yet they had all sworn they'd seen nothing.

Walking up the path, Arkady stopped every few feet to brush aside leaves and look for prints or signs of blood, as he had done a dozen times before and with no more success. He paused at the cemetery gate and imagined Timofeyev standing, kneeling, lying on his back. Photographs really would have been helpful. Or a diagram or sketch. At this point Arkady was no better than a dog trying to uncover a stale scent. Yet there was always something. Visitors to the rolling hills of Borodino still felt the breath of French and Russian fusiliers underneath the grass. Why not an echo of Timofeyev's last living moment? And why not the spirits of those buried in this village plot? If ever there were simple lives, there were these, passed within the circuit of a few fields and orchards, almost as far from the rest of the world as another century.

Arkady opened the gate. The cemetery was a second village of plots and crosses separated by wrought-iron fences. A few plots had barely enough room to stand in, while one or two offered the comfort of a table and bench, but there were no impressive crypts or stones; wealth played little part in the life or death of such a community. Maria had industriously cleared around the crosses on one entire side, and on their own, without crosses, stood four glass jars of pansies, purple, blue and white, each at the head of a faintly discernible mound. The light was so thin that Arkady couldn't be sure. He knelt and spread his arms. Four child-size graves hidden by their lack of crosses. Illegal graves. How great a crime was that?

Eva had said that Timofeyev was white, he seemed drained. Frozen bodies could fool, but Arkady was willing to believe that she had seen more violence than most physicians, and Timofeyev's one-eyed stare through a mask of hoarfrost must have reminded her more of Chechnya than of cardiac arrest. Only, when Timofeyev's throat was cut, the blood went where? Right side up, blood should have soaked his shirt. Upside down, his hair. That only his nose was filled with blood suggested that he was inverted and, afterward, his face and hair rinsed. And the eye? Was that a delicacy for wolves?

Unless he was hung by his feet and, afterward, had his hair washed. Despite the draining there still would have been some lividity of settled blood around the head, but that could have been confused with freezer burn.

Arkady stood with his hand on the gate and for a moment caught the glint of something revealed, something lying in front of him and then gone, chased by a patter of raindrops, the light preparation of a hard rain.

The next black village had no inhabitants at all, and its cemetery lay deep in the embrace of brambles and weeds. Arkady had hoped the comparison would lead to some sort of realization, but what he found as he dismounted from the motorcycle and walked around was a deepening gloom of rotting cottages. A loamy toadstool smell vied with the oversweet scent of decaying apples. Where wild boar had dug for mushrooms, the dosimeter in Arkady's pocket spoke up. He heard something shifting in the house ahead and asked himself which was faster to the motorcycle, man or boar? Suddenly he wished he had Captain Marchenko's hunting knife or, better, Yakov's cannon.

The house gave a single-cylinder whine, and a rider in a helmet and camos on a small motorbike came out the front door. The rider pushed through the debris in the yard and over a prostrate picket fence, where he momentarily came to a halt to lower his helmet visor. The bike had no sidecar to stuff an icon in, and it did have a license plate, but it was a blue Suzuki, and the reflector was missing from the rear fender. Arkady had that reflector in his pocket.

"Are you looking for more icons to steal?" Arkady asked.

The thief returned Arkady's gaze as if to say, "You again?" and started off. By the time Arkady had reached his own motorcycle, the thief was halfway out of the village.

Arkady had the bigger, faster bike, but he simply wasn't as good a rider. The thief left the village on a narrow trail made for gathering firewood. Where branches had half-fallen, he ducked, and where the path was blocked, he deftly slipped by. Arkady crashed through the smaller branches and was swept clean off his saddle by the outstretched arm of an oak. The bike was all right, that was the main thing. He climbed back on and listened for the voice of the Suzuki. Rain pinged the leaves. Birches swayed in the arriving breeze. There was no hint of the thief.

Arkady pushed ahead with his engine off and, at this more deliberate speed, found motorbike tracks in the damp leaves underfoot; moisture made footprints and tire treads easier to read. Where the path forked, he consciously took the wrong trail for fifty meters before cutting through the woods to the right trail, where he saw the thief waiting behind a glistening screen of firs. The forest floor of damp needles was soft, and the thief's attention was fixed entirely on the trail until the steel jaws of a trap sprang from the ground and snapped shut next to Arkady's foot. The thief turned to regard the tableau of Arkady, bike and trap, and in a second was riding back down the trail the way he had come.

The thief kept ahead of Arkady but didn't completely lose him; as long as Arkady kept the smaller bike in sight, he could anticipate obstacles. Also, Arkady took chances he wouldn't have in a saner mood, following a far more expert rider leap for leap, fishtailing on leaves to swing off the path and weave through a stand of pines until they broke back into the village. On the far side was a forestry road with chest-high seedlings of second-growth trees. The thief took them like a slalom skier, leaning one way and then the other. Arkady rode straight over the seedlings, gaining all the time.

As Arkady drew close, the thief veered off the forestry road into a line of rust-colored pines, the outer reach of the Red Forest, then through onto an undulating field with radiation markers of buried houses, cars and trucks. Arkady plunged into hollows, churned his way out and plunged again, while the thief flew in and out with acrobatic ease. Every way Arkady turned, the thief appeared farther out of reach until a hidden ditch twisted the front wheel of Arkady's bike and sent him over the handlebars. He hauled himself up, but the chase was over. The thief disappeared toward Chernobyl as the horizon went white and shuddered, followed by a thunderclap that announced a storm finally delivered.

As the clouds unloaded, the lights of the town seemed to drown. Arkady rode in at a limp, wet hair wrapped across his brow. He passed the inviting glow of the café and heard the splash of people running for its door. The windows were steamed. No one saw him go by. He rode past the dormitory, the parking lot sizzling with rain. He rode under bending branches. He pictured Victor sitting out the storm at a café in Kiev, sharing the space with pigeons. Arkady's camos took a clammy grip on his chest and shoulders. A truck went by with windshield wipers thrashing, and he doubted it had noticed him at all.

He turned at the road that led down to the river, where he had a panorama of the storm. Steam rose from the water as rain fell, but Arkady could see that Hoffman, Yakov and their car had deserted the yacht-club dock. Scuttled ships levitated from fog with each lightning strike. The far bank was a hazy sketch of aspens and reeds, but farther upstream the bridge led to the forlorn lights of staff quarters still occupied. Arkady could see well enough by the lightning to keep his own headlight off. He crossed the bridge and passed between the solid brick buildings on spongy soil that came to an end, except for a car track that led along what might once have been a sports field but had sunk under cattails and ferns.

Arkady killed his engine and pushed, following the track around a shadowy stand of trees to a garage fashioned from sheets of corrugated steel. The doors were held shut with a loose padlock. They creaked as he swung them open, but with thunder in every direction, he doubted anyone would hear less than a bomb. Arkady scanned the interior with his penlight. The garage was crammed but orderly: hardware in jars on shelves, hand tools in rows along the walls. In the middle was Eva Kazka's white Moskvich. On one side of the car was a Suzuki bike with the engine still warm; under a tarp on the other side, a disengaged sidecar. From his pocket Arkady took the reflector he had snapped off the rear fender of the icon thief's bike and mated it to the metal stub on Eva's fender. They fit.

Wood smoke led to a cabin set among a blue mass of lilacs. A porch had been converted to a parlor. Through a window Arkady glimpsed an upright piano and bright chinks of fire in a woodstove. He rapped on the door, but thunder had opened up like siege guns, flattening all other sounds. He opened the door as lightning flashed behind him, strobe-lighting a glassed-in porch's assortment of a rug, wicker table and chairs, bookshelves and paintings. The room sank back into the dark. He had taken a step in when the sky above cracked open and filled the room like a searchlight. Eva moved to the middle of the rug with a gun. She was barefoot, in a robe. The gun was a 9mm, and she seemed familiar with it.

Eva said, "Get out or I'll shoot."

The door slammed shut in the wind, and for a moment Arkady thought she had fired. She gathered the robe together with her free hand.

"It's me," he said.

"I know who it is."

In a momentary dark he moved closer and pushed aside the collar of the robe to kiss her neck on the same fine scar he had found before. She pressed the muzzle of the pistol against his head as he slid open the robe. Her breasts were cold as marble.

He heard a mechanism of the gun at work, easing the hammer down. He felt a tremor run through her legs. She pressed the flat of the gun against his head, holding him.

Her bed was in a room with its own woodstove, which whistled softly with heat. How they had arrived there, he wasn't quite sure. Sometimes the body took over. Two bodies, in this case. Eva rolled on top as he entered until her head rocked back, sweat like kohl around her eyes, her body straining as if she were about to leap, as if all the frenzy he had detected in her before had become a voracious need. No different from him. They were two starving people feeding from the same spoon.

Chaos turned to steady rain. Eva and Arkady sat at opposite ends of the bed. The light of an oil lamp brought out the black of her eyes, hair, curls at the base of her stomach, the gun by her hand.

"Are you going to shoot me?" he asked.

"No. Punishment only encourages you." She gave his scratches and bruises a professional glance.

"Some of these are thanks to you," he said.

"You'll live."

"That's what I thought."

She gestured vaguely to the bed, as if to a battlefield. "This didn't mean anything."

"It meant a great deal to me."

"You took me by surprise."

He thought about it. "No. I took you by inevitability."

"A magnetic attraction?"

"Something like that."

"Have you ever seen little toy magnetic dogs? How they attract each other? That doesn't mean they want to. It was a mistake."

The lamp threw as much shadow as light, but he could see an agreeable mess: an overlap of pillows, books and rugs. A framed photo showing an older couple in front of a different house; Arkady had to look twice to recognize the ruin where Eva had hidden with her bike. A poster for a Stones concert in Paris. A teapot and cups with bread, jams, knife, cutting board and crumbs. All in all, an intimate cabin.

Arkady nodded to the gun. "I could field-strip that for you. I could field-strip it blindfolded by the age of six. It's about the only thing my father ever taught me."

"A handy ability."

"He thought so."

"You and Alex have more in common than you imagine."

One item they had in common was obvious, but Arkady felt that Eva had meant more than herself. "How is that?"

Eva shook her head. She dismissed that line of conversation. Instead, she said, "Alex said this would happen."

"Alex is a smart man," Arkady said.

"Alex is a crazy man."

"Did you drive him crazy?"

"By sleeping with other men? Not that many. I desperately need a cigarette."

Arkady found two and an ashtray he put in no-man's-land at the center of the bed.

Eva said, "What do you know about suicide? Besides cutting down the bodies, I mean?"

"Oh, I come from a long line of suicides. Mother and father. You'd think it would be a short line, but no, they get their procreation done early, and then they kill themselves."

"Have you…"

"Not successfully. Anyway, here we are in Chernobyl. I think we're making effort enough. And you?"

She balked again, not ready to let him lead. "So how is your investigation going?"

"Moments of clarity. Millionaires are generally murdered for money. I'm not sure that's the case here."

"Anything else?"

"Yes. When I first came, I assumed that the deaths of Ivanov and Timofeyev were connected. I still think so, but in a different way. Perhaps more parallel."

"Whatever that means. What were you doing in the village today?"

"I was at the cemetery at Roman and Maria's, and I began wondering if any of the official fatalities from the accident came from the villages in the Zone. Whether I would recognize names on the crosses. I didn't, but I found four unmarked graves of children."

"Grandchildren. Of different causes supposedly unrelated to Chornobyl. What happens is the family breaks up, and no one is left to bury the dead but the grandparents, who take them home. No one keeps track. There were forty-one official deaths from the accident and half a million unofficial. An honest list would reach to the moon."

"Then I went to the next village, where I found you. What were you doing on a motorcycle in a house? Let me guess. You take icons so they can be reported as stolen to the militia. That way scavengers and the corrupt officers they work with have no reason to bother old folks like Roman and Maria. Then you return the icons. But there were no occupied houses or icons in that village, so why were you there? Whose house was it?"

"No one's."

"I recognized the bike by the broken reflector and recognized you by the scarf. You should get rid of your scarves." He leaned across the bed to kiss her neck. That she didn't shoot him he took as a good omen.

Eva said, "Every once in a while I remember this thirteen-year-old girl parading on May Day with her idiotic smile. She's moved out of the village to Kiev to live with her aunt and uncle so she can go to a special school for dance; their standards are rigid, but she's been measured and weighed and has the right build. She has been selected to hold a banner that says, 'Marching into the Radiant Future!' She is so pleased the day is warm enough not to wear a coat. The young body is a wonder of growth, the division of cells produces virtually a new person. And on this day she will be a new person, because a haze comes over the sun, a breeze from Chornobyl. And so ends her days of dancing and begins her acquaintanceship with Soviet surgery." She touched the scar. "First the thyroid and then the tumors. That's how you know a true citizen of the Zone. We fuck without worries. I am a hollow woman; you can beat me like a drum. Still, once in a while, I remember this fatuous girl and am so ashamed of her stupidity that if I could go back in time with a gun, I would shoot her myself. When this feeling overcomes me, I go to the nearest hole or black house and hide. There are enough black houses that this is never a problem. Otherwise I have nothing to fear. Were you ambitious as a boy? What did you want to be?"

"When I was a boy, I wanted to be an astronomer and study the stars. Then someone informed me that I wasn't seeing the actual stars, I was seeing starlight generated thousands of years before. What I thought I was seeing was long since over, which rendered the exercise rather pointless. Of course, the same can be said about my profession now. I can't bring back the dead."

"And the injured?"

"Everybody's injured."

"Is that a promise?"

"It's the only thing I'm sure of."