Wolves Eat Dogs

6

Captain Marchenko steered with one finger and waved a radio microphone in his other hand like a tank commander. "This is good. We will prove there is law and order in the Zone. Even here! These vultures go into the village churches and steal the church icons, or go into the houses of simple people and take the icons there. Well, we have him now. The fields are too boggy to cross, and there isn't much traffic on this road. Aha, there he is! The vulture is in sight!"

A dot on the horizon was developing into a motorcycle and sidecar, not a powerful bike, more what a farmer might use to transport chickens. Gray sky swept by. Red firs lined the road, and markers showed where houses and barns too hot to truck away or burn were buried.

Captain Marchenko had swung by in a militia car and invited Arkady to help pursue a thief who had escaped a checkpoint with an icon in the sidecar of his motorcycle. From exchanges on the radio, Arkady gathered that another car was posted ahead. It was clear that it gave the captain pleasure to turn an investigator from Moscow into a captive audience. "We may not have investigators like in Moscow, but we know what we're about."

"I'm sure that Chernobyl holds its own."

"Ch'o'rnobyl. The Ukrainian pronunciation is Ch'o'rnobyl."

Much of the topsoil had been buried under sand; up to the woods the ground was bulldozed flat, a chute for a headwind that made the motorcycle skitter from one side of the road to the other, not over a hundred meters ahead, and although the rider hunched down, the car was gaining. Arkady could see that the bike was small, maybe 75cc, blue, the license plate taped over.

"They're criminals, Renko. This is the way you have to treat them, not like you do, making friends, leaving food and money like it's everybody's birthday. You think you're going to find informants? You think that one dead Russian is more important than regular policing? Maybe he was a big man in Moscow, but he was nothing here. His office called. A Colonel Ozhogin said to keep an eye on you. I told him you were getting nowhere."

To locate the local squatter, Arkady had, over three weeks, created a registry of Zone illegals: old folks, squatters, scavengers, poachers and thieves. The old people were hidden but stationary. Scavengers operated out of cars and trucks. Poachers were usually restaurant employees from Kiev or Minsk, looking for venison or boar. Icon thieves were hit-and-run and harder to net.

Arkady said, "Then why was Timofeyev here? What was the connection between him and Chornobyl? What was the connection between him and Ivanov and Chornobyl? How many murders do you hive here?"

"None. Only your Timofeyev, only a Russian. I would have a perfect record otherwise. I might be out of here with a clean record. How do we know he was killed by someone from here? How do we know he was even here before in his life?"

"We ask. We find local people and ask, although I'll grant you, it isn't easy when officially no one is here."

"That's the Zone."

Sometimes Arkady thought of the Zone as an amusement-park mirror. Things were different in the Zone. He said, "I still wonder about the body. An Officer Katamay turned in the first report. I haven't been able to interview him, because he quit the militia. Do you have any idea where Katamay is?"

"Try the Woropay brothers. He was close to them."

"The Woropays were not responsive." The brothers Woropay knew that Arkady had no authority. They had been both dull and sly, smirking to each other, going heavy-lidded and silent. "I'd like to find Katamay, and I'd like to know who led him to the body."

"What does it matter? The body was a mess."

"How so?"

"Wolves."

"Specifically what did the wolves do?"

"They ate his eye."

"Ate his eye?" No one had mentioned that before.

"The left eye."

"Wolves do that?"

"Why not? And they tugged on his face a bit. That's why we missed the knife wound on the throat."

"He was dead when the wolves arrived. He wouldn't have bled that much."

"There wasn't that much blood. That's one reason we thought heart attack. Except for his eye and his nose, his face was clean."

"What was in his nose?"

"Blood."

"And his clothes?"

"Pretty clean, considering how the rain and how the wolves messed up the scene."

Hardly more than the militia, Arkady thought, but bit his tongue. "Who examined the body the second time? Who noticed that his throat was cut? They left no name or official report, only a one-line description of the neck wound.'

"I'd like to get my hands on them, too. If it hadn't been for someone mucking around where they shouldn't have been, the Russian would still be a heart attack, you wouldn't be here and my slate would be clean."

"Now, there's a new approach to militia work. If they don't have a pickax in the head, call it cardiac arrest." Arkady had meant to sound lighthearted, but Marchenko didn't seem to take it that way. Maybe it came out wrong, Arkady thought. "Anyway, the second examiner knew what he was doing. I'd just like to know who it was."

"You always want to know. The man from Moscow and his hundred thousand questions."

"I'd also like to take another look at Timofeyev's car."

"See what I mean? I don't have the time or the manpower for a homicide investigation. Especially of a dead Russian. Do you know what the official attitude is? 'There's nothing in the Zone but spent uranium, dead reactors and the suckers stationed there. Fuck them. Let them live on berries.' You saw yourself how all those other investigators didn't want to stay around too long. Nevertheless, we still carry out our functions, like now." Marchenko squinted ahead. "Ah, here we come."

Ahead, where dead firs gave way to potato fields, a white militia Lada and a pair of officers blocked the road. The fields were wet from the previous week's rain: no escape there. No problem. The motorcycle rider slowed to size up the blockade, sped up, leaned to his left and steered down and up the right shoulder of the road as neatly as plucking a blade of grass.

Marchenko picked up the radio. "Get out of the way."

The officers desperately pushed the Lada onto the shoulder as Marchenko barreled through. Arkady was glad he hadn't quit smoking. If he was going to die in the Zone, why deny himself a simple pleasure?

"Do you work out?" Marchenko asked.

Arkady hung on to a strap. "Not really."

"Middle of Moscow, it can't be easy. You can have Moscow. Do you like the Ukraine?"

"I haven't seen much besides the Zone. Kiev is a beautiful city." Arkady hoped that was diplomatic enough.

"Ukrainian girls?"

"Very beautiful."

"The most beautiful in the world, people say. Big eyes, big…" Marchenko cupped his chest. "Jews come once a year. They talk Ukrainian girls into going to America to be au pairs and keep them as slaves and whores. The Italians are as bad."

"Really?" There was a free-floating quality to the captain's anger that Arkady found disturbing.

"A bus goes daily to Milan, full of Ukrainian girls who end up as prostitutes."

"But not to Russia," Arkady said.

"No, who would go to Russia?" The captain shifted and dug out of a pocket a large knife in a leather sheath. "Go ahead, take it out."

Arkady unsnapped the guard and drew out a heavy blade with a blood groove and a two-edged tip. "Like a sword."

"For wild boar. You can't do that in Moscow, right?" Marchenko said.

"Hunting with a knife?"

"If you have the nerve."

"I am sure I do not have the nerve to catch a wild boar and stab it to death."

"Just remember, it's essentially a pig."

"And then you cat them?"

"No, they're radioactive. It's sport. We'll try it sometime, you and I."

The motorcycle swerved onto a side road, but Marchenko would not be shaken. The road dove down along a black mire of ragged cattails and then up by an apple orchard carpeted with rotting fruit. Two hovels seemed to rise from the ground, and the motorcycle went in between, followed by Marchenko, at the cost of a wing mirror. Suddenly they were in the middle of a village that was a quagmire of houses so cannibalized from the bottom up for firewood that every roof and window was at a slant. Washtubs sat in the front yards, and chairs sat at the street, as if there had been a final parade out of town and people to watch. Arkady heard the dosimeter raise its voice. The motorcycle shot through a barn, in the front and out the back. Marchenko followed only ten meters behind, close enough for Arkady to see an icon and blanket stuffed in the sidecar. The road dropped again toward a stand of sickly willows, a stream and, rising on the far side, a field of grain tangled by wind and gone to seed. The road narrowed at the willows, the perfect point to cut off the motorcycle-just like in the movies, Arkady thought, when Marchenko swerved to a stop and the motorcycle slipped into the trees and out of sight behind a screen of leaves.

Arkady said, "We can go on foot. A path like that, we'll catch up."

The captain shook his head and pointed to a radiation marker rusting among the trees. "Too hot. This is as far as we can go."

Arkady got out. The trees didn't quite reach the creek, and although the grass was high, the slope was downhill, and his boots were heavy with mud, Arkady managed to push through. Marchenko shouted for Arkady to stop. He saw the thief emerge from the trees. Despite the fact that the rider had gotten off to push, the motorcycle stayed virtually in place, spewing smoke and spraying mud. The rider was short, in a leather jacket and cap, with a scarf wrapped around his face. The icon, a Madonna with a starry cowl, peered from the sidecar. Arkady nearly had his hand on it when the bike gained traction and lurched forward on a road so overgrown it was barely a fold in the grass. He was close enough to read the logo on the engine cover. Suzuki. The bike bounced down from rut to rut, Arkady a step behind and Marchenko a step behind him. Arkady tripped over a radiation sign but was still almost within reach when the bike spurted across the streambed, kicking back rocks. Prom one step to the next, he was about to reach for the sidecar, but the climb from the stream on the other side was steeper, the wheat sleeker, and the motorcycle had more space to maneuver. Arkady dove for the rear fender and held it until a reflector snapped off in his hand and the bike pulled away by one meter, then five, then ten. It drew off while Arkady leaned on his knees and gave up. Blowing like a whale, Marchenko joined him.

The hillside was a yellow knoll topped by a silhouette of bare trees dead where they stood. The biker climbed to the trees, stopped and looked back. Marchenko pulled out his gun, a Walther PP, and aimed. It would take a real marksman at this range, Arkady thought. The pistol swayed with the captain's breathing. The biker didn't move.

Finally Marchenko replaced the gun in its holster. "We're over the border. The stream is the border. We're in Byelorussia. I can't go shooting people in other countries. Brush off the wheat. It's hot. Everything is hot."

Horseflies spun around the two men as they trudged back to the car. For humiliation, the day was already quite full, Arkady thought. Out of curiosity, he turned on his dosimeter when they crossed the stream, then shut off the angry ticking as soon as he heard it. "Can you take me back to Chernobyl?" he asked.

The captain slipped in the mud. As he rose, he bellowed, "It's Chornobyl. In Ukrainian, it's Chornobyl!"

Arkady's room in Chernobyl was in a metal dormitory perched on the edge of a parking lot. He had a bed and a quilt, a desk trimmed in cigarette burns, a dim lamp and a stack of files.

The team of investigators from Moscow had not completely wasted their time. They had searched for any possible connection among Timofeyev, Ivanov and Chernobyl. After all, before finding a second vocation in business, the two men had been physicists. They had grown up in the same Moscow neighborhood and, from the playground, had become good friends, Ivanov a natural leader, Timofeyev an ardent follower and both gifted enough in science to be sent to special schools and the Institute for Extremely High Temperatures under the tutelage of its director, Academician Gerasimov himself. For them the operation of a nuclear power plant would have been as dull as driving a bus. As far as detectives had been able to ascertain, Ivanov and Timofeyev had no relatives or friends at Chernobyl. None of their teachers or fellow students came from the Chernobyl area. They had never visited Chernobyl before the accident. There was no connection to Chernobyl at all.

Who was connected to Chernobyl?

Not Colonel Georgi Jovanovich Ozhogin, the head of NoviRus Security. His file was stuffed with encomiums to his first career as a Master of Sport, and adulatory references to his second career as a "selfless agent of the Committee for State Security." The authors of the report did not detail what this selflessness involved beyond citing his efforts for "international amity and athletic competition in Turkey, Algeria and France." Age: fifty-two. Married: Sonya Andreevna Ozhogin. Children: George, fourteen, and Vanessa, twelve. Arkady had not been part of the investigation team. Had he been, he might have pursued the idea that the only person with access to all the contaminated residences was the chief of NoviRus Security. However, the colonel volunteered to be interviewed under truth serum and hypnosis and passed both tests. From that point on, the investigators tiptoed around Ozhogin.

The investigators hadn't known what to make of Rina Shevchenko. Pasha Ivanov had given his lover excellent but thoroughly fictitious papers: birth certificate, school record, union card and residency permit. At the same time, it was clear from police reports that an underage Rina had run away from a cooperative farm outside St. Petersburg, moved illegally to Moscow and survived initially as a prostitute. The investigators' dilemma was whether the protection of such a powerful benefactor extended posthumously. On the advice of lawyers retained for her by her two friends Kuzmitch and Maximov, she refused to meet with investigators a second time. Would they have asked her about her Ukrainian surname? Well, millions of Russians had a Ukrainian surname. Arkady couldn't see her walking around Ivanov's apartment broadcasting salt and cesium. What he had seen in the apartment was Rina unable to do anything other than watch a video of Pasha over and over again.

The investigators loathed Robert Aaron Hoffman. Age: thirty-seven. Nationality: U.S.A. and Israel. Occupation: business consultant. A visa photograph of Hoffman accentuated his small eyes and round jowls. According to the report, Hoffman had stolen a computer disk from the Ivanov apartment, and although the disk was retrieved, there was reason to believe that he had altered the contents to compromise the entire NoviRus computer network. Hoffman might have stolen other items from the apartment as well. However, all Arkady had seen Hoffman take was the gift of a suede jacket. And Arkady remembered Bobby's drunken vigil. Would a man who had spread toxic cesium linger at all?

On the other hand, in June of the previous year, Hoffman had taken a NoviRus jet from Moscow to Kiev 's Boryspil Airport, and a bus from Boryspil to Chernobyl to, in the opinion of the investigators, "meet fellow Jews and possibly transfer diamonds." He had returned to Moscow that night. Arkady sometimes avoided raising the subject of Jews because people who appeared quite decent and sane one moment would start ranting about Jewish cabals the next. Arkady found anti-Semitism depressing and endemic, like scabies or lice. Captain Marchenko, however, had been correct about one thing: according to the investigators Jews did sometimes visit Chernobyl 's Jewish cemetery. Bobby Hoffman, who hadn't struck Arkady as the religious sort, had come with them. He hadn't noticed any Jews in Chernobyl, so why would they visit?

Who else had the investigators turned their attention to?

The muscleman Anton Obodovsky proved a disappointment. He may have threatened Ivanov, but he was in Butyrka Prison the night of Pasha's suicide and very publicly in Moscow casinos at the time of Timofeyev's disappearance.

The elevator operator at Pasha's building, the Kremlin veteran, had access to the tenth floor, but not to Ivanov's two previous homes or Timofeyev's. A sweep of his wardrobe and apartment showed not a trace of radioactivity.

Timofeyev's household staff was under treatment for exposure to radioactive materials. They had no information to offer, and their loss of hair seemed sincere.

Day by day Moscow lost interest. After all, Ivanov was a suicide, half crazed from radiation or not. Timofeyev had been murdered, but not in Moscow, not even in Russia. In short, any homicide investigation was properly a Ukrainian responsibility, with Russian assistance limited to a single investigator. It was fair to say that there was no real investigation anymore. Arkady occasionally felt like a man underwater breathing through a reed, the reed being his mobile phone. For a while Victor ran down leads in Moscow, an example being laboratories that produced cesium chloride. Although there was no commercial use of anything so toxic, grains were used in scientific research. Victor tracked down labs and researchers until, on Zurin's orders, he stopped taking Arkady's calls. Arkady was on his own. Meanwhile, NoviRus stock plunged, and the world moved on.

Although the Chernobyl cafeteria offered borsch, buns, tomato salad, meat and potatoes, pudding, lemonade and tea, it struck Arkady that the delegation from the British Friends of the Ecology seemed unsure, less than famished, shy of their food. They also seemed intimidated by a constantly moving corps of heavily rouged waitresses who might have once been a sister trapeze act.

Alex stood and played host. "We welcome all our British Friends and, in particular, Professor Ian Campbell, who will be staying on with us for a week." He indicated a bearded, ginger-haired man who looked like he had drawn the short straw. "Professor, perhaps you'd like to say a few words?"

"Is the food locally grown?"

"Is the food locally grown?" Alex repeated. He savored the question like the blue smoke of his cigarette. "Although we are not quite ready to label it 'Product of Chernobyl,' yes, much of the food was grown and harvested in the neighboring environs." He took an extravagant inhale. " Chernobyl is not the Black Earth region of the Ukraine, famous for its wheat. We have a more sandy soil given to potatoes and beets. The greens are local, the lemons in the lemonade are not and the tea, I believe, is from China. Bon appétit."

Another question passed the length of the table before Alex could sit.

"Ah, is the food radioactive? The answer to that depends on how hungry you are. For example, this copious meal makes up in part for the low pay of the staff. They are paid in calories as well as cash. The waitresses are overage but extremely coquettish, practically a floor show in and of themselves. The food? Milk is dangerous; cheese is not, because radionuclides stay in the water and albumin. Shellfish are bad, and mushrooms are very, very bad. Did they serve mushrooms today?"

While the Friends glumly regarded their lunch, Alex sat and vigorously carved his meat. Vanko put a soup bowl next to Arkady and sat down. The researcher looked like he had been following an earthworm down a hole.

"Did you understand any of that?" he asked Arkady.

"Enough. Is Alex trying to be dismissed?"

"They wouldn't dare." Vanko ladled the soup slowly. "This is my grandmother's remedy for a hangover. You don't even have to chew."

"Why wouldn't they?"

"He's too famous."

"Oh." Arkady felt suddenly ignorant.

"He is Alex Gerasimov, son of Felix Gerasimov, the academician. With Alex, the Russians will fund the study; without him, they won't."

"Why doesn't he just leave?"

"The work is too interesting. He says he'd rather leave with his head off than on. Last night was fun. You shouldn't have left."

"They closed the café."

"The party continued. It was a birthday. You know who can really drink?"

"Who can really drink?" Coming from Vanko, this sounded like high praise.

"Dr. Kazka. She's tough. She was in Chechnya, a volunteer. She saw real action." Vanko mopped up the soup with bread. Alex seemed to be having a grand time at the long table, urging his guests to dig in.

"You mentioned something last night about poachers," Arkady said.

"No, you mentioned poachers," Vanko said. "I thought you were looking for the squatter who found that millionaire from Moscow."

"Maybe. The note said squatter, but squatters tend to stay in Pripyat. They like apartments. I get the impression that black villages are more for old folks."

A salad swimming in oil replaced Vanko's soup. He didn't raise his head again until he had wiped the last piece of lettuce from his chin. "Depends on the squatter."

"I don't think squatters spend much time at cemeteries. There's nowhere to sleep and nothing to steal."

"Are you going to eat your potatoes? They're locally grown."

"Help yourself." Arkady pushed his plate over. "Tell me about poachers."

Vanko talked between mouthfuls. The good poachers were local. They had to know their way around, or they could walk into some very hot spots. They might be adding some meat to their diet, or they might be called by a restaurant so a chef could put game on the menu.

"A restaurant in Kiev."

"Maybe Moscow. Gourmets love wild boar. The problem is that wild boars love to root for big fat radioactive mushrooms. Stick to pigs that eat slops, and you'll be fine."

"I'll keep that in mind. You study wild boar?"

"Boar, elk, mice, kestrels, catfish and shellfish, tomatoes and wheat, to name a few."

"You must know some poachers," Arkady said.

"Why me?"

"You set traps."

"Of course."

"Poachers set traps. Maybe they even rob your traps from time to time."

"Yeah." Vanko's eating slowed to a ruminative pace.

"I don't want to arrest anyone. I only want to ask about Timofeyev, exactly when he was found, his position and condition, whether his car was ever nearby."

"I thought his car was found in Bela's yard. A BMW."

"Timofeyev got there somehow."

"The path to the village cemetery is too narrow for a car."

"See, that's exactly the kind of information I need."

Meanwhile, Alex got to his feet again. "To vodka, the first line of radiation defense."

Everyone drank to that.

Pripyat was worse in the light of day, when a breeze stirred the trees and lent a semblance of animation. Arkady could almost see the long lines of people and the way they must have looked over their shoulders at their apartments and all their possessions, their clothes, televisions, Oriental rugs, the cat at the window. Families must have pulled the reluctant young and pushed the confused elderly and shielded babies from the sun. Ears had to close to the question "Why?" Patience must have been an asset as the doctors handed iodine tablets to every child, too late. Too late because, at the beginning, although everyone saw the fire at Reactor Four, only two kilometers away, the official word was that the radioactive core was undamaged. Children went to school, though they were drawn to the spectacle of helicopters circling the black tower of smoke and fascinated by the green foam covering the streets. Adults recognized the foam as the plant's protection against an accidental release of radioactive materials. Children waded though the foam, kicked it, packed it into balls. The more suspicious parents called friends outside Pripyat for news that might have been withheld, but no, they were told that May Day preparations were in full swing in Kiev, Minsk, Moscow. Costumes and banners were finished. Nothing was canceled. Still, those people with binoculars went to the roofs of their apartment blocks and watched firemen scramble off giant ladders onto the reactor and carry back blocks of indeterminate material, no fireman staying longer than sixty seconds. No one was allowed out of Pripyat except to fight the fire, and those who returned from the plant were dizzy, nauseated, mysteriously tanned. Supermarket stocks of iodine tablets sold out. Children were sent home from school with instructions to shower and ask Mommy to wash their clothes, even though all the city's water had been diverted to the fire. The news broadcast from Moscow said that there had been an incident at Chernobyl, but measures were being taken and the fire was contained. Finally, no one in Pripyat was allowed outside. Three days passed between the accident and the sudden evacuation of the city. Eleven hundred buses took away the fifty thousand inhabitants. They were told they were going to a resort, to bring casual clothes, documents, family pictures. As the buses departed, loose pictures scattered, and children waved at the dogs running behind.

So any stir of the trees or tall grass created a false sense of resurrection, until Arkady noticed the stillness at doors and windows and recognized that the sound traveling from block to block was the moving echo of his motorcycle. Sometimes he imagined Pripyat not so much as a city under siege but as a no-man's-land between two armies, an arena for snipers and patrols. From the central plaza he rode up one avenue to the town stadium and back on another, amid headless streetlamps, over a black crust of roads undergoing a slow upheaval. Outdoor murals of Science, Labor and the Future peeled off office fronts.

A movement at a corner window made Arkady swing the motorcycle to an apartment block, park and climb the stairs to the third floor, a living room with tapestries on the wall, a reclining chair, a collection of decanters. A bedroom was heaped with clothes. A little girl's room had a pink theme, school awards and a pair of ice skates hanging from the wall. In a boy's room an intricate skeleton curled in a glass tank under posters of Ferraris and Mercedeses. Photographs were everywhere, color pictures of the family caravanning in Italy, and older black-and-white portraits of a previous generation of mustached men and tightly buttoned women. The photos seemed trampled, suggesting violent disagreement or grief. A doll dangling from a cord tapped the sash of a broken window-the movement Arkady had seen. Scavengers had come and gone, punching in walls to rip out electrical wiring. Every time he left an apartment like this, he felt he was stepping from a tomb, in a city of tombs.

He rode back to the main plaza and to the office where he had spotted the scavenger the night before. The suitcase and makeshift grill were gone. So was the note with Arkady's mobile-phone number and the dollar sign. He didn't know whether he was hunting or fishing, but he was doing what he could, and that, he had to admit, was where Zurin was so brilliant. The prosecutor knew that where another, more balanced individual would say that if the Chernobyl nuclear accident had caused forty or four million deaths-depending on who was counting-who would care what had happened to a single man? So what if Arkady found a connection between Timofeyev and Chernobyl? Russians, Byelorussians, Ukrainians, Danes, Eskimos, Italians, Mexicans and Africans touched by the poison as it spread around the world had no connection to Chernobyl, and they would die, too. The first ones, Pripyat's firemen, irradiated inside and out, died in a day. The rest would die obliquely over generations. On that scale, what did Timofeyev or Ivanov matter? Yet Arkady couldn't stop himself. In fact, riding a motorcycle through the abandoned streets of Pripyat, he found himself more and more at home.

The Chernobyl militia station was a brick building with a linden tree sprouting from a corner like a feather in a cap. Marchenko joined Arkady in the parking lot where Timofeyev's impounded BMW had disappeared.

The captain wore clean camos and bitter satisfaction. "You wanted to take another look? Too late. Bela took it to Kiev while you and I were out chasing the icon thief. So someone in my own station house told Bela I was gone." He tilted his head. "Listen: the first cricket of the evening. An idiot, obviously. Anyway, I should apologize for my outburst this morning. Chernobyl, Chornobyl, what difference does it make?"

"No, you were right, I should say Chornobyl."

"Let me give you some advice. Say, 'Farewell, Chornobyl.' "

"But something occurred to me."

"Something always occurs to you."

"When you originally found Timofeyevs car in the truck graveyard, it had no keys?"

"No keys."

"You towed it here from the truck graveyard?"

"Yes. We went over this."

"Remind me, please."

"Before we towed the car here, we looked for keys, looked for blood on the car seats, forced open the trunk to look for blood or any other evidence. We didn't find anything."

"Nothing to suggest that Timofeyev had been killed somewhere else and taken in the car to the cemetery?"

"No."

"Did you take casts of any tire treads at the cemetery?"

"No. Anyway, our cars rolled over any tracks there."

Right.

"It's a black village. Radioactive. Everyone moved fast. And it rained on and off, don't forget."

"And there were wolf tracks?" Arkady still found that hard to believe.

"Big as a plate."

"Who did the towing?"

"We did."

"Who drove?"

"Officer Katamay."

"Katamay is the officer who found Timofeyevs body and then disappeared?"

"Yes."

"He does a lot around here."

"He knows his way around. He's a local boy."

"And he's still missing?"

"Yes. It's not necessarily a crime. If he quits, he quits. Though we would like the uniform and gun."

"I looked at his file. He had disciplinary problems. Did you ask him about Timofeyev's wallet and watch?"

"Naturally. He denied it, and the matter was dropped. You have to meet his grandfather to understand."

"Is he from around here?"

"From a Pripyat family. Look, Renko, we're not detectives, and this is not the normal world. This is the Zone. We are as forgotten as any police can be. The country is collapsing, so we work for half pay, and everyone steals to make ends meet. What's missing? What's not missing? Medicine, morphine, a tank of oxygen, gone. We were given night-vision goggles from the army? Disappeared. I was with Bela when we discovered Timofeyev's BMW, and I remember his look, as if he would kill me for that car. If that's the truck graveyard manager, what kind of officers do you think I'm going to have? I know what he's doing, I see the sparks at night. Everyone else is suffering, and he's making his fortune, but I'm not allowed to conduct the sort of raid I would like, because he has a 'roof,' understand, he's protected from above."

"I didn't mean to criticize."

"Fire away. Like my wife says, anyone intelligent steals. The thieves understand. Most of the time they just pay off the guards at the checkpoints; this morning was an exception. Usually they slip from one black village to the next, and if we get too close, they just dive into a hot spot we can't go into. I'm not going to risk the lives of my men, even the worst of them, and there are maybe a thousand hot spots, a thousand black holes for thieves to dive into and come out who knows where. If you know anyone else who is willing to come here, ask them." While they talked, the afternoon had turned to dusk. Marchenko lit a cigarette and smiled like the happy captain of a sinking ship. "Invite all your friends to Chornobyl."

Since the ecologists and British Friends had been absent from the cafeteria, Arkady had eaten a quiet dinner and gone to bed with case notes when a phone call came from Olga Andreevna at the children's shelter in Moscow. "I am sorry to report that we have had problems with Zhenya since you left. Behavioral problems and refusal to eat or communicate with other children or with staff. Twice we caught him leaving the shelter at night-so dangerous for a boy his age. I cannot help but associate this increase in social dysfunction with your absence, and I must ask when you plan to return."

"I wish I could say. I don't know." Arkady reached automatically for a cigarette to help him think.

"Some estimate would be helpful. The situation here is deteriorating."

"Has my friend Victor visited Zhenya?"

"Apparently they went to a beer garden. Your friend Victor fell asleep, and the militia returned Zhenya to the shelter. When are you coming back?"

"I am working. I am not on vacation."

"Can you come next weekend?"

"No."

"The weekend after?"

"No. I'm not around the corner, and I'm not his father or an uncle. I am not responsible for Zhenya."

"Talk to him. Wait."

There was silence on the other end of the line. Arkady asked, "Zhenya, are you there? Is anyone there?"

Olga Andreevna came on. "Go ahead, he's here."

"Talk about what?"

"Your work. What it's like where you are. Whatever comes to mind."

All that came to Arkady's mind was an image of Zhenya grimly clutching his chess set and book of fairy tales.

"Zhenya, this is Investigator Renko. This is Arkady. I hope you are well." This sounds like a form letter, Arkady thought. "It seems you've been giving the good people at the shelter problems. Please don't do that. Have you been playing chess?"

Silence.

"The man you played chess with in the car said you were very good."

Maybe there was a boy at the other end, Arkady thought. Maybe the telephone was dangling down a well.

"I'm in the Ukraine, a long drive from Moscow, but I will be back in a while, and I won't know where to find you if you run away from the shelter."

Talk about what else, a man with his throat cut? Arkady searched. "It's like Russia here, but wilder, overgrown. Not many people, but real elk and wild boar. I haven't seen any wolves, but maybe I'll hear them. People say that's a sound you don't forget. It makes you think of wolf packs chasing sleds across the snow, doesn't it? My parents and I used to drive to a dacha. I didn't play chess like you." Arkady remembered the disassembled pistol in his hands and wondered how he'd gotten on this topic. "It was dark when we arrived. There were other dachas, but the people in them had been warned away. When we pulled up to the house, the younger officers who had gone ahead would greet my father by baying like wolves. He would lead them like a conductor. He tried to teach me, but I was never any good."