Wolves Eat Dogs (11 page)

The elevator operator was the former Kremlin guard Arkady had interviewed before. As the floors passed, he looked Arkady up and down. "You need a code."

"I have you. You know the code." Arkady pulled on latex gloves.

The operator shifted, exhibiting the training of an old watchdog. At the tenth floor, he was still uncertain enough to take a mobile phone from his pocket. "I have to call Colonel Ozhogin first."

"When you call, tell the colonel about the breakdown in building security the day Ivanov died, how you shut down the elevator at eleven in the morning and checked each apartment floor by floor. Explain why you didn't report the breakdown then."

The elevator whined softly and came to a stop at the tenth floor. The operator swayed unhappily. Finally he said, "In Soviet days we had guards on every floor. Now we have cameras. It's not the same."

"Did you check the Ivanov apartment?"

"I didn't have the code then."

"And you didn't want to call NoviRus Security and tell them why you needed it."

"We checked the rest of the building. I don't know why the receptionist was worried. He thought maybe he'd seen a shadow, something. I told him if he missed anything, the man watching the screen at NoviRus would catch it. In my opinion, nothing happened. There was no breakdown."

"Well, you know the code now. After you let me in, you can do whatever you want."

The elevator doors slid open, and Arkady stepped into Ivanov's apartment for the fourth time. As soon as the doors closed, he pressed the lock-out button on the foyer panel. Now the operator could call anyone, because the apartment was, as Zurin had said, sealed from the rest of the world.

With its white walls and marble floors, the apartment was a beautiful shell. Arkady removed his shoes rather than track dirt across the foyer. He turned on the lights room by room and saw that other visitors had preceded him. Someone had cleaned up the evidence of Hoffman's vigil on the sofa; the snifter was washed and the cushions were plumped. The photo gallery of Pasha Ivanov still graced the living room wall, although now it seemed sadly beside the point. The only missing photographs were the ones of Rina with Pasha from the bedroom nightstand. And no doubt Ozhogin had been to the scene, because the office was stripped clean of anything that, encrypted or not, possibly held any NoviRus data: computer, Zip drive, books, CDs, files, phone and message machine. All the videotapes and disks were gone from the screening room. The medicine cabinet was empty. Arkady appreciated professional thoroughness.

He didn't know exactly what he was looking for, but this was the last chance he would have to look at all. He remembered the Icelandic fairy, the imp with nothing but a head and foot, who could be seen only out the corner of the eye. Look directly, and he disappeared. Since all the obvious items had been removed, Arkady had to settle for glimpsed revelations. Or the lingering shadow of something removed.

Of course, the home of a New Russian should be shadow-free. No history, no questions, no awkward legalities, just a clear shot to the future. Arkady opened the window that Ivanov had fallen from. The curtains rushed out. Arkady's eyes watered from the briskness of the air.

Colonel Ozhogin had removed everything related to business; but what Arkady had seen of Pasha Ivanov's last night among the living had nothing to do with business. NoviRus was hardly on the point of collapse. It might be soon, with Timofeyev at the helm, but up to Ivanov's last breath, NoviRus was a thriving, ravenous entity, gobbling up companies at an undiminished rate and defending itself from giant competitors and small-time predators alike. Perhaps a ninja had climbed down the roof like a spider, or Anton had slipped through the bars at Butyrka; either was a professional homicide that Arkady had little realistic hope of solving. But Arkady had the sense that Pasha Ivanov was running from something more personal. He had banned virtually everyone, including Rina, from the apartment. Arkady remembered how Ivanov had arrived at the apartment, one hand holding a handkerchief and the other clutching an attaché case that seemed light in his hand, not laden with financial reports. What was in the case when Arkady saw it on the bed? A shoe sack and a mobile phone recharger. Ivanov might have headed to the apartment office and learned about some disastrous investment? In that case, Arkady pictured a maudlin Ivanov assuaging himself with a Scotch or two before working up the nerve to open the window. What Arkady recalled from the videotape was an Ivanov who emerged reluctantly from his car, entered the building in a rush, bantered with another tenant about dogs, rode the elevator with grim determination and added a valedictory glance at the security camera as he stepped out the door. Was he rushing to meet someone? In his attaché case, why a single shoe sack? Because it wasn't being used for shoes. Ivanov had gone to the bathroom, maybe, but he hadn't swilled pills in any suicidal amount. He was the decisive type, not the sort to wait passively for a sedative's effect. He had talked to Dr. Novotny enough to concern her, then skipped his last four sessions. All Arkady really knew about Ivanov's last night was that he had entered his apartment by the door and left by the window and that the floor of his closet was covered with salt. And there had been salt in Pasha's stomach. Pasha had eaten salt.

The bedroom phone rang. It was Colonel Ozhogin.

"Renko, I'm driving over. I want you to leave the Ivanov apartment now and go down to the lobby. I'll meet you there."

"Why? I don't work for you."

"Zurin dismissed you."

"So?"

"Renko, I—"

Arkady hung up.

Ivanov had gone to the bedroom and laid his attaché case on the bed. Set his mobile phone on the edge of the bed. Opened the attaché case, so intent on the contents that he did not notice having knocked the phone onto the carpet or kicked it under the bed, for Victor to find later. What did Ivanov slip from the shoe sack: a brick, a gun, a bar of gold? Arkady walked through every move, trying to align himself on an invisible track. Pasha had opened the walk-in closet and found the floor covered in salt. Did he know about a coming worldwide shortage of salt? Good men were the salt of the earth. Smart men salted away money. Pasha had rushed home to eat salt, and all he took with him on his ten-story exit was a shaker of salt. Arkady inverted the shoe sack. No salt.

This
thing
from the sack, was it still in the apartment? Ivanov had not taken it with him. As Arkady remembered, everyone focused on company matters, and a shoe sack was the wrong size and shape for either computer disks or a spreadsheet.

The phone rang again.

Ozhogin said, "Renko, don't hang—"

Arkady hung up and left the receiver off the hook. The colonel's problem was that he had no leverage. Had Arkady been a man with a promising career, threats might have worked. But since he was dismissed from the prosecutor's office, he felt liberated.

Back a step. Sometimes a person thought too much. Arkady returned to the bed, mimed opening the attaché case, slipping something from the shoe sack and moving to the closet. As the closet opened, its lights lent a milky glow to the bed of salt still covering the floor. The top of the mound showed the same signs of activity that Arkady had seen before: a scooping here, a setting something down there. Arkady saw confirmation in a brown dot of blood tunneled through the salt, from Ivanov leaning over. Ivanov had removed the
thing
from the shoe sack, set it on the salt and then ... what? The saltshaker might have fit nicely into the depression in the middle of the salt. Arkady pulled open a drawer of monogrammed long-sleeved shirts in a range of pastels. He flipped through them and felt nothing, shut the drawer and heard something shift.

Arkady opened the drawer again and, in the back, beneath the shirts, found a bloody handkerchief wrapped around a radiation dosimeter the size of a calculator. Salt was embedded in the seam of its red plastic shell. Arkady held the dosimeter by the corners to avoid latent fingerprints, turned it on and watched the numbers of the digital display fly to 10,000 counts per minute. Arkady remembered from army drills that an average reading of background radioactivity was around 100. The closer he held the meter to the salt, the higher the reading. At 50,000 cpm the display froze.

Arkady backed out of the closet. His skin was prickly, his mouth was dry. He remembered Ivanov hugging the attaché case in the elevator, and his backward glance to the elevator camera. Arkady understood that hesitation now. Pasha was bracing himself at the threshold. Arkady turned the meter off and on, off and on, until it reset. He made a circuit of Pasha's beautiful white apartment. The numbers dramatically shuffled and reshuffled with every step as he picked his way like a blind man with a cane around flames he sensed only through the meter. The bedroom burned, the office burned, the living room burned, and at the open window, curtains dragged by the night wind desperately whipped and snapped to point the fastest way out of an invisible fire.

5

Pripyat had been a city of science built on straight lines for technicians, and it shimmered in the light of a rising moon. From the top floor of the municipal office, Arkady overlooked a central plaza wide enough to hold the city's entire population on May Day, Revolution Day, International Women's Day. There would have been speeches, national songs and dances, flowers in cellophane presented by neatly pressed children. Around the plaza were the broad horizontals of a hotel, restaurant and theater. Tree-lined boulevards spread to apartment blocks, wooded parks, schools and, a mere three kilometers away, the constant red beacon of the reactor.

Arkady sank back into the shadows of the office. He had never thought his night vision was particularly good, but he saw calendars and papers strewn on the floor, fluorescent tubes crushed, file cabinets facedown around a nest of blankets and the glint of empty vodka bottles. A poster on the wall proclaimed something lost in faded letters: confident of the future was all Arkady could make out. In camouflage fatigues, he himself was fairly hard to see. The pinprick of a match being struck drew him closer to the window. He'd missed where. The buildings were blank, streetlamps broken. The forests pressed increasingly closer, and when the wind died, the city was utterly still, without a single light, without the progress of a car or the sound of a footstep. Around the city there was not one human intrusion until the orange bud of a cigarette stirred directly across the plaza in the dark mass of the hotel.

Arkady had to use a flashlight in the stairway because of the debris—bookcases, chairs, drapes and bottles, always bottles, and everything covered by a chalky residue of disintegrating plaster that formed a cavern's worth of stalactites and stalagmites. Even if there had been power, the elevators were rusted shut. From outside, a building might seem intact. Inside, this one resembled a target of artillery, with walls exploded, pipes ruptured and floors heaved by ice.

On the ground floor, Arkady turned off the light and went at a lope around the plaza. The hotel entrance doors were chained together. No matter; he walked through missing panes of glass, turned on the flashlight, crossed the lobby and maneuvered as silently as possible around service trolleys piled on the steps. On the fourth floor, the doors were open. Beds and bureaus materialized. In one room, the wallpaper had curled off in enormous scrolls; in another, the ivory torso of a toilet lay on the carpet. By now he smelled the sourness of a doused fire. In a third room, the window was covered by a blanket that Arkady pulled aside to let moonlight creep in. A box spring had been stripped to the coils and set over a hubcap as a makeshift grill and pan that was filled with coals and water and a ghostly hint of smoke. An open suitcase showed a toothbrush, cigarettes, fishing line, a can of beef and a plastic bottle of mineral water, a plumber's pipe cutter and a wrench wrapped in rags. If their owner had been able to resist a peek out of the blanket, Arkady never would have seen him. He spotted him now, moving at the edge of the plaza.

Arkady went down the stairs two at a time, sliding over an overturned desk, stumbling on the crushed maroon of hotel drapes. Sometimes he felt like a diver plunging through the depths of a sunken ship, his vision and hearing magnified in such faint light. As he hit the ground, he heard a screen door slap shut at the far end of the plaza. The school.

Between the school's two front doors was a blackboard that read APRIL 29, 1986. Arkady ran through a cloakroom painted with a princess and a hippo sailing a ship. The lower rooms were for early grades, with blackboard examples of penmanship, bright prints of farm children with happy cows that smiled amid blown-in windows and desks overturned like barricades. Footsteps pounded the floor above. As Arkady climbed the stairs, a display of children's art fluttered in his wake. Pictures of students sitting neatly in a music room led to a music room with a shattered piano and half-size chairs around broken drums and marimbas. Dust exploded with every step; Arkady swallowed a fine powder with every breath. In a nap room, bed frames stood at odd angles, as if caught in a wild dance. Picture books lay open: Uncle Ilyich visiting a snowy village,
Swan Lake,
May Day in Moscow. Arkady heard another door shut. He ran down a second stairway to the school's other exit and slowed to navigate a heap of child-size gas masks. Crates had been delivered and tipped over in a panic. The masks were shaped like sheep heads, with round eyes and rubbery tubes. Arkady burst out the door, too late. He played the flashlight around the plaza and saw nothing.

Although it was wrong to think "nothing" when the place was so alive with cesium, strontium, plutonium or pixies of a hundred different isotopes no larger than a microdot hiding here and there. A hot spot was just that: a spot. Very close, very dangerous. One step back made a great difference. The problem with, say, cesium was that it was microscopic—a flyspeck—and it was water-soluble and adhered to anything, especially the soles of shoes. Grass that grew chest-high from scams in the road earned another tick from the dosimeter. At the opposite end of the plaza from the school was a small amusement park, with crazy chairs, a rink of bumper cars and a Ferris wheel that stood against the night like a rotting decoration. The reading at the rink shot the needle off the dial and made the dosimeter sing.

Arkady made his way back to the hotel, to the room with the box-spring grill. He weighted, with the can of beef, a note with his mobile-phone number and the universal sign for dollars.

Arkady had left a motorcycle in a stand of alders. He wasn't a skilled rider, but a Uralmoto bike, unlike some fancier makes, relished punishment. He fishtailed to the highway and, headlights off, rode out of the city.

This quarter of the Ukraine was steppe, flatland edged by trees, and the moon was bright enough to show pines on either side of the road. The trees had turned red—dead where they stood—the day after the accident. Otherwise, the fields swept all the way to the reactors.

Death had been so generous here that there was a graveyard even for vehicles. Arkady coasted to a halt at a fence of wooden stakes and barbed wire and a loosely tied gate with the warnings extreme danger and remove nothing from this site. He untied the rope and rode in.

Trucks were lined up by the thousands. Heavy trucks, tankers, tow trucks, flatbeds, decontamination trucks, fire engines, mess trucks, buses, caravans, bulldozers, earthmovers, cement trucks and row after row of army trucks and personnel carriers. The yard was as long as an Egyptian necropolis, although it was for the remains of machinery, not men. In the headlight of the motorcycle, they were a labyrinth of metal cadavers. A giant spread its arms overhead, and Arkady realized that he had passed under the rotors of a crane helicopter. There were more helicopters, each marked in paint with its individual level of radiation. It was here, tucked in the center of this yard, that Timofeyev's BMW, covered with the dust of the long trip from Moscow, had been found.

A fountain of sparks led Arkady to a pair of scavengers cutting up an armored car with an arc welder. Radioactive parts from the yard were sold illegally in car shops in Kiev, Minsk, Moscow. The men were hidden in coveralls and surgical masks, but they were familiar to Arkady because they had sold him his motorcycle. The yard manager, Bela, a round Hungarian, used a voluminous handkerchief to wipe his brow free of the dust that kicked off the raw earth. Bela's office was a trailer a few meters away. Dust infiltrated the trailer's windows and lined the maps on his worktable. Each map corresponded to a section of the yard, locating every vehicle. Bela culled the yard judiciously, leaving the impression of a full row here, a complete car there. The trailer itself was going nowhere; at this point it was as radioactive as the surrounding vehicles. Bela didn't care that he was king of a poisoned realm; with his canned food, bottled water, television and VCR, he considered himself hermetically sealed where it counted. He waved to Arkady, who rode past, looped around a mountain of tires and went out the gate.

By this point the eye was always pulled to the reactors. Chain link and razor wire surrounded what had been a massive enterprise of cooling towers, water tanks, fuel storage, cooling ponds, the messenger ranks of transmission towers. Here four reactors had produced half the power of the Ukraine, and now sipped power to stay lit. Three reactors looked like windowless factories. Reactor Four, however, was buttressed and encased by ten stories of lead-and-steel shielding called a sarcophagus, a tomb, but it always struck Arkady, especially at night, as the steel mask of a steel giant buried to the neck. St. Petersburg had its statue of the Bronze Horseman. Chernobyl had Reactor Four. If its eyes had lit and its shoulders begun shifting free of the earth, Arkady would not have been totally surprised.

Ten kilometers from the plant was a checkpoint, its gate a crude bar counterweighted by a cinder block. As Arkady was Russian and the guards were Ukrainian, they walked the bar out of his way at half speed.

Past the checkpoint were a dozen "black villages" and fields where scarecrows had been replaced by diamond-shaped warning signs on tall stakes. Arkady swung the bike onto the crusted ruts of a dirt road and rode a jaw-shaking hundred meters around a tangle of scrub and trees into a gathering of one-story houses. All the houses were supposed to be evacuated, and most looked collapsed from sheer emptiness, but others, even in the moonlight, betrayed a certain briskness: a mended picket fence, a sledge for gathering firewood, a haze of chimney smoke. A scarf and candle turned a window red or blue.

Arkady rode through the village and up a footpath through the trees another hundred meters to a clearing surrounded by a low fence. He swung his headlamp, and up jumped a score of grave markers fashioned from iron tubing painted white and decorated with plastic flowers, improbable roses and orchids. No burials had been allowed since the accident; the soil was too radioactive to be disturbed. It was at the cemetery gate that Lev Timofeyev—one week after the suicide of Pasha Ivanov—had been found dead.

The initial militia report was minimal: no papers, no money, no wristwatch on a body discovered by a local squatter otherwise unidentified, cause of death listed as cardiac arrest. Days later, the cause of death was revised to "a five-centimeter slice across the neck with a sharp unserrated blade, opening the windpipe and jugular vein." The militia later explained the confusion with a note that said the body had been disturbed by wolves. Arkady wondered whether the excuse had wandered in from a previous century.

He lifted his ear to the muffled flight of an owl and the soft explosion that marked the likely demise of a mouse. Leaves swirled around the bike. All of Chernobyl was reverting to nature. Sometimes it crept in while he watched.

One way to look at Chernobyl was as a bull's-eye target, with the reactors at the center and circles at ten and thirty kilometers. The dead city of Pripyat fit within the inner circle, and the old town of Chernobyl, for which the reactors were named, was actually farther away, in the outer circle. Together the two circles composed the Zone of Exclusion.

Checkpoints blocked the roads at ten and thirty kilometers, and though the houses of Chernobyl were ostensibly abandoned, dormitories and housing had been found for security troops, and the town's café contained the Zone's social life. The café looked as if it had been slapped together over a weekend. Twenty people fit comfortably, but fifty had pushed their way in, and what was more comforting than the press of other bodies, what tastier than dried fish and candy bars, nuts and chips? Arkady bought peanuts and beer and slipped into a corner to watch couples dance to what was either hip-hop or polka. All the men were in camouflage uniforms they called camos, and the women wore sweats, except for a few younger secretaries who couldn't stand to be drab, even next door to disaster. One of the researchers was having a birthday that required repeated toasts with champagne and brandy. Cigarette smoke was so thick that Arkady felt as if he were on the bottom of a swimming pool.

A researcher named Alex brought Arkady a brandy. "Cheers! How long have you been with us, Renko?"

"Thanks." Arkady downed the glass in a swallow and didn't breathe for fear of detonation.

"That's it. People around you are trying to get drunk. Don't be a prig. How long?"

"Three weeks."

"Three weeks and you're so unfriendly. It's Eva's birthday, and you have yet to give her so much as a kiss."

Eva Kazka was a young woman with black hair that put Arkady in mind of a wet cat. Even she was in camos.

"I've met Dr. Kazka. We shook hands."

"She was unfriendly? That's because your colleagues from Moscow were cretins. First they stepped on everything, and then they were afraid to step on anything. By the time you came, fraternal relations were in the toilet." Alex was a tall man with a swimmer's broad shoulders and a cynic's long nose. He brightened up as a captain in militia blues entered with two corporals in camos and knit caps. "Your fan club. They just love the way you've complicated their lives. Do you ever feel like the most unpopular man in the Zone?"

"Am I?"

"By acclamation. You have to pull your head out of your investigation and enjoy life. Wherever you are, that's where you are, as they say in California."

"Except that they're in California."

"Good point. Check out Captain Marchenko. With his mustache and uniform, he looks like an actor abandoned in a provincial theater. The rest of the troupe has moved on and left him nothing but the costumes. And the corporals, the Woropay brothers, Dymtrus and Taras, I see them as the boys most likely to have sexual congress with barnyard animals."

Arkady had to agree that the captain had a classic profile. The Woropays had pasty faces speckled with a late bloom of acne, and their shoulders were broad as barrels. They turned away from Arkady to share a laugh with the captain.

"Why does Marchenko spend his time with them?" Arkady asked.

"The sport here is hockey. Captain Marchenko fields a team, and the Woropays are two of his stars. Get used to it. You're a sitting duck. People say you've been exiled and your boss in Moscow wants to keep you here forever."

"It would help if I solved the case."

"But you won't. Wait, I want to hear this."

The other table started serenading Eva Kazka, and she let her face go blissfully stupid. Researchers were variously described to Arkady as the scientific crème de la crème or washouts, but always as fools because they were volunteers; they didn't have to be here. Alex returned to his friends briefly to bay like a wolf and steal a bottle of brandy before returning to Arkady.

"Because people think you're crazy," Alex said. "You go to Pripyat. Nobody gives a damn about Pripyat anymore. You ride through the woods on a bike that glows in the dark. Do you know anything about radioactivity?"

"I went over the bike with a dosimeter. It's clean, and it doesn't glow."