Wolves Eat Dogs (16 page)

A wall of rusting pines stretched as far as Arkady could see, from left to right. Being dead, the branches held no cones and no squirrels; except for the flit of a bird, the trees were as still as posts.
Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well.
Arkady could picture a skull on each post. Something ghostly did a pirouette in front of the trees. It fluttered like a handkerchief and darted away.

"A white swallow," Alex said. "You won't see many of those outside of Chernobyl."

"Do poachers come here?"

"No, they know better."

"Do we?"

"Yes, but it's irresistible, and we do it anyway. In the wintertime you should see it, the ground covered with snow, like a belly dimpled with mysterious scars, and the trees bright as blood. People call it the red forest or the magic forest. Sounds like a fairy tale, doesn't it? And not to worry—as the authorities always say, Appropriate measures will be taken, and the situation is under control.' "

They moved along the face of the red forest to an area replanted with new pine trees, where Alex hopped out of the truck and brought back the end of a bough.

"See how stunted and deformed the tip is. It will never grow into a tree, only scrub. But it's a step in the right direction. The administration is pleased with our new pines." Alex spread his arms and announced, "In two hundred and fifty years, all this will be clean. Except for the plutonium; that will take twenty-five thousand years."

"Something to hope for."

"I believe so."

Still, Arkady found himself breathing easier when the red pines gave way to a mix of ash and birch. At the base of a tree, Alex brushed back high grass to reveal a tunnel leading to a cage of what looked to Arkady like squirming field mice.

"Clethrionomys glareolus,"
said Alex. "Voles. Or maybe super voles. The rate of mutation among our little friends here has accelerated by a factor of thirty. Maybe they'll be doing calculus next year. One reason voles have such a fast rate of mutation is that they reproduce so quickly, and radiation affects organisms when they are growing much more than it does when they're adult. A cocoon is affected by radiation, a butterfly is not. So the question is, How does radiation affect this fellow?" Alex opened the top of the cage to lift out a vole by its tail. "The answer is that he does not worry about radionuclides. He worries about owls, foxes, hawks. He worries about finding food and a warm nest. He thinks that radiation is by far the smallest factor in his survival, and he's right."

"And you, what is the largest factor in your survival?" Arkady asked.

"Let me tell you a story. My father was a physicist. He worked at one of those secret installations in the Urals where spent nuclear fuel was stored. Spent fuel is still hot. Insufficient attention was paid, and the fuel exploded, not a nuclear explosion but very dirty and hot. Everything was done secretly, even the cleanup, which was fast and messy. Thousands of soldiers, firemen, technicians waded through debris, including physicists led by my father. After the accident here, I called my father and said, 'Papa, I want you to tell me the truth. Your colleagues from the Urals accident, how are they?' My father took a moment to answer. He said, 'They're all dead, son, every one. Of vodka.' "

"So you drink and smoke and ride around a radioactive forest."

Alex let the vole drop into the cage and switched the full cage with an empty. "Statistically, I admit that none of these are healthy occupations. Individually, statistics mean nothing at all. I think I will probably be hit by a hawk of some kind. And I think, Renko, that you're a lot like me. I think you are waiting for your own hawk."

"Maybe a hedgehog."

"No, trust me on this, definitely a hawk. From here we walk a little."

Alex carried the rifle, and Arkady carried a cage that had a one-way gate baited with greens. Step by step, the woods around them changed from stunted trees to taller, sturdier beeches and oaks that produced a dappling of birdcalls and light.

Arkady asked, "Did you ever met Pasha Ivanov or Nikolai Timofeyev?"

"You know, Renko, some people leave their problems behind them when they go into the woods. They commune with nature. No, I never met either man."

"You were a physicist. You all went to the Institute of Extremely High Temperatures."

"They were older, ahead of me. Why this focus on physicists?"

"This case is more interesting than the usual domestic quarrel. Cesium chloride is not a carving knife."

"You can get cesium chloride at a number of labs. Considering the economic health of the country, you can probably persuade a scientist to siphon off a little extra for either terrorism or murder. People steal warheads, don't they?"

"To transport cesium chloride would take professional skill, wouldn't it?"

"Any decent technician could do that. The power plant still employs hundreds of technicians for maintenance. Far too many for you to question."

"If the person who used cesium in Moscow is the same person who killed Timofeyev here, wouldn't that narrow the field?"

"To those hundreds of technicians."

"Not really. The technicians live an hour away. They commute by train to the plant, work their shift and go directly home. They don't wander around the Zone. No, the person who cut Timofeyev's throat is part of the security staff, or a squatter or poacher."

"Or a scientist living in the Zone?" Alex said.

"That's a possibility, too." There weren't many of those, Arkady thought. There was no scientific glory work being done at Chernobyl. Everything was cleanup or observation.

"Cesium is a complicated way to kill someone or drive them crazy."

"I agree," said Arkady. "And hardly worth the effort, unless you're sending a message. The fact that neither Ivanov nor Timofeyev complained to the militia or their own security, in spite of a threat to their lives, suggests that some sort of message was understood."

"Timofeyev had his throat cut. Where's the subtle message in that?"

"Maybe it was in where he was found—at the threshold of a village cemetery. Either he drove all the way from Moscow just to go to that graveyard, or someone went to a great deal of trouble to put him there. Who noticed his throat was cut?"

"I suppose someone who went into the freezer. I can tell you that people were very unhappy there was a body inside. They had to clean everything else out."

"Then why go into the freezer except to look at the body?"

"Renko, I had never appreciated before how much detection work was groundless speculation."

"Well, now you know."

Trees continued to grow taller, shadows deeper, roots more ancient and interlaced. Arkady waded through fronds of bracken and had the illusion of spiders, salamanders, snakes scurrying ahead, a subtle ripple of life. Finally Alex stopped Arkady at the edge of blinding light, an arching meadow of wide-open daisies and, here and there, the red flags of poppies. Alex motioned him to crouch and be quiet, then pointed to the top of the meadow, where two deer stared back with dark liquid eyes. Arkady had never been so close to deer in the wild. One was a doe; the other had a wide rack of antlers, a hunter's prize. The tension in their gaze was different from the placid observation of zoo deer.

Alex whispered, "They are fat from grazing at the orchards."

"Are we still in the Zone?" Arkady found it hard to believe.

"Yes. What you can see from the road is a horror show—Pripyat, the buried villages, the red woods—but much of the Zone is like this. Now slowly stand."

Both deer went still as Arkady rose. They balanced more particularly but held their ground.

Alex said, "Like the hedgehog, they're losing their fear."

"Are they radioactive?"

"Of course they're radioactive, everything here is. Everything on earth is. This field is about as radioactive as a beach in Rio. There's a lot of sun in Rio. That's why I wanted you to turn off your Geiger counter so you would hear more than that little ticking. Use your eyes and ears. What do you hear?"

For a minute Arkady heard nothing more than the mass drone of field life or his hand slapping a bug on his neck. By concentrating on the deer, however, he started to pick up their thoughtful chewing, the individual transit of dragonflies amid a sunlit cross fire of insects, and in the background, a squirrel scolding from a tree.

Alex said, "The Zone has deer, bison, eagles, swans. The Chernobyl Zone of Exclusion is the best wild-animal refuge in Europe because the towns and villages have been abandoned, fields abandoned, roads abandoned. Because normal human activity is worse for nature than the greatest nuclear accident in history. The next greenie I meet who tells me how he wants to save the animals, I'll tell him that if he's sincere, he should hope for nuclear accidents everywhere. And the next poacher I find here, I will do more than break his toy crossbow. If you do find any poachers, will you please tell them that? Don't move. Be absolutely still. Look over your left shoulder, between the two pretty birches."

Arkady turned his head as slowly as possible and saw a row of yellow eyes behind the trees. The air grew heavy. Insects slowed in their spirals. Sweat ringed Arkady's neck and ran down his chest and spine. The next moment the deer bolted in an explosion of dust and flower heads, took the measure of the field in two bounds and crashed into the woods on the far side. Arkady looked back at the birches. The wolves had gone so silently that he thought he might have imagined them.

Alex unslung his rifle and ran to the birches. From a lower branch, he freed a tuft of gray fur that he carefully placed inside a plastic bag. When he had put the bag in a pocket and given the pocket a loving pat, he tore a strip of bark off the birch, placed the strip between his palms and blew a long, piercing whistle. "Yes!" he said. "Life is good!"

Eva Kazka had set up a card table and folding chairs in the middle of the village's only paved road. Her white coat said she was a doctor; otherwise, her manner suggested a weary mechanic, and she didn't tame her black hair back as much as subdue it.

On either side of this outdoor office, the village slumped in resignation. Window trim hung loose around broken panes, the memory of blue and green walls faded under the black advance of mildew. The yards were full of bikes, sawhorses and tubs pillowed in tall grass and bordered by picket fences that leaned in an infinitely slow collapse. All the same, set farther back from the main street were, here and there, repainted houses with windows and intricate trim intact, with a haze of wood smoke around the chimney and a goat cropping the yard.

A benchful of elderly women in versions of shawl-and-coat-and-rubber-boots waited while Eva looked down the throat of a round little woman with steel teeth.

"Alex Gerasimov is crazy, this is a well-known fact," Eva said as an aside to Arkady. "Him and his precious nature. He's a perfectionist. He is a man who would drive a car into a pole again and again until it was a perfect wreck. Close."

The old woman closed her jaw firmly to signify nothing less then complete cooperation. Arkady doubted that, from the shawl tied tight around her head to her boots hanging clear of the ground, she was over a meter and a half tall. Her eyes were bright and dazzling, a true Ukrainian blue.

"Maria Fedorovna, you have the blood pressure and heart rate of a woman twenty years younger. However, I am concerned about the polyp in your throat. I would like to take it out."

"I will discuss it with Roman."

"Yes, where is Roman Romanovich? I expected to see your husband, too."

Maria lifted her eyes to the top of the lane, where a gate swung open for a bent man in a cap and sweater, leading a black-and-white cow by a rope. Arkady didn't know which looked more exhausted.

"He's airing the cow," Maria said.

The cow trudged dutifully behind. A milk cow was an asset precious enough to be displayed for visitors, Arkady thought. All attention was fixed on the animal's plodding circuit up and down the street. Its hooves made a sucking sound in the wet earth.

Eva's fingers played with a scarf tucked into the collar of her lab coat. She wasn't pretty in an orthodox way; the contrast of such white skin and black hair was too exotic and her eyes had, at least for Arkady, an unforgiving gaze.

"There's no house here you could use for more privacy?" Arkady asked.

"Privacy? This is their entertainment, their television, and this way they can all discuss their medical problems like experts. These people are in their seventies and eighties. I'm not going to operate on them except for something like a broken leg. The state doesn't have the money, instruments or clean blood to waste on people their age. I'm not even supposed to be making calls, and Maria would never go to a city, for fear they wouldn't let her return here."

Arkady said, "She's not supposed to be here anyway. This is the Zone."

Eva turned toward the ladies on the bench. "Only someone from Moscow could say something as stupid as that." To judge by their expressions, they seemed to agree. "The state turns a blind eye to the return of old people. It has given up trying to stop them," Eva informed Arkady. "It has also stopped sending doctors to see them. It demands they go to a clinic."