Wolves Eat Dogs (21 page)

"Alex, you should be an actor," Vanko said.

Eva said, "He
is
an actor."

"You were a physicist before you became an ecologist," Arkady said to Alex. "Why did you change?"

"What a dull question. Vanko is a singer." Alex poured for everyone. "This is the entertainment section of the evening. We are on a night train, samogon is our fuel and Vanko is our engineer. Vanko, the floor is yours."

Vanko sang a long song about a Cossack off to the wars, his chaste wife and the hawk that carried their letters back and forth until it was shot down by an envious nobleman. When Vanko was done, everyone applauded so hard they sweated.

"I found the story absolutely believable," Alex said. "Especially the part about how love can turn to suspicion, suspicion to jealousy and jealousy to hate."

"Sometimes love can go right to hate," said Eva. "Investigator Renko, are you married?"

"No."

"Been married?"

"Yes."

"But no more. We often hear how difficult it is for investigators and militia detectives to maintain a successful marriage. The men supposedly become emotionally cold and silent. Was that your problem, that you were cold and silent?"

"No, my wife was allergic to penicillin. A nurse gave her the wrong injection, and she died of anaphylactic shock."

"Eva," Alex whispered. "Eva, that was a bad mistake."

"I'm sorry," she told Arkady.

"So am I," said Arkady.

He left the party for a while. Physically he was present and smiled at the appropriate times, but his mind was elsewhere. The first time he'd met Irina was at the Mosfilm studio, during an outdoor shoot. She was a wardrobe mistress, not an actress, and yet once the sun lit her huge deep-set eyes, everyone else seemed made of cardboard. It was not a placid relationship, but it was not cold. He could not be cold around Irina; that was like trying to be cold beside a bonfire. When he saw her on the gurney, dead, her eyes so blank, he thought his life had ended, too, yet here he was years later, in the Zone of Exclusion, lost and stumbling but alive. He looked around the room to clear his head and happened to light on the icons high in their corner, Christ on the left wall, the Madonna on the right, the two framed by richly embroidered cloths and lit by votive candles on a shelf. The Christ was actually a postcard, but the Mother was the genuine article, a Byzantine painting on wood of the Madonna in an unusual blue cowl with gold stars, her fingertips lightly pressed together in prayer. She looked like the stolen icon he had seen in the motorcycle sidecar. That icon had been taken over the border to Byelorussia. What was it doing here?

Vanko said, "The Jews are here."

"Where?" Arkady asked.

"In Chernobyl. Everywhere, walking up and down the streets."

Alex said, "Thank you, Vanko, we've been warned." He added to Arkady, "Hasidic Jews. There's a famous rabbi buried here. They visit and pray. Maria's turn."

After the formalities of modesty and protest, Maria sat up in her chair, closed her eyes and broke into a song that transformed her from an old woman into a girl looking for her lover at a midnight tryst, and singing in a register so high the windowpanes seemed to vibrate like crystals. When Maria finished, she opened her eyes, spread a smile of steel teeth and swung her feet with pleasure. Roman tried to follow with selections on a violin, but a string broke, and he went hors de combat.

"Arkady?" Alex asked.

"Sorry, I'm low in entertainment skills."

"Then it's your turn," Alex told Eva.

"All right." She ran her hands through her hair as if that combed it, fixed her eyes on Alex and began:

We're all drunkards here and harlots:

How wretched we are together
...

The poetry was coarse and blunt, Akhmatova's words, familiar to Arkady, familiar to any literate man or woman over the age of thirty, before the new poetry of "Billions Served" and "Snickers for Energy!"

I have put on a narrow skirt

to show my lines are trim.

The windows are tightly sealed,

What brews? Thunder or sleet?

How well I know your look,

Your eyes like a cautious cat.

She swung her own gaze from Alex to Arkady and hesitated so long that Alex took over the last line:

O heavy heart, how long

before the tolling bell?

But that one dancing there,

will surely rot in hell!

Alex pulled Eva's face to his and collected a deep kiss until she pulled away and slapped him hard enough to make even Arkady smart. She stood and plunged out the door. It was like a Russian party, Arkady thought. People got drunk, recklessly confessed their love, spilled their festering dislike, had hysterics, marched out, were dragged back in and revived with brandy. It wasn't a French salon.

Arkady's mobile phone rang. It was Olga Andreevna, from the children's shelter in Moscow.

"Investigator Renko, you have to come back."

"A second, please." Arkady gestured apologies to Maria and went outside. Eva was nowhere in sight, although her car hadn't left.

Olga Andreevna asked, "Investigator, what are you still doing in the Ukraine?

"I am assigned here. I am working on a case."

"You should be here. Zhenya needs you."

"I don't think so. I can't think of anyone he needs less."

"He goes and stands by the street, waiting for you and looking for your car."

"Maybe he's waiting for the bus."

"Last week he was gone for two days. We found him sleeping in the park. Talk to him."

She put Zhenya on the line before Arkady could get off. At least he assumed Zhenya was on; all Arkady heard at his end was silence.

"Hello, Zhenya. How are you doing? I hear you've been causing people at the shelter some anxiety. Please don't do that." Arkady paused in case Zhenya wanted to offer any response. "So I suppose that's all, Zhenya."

He was in no mood and no condition to have another one-sided conversation with the garden gnome. He leaned back to take a breath of cool air and watched clouds cover the moon, slipping the house in and out of shadow. He heard the cow shuffle in her stall and a twig snap and wondered whether it was a night for wolves to be abroad.

"Still there?" Arkady asked. There was no answer; there never was an answer. "I met Baba Yaga. In fact, I'm outside her house right now. I can't say whether her fence is made of bones, but she definitely has steel teeth." Arkady heard, or thought he heard, a focusing of attention at the other end. "I haven't seen her dog or cat yet, but she does have an invisible cow, who has to be invisible because of the wolves. Maybe the wolves wandered in from a different story, but they're here. And a sea serpent. In her pond she has a sea serpent as big as a whale, with long whiskers. I saw the sea serpent swallow a man whole." There was unmistakable rustling on the other end now. Arkady tried to remember other details of the fairy tale. "The house is very strange. It is absolutely on chicken legs. Right now the house is slowly turning. I'll lower my voice in case it hears me. I didn't see her magic comb, the one that can turn into a forest, but I did see an orchard of poisonous fruit. All the houses around are burned and full of ghosts. I will call in two more days. In the meantime, it's important that you stay at the shelter and study and maybe make a friend in case we need help. I have to go now, before they see that I'm missing. Let me say a word to the director."

There was a passing of the phone, and Olga Andreevna came back on. "What did you tell him? He seems much better."

"I told him that he is a citizen of a proud new Russia and should behave like one."

"I'm sure. Well, whatever you said, it worked. Are you coming to Moscow now? Your work there surely must be done."

"Not quite yet. I'll call in two days."

"The Ukraine is sucking us dry."

"Good night, Olga Andreevna."

As Arkady put the mobile phone away, Eva stepped out of the orchard, silently applauding. "Your son?" she asked.

"No."

"A nephew?"

"No, just a boy."

She shifted like a cat getting comfortable. "Baba Yaga! Quite a story. You are an entertainer after all."

"I thought you were going."

"Not quite yet. So you're not with anybody now? A woman?"

"No. And you, are you and Alex married, separated or divorced?"

"Divorced. It's that obvious?"

"I thought I detected something."

"The residue of an ancient disaster, the crater of a bomb, is what you detect." The window light on her was watery, the stamp of linen making her eyes darker. "I still love him. Not the way you loved your wife. I can tell you had one of those great faithful romances. We didn't. We were more ... melodramatic, let's say. Neither of us was undamaged goods. You can't be in the Zone without a little damage. How much longer do you plan to stay?"

"I have no idea. I think the prosecutor would like to leave me here forever."

"Until you're damaged?"

"At least."

What was disturbing about Eva Kazka was her combination of ferocity and, as she said, damage. She had been to Chernobyl
and
Chechnya? Maybe disaster was her milieu. Her smile suggested that she was giving him a second chance to say something interesting or profound, but Arkady thought of nothing. He had spent his imagination on Baba Yaga.

The door opened. Alex leaned out to say, "My turn."

"Our new friend Arkady may not know all the facts. Facts are important. Facts should not be swept aside."

"You're drunk," Eva said.

"It goes without saying. Arkady, do you enjoy comedy?"

"If it's funny."

"Guaranteed. This is Russian stand-up comedy," Alex said. "Comedy with samogon."

Maria opened a new bottle, releasing the sickeningly sweet smell of fermented sugar, and toddled from guest to guest refilling glasses.

"April twenty-sixth, 1986. The setting: the control room of Reactor Four. The actors: a night shift of fifteen technicians and engineers conducting an experiment—to see whether the reactor can restart itself if all external power for the machinery is cut off. The experiment has been performed before with safety systems on. This time they want to be more realistic. To defeat the safety system of a nuclear reactor, however, is no simple matter. It involves application. You have to disconnect the emergency core cooling system and close and lock the gate valves." Alex walked rapidly back and forth, attending to imaginary switches. "Turn off the automatic control, block the steam control, disable the pre-sets, switch off design protection and neutralize the emergency generators. Then start pulling graphite rods from the core by remote control. This is like riding a tiger, this is fun. There are a hundred and twenty rods in all, a minimum of thirty to be inserted at all times, because this was a Soviet reactor, a military model that was a little unstable at low efficiency, a fact that was, unfortunately, a state secret. Alas, the power plunged."

"When does this start to become funny?" Eva asked.

"It's already funny. It just gets funnier. Imagine the confusion of the technicians. The reactor efficiency is dropping through the floor, and the core is flooding with radioactive xenon and iodine and combustible hydrogen. And somehow they have lost count— they have lost count!—and pulled all but eighteen control rods from the core, twelve below the limit. All the same, there is one last disastrous step to take. They can replace the rods, turn on the safety systems and shut down the reactor. They have not yet turned off the turbine valves and started the actual experiment. They have not pushed the final button."

Alex mimicked hesitation.

"Let's pause and consider what is at stake. There is a monthly bonus. There is a May Day bonus. If they run the test successfully they will likely win promotions and awards. On the other hand, if they shut down the reactor, there would certainly be embarrassing questions asked and consequences felt. There it is, bonuses versus disaster. So, like good Soviets, they marched forward, hands over their balls."

Alex pushed the button.

"In a second the reactor coolant began to boil. The reactor hall started to pound. An engineer hit the panic switch for the control rods, but the rod channels in the reactor melted, the rods jammed, and superheated hydrogen blew off the roof, carrying reactor core, graphite and burning tar into the sky. A black fireball stood over the building, and a blue beam of ionized light shot from the open core. Fifty tons of radioactive fuel flew up, equal to fifty Hiroshima bombs. But the farce continued. Cool heads in the control room refused to believe that they had done anything wrong. They sent a man down to check the core. He returned, his skin black from radiation, like a man who had seen the sun, to report that there was no core. Since this was not an acceptable report, they sacrificed a second man, who returned in the same fatal condition. Now, of course, the men in the control room faced their greatest test of all: the call to Moscow."