Wolves Eat Dogs (26 page)

"Alex? Vanko?"

There was no answer but the sifting of leaves overhead, until he heard a laugh in the dark. Arkady clutched Vanko's videotape under his arm and started to trot. The dormitory light was a mere fifty meters off. He wasn't afraid; he was just a man taking midnight exercise. Something flew by, scooped up his leg in midstride and planted him on his back. Something from the other side speared him in the stomach and knocked the air out of him. Oxygen floated over him just out of reach, and his chest made the sound of a dry pump. The best he could do was roll to the side as a blade dug into the street by his ear, which earned him a slap on the head from the other direction. The gliding sound went on. Face on the pavement, he sucked his first breath and saw, silhouetted against the distant light of the café, a figure in camos on inline skates and carrying a hockey stick. It rolled forward, stick poised for a winning goal. Arkady tried to get to his feet and immediately went down on a numb leg, his reward a blow across the back. Facedown again, he noticed that what made them such excellent shots were night-vision goggles strapped to their heads. Since he was going nowhere, they circled, darting in and out, letting him twist one way and then the other. When he kicked back, they slashed his legs. When he tried to grab a stick, they feinted and hit him from the other side. The last thing he was prepared for was a man stepping in between with a flashlight that he shone directly into the eyes of the nearest skater. While the skater blindly staggered back, the man put a large gun under the skater's chin and directed the light on it so that the second skater could see the relationship of gun barrel to head.

A voice croaked, "Fascists! I will shoot, and your friend will blow up like a grapefruit. Get back, go home or I'll shoot both of you
goyischer
boot shit. Go on, go!"

It was Yakov, and although he was half the size of the skater in his grasp, Yakov gave him a kick to send him on his way to the other skater. They huddled for a moment, but the click of the gun hammer being cocked discouraged them, and they rolled off into the shadows on the far side of the street.

Arkady got to his feet and located, in order, his head, shins and the videotape.

"If you're standing, you're okay," Yakov said.

"What are you doing here?"

"Following you."

"Thank you."

"Forget it. Let me see again." Yakov played the flashlight beam around Arkady's head. "You look fine."

Yakov is now the arbiter of damage? Arkady thought. This was trouble.

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.