Wolves Eat Dogs (10 page)

Hoffman hunched forward. "Did I mention he likes you just as much as me?"

"I don't know why." The prospect of running into Ozhogin again made Arkady want to lift weights and work out regularly. He lit a cigarette. "Where did you hide the disk?"

"I knew Ozhogin would look in my apartment, so I put it in my gym locker. I actually taped it upside down. It was invisible. I don't know how he found it."

"How often do you go to the gym, Bobby?"

"Once a..." Hoffman shrugged.

"There you are."

"Oh, and now that they have the disk, the offer is 'Leave the country or go to jail.' I pissed them off. Fuck them, I'll be back."

"And Rina?"

"Let me tell you about Rina." Bobby picked pirozhki crumbs off his jacket. "She is a lovely kid, and Pasha left her well set up, and within a year the most important thing in her life will be fashion shows. And she'll run Pasha's foundation, that'll keep her busy. Everyone wins except you and me. And I'll bounce back."

"Which leaves me."

"At the bottom of the food chain. I'll tell you this much: the company's dead."

"NoviRus?"

"Kaput. All that held it together was Pasha." Bobby gently touched his nose. "Maybe Timofeyev was a good scientist once upon a time, but in business he is a total dud. No nerve, no imagination. I never understood why Pasha kept him on. Not to mention that Timofeyev is falling apart in front of everyone's eyes. Six months, you know who'll run the show at NoviRus? Ozhogin. He's a cop. Only you can't run a complicated business entity like a cop, you have to be a general. Kuzmitch and Maximov can't wait. When they're done with Ozhogin, you won't be able to find his bones. It's the food chain, Renko. Figure out the food chain, and you figure out the world."

Arkady watched Zhenya bounce in and out of sight. He asked Hoffman, "What do you know about Anton Obodovsky?"

"Obodovsky?" Bobby raised his eyebrows. "Tough guy, local Mafia, jacked some of our trucks and drained some oil tanks. He has balls, I'll give him that. Ozhogin pointed him out on the street once. Obodovsky made the colonel nervous. I liked that."

When Zhenya finally emerged from the fun house, they started home. Hoffman and Zhenya played chess without a board, calling out their moves, the boy piping "e4" from the backseat, followed quickly by Hoffman's confident "c5" up front. Arkady could follow through the first ten moves, and then it was like listening to a conversation between robots, so he concentrated more on his own diminishing prospects.

It was virtually impossible to be dismissed for incompetence. Incompetence had become the norm under the old law, when prosecutors faced no courtroom challenges from upstart lawyers, and convenient evidence and confessions were always close at hand. Drinking was indulged: a drunken investigator who curled up in the back of a car was treated as gently as an ailing grandmother. Corruption, however, was tricky. While corruption was the lubrication of Russian life, an investigator accused of corruption always drew public outrage. There was a painting called
The Sleigh Ride,
of a troika driver throwing a horrified girl to a pursuing wolf pack. Zurin was like that driver. He compiled files on his own investigators, and whenever the press got close to him, he tossed them a victim. Arkady had no reason to be horrified or surprised.

He asked Hoffman, "Does Timofeyev have a cold or a bloody nose?"

"He says he has a cold."

"There were spots on his shirt that looked like dried blood."

"Which could have come from blowing his nose."

"Did Pasha have a bloody nose?"

"Sometimes," Hoffman said. He was still engaged in the chess game.

"Did he have a cold?"

"No."

"An allergy?"

"No. Rook takes b3."

Zhenya said, "Queen to d8, check."

"Did he see a doctor?" Arkady asked.

"He wouldn't go."

"He was paranoid?"

"I don't know. I never looked at it that way. It wasn't that obvious, because he was still on top of the business end. King to h7."

"Queen to e7," said Zhenya.

"Queen to d5."

"Checkmate."

Hoffman threw his hands up as if upsetting a board. "Fuck!"

"He's good," Arkady said.

"Who knows, with these distractions?"

Zhenya
won two more games before they got to the children's shelter. Arkady walked him to the door, and Zhenya marched through without a backward look, which was both more and less than disdain. Hoffman was closing his mobile phone when Arkady returned to the car.

"He's Jewish," Hoffman said.

"His last name is Lysenko. That's not Jewish."

"I just played chess with him. He's Jewish. Can you let me off at the Mayakovsky metro station? Thanks."

"You like Mayakovsky?"

"The poet? Sure. 'Look at me, world, and envy me. I have a Soviet passport!' Then he blew his brains out. What's not to like?"

As Arkady drove, he glanced at Hoffman, who was not the sobbing wreck he had been the day before. That Hoffman could not have played chess with anyone. This Hoffman went from poetry to boasting lightly, without incriminating detail, about a variety of business scams—front companies and secret auctions—that he and Ivanov had perpetrated together.

"How are you feeling?" Arkady asked.

"Pretty disappointed."

"You've been humiliated and fired. You should be furious."

"I am."

"And you lost the disk."

"That was the ace up my sleeve."

"You're bearing up well, considering."

"I can't get over that kid. You probably don't appreciate it, Renko, but that was chess at a really high level."

"It certainly sounded like it. Keeping the disk, hiding the disk, using me and my pitiful investigation to make the disk seem important, and finally letting Ozhogin find it at your gym, of all places. What did you put on it? What's going to happen at NoviRus when that disk goes to work?"

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

"You're a computer expert. The disk is poison."

The sky darkened behind illuminated billboards that used to declaim: The Party Is the Vanguard of the Workers! and now advertised cognac aged in the barrel, as if a madman raving on a corner had been smoothly replaced by a salesman. Neon coins rolled across the marquee of a casino and lit a rank of Mercedeses and SUVs.

"How would you know?" Hoffman twisted in his seat. "I'm getting out. Right here is good."

"We're not at the station."

"Hey, asshole, I said this corner was good."

Arkady pulled over, and Bobby heaved himself out of the car. Arkady leaned across the seat and rolled down the window. "Is that your good-bye?"

"Renko, will you fuck off? You wouldn't understand."

"I understand that you made a mess for me."

"You don't get it."

Drivers trapped behind Arkady shouted for him to move. Horns were rarely used when threats would do. A wind chased bits of paper around the street.

"What don't I get?" Arkady asked.

"They killed Pasha."

"Who?"

"I don't know."

"They pushed him?"

"I don't know. What does it matter? You were going to quit."

"There's nothing to quit. There's no investigation."

"Know what Pasha said? 'Everything is buried, but nothing is buried long enough.' "

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning here's the hot news. Rina is a whore, I'm a shit and you're a loser. That's as much chance as we had. This whole place is fucked. I used you, so what? Everybody uses everybody. That's what Pasha called a chain reaction. What do you expect from me?"

"Help."

"Like you're still on the case?" Bobby looked up at the heavy sky, at the gold coins of the casino, at the split toes of his shoes. "They killed Pasha, that's all I know."

"Who did?"

Bobby whispered, "Keep your fucking country."

"How—" Arkady began, but the lead Mercedes in line slid forward and popped open its rear door. Bobby Hoffman ducked in and shut it, closing himself off behind steel and tinted glass, although not before Arkady saw a suitcase on the seat. So the car hadn't been idly sitting by, it had been arranged. At once the sedan eased away, while Arkady followed in the Zhiguli. In tandem, the two cars passed Mayakovsky Station and continued on Leningrad Prospect, headed north. What was worth heading to? It was too dark for a sunlit stroll on the beach at Serebryaniy Bor, and too late for races at the Hippodrome. But there was the airport. Evening flights from Sheremetyevo headed in all directions, and Hoffman had been in and out of the airport often enough to grease half the staff there. He would have a ticket to Egypt or India or a former-Soviet-stan, any place without an extradition treaty with the United States. He would be whisked through security, ushered to first class and offered champagne. Bobby Hoffman, veteran fugitive, was stealing the march again, and once he was through security, he would be beyond Arkady's reach.

Not that Arkady had any authority to stop Hoffman. He simply wanted to ask him what was buried. And what he had meant when he said that Pasha had somehow been killed? Was Pasha Ivanov pushed or not? Hoffman's driver reached up to place a blue light on the car roof and plowed ahead in the express lane. Arkady slapped on his own official light and swung from lane to lane to stay close. No one slowed. Russian drivers took an oath at birth to never slow, Arkady thought, just as Russian pilots took off no matter what the weather.

But traffic did brake and squeeze around a bonfire in the middle of the road. Arkady thought it was an accident until he saw figures dancing around the fire, executing Hitler salutes and smashing the windshields and headlights of passing cars with rocks and steel rods. As he drew closer, he saw not wood but a blackened car shifting in the flames and spewing the acrid smoke of burning plastic. Fifty or more figures rocked a bus. A woman jumped from the bus door and went down screaming. A three-wheeled Zaporozhets hardly larger than a motorcycle cut in front of Arkady and rammed his fender. Inside were a man and woman, perhaps Arabs. Four men with shaved heads and a red-and-white banner swarmed the car. The largest lifted the car so that its front wheel spun in the air, while another stove in the passenger window with the banner pole. Arkady lifted his eyes to the light towers of Dynamo Stadium blazing ahead and understood what was happening.

Dynamo was playing Spartak. The Dynamo soccer club was sponsored by the militia, and Spartak was the favorite of skinhead groups like the Mad Butchers and the Clockwork Oranges. Skinheads supported their team by stomping any Dynamo fans they found on the street. Sometimes they went a little further. The skinhead holding the front of the Zaporozhets had ripped off his shirt to show a broad chest tattooed with a wolf's head, and arms ringed with swastikas. His friend with the pole beat in the last of the windshield and dragged the woman out by her hair, shouting, "Get your black ass out of that Russian car!" She emerged with her cheek cut and her hair and sari sparkling with safety glass. Arkady recognized Mrs. Rajapakse. The other two skinheads beat in Mr. Rajapakse's window with steel rods.

Arkady was not aware of getting out of the Zhiguli. He found himself holding a gun to the head of the skinhead clutching the bumper. "Let go of the car."

"You love niggers?" The strongman spat on Arkady's raincoat.

Arkady kicked the man's knee from the side. He didn't know whether it broke, but it gave way with a satisfying snap. As the man hit the ground and howled, Arkady moved to the Spartak supporter who was pinning Mrs. Rajapakse to the hood. Since skinheads filled the street and the clip of Arkady's pistol held only thirteen rounds, he chose a middle course. "If you—" the man had begun when Arkady clubbed him with the gun.

As Arkady moved around the car, the skinheads with the rods gave themselves some swinging room. They were tall lads with construction boots and bloody knuckles. One said, "You may get one of us, but you won't get both."

Arkady noticed something. There was no clip in his gun at all. He'd removed it for the drive with Zhenya. And he never kept a round in the breech.

"Then which one will it be?" he asked and aimed first at one man and then the other. "Which one doesn't have a mother?" Sometimes mothers were monsters, but usually they cared whether their sons died on the street. And sons knew this fact. After a long pause, the two boys' grip on the bars went slack. They were disgusted with Arkady for such a low tactic, but they backed off and dragged away their wounded comrades.

Meanwhile, the general melee spread. Militia piled out of vans, and skinheads smashed bus-stop displays as they ran. The Rajapakses brushed glass from their seats. Arkady offered to drive them to a hospital, but they nearly ran over him in their haste to make a U-turn and leave the scene.

Rajapakse shouted out his broken window, "Thank you, now go away, please. You are a crazy man, as crazy as they are."

Holding his ID high, Arkady walked up to the burning car. Victims of the skinheads sprawled on the road and sidewalk, sobbing amid broken side mirrors, torn shirts, shoes. He went as far as a line of militia barricades being rapidly, belatedly erected at the stadium grounds. Hoffman was nowhere in sight, but everywhere was shining glass, in coarse grains and small.