Wolves Eat Dogs (15 page)

"I didn't mean to criticize."

"Fire away. Like my wife says, anyone intelligent steals. The thieves understand. Most of the time they just pay off the guards at the checkpoints; this morning was an exception. Usually they slip from one black village to the next, and if we get too close, they just dive into a hot spot we can't go into. I'm not going to risk the lives of my men, even the worst of them, and there are maybe a thousand hot spots, a thousand black holes for thieves to dive into and come out who knows where. If you know anyone else who is willing to come here, ask them." While they talked, the afternoon had turned to dusk. Marchenko lit a cigarette and smiled like the happy captain of a sinking ship. "Invite all your friends to Chornobyl."

Since the ecologists and British Friends had been absent from the cafeteria, Arkady had eaten a quiet dinner and gone to bed with case notes when a phone call came from Olga Andreevna at the children's shelter in Moscow. "I am sorry to report that we have had problems with Zhenya since you left. Behavioral problems and refusal to eat or communicate with other children or with staff. Twice we caught him leaving the shelter at night—so dangerous for a boy his age. I cannot help but associate this increase in social dysfunction with your absence, and I must ask when you plan to return."

"I wish I could say. I don't know." Arkady reached automatically for a cigarette to help him think.

"Some estimate would be helpful. The situation here is deteriorating."

"Has my friend Victor visited Zhenya?"

"Apparently they went to a beer garden. Your friend Victor fell asleep, and the militia returned Zhenya to the shelter. When are you coming back?"

"I am working. I am not on vacation."

"Can you come next weekend?"

"No."

"The weekend after?"

"No. I'm not around the corner, and I'm not his father or an uncle. I am not responsible for Zhenya."

"Talk to him. Wait."

There was silence on the other end of the line. Arkady asked, "Zhenya, are you there? Is anyone there?"

Olga Andreevna came on. "Go ahead, he's here."

"Talk about what?"

"Your work. What it's like where you are. Whatever comes to mind."

All that came to Arkady's mind was an image of Zhenya grimly clutching his chess set and book of fairy tales.

"Zhenya, this is Investigator Renko. This is Arkady. I hope you are well." This sounds like a form letter, Arkady thought. "It seems you've been giving the good people at the shelter problems. Please don't do that. Have you been playing chess?"

Silence.

"The man you played chess with in the car said you were very good."

Maybe there was a boy at the other end, Arkady thought. Maybe the telephone was dangling down a well.

"I'm in the Ukraine, a long drive from Moscow, but I will be back in a while, and I won't know where to find you if you run away from the shelter."

Talk about what else, a man with his throat cut? Arkady searched. "It's like Russia here, but wilder, overgrown. Not many people, but real elk and wild boar. I haven't seen any wolves, but maybe I'll hear them. People say that's a sound you don't forget. It makes you think of wolf packs chasing sleds across the snow, doesn't it? My parents and I used to drive to a dacha. I didn't play chess like you." Arkady remembered the disassembled pistol in his hands and wondered how he'd gotten on this topic. "It was dark when we arrived. There were other dachas, but the people in them had been warned away. When we pulled up to the house, the younger officers who had gone ahead would greet my father by baying like wolves. He would lead them like a conductor. He tried to teach me, but I was never any good."

7

Chernobyl Ecological Station Three was a run-down garden nursery. A filmy light penetrated a plastic roof that had been torn and patched and torn again. Rows of potted plants sat on tables, suffering the music of a radio hanging on a post. Ukrainian hip-hop. Bent over a microscope, Vanko shifted with the beat.

Alex explained to Arkady, "Actually, the most important instrument for an ecologist is a shovel. Vanko is very good with a shovel."

"What are you digging for?"

"The usual villains: cesium, plutonium, strontium. We sample soil and groundwater, test which mushroom soaks up more radionuclides, check the DNA of mammals. We study the mutation rate of
Clethrionomys glareolus,
whom you'll meet, and sample the dose rates of cesium and strontium from a variety of mammals. We kill as few as possible, but you have to be 'Merciless for the Common Good,' as my father used to say." Alex led Arkady outside. "This, however, is our Garden of Eden."

Eden was a five-by-five-meter plot of melons sprawled lazily on the ground, red tomatoes fat on the vine and sunflowers blazing in the morning sun. Beet greens grew down one row and cabbage down another, a veritable borsch on the hoof. In the corners were orange crates propped on sticks.

Alex had a gardener's pride. "The old topsoil had to be scraped away. This new soil is sandy, but I think it's doing well."

"Is that the old soil?" Arkady pointed to an isolated bin of dark earth fifty meters off. The bin was half covered by a tarpaulin and surrounded by warning signs.

"Our particularly dirty dirt. It's worse than finding a needle in a haystack. A speck of cesium is too small to see without a microscope, so we dig everything up. Ah, another visitor."

One of the orange crates had fallen. As Alex lifted the trap, a ball of quills tipped in white rolled out, a pointed nose appeared and two beady eyes squinted up.

"Hedgehogs are serious sleepers, Renko. Even trapped, they don't like to be awakened quite so rudely."

The hedgehog got to its feet, twitched its nose and, with sudden attention, dug up a worm. An elastic tug-of-war ended in a compromise; the hedgehog ate half the worm while half escaped. More alert, the hedgehog considered going one way, then another.

"All he can think of is a new nest with soft, cool rotting leaves. Let me show you something." Alex reached down with a gloved hand, picked up the hedgehog and set it in front of Arkady.

"I'm in his way."

"That's the idea."

The hedgehog marched forward until it encountered Arkady. It butted his foot two, three, four times until Arkady let it through, spines bristling, the exit of a hero.

"He wasn't afraid."

"He's not. There have been generations of hedgehogs since the accident, and they're not afraid of people anymore." Alex pulled off his gloves to light a cigarette. "I can't tell you what a pleasure it is to work with animals that aren't afraid. This is paradise."

Some paradise, Arkady thought. All that separated the plot from the reactor was four kilometers of red forest. Even at that distance, the sarcophagus of Reactor Four and the red-and-white-striped chimney loomed above the trees. Arkady had assumed the garden was only a test site, but no, Alex said, Vanko sold the produce. "People will eat it, it's nearly impossible to stop them. I used to have a big dog, a rottweiler, to guard the place. One night I was working late, and he was outside barking in the snow. He wouldn't stop. Then he stopped. I went out ten minutes later with a lamp, and there was a ring of wolves eating my dog."

"What happened then?"

"Nothing. I chased them and fired a couple of shots."

A Moskvich with a bad muffler went by on the way to Pripyat. Eva Kazka shot Arkady and Alex a glance without slowing down.

"Mother Teresa," Alex said. "Patron saint of useless good works. She's off to the villages to tend the lame and the halt, who shouldn't be here in the first place." Black smoke poured out the tailpipe of the Moskvich like a bad temper.

"She likes you," Alex said.

"Really? I couldn't tell."

"Very much. You're the poetic type. So was I once. Cigarette?" Alex unwrapped a pack.

"Thank you."

"I had stopped smoking before I came to the Zone. The Zone puts everything in perspective."

"But the radioactivity is fading."

"Some. Cesium is the biggest worry now. It's a bone seeker; it heads to the marrow and stops the production of platelets. And you've got a radiation-sensitive lining in your intestines that cesium just fries. That's if everything goes well and the reactor doesn't blow again."

"It might?"

"Could. No one really knows what's going on inside the sarcophagus, except that we believe there's over a hundred tons of uranium fuel keeping itself very warm."

"But the sarcophagus will protect any new explosion?"

"No, the sarcophagus is a rust bucket, a sieve. Every time it rains the sarcophagus leaks and more radioactive water joins the ground-water, which joins the Pripyat River, which joins the Dnieper River, which is the water that Kiev drinks. Maybe then people will notice." From his camos, Alex produced two miniature bottles of vodka, the kind that airlines sold. "I know you drink."

"Not usually this early in the day."

"Well, this is the Zone." Alex unscrewed the caps and threw them away. "Cheers!"

Arkady hesitated, but etiquette was etiquette, so he took the bottle and tossed it down in a swallow.

Alex was pleased. "I find that a cigarette and a little vodka lends a perspective to a day in the Zone."

Although Alex said, "The general rule for moving around the Zone is to stay on the asphalt," he seemed to despise the road. His preferred route was across the mounds and hollows of a buried village in a light truck, a Toyota with extra clearance, which he steered like a boat.

"Turn off your dosimeter."

"What?" That was the last thing Arkady had in mind.

"If you want the tour, you'll get the tour, but on my terms. Turn off the dosimeter. I'm not going to listen to that chattering all day." Alex grinned. "Go ahead, you have questions. What are they?"

"You were a physicist," Arkady said.

"The first time I came to Chernobyl, I was a physicist. Then I switched to radioecology. I am divorced. Parents dead. Political party: anarchist. Favorite sport: water polo, a form of anarchy. No pets. Except for disorderly conduct, virtually no arrests. I am very impressed that I have drawn the attention of a senior investigator from Moscow, and I have to confess that you have my assistant Vanko almost soiling his pants about this poacher you're looking for. He thinks you suspect him."

"I don't know enough to suspect anyone."

"That's what I told Vanko. Oh, I should add, favorite writer: Shakespeare."

"Why Shakespeare?" Arkady held on as the truck climbed a slope of chimney bricks.

"He has my favorite character, Yorick."

"The skull in Hamlet?"

"Exactly. No lines but a wonderful role. 'Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well... a man of infinite jest...' Isn't that the best you can say about anyone? I wouldn't mind being dug up every hundred years so someone could say, Alas, poor Alexander Gerasimov, I knew him well."

"A man of infinite jest?"

"I do the best I can." Alex accelerated as if crossing a minefield. "But Vanko and I don't know much about poachers. We're only ecologists. We check our traps, tag this animal or that, take blood samples, scrape some cells for DNA. We rarely kill an animal, at least a mammal, and we don't have barbecues in the woods. I can't even tell you the last time I ran into a poacher or a squatter."

"You trap in the Zone, and poachers hunt in the Zone. You might have run into each other."

"I honestly don't remember."

"I talked to a poacher who was caught with his crossbow. He said another man whom he took to be a hunter had put a rifle to his head and warned him off. He described the man as about two meters tall; lean; gray eyes; short dark hair." That pretty much described Alex Gerasimov. Arkady leaned back for a better view of the rifle bouncing in the van's rear seat. "He said the rifle was a Protecta twelve-millimeter with a barrel clip."

"A good all-purpose rifle. These characters use crossbows so they can hunt without making a lot of noise, but they're hardly the marksmen they imagine they are. Usually they botch the job, the animal escapes and takes days of agony to bleed to death. To put the barrel of a rifle to someone's head, though—that is a little extreme. This poacher, will he prosecute?"

"How can he, without admitting he was breaking the law himself?"

"A real dilemma. You know, Renko, I'm beginning to see why Vanko is afraid of you."

"Not at all. I appreciate the ride. Sometimes activity prompts a memory. You might empty a trap today and remember that you ran into such-and-such a man right there."

"I might?"

"Or perhaps a person came to you with a moose he accidentally hit with his car, to ask whether it was safe to eat, the moose already being dead and food a shame to waste."

"You think so? There wouldn't be much car left after hitting a moose."

"Just a possibility."

"And I wouldn't advise going in those woods at all."