Wolves Eat Dogs (22 page)

Alex picked up his glass of samogon.

"And what did our heroes say when Moscow asked, 'How is the reactor core?' They answered, 'The core is fine, not to worry, the core is completely intact.' Moscow is relieved. That's the punch line. 'Don't worry.' And here is my toast: 'To the Zone! Sooner or later, it will be everywhere!' Nobody's drinking?"

Roman and Maria sat numb and deflated, feet hanging free of the floor. Vanko looked away. Eva pressed her fist to her mouth, then stood and applied the fist to Alex, not slapping him as she had before but hitting him solidly in the chest until Arkady pulled her away. For a moment no one moved, like marionettes gone limp, until Eva bolted again for the door. This time Arkady heard her car start.

Alex's glass spilled. He refilled and raised it a second time. "Well, it seemed hilarious to me."

10

As a rule, fresh bodies hang facedown underwater, with their arms and legs dangling in a shallow dive. This one was suspended against the bars of the inlet that fed water from the cooling pond to the smaller holding ponds of the station. Emergency water was still needed; the reactors were full of fuel, and in some ways they weren't so much dead as in hibernation.

Two men with gaffs were trying to pull the body closer without falling in themselves. Captain Marchenko watched from the wall of the pond with a group of useless but curious militia officers, the Woropay brothers in front. Eva Kazka stood by her car, as far from the proceedings as possible. Arkady noticed that she looked, if possible, wilder and more unkempt than usual. Probably she had just gone home and dropped, in a samogon stupor. She seemed to be drawing the same conclusion about him.

As Marchenko joined Arkady, a shadow broke the surface of the water to display a slick gray head with rubbery lips, then slid back toward the bottom to stir with even larger catfish in the murk.

The captain said, "Taking into account the bad weather yesterday and the dimensions of the cooling pond, I think you'll agree that it was wise to wait before looking for a body. The way the ponds circulate, everything ends up here at the inlet. Now it's right in our hands."

"And now it's ten in the morning a day later."

"A fisherman falls off his boat and drowns, it really doesn't matter whether you find him one day or the next."

"Like the tree that falls in the forest, does it make a noise?"

"Lots of trees fall in the forest. They're called accidental deaths."

Arkady asked, "Is Dr. Kazka the only doctor available?"

"We can't pull the station doctors. All Dr. Kazka has to do is sign a death certificate."

"You couldn't call for a pathologist?"

"They say Kazka was in Chechnya. If that's the case, she's seen plenty of dead bodies."

Eva Kazka tapped out a cigarette. Arkady had never seen such a nervous individual.

"By the way, I meant to ask you, Captain, did you ever find out whose icon we saw stolen the other day?"

"Yes. It belonged to an old couple named Panasenko. Returnees. The militia keeps a record. I understand it was a beautiful icon."

"Yes."

So a thief on a motorcycle had stolen the icon of Roman and Maria Panasenko's, a crime officially recorded, and yet the icon had returned to its corner perch in the Panasenko cabin. Which was, to Arkady, the opposite of a tree falling without a sound.

From the inlet Arkady had a view of half-completed cooling towers that resembled, with the brush that flourished under and around them, temples half-built. The towers had been meant for the planned Reactors Five and Six. Now power went the other direction, at a trickle, to keep lightbulbs and gauges alive.

An ironic cheer went up when the body was finally grappled. As it was lifted, water drained from its pants and sleeves.

"Don't you have a tarp or plastic to lay the body on?" Arkady asked Marchenko.

"This is not a murder investigation in Moscow. This is a dead drunk in Chornobyl. There's a difference." Marchenko cocked his head. "Don't be shy, take a look."

The captain's men moved truculently out of Arkady's way; the Woropays snickered at the recorder in Arkady's hand.

"Speak up," Marchenko said. "We can all learn."

"Pulled from the water at the inlet of Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant at 1015 hours on July 15, a male apparently in his sixties, two meters tall, dressed in a leather jacket, blue work pants and construction boots." An ugly man, in fact, his thick features bleached by immersion, brown teeth badly sorted, clothes sodden as a wet sheet. "Extremities are rigid, exhibiting rigor mortis. No wedding ring." Arms and legs yearned for the sky, fingers open. "Hair brown." Arkady peeled an eyelid back. "Eyes brown. Left eye dilated. Fully clothed, the body presents no tattoos, moles or other identifying marks. No immediately evident abrasions or contusions. We'll continue at the autopsy."

"No autopsy," Marchenko said.

"We know him," Dymtrus Woropay said.

Taras said, "He's Boris Hulak. He scavenges and fishes. He squats in apartments in Pripyat, always moving around."

"Do you have latex gloves?" Arkady asked.

Marchenko said, "Afraid of getting your hands wet?"

At a nod from the captain, the Woropays unzipped the dead man's jacket and dug out his booklet of identification papers.

Marchenko read them: "Boris Petrovich Hulak, born 1949, residence Kiev, occupation machinist. With his picture." The same ugly face with a living glower. This was the Plumber, Arkady was sure of it. Marchenko threw the ID at Arkady. "That's all you need to know. A social parasite fell off his boat and drowned."

"We'll check his lungs for water," Arkady said.

"He was fishing."

"Where's the rod?"

"He caught a catfish. He had consumed an entire bottle of vodka, he was standing in his boat, a catfish bigger than him pulled the rod out of his hands, and he lost his balance and fell in. No autopsy."

"Maybe the bottle was empty to begin with. We can't assume he was drunk."

"Yes, we can. He was a well-known drunk, he was alone, he fished, he fell in." From his tunic Marchenko pulled the hunting knife he had shown Arkady before, the boar knife. "You want an autopsy? Here's your autopsy." He drove the knife into Boris Hulak's stomach, spewing the sweet gas of digested alcohol. The samogon in Arkady's own stomach rose to his throat. "That's drunk."

Even the Woropays took a step back from the hanging mist. Marchenko wiped his blade on the dead man's jacket.

Arkady said between shallow breaths, "There's still the eye."

"What eye?" the captain asked, his satisfaction interrupted.

"The right eye is normal, but the left eye is fully dilated, which indicates a blow to the head."

"He's decomposing. The muscles relax. His eyes could go different directions. Hulak hit his head on the boat as he went over, what does it matter?"

"He's not a pig. We have to see."

"The investigator is right," Eva Kazka said. She had wandered over from her car. "If you want me to sign a death certificate, there should be a cause of death."

"You need an autopsy for that?"

"Before you stick the body again, I think so," Eva said.

She wasn't talkative. Boris Hulak was laid out naked on a steel table with his head propped against a wooden block, and he said about as much as Eva did while she opened his body, first with an incision from his collar to his groin and then in handfuls, moving organs into separate bedpans, all with the brisk dispatch of someone washing dishes. The room was meanly furnished, with little more than the essentials of scales and pails, and she had already spent an hour washing the body and examining it for bruises, tattoos and needle tracks. Arkady had checked Hulak's clothes at a sink, finding nothing more remarkable in the dead man's pockets than a purse of loose change and a door key, and nothing in his billfold except a damp twenty-hryvnia note, a photo-booth picture of a boy about six years old and an expired video-club card. Arkady had cut off Hulak's boots and found hidden under the sole almost two hundred American dollars—not bad for a scavenger of radioactive electrical wiring. While Eva Kazka worked on one side of the table, Arkady worked on the other, drying out fingers wrinkled by immersion and then plumping them with injections of saline to lift the ridges and produce usable prints to compare with those he had lifted from the bottle found in the boat.

Fluorescent lights turned cadavers green, and Boris Hulak was greener than most, a fleshy body wrapped in fat through the middle, hard through the legs and shoulders, exuding a bouquet of ethanol. Eva wore her lab coat, cap and professional demeanor, and she and Arkady smoked as they worked to mask the smell. There were few enough benefits to smoking; this was one.

"Ever wish you hadn't asked for something?" Eva said. She saw through him, which didn't make him feel any better. She consulted her autopsy chart. "All I can tell you so far is that between cirrhosis of the liver and necrosis of the kidney, Boris had perhaps two more years to live. Otherwise, he was a hardy specimen. And no, there was virtually no water in the lungs."

"I think I chased Hulak through Pripyat a few nights ago."

"Did you catch him?"

"No."

"And you never would have. Scavengers know the Zone like a magician knows his trapdoors and top hats and radioactive bunnies." She tapped the scalpel on the table. "Captain Marchenko doesn't like you. I thought you were great friends."

"No. I've ruined his perfect record. A militia station commander wants no problems, no homicides and, most of all, no unsolved homicides. He certainly doesn't want two of them."

"The captain is a bitter man. The story is that he got in trouble in Kiev by turning down a bribe, which embarrassed his superiors, who had taken their share of the money in good faith. He's been stationed here to give him a glimpse of hell in case he ever thinks of making that mistake again. Then you arrive from Moscow, and he feels more trapped than ever. You were comparing Hulak's fingerprints to some on a card."

"From the vodka bottle I found in the boat."

"And?"

"They're all Hulak's."

"Wouldn't you say that was fairly strong evidence Hulak was alone? Have you ever known a Russian or a Ukrainian to not share a bottle? He didn't drown, but I have to tell you that apart from being posthumously stabbed by the captain, I see no signs of recent violence. Maybe he did hook a big fish and hit his head on the boat as he went over. Either way, you made the wrong enemy in Captain Marchenko. It might make him happy if we stopped right here."

Arkady leaned over the body. Boris Hulak had a pugnacious head with heavy brows, a broad nose mapped in erupted veins, brown hair thick as otter fur and cheeks covered in stubble, no bruising or swelling, no ligature marks around the neck, no defensive wounds on the hands, not a scratch in the scalp. However, there was that dilated iris of the left eye, as open as the stuck shutter of a camera. Also, Arkady had worked his way out of his samogon stupor.

Arkady said, "Then it will make the captain even happier if we prove I'm wrong."

Most doctors never encountered a cadaver after anatomy class, and forgot the reeking totality of death. But Eva coolly repositioned the block farther down under Hulak's neck.

He said, "You've seen men shot in the head before."

"Shot in the head with a pistol and shot in the back with a rifle, supposedly in the middle of combat. Either way, there's usually an entry wound, which your man appears to lack. Last chance to stop."

"You're probably right, but let's see."

Eva sliced the back of Hulak's scalp from ear to ear. She folded the flap of skin and hair forward over the eyes to work with a circular saw. A power saw was always heavy and, what with the cloud of white dust it produced, hard to manage in delicate work. She popped the top of his skull with a chisel, reached in with a scalpel to free the brain from the spinal cord and laid the soft pink mass in its glistening sac beside the empty head.

"The captain is not going to like this," Eva said.

A red line ran across the top, the trail of a bullet that had traversed the brain and then, bouncing off angles, scoured the cranium. Hulak must have gone down instantly.

"Small-caliber?" Eva asked.

"I think so."

She turned the brain in every direction before choosing one pomegranate-red clot to attack. She cut the sac, sliced into gray matter and squeezed out a bullet like a pip. It pinged as it dropped onto the table. She wasn't done. She shone a penlight around the inside of the skull until a beam came out the left ear.

"Who is this good a shot?" she asked.

"A sniper, a sable hunter, a taxidermist. I would guess the bullet is five-point-six-millimeter, which is what marksmen use in competitive shooting."

"From a boat?"

"The water was still."

"And the sound?"

"A silencer, maybe. A small-caliber doesn't make that much noise to begin with."

"So, now, two murders. Congratulations, Chornobyl has killed a million people, and you have added two more. I would say that at death, you're very good."

While she was impressed Arkady asked, "What about the first body, the one from the cemetery? Besides the nature of the wound on the throat, was there anything else you could have added to your note?"

"I didn't examine him. I simply saw the wound and wrote something. Wolves tear and yank, they don't slice."

"How bloody was his shirt?"

"From what I saw, very little."

"Hair?"

"Clean. His nose was bloody."

"He suffered from nosebleeds," Arkady said.

"This would have been quite a nosebleed. It was packed."

"How do you explain that?"

"I don't. You're the magician—only you pull up the dead instead of rabbits."

Arkady was wondering how to respond when there was a knock at the door and Vanko stuck in his head.

"The Jews are here!"

"What Jews?" Arkady asked. "Where?"

"In the middle of town, and they're asking for you!"

The afternoon sun detailed Chernobyl's drab center: café, cafeteria, statue of Lenin amid candy wrappers. A pair of militia stepped out of the cafeteria to look up the road; they stared so hard, they leaned. Vanko ran off, to what purpose Arkady didn't know. All he saw was a man walking with familiar flat-footed arrogance ahead of a car. He was dressed in a Hasidic Jew's black suit, white shirt and fedora, although in place of a full beard was red stubble.

"Bobby Hoffman."

Hoffman looked over his shoulder. "I knew I'd find you if I just kept walking. This is the second day I've been marching up and down."

"You should have asked people where I was."

"Jews do not ask Ukrainian cannibals. I asked one, and he disappeared."

"He said the Jews were coming. It's just you?"

"Just me. Did I scare them? I wish I could fry the whole fucking lot of them. Let's keep walking. My advice to Jews in the Ukraine is, always present a moving target."

"You've been here before."

"Last year. Pasha wanted me to look into the spent-fuel situation."

"There's a profit in spent radioactive fuel?"

"It's the coming thing."

The car was a mud-spattered Nissan, a comedown from the Mercedes Arkady had last seen Hoffman in. Hoffman's clothes, too, were a change.

"Is this a new you?"

"The Hasidic gear? Hasidim are the only Jews they see around here. The idea is, this way I draw less attention." Hoffman looked at Arkady's camos. "Join the army?"

"Standard wear for a citizen of the Zone. Does Colonel Ozhogin know you're here?"

"Not yet. You remember that disk the colonel was so proud of finding? It was more than just a list of foreign accounts. It was an order to reroute them to a little bank of my own. I could have stayed in Moscow, but when Pasha died and Ozhogin locked me out of NoviRus, out of my own office, I said, 'Fuck them! Them or me!' But I had to get the asshole to want the disk and feed it into the system. Remember how the colonel pinched my nose until he got blood? Well, I'm doing the pinching now, buddy, and it's not by the nose."

"So you should be on the run. Why are you here?"

"You need help. Renko, you've been here over a month. I talked to your detective Victor."

"You talked to Victor?"

"Victor does e-mail."

"He hasn't communicated with me. I call and he's out of the office, I call his mobile phone and there's no answer at all."

"Caller ID. You're not paying him, and I am. And Victor says you didn't send any reports to Moscow worth shit. Have you made any progress?"

"No."

"No progress at all?"

"Nothing."

"You're drowning here. You're on dream time."

They had walked past the café to a neighborhood of acacias and two-story wooden houses where once lived Chernobyl's socialist gentry: mayor and militia commander, local Party secretary and assistants, prosecutor and judge, port and factory managers. Some walls rotted and dragged down the roof; some roofs collapsed and buckled the walls. Trees groped into one window and pushed open the shutters of the next. A doll with a bleached-out face stood in the yard.

"How are you going to help?" Arkady asked.

"We'll help each other."

Hoffman motioned for the car to draw forward and pushed Arkady inside. The driver offered a glance of indifference. He had sunken eyes and a skullcap pinned to a wisp of hair. He rested busted knuckles on the steering wheel.

Hoffman said, "Don't worry about Yakov. I selected him because he's the oldest Jew in the Ukraine, and he doesn't speak a word of English." The space in back was tight and became more cramped when Hoffman opened a laptop computer. "I'm going to give you a chance to shine, Renko. I'm not saying you're a complete incompetent."

"Thanks."

"I'm just saying you need a little assistance. For example, you had an idea about collecting surveillance videotapes not only from Pasha's apartment building but also from the buildings on either side. In fact, Victor did what you told him. The problem was that you caved. You called Pasha's death a suicide."

"It was a suicide."

"Driven to killing himself is not what I call suicide. Don't get me started. Okay, Pasha was called a suicide, and no more investigation, and Victor had read somewhere about vodka protecting against radiation. He got real protected. By the time he got sober, he had forgotten all about the tapes. Then Timofeyev got his throat cut, and Prosecutor Zurin sent you here." Bobby looked out the car window at the houses. "Eskimos are kinder: they just set you on a fucking ice floe."

"The tapes?"

"I reached Victor. Know what his e-mail address is? You can buy it on the Internet; it's illegal, but you can do it. Apparently, like all Russians, he once had a dog named Laika. So I reached 'Laika 1223' and offered Victor a reward for any notes or evidence left over. I caught him at a sober moment, because he even transferred the tapes to a disk for me."