Wolves Eat Dogs (36 page)

Arkady was on foot. When he was a boy and his father took him hunting, the general would shout, "Run, rabbit!," because shooting a standing rabbit was so little fun. "Wave," he'd tell Arkady. "Damn it, wave." Arkady would wave, the rabbit would bolt and the old man would drill it.

Dymtrus followed Arkady into the school, by the hanging chalkboard. Arkady tripped in the dark over gas masks on the lobby floor. They flopped out of the crate like rubber fish. He moved by memory as much as sight, heading for the kitchen in the back of the building. White tiles lined the kitchen walls. A dough bowl the size of a wheelbarrow stood on its legs. All the oven doors were open or broken off. The back door, however, had been boarded up in the last week. We should have rehearsed, the comic in him said. He looked out a window at chairs set on the ground for staff to use while smoking. He considered breaking the window with a loose oven door, until he saw Dymtrus waiting behind a birch. Arkady returned to the lobby and looked out the front window. Skates off, Taras was stepping up to the door.

Arkady went up the stairs two at a time, kicking bottles and debris aside. Taras was inside, at the bottom of the stairwell. Arkady knocked a loose bookcase down toward him. Copybooks fluttered down. Taras didn't have to shout to his brother where Arkady was. Anyone could hear.

Second floor. The music room. A piano leaning like a drunk against a loose keyboard. The tub-thumping sound of a drum accidentally kicked. All the notes a xylophone could make when stumbled into. A one-man band. Heavier feet on the stairs. Dymtrus. The next room was a flood of books, desks, children's benches. The door frame next to Arkady's head split open before he heard the shot. He javelined a bench down the hall and knew he had caught someone when he heard a curse. The last room was a nap center of dolls asleep on white beds. Arkady gathered a mattress around himself and dove through the glass of the window.

He landed on his back between seesaws, rolled to the trees and crawled under a thorn bush, feeling a prick or two, also aware of blood running down the back of his neck and into his camos, but there was no time to take inventory. In the moonlight he saw the brothers scanning trees from the broken window. He thought he might get away. He would have at least the time it would take them to go the length of the hall, down the stairs and out the front while he went the opposite direction. But they were athletes. Dymtrus stepped up on the sill and jumped. He hit the mattress and rolled off. Taras followed suit, and they were close enough for Arkady to hear their breathing. Close enough to smell a mixture of vodka and cologne.

They signaled to each other and separated. Arkady couldn't see where to, although he suspected they would go only a short distance and double back right to where he was. If he did get to the far woods, he could head west to the wild Carpathian Mountains or east to Moscow. The sky was the limit.

The woods were so loud. The electric shriek of crickets and cicadas. The invisible luffing of trees in the breeze. A man could just sink into the sound. Dead, he would.

A rock, a brick, something hit the wall of the school. Immediately, Taras, one arm hung low, hurt, ran forward and around the side of the school. One on one, Arkady took his chance. He emerged and moved to the quarter that Taras had deserted.

He had been suckered. Dymtrus was waiting behind a big enough tree this time, but Arkady tripped in brambles, and the shot that should have taken off his shoulder was high. By the time Dymtrus had advanced to see, Arkady was on his feet again, weaving downhill between trees.

Arkady had no plan. He wasn't headed to any particular road or checkpoint, he was only running. Since the Zone was uninhabited, apart from the staff in Chernobyl and the old folks in their black villages, he had a lot of running to do. He heard Taras's shouts catching up. The brothers were behind him, one on either side. One problem was that moonlight was not real light. Branches materialized to slap his face. Roots insidiously spread. Radiation markers seemed to multiply.

He glimpsed a Woropay closer every time he dared look. How could they be so fast? The ground pitched forward, and they were herding him through deeper and deeper bracken. His feet grew heavy, clutched by mud, and he saw ahead a trail of silver water.

It was a small swamp ringed by armless, rotting trees, reeds, the plop of frogs. In the center, the hump of a beaver dam and, topping that, a diamond-shaped marker.

Arkady moved back to firmer ground. He found no stones. A branch he picked up turned to dust. Weaponless, he met the charge of Taras, threw him over his hip, and stood to face Dymtrus. Dymtrus fought like an ice-hockey player: grab with one hand and pound with the other. Arkady took the hand, twisted and locked it behind Dymtrus's back, then ran him into a tree. He kicked Taras in the head when he returned. He hit Dymtrus below the belt. But Dymtrus clutched Arkady's knees as he dropped, and Arkady couldn't put enough force behind a punch into Taras's head. Dymtrus climbed up Arkady. Taras hit back with the gun. Dymtrus held Arkady's arms so Taras could swing the gun at a steadier target. The next conscious moment, Arkady was being turned over on the ground. Shooting him was too easy; they could have done that when they first caught up.

Dymtrus said, "I brought the pillow."

He pulled the pillow out of his tunic and sat on Arkady's chest while Taras knelt and held on to Arkady's arms. Dymtrus breathed hard through the saliva that draped from his mouth. The blood on the pillow was still damp.

Arkady's eyes sought the moon, a treetop, anything else.

Dymtrus said, "You'll go like Karel went. Then we'll put you in the water, and no one will find you for a thousand fucking years."

"Fifty thousand." Alex Gerasimov came out of the trees. "More like fifty thousand years."

In Alex's hand was a gun. He shot Dymtrus in the back, and the big man collapsed as dead as a slaughtered steer while his brother sat back on his heels in surprise. Taras brushed the hair from his eyes and had started to form a question when Alex shot him. A cigarette burn through the heart. Taras looked down at it and kept falling until he spread out on the ground.

Alex picked up the pillow.
"Je ne regrette rien.
Absolutely," he said and flung the pillow into the water almost to the diamond marker.

They carried the bodies back.

Alex said the swamp and hillside were too hot; the militia would either leave the Woropays or drag them out by the heels. Hadn't Arkady seen the Chernobyl militia in action? What kind of investigation did he expect? Fortunately, there were two witnesses.

"They were trying to kill you and I saved your life. Isn't that what happened?"

They carried the Woropays over the shoulder, fireman-style. Alex led the way with Dymtrus while Arkady, one eye swollen shut and his sense of balance badly out of kilter for being gunwhipped, staggered under Taras. Going uphill was slow work, slipping on needles with every step.

Alex said, "You're lucky I heard the shot. I thought it was a poacher in the middle of the city. You know how I am about poachers."

"I know."

"Then I heard another shot behind the school and followed the shouting. The Woropays make a lot of noise."

"Yes."

"You're not hurt?"

"I'm fine."

Alex paused to look back. "We'll take these two up to the school, and then I'll get the truck."

Arkady tripped on a root and went to one knee like a waiter with too much on his tray. He couldn't shift shoulders because he could see out of only one eye. He pushed himself up and asked, "Did you see Katamay?"

"Yes. You know what makes a full moon extraordinary? You feel like an animal, like an animal sees." Despite Dymtrus's weight, with guns stuck fore and aft in his belt, Alex slowed his pace just to accommodate Arkady. "We don't deserve a full moon. We make everything smaller. Everything big we cut down. First-growth trees, big cats, adult fish, wild rivers. That's what's wonderful about the Zone. Keep us out for fifty thousand years, and this place may grow into something."

"You saw Karel?" Arkady repeated.

"He didn't look good."

Arkady climbed a step at a time, and Alex began talking the way an adult would on a long, cold walk with a boy who was sniveling and slow, by distracting him with stories and things the boy would like to hear.

"Pasha Ivanov and Lev Timofeyev were my father's favorites, always in and out of our apartment. His best researchers, best instructors and, when he was too drunk to function, his best protection. There's always a good impulse behind the worst disasters, don't you find? And I swear, when I began working at NoviRus, it was purely for the extra money. I had no great plan of retribution."

Retribution? Was that what Alex had said? Arkady's head was still ringing, and it took all his concentration to continue moving as Alex bent a tree limb out of his way.

"My friend Yegor called from Moscow. Yes, I worked part-time for NoviRus Security as an interpreter in the accident section, which usually meant twenty-four hours of reading in a small, windowless room. Maybe Colonel Ozhogin's office was on the fifteenth floor, but we were in the bowels of the building."

"The belly of the beast."

"Exactly. Since your're underground, it always seems like night. Very space-age, with tinted glass for walls. I began wandering the halls and discovered that the technicians monitoring all those security screens were even more bored than I was. They're kids; I was the only one over thirty. Imagine sitting in the dark and staring at a bank of screens for hours on end. For what? Martians? Chechens? Bank robbers with stockings pulled over their heads? One day I went by an empty chair, and on the screen was a palace gate swinging open for a couple of Mercedeses. The cars moved to another screen, and there was Pasha Ivanov after so many years, Mr. NoviRus himself, getting out of a car with a beautiful woman on his arm. It's
his
palace. I hadn't seen him since Chernobyl. On the screens I could follow him up the grand staircase and into the lobby. Here, I told myself, was a man who had everything.

"I wondered, what do you give a man who has everything? We were working with cesium chloride at the institute. Remember how social Ivanov was? At Christmas he threw a party for about a thousand people at his palace, collecting gifts for some charity. Very democratic: staff, friends, millionaires, children, wandering in every room because Ivanov liked to show off, the way New Russians do. I brought some grains of cesium chloride and a dosimeter in a lead box wrapped as a present, and lead-lined gloves and tongs in the back of my belt. I found his bathroom and left one grain out for him to step on and track around, and the present on the toilet seat with a card inviting him to Chernobyl to atone. I waited months, and all Ivanov did was send Hoffman, his fat American friend, to hide among the Hasidim. Can you believe it? Ivanov delegated a prayer for the dead, and Hoffman didn't even perform."

Arkady was not performing well, either. Taras was deadweight that took any opportunity—the brush of a limb, a faltering step—to slide off Arkady's shoulder. Arkady stumbled, but he followed Alex's voice. Alex stopped every few steps to make sure of it. He laid out the story like a trail of tasty crumbs along a forest path. "Ivanov moved to a mansion in the city with a guardhouse. But all the bodyguards in the world won't help if your dog comes back from his run in the park with a grain or two in his hair, which he distributes around the house. I started a campaign against Timofeyev, too, but he was a secondary character. He was no Pasha Ivanov. Of course, after Ivanov was dead, Timofeyev was willing to come here, but before, the two of them had to behave as if nothing was happening, nothing to report to the militia or even NoviRus Security, where, incidentally, I flourished. I was every technician's big brother. I helped them study their correspondence courses for business degrees so they could become New Russians themselves. I found the code clerk a doctor he could take his sexual dysfunction to while I covered for him. Really, the plan took shape by itself. See, there's the school already, at the top of the hill."

To Arkady, the school was as distant as a cloud in the sky. He was impressed that he had come so far. Taras, dead or not, kept trying different ways to slither out of Arkady's arm. Alex steadied Arkady over a log, and Arkady wondered whether he could get close enough to grab one of the guns tucked in Alex's waistband, but Alex was on the march with Dymtrus again, setting an example, jollying Arkady along, keeping him entertained.

"Want to hear about the fumigator van? That was fun. Saturday mornings the tech for Ivanov's building was always hungover. I covered and saw the same images the receptionist saw in the lobby, and as soon as the van rolled into the service alley, I called on the security line and told him to read a list of the previous month's guests to me. This is not computerized. The receptionist has to physically turn away from the street, get the binder from a bottom drawer, find the day and decipher his own handwriting, with no view of the screens. I know all this because I have been watching him on the lobby monitor for weeks. The fumigator has codes for touchpads at the back door, the service elevator and Ivanov's floor, and I've promised him twelve minutes of distraction. In the middle of this, the tech comes back to replace me. I shake my head. He waits while I go on talking to the receptionist, because I'm waiting for the fumigator to get out. I can see why people turn to a life of crime; the adrenaline is incredible. I give the tech two aspirin, and he leaves for water. At the same moment the fumigator comes into the alley, faster now because he's no longer pulling a suitcase full of salt, loads the van and drives off. I thank the receptionist, hang up and then watch. He puts down the binder, looks up at the camera, checks his screens, rewinds the street and alley tapes. He sees the van and he calls in the doorman, who disappears toward the back. I feel like I'm in the lobby. We wait, the receptionist and I. The doorman returns, shaking his head, and hops in the elevator. On the monitors I can see him going from floor to floor knocking on doors, while the receptionist acts super calm, with half an eye on the camera, until the doorman returns. No problem, nothing to worry about, everything's under control. Almost there, Renko."