Wolves Eat Dogs (20 page)

“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.”

“You and Victor, what a pair.”

“Hey, I feel bad about the way I left you in Moscow, I do. Maybe this will make up for it.” Hoffman’s fingers played the laptop keyboard, and on the screen appeared a daytime view of a driveway and Dumpsters. A clock in the corner of the tape read 1042:25. “Do you recognize this?”

“The service alley behind Pasha Ivanov’s apartment house. But this is taken from the apartment house on the right.”

“You saw the tape from Pasha’s building?”

“It was taped over; it was on a short loop. We saw Pasha arrive and fall, and we saw about two hours before that, but nothing from before.”

“Watch,” Hoffman said.

The camera froze images with a five-second lag to stretch tape time. Also, it was on a motorized pivot that swung 180 degrees. The result was a curious collage: a cat was caught in the act of entering from the street; seen next balanced on the rim of a Dumpster; and then, in a sideways view, approaching the Dumpster next door, at Ivanov’s building.

Hoffman said, “According to Victor, you thought there was a security breach about now.”

“We know that the staff went up and down the building knocking on doors. There was some sort of event.”

At 1045:15 the cat was caught in acrobatic midleap from the Dumpster as a white van entered the left side of the alley.

“When you’re right, you’re right,” Hoffman said.

At 1045:30 the van had stopped beside Ivanov’s Dumpster. At fifteen-second gaps, the camera returned to the Dumpster, and the screen showed what were essentially poor-quality black-and-white photographs of:

The van with the driver’s door open and a dark figure at the wheel.

The van with the door shut and the driver’s seat empty.

The same scene for one minute.

A bulky man in coveralls, gas mask and cowl that completely covered his head, shouldering a tank and hose and rolling a suitcase on casters from the van to Ivanov’s building.

The van in the driveway.

The same scene for five minutes.

An encore by the cat.

The van.

For one more minute, the van.

The same man with the same gear returning to the rear of the van.

The van.

A figure in coveralls and mask climbing into the driver’s seat.

The van moving away as the driver removed the mask, his face a blur.

The empty alley.

The cat.

The building’s doorman, fists on his hips.

The empty alley.

The cat.

Time 1056:30. Time elapsed, eleven minutes. Seven minutes of risk for the driver.

“When you interrogated the staff, they never mentioned an exterminator, did they?” Hoffman said. “A fumigator? Bugs?”

“No. Can you enlarge the image of the man moving from the van to the building?”

Hoffman did. How he fit such fat fingers onto the keyboard, Arkady didn’t know, but Bobby was quick.

“The head?” Arkady asked.

Hoffman circled the head and magnified a gas mask with goggles and two shiny filters.

“Can you enlarge it more?”

“I can enlarge it all you want, but it’s a grainy picture. All you’ll get is bigger grains. A fucking exterminator.”

“That’s not an exterminator’s mask. That’s radiation gear. Can you enlarge the tank?”

The tank bore what appeared to be fumigation warnings.

“The suitcase?”

The suitcase was covered with cartoon decals of dead rats and roaches. On the way in the suitcase was rolled. Arkady remembered that on the way out it had been carried.

“It’s a delivery. The suitcase arrived heavy, it left light.”

“How heavy?”

“I would guess—fifty or sixty kilos of salt, a grain of cesium and lead-lined suitcase—maybe seventy-five kilos in all. Quite a load.”

“See, this is fun. Working together. This is a breakthrough, right?”

“Can you bring out the license plate?”

It was a Moscow plate. Hoffman said, “Victor checked it out. This van is from the motor pool of Dynamo Electronics. They install cable TV. Dynamo Electronics is owned by Dynamo Avionics, which is owned by Leonid Maximov. They reported it missing.”

“Victor is on your payroll now?”

“Hey, I’m doing your work for you
and
paying for it. I’m giving you Maximov on a platter. While you’ve been stumbling around here, there’s been a war in Moscow between Maximov and Nikolai Kuzmitch over NoviRus.”

“I have been out of touch,” Arkady granted.

“They both always wanted NoviRus.”

Arkady remembered them at the roulette table. Kuzmitch was a risk taker who stacked chips on a number; Maximov, a mathematician, was a methodical, cautious player.

“The Ivanov case is closed,” Arkady said. “Ivanov jumped. If Kuzmitch drove him to it, then Kuzmitch succeeded. I’m working on the Timofeyev case. Someone cut his throat. That’s murder. And the evidence has not been paid for.”

“How much do you want?”

“Much what?”

“Money. How much to drop Timofeyev and concentrate on Pasha? What’s your number?”

“I don’t have a number.”

Hoffman closed the laptop. “Let me put it another way. If you won’t help, Yakov will kill you.”

Yakov turned and aimed a gun at Arkady. The gun was an American Colt, an antique with a silencer but nicely greased and cared for.

“You’d shoot me here?”

“Nobody would hear a thing. A little messy, that’s why the old car. Yakov thinks of everything. Are you in or are you out?”

“I’d have to think about it.”

“Fuck thinking. Yes or no?”

But Arkady was distracted by the sight of Vanko’s face pressed against Hoffman’s window. Hoffman recoiled. Up front, Yakov was swinging the gun toward Vanko when Arkady raised his hands to reassure him and told Hoffman to open his window.

Bobby demanded, “Who is this nut?”

“It’s okay,” Arkady said.

As the window slid down, Vanko shook a massive ring of keys. “We can start now. I’ll let you in.”

Hoffman and Arkady followed Vanko on foot back the way they had come as Yakov trailed behind. Away from the car, he was a small man dressed like a librarian, in a mended sweater and jacket, but his crushed brow and flattened nose gave him the look of a man who had been run over by a steamroller and not totally reassembled.

“Yakov’s not afraid,” Bobby said. “He was a partisan in the Ukraine during the war and in the Stern Gang in Israel. He’s been tortured by Germans, British and Arabs.”

“A walking history lesson.”

“So where is our happy friend with the keys taking us?”

“He seems to think you know,” Arkady said.

Vanko veered toward a solid building in municipal yellow that stood alone, and Arkady wondered whether they were headed to some sort of historical archive. Short of the building, Vanko stopped at a windowless bunker that Arkady had passed a hundred times before and always assumed housed an electrical substation or mechanics of some sort. Vanko unlocked a metal door with a flourish and ushered Hoffman and Arkady in.

The bunker sheltered two open cement boxes, each about two meters long and one wide. There was no electricity; the only light came through the open door, and there was barely enough overhead clearance for Bobby’s hat. There were no chairs, no icon or pictures, instructions or decoration of any kind, although the rims of the two boxes were lined with votive candles burned down to tin cups, and the inside of each box was stuffed with papers and letters.

“Who is it?” Arkady asked.

Hoffman took so long to answer that Vanko, the tour guide, did. “Rabbi Nahum of Chornobyl and his grandson.”