Traffyck (41 page)

“What do you suggest?” shouted Janos, grasping the wheel and staring straight ahead.

“They know we are eventually going to Chernigov!” shouted Mariya. “But they don’t know about the camper van! We must lose them!”

“But if they know we’re going to Chernigov, and if the peninsula is nearby, they could simply wait for us there!”

“We could fly!” shouted Mariya.

“We’re already flying!” shouted Janos as he slowed the Fiat for a long sweeping curve on which the tires screamed.

“We’re almost to the campground!” shouted Mariya.

“I know!” shouted Janos.

Soon it became wooded, the road winding as they passed several cottages. After they went around a curve, Janos slammed on the brakes and went off onto the shoulder.

Behind them, an old cottage was close to the road. Janos backed the car into the side drive of the cottage and, a few seconds later, the van sped past. It was dark blue, windowless except for the windows in front. It had fat tires, and its engine gave off an animal roar.

“It’s an American van with a large engine,” said Janos.

“They didn’t see us,” said Mariya.

“I’m not sure,” said Janos, taking his pistol out and clicking off the safety.

Less than a minute later, as they entered the road, the van was back, appearing from the curve ahead and speeding toward them. When it crossed the centerline, Janos cranked the wheel left and did a fishtail U-turn. He sped back behind the cottage on a dirt road that opened into flatland. Weeds brushed the undercarriage of the Fiat. The rumble of the van’s engine sounded as if it were in the backseat.

“I can’t lose him!” shouted Janos. “I should have stayed on the road!”

Janos U-turned and went back the other way through clumps of weeds. The van did its U-turn, caught up, and touched them softly, giving Mariya the sensation of being on a swing with someone pushing. After they got back on the road to Kilija, the van dropped back a few meters before it accelerated ahead, hitting them hard. The van had vertical bars on the front bumper, making it into a battering ram. The Fiat bounced off like a windup toy and skittered side to side on the road.

“Where the hell is everybody?” shouted Mariya.

“Off-season!” shouted Janos.

When the van hit them again, Janos almost lost it.

“Hang on!” he shouted. “I’m going into the woods ahead!”

Janos turned off the right side of the road. A dirt road through the woods was like a relief map. The Fiat launched into the air several times. The shoulder belt tightened like a noose around Mariya. The car made horrible sounds of protest.

When Janos turned around and they passed the van going in the opposite direction, an arm came out of the van window and Mariya saw the puffs of smoke and heard the shots.

Back on the road, they had a lead of a few hundred meters when the van finally got turned around. But they were not in the lead for long. And when the van got closer, a rifle pointed out the passenger window and Janos rocked the Fiat side to side as the back window was blown out.

In the curves, Janos managed a slight lead. But when they approached another long, straight stretch of road, he braked hard and turned back, playing chicken with the van until he passed it on the left, its nose clipping their rear fender and spinning both vehicles.

Janos kept control and headed back away from Kilija with a good lead.

“We’re going to get out of the car!” shouted Janos.

“Where?”

“Over that hill! Undo your belt and mine! There’s a drop-off and a deep ditch! Jump when I tell you! Then cross to the other side of the road and hide behind the cottage!”

Once over the hill, Lazlo braked the Fiat hard and yelled, “Now!”

When she jumped, it was like falling from her bicycle. Gravel bit into her knees and hands. For a second, she could not move. For another second, she watched Janos tumble out near the edge as the car went over. It crashed down a steep drop-off into the ditch, turning over several times as they ran across the road.

A few seconds later, as they clambered behind the cottage on the inside of the curve, the moan and growl of the van was upon them. They hid behind the cottage as the van passed. When the van returned, they were a hundred meters back behind the cottage, lying flat in wet soil amidst an outcropping of reeds.

A man in a red tee shirt and blue jeans got out of the van and walked to the edge of the road. He carried a rifle. Beyond him, at the bottom of the ditch, the Fiat rested, twisted and battered in muddy water, its cabin below the water line.

Another man wearing a white tee shirt and jeans got out of the van with a pair of binoculars. For several minutes, he focused on the wreck. Then he turned and scanned the fields where Mariya and Janos lay flat and still.

A snake crawled a few meters to the side as they lay this way. Mariya did not move even though the snake reminded her of other men in a van, men who had spread her legs and made her believe they had a snake. Although it was probably not the same van, she wondered whether these could be the same men. And if they were, she wondered where the girl was who had spoken kindly to her, the girl who had the courage, or the power, to slap the men.

Mariya and Janos lay very still listening for footsteps, Janos with his gun pointed ahead toward the road beyond the cottage. But no footsteps came, and soon the van started up and rumbled off slowly like a large cat purring after devouring its prey.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE

The last time Lazlo flew into Kiev, Tamara, his stepdaughter, had been with him. He had insisted she take the window seat and watched her staring out at her homeland. He recalled the approach to Borispol Airport, the plane banking on a clear day so they were able to look north up the Dnepr River to the vast Kiev Reservoir. Although they could not see the Chernobyl Nuclear Station during their approach, they had both been silent, staring toward the Exclusion Zone.

Today, instead of watching Tamara looking out the window, Lazlo sat in the window seat. The puffs of clouds to the north were like tombstones for his brother, Mihaly; his wife, Juli; his niece and stepdaughter, Tamara; and his sister-in-law, Nina. Beneath these clouds resembling tombstones was the Soviet Union’s Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.

When Lazlo realized the young man in the seat beside him was leaning forward to look out, he leaned back. The man’s name was Michael. He was a University of Illinois student going to Ukraine as part of a work-study program. Michael’s great-grandfather had come from Ukraine in the early 1900s, leaving his wife and two boys behind while he worked in a Pittsburgh steel mill. After two years’ work, Michael’s great-grandfather had returned to Ukraine to purchase farmland, only to have the land lost to Stalin’s collective system.

Michael was slender, with a pointed chin and nose, reminding Lazlo of Janos Nagy when he was a young militia recruit in 1985. During the flight, Lazlo told Michael about his brother, Mihaly, the junior engineer in charge at Chernobyl, who died shortly after the explosion. Michael knew
Mihaly
was Hungarian for his own name, and this had begun the conversation during the flight in which Lazlo recounted the events of 1986. He told of the insane KGB major, intent on creating a conspiracy of sabotage among Hungarian-Ukrainians where none existed; he told of his brother’s affair with Juli, who was then a technician at Chernobyl; he told of Mihaly’s wife, Nina, and her daughters, Anna and Ilonka, all treated for cancer over the intervening years, and of Nina’s death; and finally, he told Michael that he and Juli, who carried Mihaly’s child in her womb during their escape from Ukraine, become man and wife and that not only had Juli died in 2000, but Tamara, the Chernobyl child, had also recently died in Chicago.

Two men in tears and Michael hugging Lazlo caused the steward to come down the aisle to see if they needed anything. During the remainder of the flight, they told stories alternating from Lazlo’s boyhood in Ukraine to Michael’s boyhood in a south suburb of Chicago. They spoke of games and tricks played on other boys. They spoke of first girlfriends. They became companions. And in the end, Lazlo told of his lifelong guilt for having killed another boy soldier while serving in the Soviet Army, and he told of Jermaine’s recent death on the busiest of Chicago’s Humboldt Park streets. In return, Michael told Lazlo he was gay and that, because he’d not had courage to tell his parents, he felt a different kind of guilt, as if he had betrayed them. Michael said when he hugged Lazlo, he imagined he was hugging his father.

Michael and Lazlo agreed to remain in touch, and after Michael said, “in touch,” they both laughed. When the plane touched down at Borispol Airport, Lazlo wondered if he would survive his trip to Ukraine and be there to receive e-mails and reunite with Michael or anyone else. Lazlo considered survival intangible. Yet he required survival to help his comrade Janos. He required survival to meet again with his new friend, Michael, when and if they returned to Chicago.

If sacrifice was required, Lazlo would provide it. If he needed a weapon, past experience as a Kiev militiaman would be useful. Perhaps he would come across his battered old Makarov 9mm pistol at a street market, or at least one like it. If anyone tried to kill Janos, Lazlo prayed he would be there to stop it.

As the plane taxied to the terminal, Lazlo stared at his new friend. The young face, which now reminded him of his brother Mihaly’s, was determined. Michael would survive. He no longer needed Lazlo Horvath, because Lazlo had already given him what was needed. Like a priest, he had provided absolution. Lazlo knew by the look on Michael’s face, their hug had been the practice session for a conversation with father and mother and the rest of his family when he returned from Ukraine, a headstrong land of truth and beauty, no matter its tempestuous past.

When the plane braked at the terminal and the seatbelt lights went off, Lazlo Horvath, former Kiev militia investigator, braced himself for whatever struggles awaited him.

Summer had been hot, and this late in the season, the heat was stifling. At lunchtime, pedestrians walked slowly and mopped their brows. The wind was strong off the steppes to the southwest, the temperature 33 degrees. Today, on Kiev Radio, several superstitious workers went so far as to say they would remain in the conditioned air of their offices whenever the centigrade temperature equaled or exceeded 33, the age at which Christ was put to death.

Yuri Smirnov was among the few who ventured into the heat. He had just walked through a cooling plume of windblown spray from the fountain on Independence Square, and this, along with perspiration, made his skin wet and slick like the skin of a river carp.

Smirnov headed toward the river past the Monument of Kiev’s Founders. He glanced at the three brothers on the monument—Kyj, Shchek, and Khoryv—and their sister, Lybid, who stood at the bow of their boat. What would they think of Kiev today?

As Smirnov stared at the monument, he imagined modern technology away. Around him, horse-drawn buggies and wagons replaced traffic. No cellular phones or databases. A precursor of the SBU just formed. In its Kiev office, Inspector Yuri Smirnov behind a wooden desk. His jacket off, his sleeves rolled up. Wearing suspenders and sporting a handlebar moustache. Deep in thought because in this day and age the brain is the investigative tool … Even though Ukraine was never really at peace, the world without engines must have been quieter, a simpler world, with databases far in the future as the founders stood in their boat holding their spears. It would have been a time in which an investigator acted independently and would not have been required to react to insane bulletins sent from above.

When Smirnov arrived at the park on a shaded path leading down to the river, he felt much better. He walked at least a kilometer along the path before turning back. He became acclimated to the heat. The walk back to his office, even across the square in bright sunlight, did not overheat him. Walking and thinking on the path in the park had cleared his head. As soon as he was inside his office, he closed the door, sat at his desk, and called Chief Investigator Boris Chudin at Kiev militia headquarters.

“Hello, Yuri. I missed your earlier call this week.”

“It was the Day of the Entrepreneur, and I had no business to conduct.”

“Here at militia headquarters, we are always busy.”

“I’m glad you and your staff are protecting us,” said Smirnov.

“I’m glad you are glad,” said Chudin. “Obviously, you are calling for information.”

“Yes, I wondered if you had news about Janos Nagy.”

“Of course you would wonder about him,” said Chudin. “I saw the bulletin your office released. He is not a kidnapper. What the fuck is your SBU up to?”

“I had nothing to do with the bulletin,” said Smirnov. “It came from upstairs.”

“Do you not communicate with your superiors?”

“I wanted to find out what you could tell me first.”

“Everything I know comes from my men,” said Chudin.

“As far as I’m concerned, Janos Nagy and Mariya Nemeth went into hiding. There is no law against it, so we wait.”