Wolves Eat Dogs (14 page)

The Chernobyl militia station was a brick building with a linden tree sprouting from a corner like a feather in a cap. Marchenko joined Arkady in the parking lot where Timofeyev’s impounded BMW had disappeared.

The captain wore clean camos and bitter satisfaction. “You wanted to take another look? Too late. Bela took it to Kiev while you and I were out chasing the icon thief. So someone in my own station house told Bela I was gone.” He tilted his head. “Listen: the first cricket of the evening. An idiot, obviously. Anyway, I should apologize for my outburst this morning. Chernobyl, Chornobyl, what difference does it make?”

“No, you were right, I should say Chornobyl.”

“Let me give you some advice. Say, ‘Farewell, Chornobyl.’ ”

“But something occurred to me.”

“Something always occurs to you.”

“When you originally found Timofeyev’s car in the truck graveyard, it had no keys?”

“No keys.”

“You towed it here from the truck graveyard?”

“Yes. We went over this.”

“Remind me, please.”

“Before we towed the car here, we looked for keys, looked for blood on the car seats, forced open the trunk to look for blood or any other evidence. We didn’t find anything.”

“Nothing to suggest that Timofeyev had been killed somewhere else and taken in the car to the cemetery?”

“No.”

“Did you take casts of any tire treads at the cemetery?”

“No. Anyway, our cars rolled over any tracks there.”

“Right.”

“It’s a black village. Radioactive. Everyone moved fast. And it rained on and off, don’t forget.”

“And there were wolf tracks?” Arkady still found that hard to believe.

“Big as a plate.”

“Who did the towing?”

“We did.”

“Who drove?”

“Officer Katamay.”

“Katamay is the officer who found Timofeyev’s body and then disappeared?”

“Yes.”

“He does a lot around here.”

“He knows his way around. He’s a local boy.”

“And he’s still missing?”

“Yes. It’s not necessarily a crime. If he quits, he quits. Though we would like the uniform and gun.”

“I looked at his file. He had disciplinary problems. Did you ask him about Timofeyev’s wallet and watch?”

“Naturally. He denied it, and the matter was dropped. You have to meet his grandfather to understand.”

“Is he from around here?”

“From a Pripyat family. Look, Renko, we’re not detectives, and this is not the normal world. This is the Zone. We are as forgotten as any police can be. The country is collapsing, so we work for half pay, and everyone steals to make ends meet. What’s missing? What’s not missing? Medicine, morphine, a tank of oxygen, gone. We were given night-vision goggles from the army? Disappeared. I was with Bela when we discovered Timofeyev’s BMW, and I remember his look, as if he would kill me for that car. If that’s the truck graveyard manager, what kind of officers do you think I’m going to have? I know what he’s doing, I see the sparks at night. Everyone else is suffering, and he’s making his fortune, but I’m not allowed to conduct the sort of raid I would like, because he has a ‘roof,’ understand, he’s protected from above.”

“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.”

C
hernobyl 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 groundwater, 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.”

A wall of rusting pines stretched as far as Arkady could see, from left to right. Being dead, the branches held no cones and no squirrels; except for the flit of a bird, the trees were as still as posts.
Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well.
Arkady could picture a skull on each post. Something ghostly did a pirouette in front of the trees. It fluttered like a handkerchief and darted away.

“A white swallow,” Alex said. “You won’t see many of those outside of Chernobyl.”

“Do poachers come here?”

“No, they know better.”

“Do we?”

“Yes, but it’s irresistible, and we do it anyway. In the wintertime you should see it, the ground covered with snow, like a belly dimpled with mysterious scars, and the trees bright as blood. People call it the red forest or the magic forest. Sounds like a fairy tale, doesn’t it? And not to worry—as the authorities always say, ‘Appropriate measures will be taken, and the situation is under control.’ ”

They moved along the face of the red forest to an area replanted with new pine trees, where Alex hopped out of the truck and brought back the end of a bough.

“See how stunted and deformed the tip is. It will never grow into a tree, only scrub. But it’s a step in the right direction. The administration is pleased with our new pines.” Alex spread his arms and announced, “In two hundred and fifty years, all this will be clean. Except for the plutonium; that will take twenty-five thousand years.”

“Something to hope for.”

“I believe so.”

Still, Arkady found himself breathing easier when the red pines gave way to a mix of ash and birch. At the base of a tree, Alex brushed back high grass to reveal a tunnel leading to a cage of what looked to Arkady like squirming field mice.

“Clethrionomys glareolus,”
said Alex. “Voles. Or maybe super voles. The rate of mutation among our little friends here has accelerated by a factor of thirty. Maybe they’ll be doing calculus next year. One reason voles have such a fast rate of mutation is that they reproduce so quickly, and radiation affects organisms when they are growing much more than it does when they’re adult. A cocoon is affected by radiation, a butterfly is not. So the question is, How does radiation affect this fellow?” Alex opened the top of the cage to lift out a vole by its tail. “The answer is that he does not worry about radionuclides. He worries about owls, foxes, hawks. He worries about finding food and a warm nest. He thinks that radiation is by far the smallest factor in his survival, and he’s right.”

“And you, what is the largest factor in your survival?” Arkady asked.

“Let me tell you a story. My father was a physicist. He worked at one of those secret installations in the Urals where spent nuclear fuel was stored. Spent fuel is still hot. Insufficient attention was paid, and the fuel exploded, not a nuclear explosion but very dirty and hot. Everything was done secretly, even the cleanup, which was fast and messy. Thousands of soldiers, firemen, technicians waded through debris, including physicists led by my father. After the accident here, I called my father and said, ‘Papa, I want you to tell me the truth. Your colleagues from the Urals accident, how are they?’ My father took a moment to answer. He said, ‘They’re all dead, son, every one. Of vodka.’ ”

“So you drink and smoke and ride around a radioactive forest.”

Alex let the vole drop into the cage and switched the full cage with an empty. “Statistically, I admit that none of these are healthy occupations. Individually, statistics mean nothing at all. I think I will probably be hit by a hawk of some kind. And I think, Renko, that you’re a lot like me. I think you are waiting for your own hawk.”

“Maybe a hedgehog.”

“No, trust me on this, definitely a hawk. From here we walk a little.”

Alex carried the rifle, and Arkady carried a cage that had a one-way gate baited with greens. Step by step, the woods around them changed from stunted trees to taller, sturdier beeches and oaks that produced a dappling of birdcalls and light.