Wolves Eat Dogs (24 page)

"I'm on sick leave. Private business."

"What are you doing in Kiev?"

A sigh. "Okay, right now I'm sitting in Independence Square eating a Big Mac and watching Anton Obodovsky sip a smoothie only twenty meters away. Our friend is out of prison, and he just spent two hours with a dentist."

"A Moscow dentist wasn't good enough? He had to go all the way to Kiev?"

"If you were here, you'd know why. You've got to see it to believe it."

"Stay with him. I'll call you when I get there."

Arkady turned off the mobile phone and returned it to Bobby, who clutched Arkady's arm and said, "Before you go. A new body? That sounds like progress to me."

11

Kiev was two hours by car from Chernobyl. Arkady made it in ninety minutes on the motorcycle by riding between lanes and, when necessary, swerving onto the shoulder of the road and dodging old women selling buckets of fruit and braids of golden onions. Traffic came to a halt for geese crossing the road, but it plowed over chickens. A horse in a ditch, men throwing sand on a burning car, stork nests on telephone poles, everything passed in a blur.

As soon as Arkady saw the gilded domes of Kiev resting in summer smog, he pulled to the side of the road, called Victor and resumed his ride at a saner pace. Anton Obodovsky was back in the dentist's chair and looked like he would be there for a while. Arkady rolled along the Dnieper and endured the shock of returning to a great city that spilled over both banks of the river. He climbed the arty neighborhood of Podil, rode around the Dumpsters of urban renovation and coasted to a halt at the head of Independence Square, where five streets radiated, fountains played and somehow, more than Moscow, Kiev said Europe.

Victor was at a sidewalk café reading a newspaper. Arkady dropped into the chair beside him and waved for a waiter.

"Oh, no," Victor said. "You can't afford the prices here. Be my guest."

Arkady settled back and took in the square's leafy trees and sidewalk entertainers and children chasing fountain water carried by the breeze. Soviet-classical buildings framed the long sides of the square, but at its head the architecture was white and airy and capped with colorful billboards.

Victor ordered two Turkish coffees and a cigar. Such largesse from him was unknown.

"Look at you," Arkady said. An Italian suit and silk tie softened Victor's scarecrow aspect.

"On an expense account from Bobby. Look at
you.
Military camos. You look like a commando. You look good. Radiation is good for you."

The coffees arrived. Victor took exquisite pleasure in lighting the cigar and releasing its blue smoke and leathery scent. "Havana. The good thing about Bobby is that he expects you to steal. The bad thing about Bobby is Yakov. Yakov is old and he's scary. He's scary because he's so old he's got nothing to lose. I mean, if Bobby thinks we're working together, he'll be pissed on one level but half expect it on another level. If Yakov thinks so, we're dead."

"That is the question, isn't it? Who are you working for?"

"Arkady, you're so black and white. Modern life is more complicated Prosecutor Zurin told me that I wasn't supposed to communicate with you under any circumstances. That it would insult the Ukrainians. Now the Ukrainians have a president who was caught on tape ordering the murder of a newspaper reporter, but he's still their president, so I don't know how you insult the Ukrainians. Such is modern life."

"You're on sick leave?"

"As long as Bobby is willing to pay. Did I tell you that Lyuba and I got back together?"

"Who is Lyuba?"

"My wife."

Arkady suspected that he had committed a gaffe. The struggle for Victor's soul was like catching a greased pig, and any mistake could be costly. "Did you ever mention her?"

"Maybe I didn't. It was thanks to you. I sort of screwed up with your little friend Zhenya the Silent, and I ran into Lyuba when I was coming out of the drunk tank, and I told her everything. It was wonderful. She saw a tenderness in me that I thought I had lost years ago. We started up again, and I took stock. I could carry on the same old life with the same crowd, mostly people I put in jail, or start fresh with Lyuba, make some real money and have a home."

"That was when Bobby e-mailed you?"

"At that very moment."

"At Laika 1223."

"Laika was a great dog."

"It's a touching story."

"See what I mean? Always black and white."

"And you're dry now, too?"

"Relatively. A brandy now and then."

"And Anton?"

"This is an ethical dilemma."

"Why?"

"Because you haven't paid. I'm not just thinking about me anymore, I have to consider Lyuba. And remember, Zurin said no contact. Not to mention Colonel Ozhogin. He said absolutely no contact with you. No one wants me to talk to you."

"Did Bobby Hoffman call you while I was coming here? What did he say?"

"To talk to you but keep my mouth shut."

"How are the new shoes?" Arkady caught sight of Victor's footwear.

"Beginning to pinch."

From time to time Arkady saw Victor glance two doors over at a building with an Italian leather-goods shop on the ground floor and professional offices above. Victor had an ice-cream sundae. Arkady picked at a crepe. Somehow, the Zone dampened hunger. Afternoon faded into evening, and the square only became more charming as spotlights turned fountains into spires of light. Victor pointed out a floodlit theater on the hill above the square. "The opera house. For a while the KGB used it, and they say you could hear the screams from here. Ozhogin was stationed here for a while."

"Tell me about Anton."

"He's having dental work done, that's all I can say."

"All day? That's a lot of dental work."

Arkady got up and walked to the Italian leather store, admired the handbags and jackets and read the plaques for the businesses upstairs: two cardiologists, a lawyer, a jeweler. The top floor was shared by a Global Travel agency and a dentist named R. L. Levin-son, and Arkady remembered the vacation brochures on Anton's bunk at Butyrka Prison. On the way back to Victor's table, Arkady noticed a girl, about six years old, with dark hair and luminous eyes, dancing to the music of a street fiddler dressed as a Gypsy. The girl wasn't part of the act, just a spontaneous participant making up her own steps and spins.

Arkady sat. "How do you know he's visiting the dentist and not getting tickets to go around the world?"

"When he arrived, all the offices but the dentist were shut for lunch. I'm a detective."

"Are you?"

"Fuck you."

"I've heard that before."

Victor sank into a bitter smile. "Yeah, it's like old times." He loosened his tie and stood to observe himself in the plate glass of the café window. He sat and waved for a waiter. "Two more coffees, with just a touch of vodka."

Anton Obodovsky, as Victor told it, was a bonus. Victor had been flying to Kiev two days before to meet Hoffman and only happened to see Anton on the same plane. Anton had traveled light, not even a carry-on, and on landing, Victor thought he had lost Anton for good, assuming that he would vanish into the nether regions of Kiev, where he still had a slice of some chop shops and convenience stores. He was like any businessman who maintained domiciles in two different cities, except no one knew where those domiciles were; in Anton's business, a safe night's rest required secrecy. But dentists couldn't pick up their drills and make house calls, and Victor had spied Anton crossing the square on the way to his appointment.

Victor said, "Now that you and Bobby looked at the surveillance tapes, he's convinced Obodovsky was the guy with the suitcase in the exterminator van. Anton was strong enough, he'd threatened Ivanov on the phone and he wasn't put in Butyrka until the afternoon. Motive, means and opportunity. Besides which, he's a killer. There he is."

Anton stepped out of the door and felt his jaw as if to say that all the muscles in the world were no protection from an abscessed tooth. As usual, he was in Armani black and, with his bleached hair, not a difficult man to spot. He was followed by a short, dark woman in her mid-thirties, wearing a trim, sensible jacket.

"The dentist is a woman? She's so good, he comes all the way from Moscow?"

"That's not the whole package. Wait until you see this," Victor said. Last out of the door was a tall woman in her twenties with swirls of honey-colored hair and a brief outfit in denim and silver buttons. She took a firm grip on Anton's arm. "The dental hygienist."

After the dentist had locked the door, she was joined by the dancing girl, who by every feature was her daughter. The girl gestured toward a figure on stilts farther up the square, where a public promenade of sorts had developed, drawing sketch artists and street acts. She appealed to Anton, who shrugged expansively and led the way, he and the hygienist striding ahead, the girl skipping around her mother a step behind. Arkady and Victor fell in thirty meters back, relying on that fact that Anton would not be looking for a Moscow investigator in Ukrainian camos and certainly would not expect to see Victor in an elegant suit and puffing a cigar.

Victor said, "Bobby thinks that Anton was paid by Nikolai Kuzmitch. The van came from a Kuzmitch company, so that much makes sense."

"Kuzmitch has an exterminator company? I thought he was into nickel and tin."

"Also fumigation, cable television and airlines. He buys a company a month. I think the airline and fumigation came together, one of those Asian routes."

"Well, Anton is a carjacker. He doesn't need help getting a van."

"You think the Kuzmitch van was a setup?"

"I think it's unlikely a smart man would use a vehicle that could be easily traced to him, and Kuzmitch is a very smart man.'

The stilt walker was flamboyant in a Cossack's red coat and conical hat; he blew up balloons that he twisted into animals. Anton bought a tubular blue dog for the girl. As soon as the gift was presented, the dentist gave Anton a polite good-bye handshake and pulled her daughter away. Victor and Arkady watched from a table selling CDs, and Arkady wondered whether it would be a lifelong trait of the little girl to be attracted to dangerous men. The hygienist obviously was.

"The hygienist wears a diamond pin with her name, Galina," Victor said. "She walked by with that bouncing pin and my erection nearly knocked over the table."

The dentist and daughter turned toward the metro stop while Anton and Galina continued into a brilliantly lit glass dome where an elevator carried passengers down to an underground shopping mall, a borehole of boutiques selling French fashion, Polish crystal, Spanish ceramics, Russian furs, Japanese computer games, aromatherapy. Victor and Arkady followed on the stairs.

Victor said, "Anytime I think Russia's fucked up, I think about the Ukraine, and I feel better. While they were digging the mall, they ran into part of the Golden Gate, the ancient wall of the city, an archaeological treasure, and the city knew if it announced what it had found that work would stop. So they kept mum and buried it. They lost a little identity, but they got McDonald's. Of course, it's not as good as the McDonald's in Moscow."

A bow wave of fear preceded Anton in each store, and mall guards greeted him with such deference that Arkady considered the possibility that Anton might be a silent partner in a store or two. The beautiful Galina traded in her denim top for a mohair sweater. She and Anton slipped into the changing room at a lingerie shop while Arkady and Victor watched from a rack of cookware in the opposite store. The plate-glass transparency of the modern mall was a gift to surveillance.

"A whole day in the dentist's chair, and all Obodovsky can think of is sex. You've got to give him credit," Victor said.

Arkady thought that Anton's shopping spree had more the aspect of a public tour, a prince of the streets demanding respect. Or a dog marking his old territory.

"Anton was originally Ukrainian. I need to know from where. Let me know if he stays around. I'm going back to Chernobyl."

"Don't do it, Arkady. Fuck Timofeyev, fuck Bobby, it's not worth it. Since I got together with Lyuba again, I've been thinking: nobody misses Timofeyev. He was a millionaire, so what? He was a stack of money that blew away. No family. After Ivanov was dead, no friends. Really, I think what happened to him and Ivanov must have been a curse."

The ride back from Kiev was an obstacle course of potholes on an unlit highway and all he had looked forward to was sleep or oblivion; what he had not expected was Eva Kazka waiting at his door, as if he were late for an appointment. She drew sharply on her cigarette. Everything about her was sharp, the cutting attitude of her eyes, the edge of her mouth. She wore her usual camos and scarf.

"Your friend Timofeyev was dead white. You ask so many questions I thought you'd like to know."

"Would you like to come in?" Arkady asked.

"No, the hall is fine. You don't seem to have any neighbors."