Timofeyev's prerevolutionary palace was the same. He hadn't barred visitors because he didn't have Pasha's strength of character, but the halls and rooms of his gilded abode were a radioactive warren. No wonder about the man's nervousness and loss of weight. After waltzing with dosimeters through Timofeyev's palace, Arkady and Victor took the precaution of visiting the militia doctor, who gave them iodine tablets and assured them that they had suffered no more exposure to radiation than an airline passenger flying from St. Petersburg to San Francisco, although they might want to shower, dispose of their clothes and look out for nausea, loss of hair and, especially, nosebleeds, because cesium affected bone marrow where platelets were formed. Victor asked what to do about nosebleeds. The doctor said to carry a handkerchief.
Ivanov and Timofeyev had lived with this sort of anxiety? Why hadn't either reported to the militia that someone was trying to kill them? Why hadn't they alerted NoviRus Security? Finally, why had Timofeyev driven a thousand kilometers from Moscow to Chernobyl? If it was to save his life, it hadn't worked.
The investigation of Timofeyev's body, once it was found at the village cemetery, had been a farce. The cemetery grounds were radioactive – family members were supposed to visit grave sites only one day a year – and the first thing the lads from the militia did was drag Timofeyev a safe distance away to turn him this way and that. Since the dead man's billfold and wristwatch were missing, they had no idea of his identity or importance. Because of the rain, they wanted to toss the body in a van and go. Their surmise was that a businessman with, say, an uncle or auntie buried in the cemetery had made a clandestine visit, had a heart attack and dropped. No one asked where his car was or whether his shoes were muddy from walking. Chernobyl had neither detectives nor pathologists, and Kiev showed no interest in a death from natural causes in the provinces. Timofeyev was kept in a refrigerator, and the idea that he was Russian and not Ukrainian hadn't crossed anyone's mind until a BMW with Moscow plates was found in the truck yard two days later. By then someone who had seen Timofeyev in the cooler had the sense to notice that his throat was cut.
There was a great flurry from Moscow. Prosecutor Zurin came personally to Chernobyl with ten investigators – not including Arkady – who joined with their counterparts from Kiev to uncover the truth. They discovered nothing. The scene at the cemetery had been defiled first by wolves and then by the hurried removal of Timofeyev's body. If there had been blood on the ground, it was washed away by rain, so there was no way of telling even if the cemetery was where his throat had been cut. No photographs had been taken of the body in situ. The body itself, declared too hot to autopsy or even burn, was buried in a sealed coffin. The militia officer who made the initial report had disappeared, presumably with Timofeyev's billfold and watch. The longer the investigators from Moscow and Kiev stayed, the unhappier they became about tramping from one radioactive village to another. The old people who had surreptitiously returned to their homes knew they weren't supposed to be there, and since an encounter with officialdom was sure to gain them a one-way bus ticket to some dismal basement in the city, they went to ground like rabbits, to other cabins in other black villages, and after a few weeks the investigators threw in their cards and left, with much less fanfare than when they had arrived. Another prosecutor might have admitted defeat, but here Zurin showed his brilliance, his ability to survive any calamity. He retrieved the situation by volunteering Arkady to the Chernobyl militia, a move that, in one stroke, signified cooperation between fraternal countries, satisfied the demand for further investigation and, incidentally, put a comfortable distance between the prosecutor and his most difficult investigator. At the same time, Zurin made it impossible for Arkady to succeed. On his own, without detectives or access to any friends of Timofeyev, or a sympathetic priest or a masseuse that Timofeyev might have shared his anxiety with, exiled as far from Moscow as Pluto from the sun, Arkady was left chasing ghosts. Faced with Zurin's legerdemain, he was dazzled. "Renko! Last dance!" Alex dragged Arkady from the corner and pushed him into the arms of a burly researcher. "Don't be such a stick! Vanko needs a partner."
With his pallor and stringy hair, Vanko looked more like a crazed monk than an ecologist. "Are you gay?" he asked Arkady. "I don't dance with gays. A straight man is permissible under the circumstances."
"It's okay."
"You're not so bad. Everyone said you'd be gone in a week, like the others. You stuck it out; I have to respect that. Do you want to lead?"
"Whichever."
"Doesn't matter, I agree. Not here. This is the café at the end of the world. If you want to know what the end of the world will be like, this is it. Not so bad."
Chapter Six
* * *
Captain Marchenko steered with one finger and waved a radio microphone in his other hand like a tank commander. "This is good. We will prove there is law and order in the Zone. Even here! These vultures go into the village churches and steal the church icons, or go into the houses of simple people and take the icons there. Well, we have him now. The fields are too boggy to cross, and there isn't much traffic on this road. Aha, there he is! The vulture is in sight!"
A dot on the horizon was developing into a motorcycle and sidecar, not a powerful bike, more what a farmer might use to transport chickens. Gray sky swept by. Red firs lined the road, and markers showed where houses and barns too hot to truck away or burn were buried.
Captain Marchenko had swung by in a militia car and invited Arkady to help pursue a thief who had escaped a checkpoint with an icon in the sidecar of his motorcycle. From exchanges on the radio, Arkady gathered that another car was posted ahead. It was clear that it gave the captain pleasure to turn an investigator from Moscow into a captive audience. "We may not have investigators like in Moscow, but we know what we're about."
"I'm sure that Chernobyl holds its own."
"Ch'o'rnobyl. The Ukrainian pronunciation is Ch'o'rnobyl."
Much of the topsoil had been buried under sand; up to the woods the ground was bulldozed flat, a chute for a headwind that made the motorcycle skitter from one side of the road to the other, not over a hundred meters ahead, and although the rider hunched down, the car was gaining. Arkady could see that the bike was small, maybe 75cc, blue, the license plate taped over.
"They're criminals, Renko. This is the way you have to treat them, not like you do, making friends, leaving food and money like it's everybody's birthday. You think you're going to find informants? You think that one dead Russian is more important than regular policing? Maybe he was a big man in Moscow, but he was nothing here. His office called. A Colonel Ozhogin said to keep an eye on you. I told him you were getting nowhere."
To locate the local squatter, Arkady had, over three weeks, created a registry of Zone illegals: old folks, squatters, scavengers, poachers and thieves. The old people were hidden but stationary. Scavengers operated out of cars and trucks. Poachers were usually restaurant employees from Kiev or Minsk, looking for venison or boar. Icon thieves were hit-and-run and harder to net.
Arkady said, "Then why was Timofeyev here? What was the connection between him and Chornobyl? What was the connection between him and Ivanov and Chornobyl? How many murders do you have here?"
"None. Only your Timofeyev, only a Russian. I would have a perfect record otherwise. I might be out of here with a clean record. How do we know he was killed by someone from here? How do we know he was even here before in his life?"
"We ask. We find local people and ask, although I'll grant you, it isn't easy when officially no one is here."
"That's the Zone."
Sometimes Arkady thought of the Zone as an amusement-park mirror. Things were different in the Zone. He said, "I still wonder about the body. An Officer Katamay turned in the first report. I haven't been able to interview him, because he quit the militia. Do you have any idea where Katamay is?"
"Try the Woropay brothers. He was close to them."
"The Woropays were not responsive." The b
rothers Woropay knew that Arkady had no authority. They had been both dull and sly, smirking to each other, going heavy-lidded and silent. "I'd like to find Katamay, and I'd like to know who led him to the body."
"What does it matter? The body was a mess."
"How so?"
"Wolves."
"Specifically what did the wolves do?"
"They ate his eye."
"Ate his eye?" No one had mentioned that before.
"The left eye."
"Wolves do that?"
"Why not? And they tugged on his face a bit. That's why we missed the knife wound on the throat."
"He was dead when the wolves arrived. He wouldn't have bled that much."
"There wasn't that much blood. That's one reason we thought heart attack. Except for his eye and his nose, his face was clean."
"What was in his nose?"
"Blood."
"And his clothes?"
"Pretty clean, considering how the rain and how the wolves messed up the scene."
Hardly more than the militia, Arkady thought, but bit his tongue. "Who examined the body the second time? Who noticed that his throat was cut? They left no name or official report, only a one-line description of the neck wound.'
"I'd like to get my hands on them, too. If it hadn't been for someone mucking around where they shouldn't have been, the Russian would still be a heart attack, you wouldn't be here and my slate would be clean."
"Now, there's a new approach to militia work. If they don't have a pickax in the head, call it cardiac arrest." Arkady had meant to sound lighthearted, but Marchenko didn't seem to take it that way. Maybe it came out wrong, Arkady thought. "Anyway, the second examiner knew what he was doing. I'd just like to know who it was."
"You always want to know. The man from Moscow and his hundred thousand questions."
"I'd also like to take another look at Timofeyev's car."
"See what I mean? I don't have the time or the manpower for a homicide investigation. Especially of a dead Russian. Do you know what the official attitude is? 'There's nothing in the Zone but spent uranium, dead reactors and the suckers stationed there. Fuck them. Let them live on berries.' You saw yourself how all those other investigators didn't want to stay around too long. Nevertheless, we still carry out our functions, like now." Marchenko squinted ahead. "Ah, here we come."
Ahead, where dead firs gave way to potato fields, a white militia Lada and a pair of officers blocked the road. The fields were wet from the previous week's rain: no escape there. No problem. The motorcycle rider slowed to size up the blockade, sped up, leaned to his left and steered down and up the right shoulder of the road as neatly as plucking a blade of grass.
Marchenko picked up the radio. "Get out of the way."
The officers desperately pushed the Lada onto the shoulder as Marchenko barreled through. Arkady was glad he hadn't quit smoking. If he was going to die in the Zone, why deny himself a simple pleasure?
"Do you work out?" Marchenko asked.
Arkady hung on to a strap. "Not really."
"Middle of Moscow, it can't be easy. You can have Moscow. Do you like the Ukraine?"
"I haven't seen much besides the Zone. Kiev is a beautiful city." Arkady hoped that was diplomatic enough.
"Ukrainian girls?"
"Very beautiful."
"The most beautiful in the world, people say. Big eyes, big..." Marchenko cupped his chest. "Jews come once a year. They talk Ukrainian girls into going to America to be au pairs and keep them as slaves and whores. The Italians are as bad."
"Really?" There was a free-floating quality to the captain's anger that Arkady found disturbing.
"A bus goes daily to Milan, full of Ukrainian girls who end up as prostitutes."
"But not to Russia," Arkady said.
"No, who would go to Russia?" The captain shifted and dug out of a pocket a large knife in a leather sheath. "Go ahead, take it out."
Arkady unsnapped the guard and drew out a heavy blade with a blood groove and a two-edged tip. "Like a sword."
"For wild boar. You can't do that in Moscow, right?" Marchenko said.
"Hunting with a knife?"
"If you have the nerve."
"I am sure I do not have the nerve to catch a wild boar and stab it to death."
"Just remember, it's essentially a pig."
"And then you eat them?"
"No, they're radioactive. It's sport. We'll try it sometime, you and I."
The motorcycle swerved onto a side road, but Marchenko would not be shaken. The road dove down along a black mire of ragged cattails and then up by an apple orchard carpeted with rotting fruit. Two hovels seemed to rise from the ground, and the motorcycle went in between, followed by Marchenko, at the cost of a wing mirror. Suddenly they were in the middle of a village that was a quagmire of houses so cannibalized from the bottom up for firewood that every roof and window was at a slant. Washtubs sat in the front yards, and chairs sat at the street, as if there had been a final parade out of town and people to watch. Arkady heard the dosimeter raise its voice. The motorcycle shot through a barn, in the front and out the back. Marchenko followed only ten meters behind, close enough for Arkady to see an icon and blanket stuffed in the sidecar. The road dropped again toward a stand of sickly willows, a stream and, rising on the far side, a field of grain tangled by wind and gone to seed. The road narrowed at the willows, the perfect point to cut off the motorcycle – just like in the movies, Arkady thought, when Marchenko swerved to a stop and the motorcycle slipped into the trees and out of sight behind a screen of leaves.
Arkady said, "We can go on foot. A path like that, we'll catch up."
The captain shook his head and pointed to a radiation marker rusting among the trees. "Too hot. This is as far as we can go."
Arkady got out. The trees didn't quite reach the creek, and although the grass was high, the slope was downhill, and his boots were heavy with mud, Arkady managed to push through. Marchenko shouted for Arkady to stop. He saw the thief emerge from the trees. Despite the fact that the rider had gotten off to push, the motorcycle stayed virtually in place, spewing smoke and spraying mud. The rider was short, in a leather jacket and cap, with a scarf wrapped around his face. The icon, a Madonna with a starry cowl, peered from the sidecar. Arkady nearly had his hand on it when the bike gained traction and lurched forward on a road so overgrown it was barely a fold in the grass. He was close enough to read the logo on the engine cover. Suzuki. The bike bounced down from rut to rut, Arkady a step behind and Marchenko a step behind him. Arkady tripped over a radiation sign but was still almost within reach when the bike spurted across the streambed, kicking back rocks. From one step to the next, he was about to reach for the sidecar, but the climb from the stream on the other side was steeper, the wheat sleeker, and the motorcycle had more space to maneuver. Arkady dove for the rear fender and held it until a reflector snapped off in his hand and the bike pulled away by one meter, then five, then ten. It drew off while Arkady leaned on his knees and gave up. Blowing like a whale, Marchenko joined him.
The hillside was a yellow knoll topped by a silhouette of bare trees dead where they stood. The biker climbed to the trees, stopped and looked back. Marchenko pulled out his gun, a Walther PP, and aimed. It would take a real marksman at this range, Arkady thought. The pistol swayed with the captain's breathing. The biker didn't move.
Finally Marchenko replaced the gun in its holster. "We're over the border. The stream is the border. We're in Byelorussia. I can't go shooting people in other countries. Brush off the wheat. It's hot. Everything is hot."
Horseflies spun around the two men as they trudged back to the car. For humiliation, the day was already quite full, Arkady thought. Out of curiosity, he turned on his dosimeter when they crossed the stream, then shut off the angry ticking as soon as he heard it. "Can you take me back to Chernobyl?" he asked.
The captain slipped in the mud. As he rose, he bellowed, "It's Chornobyl. In Ukrainian, it's Chornobyl!"
Arkady's room in Chernobyl was in a metal dormitory perched on the edge of a parking lot. He had a bed and a quilt, a desk trimmed in cigarette burns, a dim lamp and a stack of files.
The team of investigators from Moscow had not completely wasted their time. They had searched for any possible connection among Timofeyev, Ivanov and Chernobyl. After all, before finding a second vocation in business, the two men had been physicists. They had grown up in the same Moscow neighborhood and, from the playground, had become good friends, Ivanov a natural leader, Timofeyev an ardent follower and both gifted enough in science to be sent to special schools and the Institute for Extremely High Temperatures under the tutelage of its director, Academician Gerasimov himself. For them the operation of a nuclear power plant would have been as dull as driving a bus. As far as detectives had been able to ascertain, Ivanov and Timofeyev had no relatives or friends at Chernobyl. None of their teachers or fellow students came from the Chernobyl area. They had never visited Chernobyl before the accident. There was no connection to Chernobyl at all.
Who was connected to Chernobyl?
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