"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 Nah
um of Chornobyl and his grandson."
Hoffman looked around. "Cold."
Vanko said, "Holy places are often cold."
"A religious expert here." Hoffman asked Arkady, "What am I supposed to do now?"
"You're the Hasidic Jew. Do what a Hasidic Jew does."
"I'm just dressed like a Hasidic Jew. I don't do this stuff."
Vanko said, "One day a year the Jews all come in a bus. Not alone like this."
"What stuff?" Arkady asked.
Hoffman picked up a couple of papers from a tomb and held them to the light to read them. "In Hebrew. Prayers to the rabbi."
"Oh, yes." Vanko was emphatic.
"Do that many Jews live here?" Arkady asked.
"Just visitors," Vanko said.
"All the way from Israel." Hoffman looked at a third letter. "Crazy Jews. Somebody else wins the Super Bowl, and he says, 'I'm going to Disneyland!' A Jew wins, he says, 'I'm going to Chernobyl!' "
"They're pilgrims," Arkady said.
"I get the idea. Now what?"
"Do something."
Vanko had been following the conversation more with his eyes than his ears. He dug into his pockets and came up with a fresh votive candle.
Hoffman said, "You happen to have a tallith, too? Never mind. Thank you, thanks a ton. What do I owe you?"
"Ten dollars."
"For a candle worth a dime? So the tomb is your concession?" Hoffman found the money. "It's a business?"
"Yes." Vanko was eager for that to be understood. "Do you need paper or a pen to write a prayer?"
"At ten dollars a page? No, thanks."
"I'll be right outside if you need anything. Food or a place to stay?"
"I bet." Hoffman watched Vanko escape. "This is beautiful. Left in a crypt by a Ukrainian Igor."
There were hundreds of prayers in each box. Arkady showed two to Hoffman. "What do these say?"
"The usual: cancer, divorce, suicide bombers. Let's get out of here."
Arkady nodded to the candle. "Do you have a match?"
"I told you, I don't do that stuff."
Arkady lit the candle and set it on the edge of the tomb. A flame hovered on the wick.
Bobby rubbed the back of his head as if it didn't fit right. "For ten dollars, that's not much light."
Arkady found used candles with wax left and relit them until he had a dozen flames that guttered and smoked but together were a floating ring of light that made the papers seem to shift and glow. The light also made Arkady aware of Yakov standing at the open door. He was thin enough for Arkady to think of a stick that had been burned, whittled and burned again.
"Is something wrong?" Vanko asked from outside.
Yakov removed his shoes and stepped inside. He kissed the tomb, prayed in a whisper as he rocked back and forth, kissed the tomb a second time and produced his own piece of paper, which he laid on the others.
Bobby bolted out and waited for Arkady. "The visit to the rabbi is over. Happy?"
"It was interesting."
"Interesting?" Bobby laughed. "Okay, here's the deal. The deaths of Pasha and Timofeyev are related. It doesn't matter that one died in Moscow and one died here, or that one was an apparent suicide and the other was obviously murder."
"Probably." Arkady watched Yakov emerge from the tomb and Vanko lock it up.
Bobby said, "So, maybe you should concentrate on Timofeyev, and I'll concentrate on Pasha. But we'll coordinate and share information."
"Does this mean that Yakov isn't going to shoot me?" Arkady asked.
"Forget about that. That's inoperative."
"Does Yakov know it's inoperative? He might be hard of hearing."
"Don't worry about that," Bobby said. "The point is, I'm not leaving, so I'll either be in your way, or we'll work together."
"How? You're not a detective or an investigator."
"The tape we just looked at? It's yours."
"I've seen it."
"What are you offering in return? Nothing?"
Vanko had been hanging back out of earshot but reluctant to leave a scene where more dollars might appear. Sensing a gap in the conversation, he sidled up to Arkady and asked, as if helpfully suggesting another local attraction, "Did you tell them about the new body?"
Bobby's head swiveled from Vanko to Arkady. "No, he hasn't. Investigator Renko, tell us about the new body. Share."
Yakov rested his hand in his jacket.
"Trade," Arkady said.
"What?"
"Give me your mobile phone."
Bobby yielded the phone. Arkady turned it on, scrolled through stored numbers to the one he wanted and hit "Dial."
A laconic voice answered, "Victor here."
"Where?"
There was a long pause. Victor would be staring at the caller ID.
"Arkady?"
"Where are you, Victor?"
"In Kiev."
"What are you doing there?"
Another pause.
"Is it really you, Arkady?"
"What are you doing?"
"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."
Chapter Eleven
* * *
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."
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