Walking up the path, Arkady stopped every few feet to brush aside leaves and look for prints or signs of blood, as he had done a dozen times before and with no more success. He paused at the cemetery gate and imagined Timofeyev standing, kneeling, lying on his back. Photographs really would have been helpful. Or a diagram or sketch. At this point Arkady was no better than a dog trying to uncover a stale scent. Yet there was always something. Visitors to the rolling hills of Borodino still felt the breath of French and Russian fusiliers underneath the grass. Why not an echo of Timofeyev's last living moment? And why not the spirits of those buried in this village plot? If ever there were simple lives, there were these, passed within the circuit of a few fields and orchards, almost as far from the rest of the world as another century.
Arkady opened the gate. The cemetery was a second village of plots and crosses separated by wrought-iron fences. A few plots had barely enough room to stand in, while one or two offered the comfort of a table and bench, but there were no impressive crypts or stones; wealth played little part in the life or death of such a community. Maria had industriously cleared around the crosses on one entire side, and on their own, without crosses, stood four glass jars of pansies, purple, blue and white, each at the head of a faintly discernible mound. The light was so thin that Arkady couldn't be sure. He knelt and spread his arms. Four child-size graves hidden by their lack of crosses. Illegal graves. How great a crime was that?
Eva had said that Timofeyev was white, he seemed drained. Frozen bodies could fool, but Arkady was willing to believe that she had seen more violence than most physicians, and Timofeyev's one-eyed stare through a mask of hoarfrost must have reminded her more of Chechnya than of cardiac arrest. Only, when Timofeyev's throat was cut, the blood went where? Right side up, blood should have soaked his shirt. Upside down, his hair. That only his nose was filled with blood suggested that he was inverted and, afterward, his face and hair rinsed. And the eye? Was that a delicacy for wolves?
Unless he was hung by his feet and, afterward, had his hair washed. Despite the draining there still would have been some lividity of settled blood around the head, but that could have been confused with freezer burn.
Arkady stood with his hand on the gate and for a moment caught the glint of something revealed, something lying in front of him and then gone, chased by a patter of raindrops, the light preparation of a hard rain.
The next black village had no inhabitants at all, and its cemetery lay deep in the embrace of brambles and weeds. Arkady had hoped the comparison would lead to some sort of realization, but what he found as he dismounted from the motorcycle and walked around was a deepening gloom of rotting cottages. A loamy toadstool smell vied with the oversweet scent of decaying apples. Where wild boar had dug for mushrooms, the dosimeter in Arkady's pocket spoke up. He heard something shifting in the house ahead and asked himself which was faster to the motorcycle, man or boar? Suddenly he wished he had Captain Marchenko's hunting knife or, better, Yakov's cannon.
The house gave a single-cylinder whine, and a rider in a helmet and camos on a small motorbike came out the front door. The rider pushed through the debris in the yard and over a prostrate picket fence, where he momentarily came to a halt to lower his helmet visor. The bike had no sidecar to stuff an icon in, and it did have a license plate, but it was a blue Suzuki, and the reflector was missing from the rear fender. Arkady had that reflector in his pocket.
"Are you looking for more icons to steal?" Arkady asked.
The thief returned Arkady's gaze as if to say, "You again?" and started off. By the time Arkady had reached his own motorcycle, the thief was halfway out of the village.
Arkady had the bigger, faster bike, but he simply wasn't as good a rider. The thief left the village on a narrow trail made for gathering firewood. Where branches had half-fallen, he ducked, and where the path was blocked, he deftly slipped by. Arkady crashed through the smaller branches and was swept clean off his saddle by the outstretched arm of an oak. The bike was all right, that was the main thing. He climbed back on and listened for the voice of the Suzuki. Rain pinged the leaves. Birches swayed in the arriving breeze. There was no hint of the thief.
Arkady pushed ahead with his engine off and, at this more deliberate speed, found motorbike tracks in the damp leaves underfoot; moisture made footprints and tire treads easier to read. Where the path forked, he consciously took the wrong trail for fifty meters before cutting through the woods to the right trail, where he saw the thief waiting behind a glistening screen of firs. The forest floor of damp needles was soft, and the thief's attention was fixed entirely on the trail until the steel jaws of a trap sprang from the ground and snapped shut next to Arkady's foot. The thief turned to regard the tableau of Arkady, bike and trap, and in a second was riding back down the trail the way he had come.
The thief kept ahead of Arkady but didn't completely lose him; as long as Arkady kept the smaller bike in sight, he could anticipate obstacles. Also, Arkady took chances he wouldn't have in a saner mood, following a far more expert rider leap for leap, fishtailing on leaves to swing off the path and weave through a stand of pines until they broke back into the village. On the far side was a forestry road with chest-high seedlings of second-growth trees. The thief took them like a slalom skier, leaning one way and then the other. Arkady rode straight over the seedlings, gaining all the time.
As Arkady drew close, the thief veered off the forestry road into a line of rust-colored pines, the outer reach of the RedForest, then through onto an undulating field with radiation markers of buried houses, cars and trucks. Arkady plunged into hollows, churned his way out and plunged again, while the thief flew in and out with acrobatic ease. Every way Arkady turned, the thief appeared farther out of reach until a hidden ditch twisted the front wheel of Arkady's bike and sent him over the handlebars. He hauled himself up, but the chase was over. The thief disappeared toward Chernobyl as the horizon went white and shuddered, followed by a thunderclap that announced a storm finally delivered.
As the clouds unloaded, the lights of the town seemed to drown. Arkady rode in at a limp, wet hair wrapped across his brow. He passed the inviting glow of the café and heard the splash of people running for its door. The windows were steamed. No one saw him go by. He rode past the dormitory, the parking lot sizzling with rain. He rode under bending branches. He pictured Victor sitting out the storm at a café in Kiev, sharing the space with pigeons. Arkady's camos took a clammy grip on his chest and shoulders. A truck went by with windshield wipers thrashing, and he doubted it had noticed him at all.
He turned at the road that led down to the river, where he had a panorama of the storm. Steam rose from the water as rain fell, but Arkady could see that Hoffman, Yakov and their car had deserted the yacht-club dock. Scuttled ships levitated from fog with each lightning strike. The far bank was a hazy sketch of aspens and reeds, but farther upstream the bridge led to the forlorn lights of staff quarters still occupied. Arkady could see well enough by the lightning to keep his own headlight off. He crossed the bridge and passed between the solid brick buildings on spongy soil that came to an end, except for a car track that led along what might once have been a sports field but had sunk under cattails and ferns.
Arkady killed his engine and pushed, following the track around a shadowy stand of trees to a garage fashioned from sheets of corrugated steel. The doors were held shut with a loose padlock. They creaked as he swung them open, but with thunder in every direction, he doubted anyone would hear less than a bomb. Arkady scanned the interior with his penlight. The garage was crammed but orderly: hardware in jars on shelves, hand tools in rows along the walls. In the middle was Eva Kazka's white Moskvich. On one side of the car was a Suzuki bike with the engine still warm; under a tarp on the other side, a disengaged sidecar. From his pocket Arkady took the reflector he had snapped off the rear fender of the icon thief's bike and mated it to the metal stub on Eva's fender. They fit.
Wood smoke led to a cabin set among a
blue mass of lilacs. A porch had been converted to a parlor. Through a window Arkady glimpsed an upright piano and bright chinks of fire in a woodstove. He rapped on the door, but thunder had opened up like siege guns, flattening all other sounds. He opened the door as lightning flashed behind him, strobe-lighting a glassed-in porch's assortment of a rug, wicker table and chairs, bookshelves and paintings. The room sank back into the dark. He had taken a step in when the sky above cracked open and filled the room like a searchlight. Eva moved to the middle of the rug with a gun. She was barefoot, in a robe. The gun was a 9mm, and she seemed familiar with it.
Eva said, "Get out or I'll shoot."
The door slammed shut in the wind, and for a moment Arkady thought she had fired. She gathered the robe together with her free hand.
"It's me," he said.
"I know who it is."
In a momentary dark he moved closer and pushed aside the collar of the robe to kiss her neck on the same fine scar he had found before. She pressed the muzzle of the pistol against his head as he slid open the robe. Her breasts were cold as marble.
He heard a mechanism of the gun at work, easing the hammer down. He felt a tremor run through her legs. She pressed the flat of the gun against his head, holding him.
Her bed was in a room with its own woodstove, which whistled softly with heat. How they had arrived there, he wasn't quite sure. Sometimes the body took over. Two bodies, in this case. Eva rolled on top as he entered until her head rocked back, sweat like kohl around her eyes, her body straining as if she were about to leap, as if all the frenzy he had detected in her before had become a voracious need. No different from him. They were two starving people feeding from the same spoon.
• • •
Chaos turned to steady rain. Eva and Arkady sat at opposite ends of the bed. The light of an oil lamp brought out the black of her eyes, hair, curls at the base of her stomach, the gun by her hand.
"Are you going to shoot me?" he asked.
"No. Punishment only encourages you." She gave his scratches and bruises a professional glance.
"Some of these are thanks to you," he said.
"You'll live."
"That's what I thought."
She gestured vaguely to the bed, as if to a battlefield. "This didn't mean anything."
"It meant a great deal to me."
"You took me by surprise."
He thought about it. "No. I took you by inevitability."
"A magnetic attraction?"
"Something like that."
"Have you ever seen little toy magnetic dogs? How they attract each other? That doesn't mean they want to. It was a mistake."
The lamp threw as much shadow as light, but he could see an agreeable mess: an overlap of pillows, books and rugs. A framed photo showing an older couple in front of a different house; Arkady had to look twice to recognize the ruin where Eva had hidden with her bike. A poster for a Stones concert in Paris. A teapot and cups with bread, jams, knife, cutting board and crumbs. All in all, an intimate cabin.
Arkady nodded to the gun. "I could field-strip that for you. I could field-strip it blindfolded by the age of six. It's about the only thing my father ever taught me."
"A handy ability."
"He thought so."
"You and Alex have more in common than you imagine."
One item they had in common was obvious, but Arkady felt that Eva had meant more than herself. "How is that?"
Eva shook her head. She dismissed that line of conversation. Instead, she said, "Alex said this would happen."
"Alex is a smart man," Arkady said.
"Alex is a crazy man."
"Did you drive him crazy?"
"By sleeping with other men? Not that many. I desperately need a cigarette."
Arkady found two and an ashtray he put in no-man's-land at the center of the bed.
Eva said, "What do you know about suicide? Besides cutting down the bodies, I mean?"
"Oh, I come from a long line of suicides. Mother and father. You'd think it would be a short line, but no, they get their procreation done early, and then they kill themselves."
"Have you..."
"Not successfully. Anyway, here we are in Chernobyl. I think we're making effort enough. And you?"
She balked again, not ready to let him lead. "So how is your investigation going?"
"Moments of clarity. Millionaires are generally murdered for money. I'm not sure that's the case here."
"Anything else?"
"Yes. When I first came, I assumed that the deaths of Ivanov and Timofeyev were connected. I still think so, but in a different way. Perhaps more parallel."
"Whatever that means. What were you doing in the village today?"
"I was at the cemetery at Roman and Maria's, and I began wondering if any of the official fatalities from the accident came from the villages in the Zone. Whether I would recognize names on the crosses. I didn't, but I found four unmarked graves of children."
"Grandchildren. Of different causes supposedly unrelated to Chornobyl. What happens is the family breaks up, and no one is left to bury the dead but the grandparents, who take them home. No one keeps track. There were forty-one official deaths from the accident and half a million unofficial. An honest list would reach to the moon."
"Then I went to the next village, where I found you. What were you doing on a motorcycle in a house? Let me guess. You take icons so they can be reported as stolen to the militia. That way scavengers and the corrupt officers they work with have no reason to bother old folks like Roman and Maria. Then you return the icons. But there were no occupied houses or icons in that village, so why were you there? Whose house was it?"
"No one's."
"I recognized the bike by the broken reflector and recognized you by the scarf. You should get rid of your scarves." He leaned across the bed to kiss her neck. That she didn't shoot him he took as a good omen.
Eva said, "Every once in a while I remember this thirteen-year-old girl parading on May Day with her idiotic smile. She's moved out of the village to Kiev to live with her aunt and uncle so she can go to a special school for dance; their standards are rigid, but she's been measured and weighed and has the right build. She has been selected to hold a banner that says, 'Marching into the Radiant Future!' She is so pleased the day is warm enough not to wear a coat. The young body is a wonder of growth, the division of cells produces virtually a new person. And on this day she will be a new person, because a haze comes over the sun, a breeze from Chornobyl. And so ends her days of dancing and begins her acquaintanceship with Soviet surgery." She touched the scar. "First the thyroid and then the tumors. That's how you know a true citizen of the Zone. We fuck without worries. I am a hollow woman; you can beat me like a drum. Still, once in a while, I remember this fatuous girl and am so ashamed of her stupidity that if I could go back in time with a gun, I would shoot her myself. When this feeling overcomes me, I go to the nearest hole or black house and hide. There are enough black houses that this is never a problem. Otherwise I have nothing to fear. Were you ambitious as a boy? What did you want to be?"
"When I was a boy, I wanted to be an astronomer and study the stars. Then someone informed me that I wasn't seeing the actual stars, I was seeing starlight generated thousands of years before. What I thought I was seeing was long since over, which rendered the exercise rather pointless. Of course, the same can be said about my profession now. I can't bring back the dead."
"And the injured?"
"Everybody's injured."
"Is that a promise?"
"It's the only thing I'm sure of."
Chapter Thirteen
* * *
In the morning the rain had passed and the cabin felt like a boat safely landed. Eva was gone but had left him brown bread and jam on a cutting board. While Arkady dressed he noticed more photographs: a ballet mistress, a tabby cat, friends skiing, someone shielding their eyes on a beach. None of Alex, which, he confessed, reassured him.
As he stepped out the screen door he couldn't help but notice how the willows, like timid girls, stood with one foot in the water and that the river, swollen with runoff, bore an earthy smell and a new full-throated voice. Arkady hadn't slept with a woman for a while and he felt warm and alive. Blow on cold ashes, he thought, you never know.
"Hello." Oksana Katamay slipped into view around the corner of the house. She was in her blue jogging suit and knit cap; a wig, maybe, or lunch for her brother Karel was in her backpack. She ducked her head with every step forward and pulled her hands into her sleeves. "Is everyone up?"
"Yes."
"The lilacs smell so sweet. This is the doctor's house?"
"Yes. What are you doing here?"
"I saw your motorbike. That's my friend's Vespa next to it. I borrowed it."
"A friends?"
"Yes."
Arkady saw the bike and scooter in the yard but they were hardly visible from the road. Oksana smiled and looked around in a goose-necked way.
Arkady asked, "Have you been here long?"
"Awhile."
"You're very quiet."
She smiled and nodded. She must have rolled the scooter the last fifty meters with the engine off to arrive so silently, and she obviously didn't find anything odd about waiting for him outside another woman's door.
"You're not at work today?" Arkady asked.
"I'm home, sick." She pointed at her shaved head. "They let me take time off whenever I want. There's not much to do, anyway."
"Can I give you some coffee, hot or cold?"
"You remembered. No, thank you."
He looked at the scooter. "You can travel around here? What about checkpoints?"
"Well, I know where to go."
"So does your brother Karel. That's the problem."
Oksana shifted uncomfortably. "I just wanted to see how you were. If you're with the doctor, I suppose you're okay. I was worried because of Hulak."
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