"More recent stuff," Victor said. "Newspaper clippings. London Times portrait from ten years ago, 'Physics in a Russian family: Academician Felix Gerasimov and his son, Alexander.' Genius in the genes, blah, blah. Friendly debate between generations over safety of reactors. 'Found dead.' Sorry, I skipped to another piece. From Izvestya, 'Institute director found dead at home by his own hand.' A gun. In good health but declining spirits after the death of his wife six months earlier. Last one, an appreciation in Pravda. 'Career that touched the highs and lows of Soviet science.' Here's the wife again. 'Tragic death.' "
A family tradition of suicide, that was the connection between Alex and Arkady. Eva had spotted the merry bond right away. "What is the date on the Izvestya piece?"
"May second. He was found on May Day."
Imagine, Arkady thought. One day Felix Gerasimov is the respected and honored director of a scientific institute well enough funded to have its own research reactor in the middle of Moscow, a reactor he's earned not only through his groundbreaking work in theoretical physics but also through his willingness to engage in the down-to-earth problems of nuclear this and that (test-site pollution and spontaneous explosions in the hinterland), all the signs of a politically shrewd careerist. And then the political system collapses. The Communist Party lies as gutted as Reactor Four. Bankrupt. The director and his faculty (including Ivanov and Timofeyev) have to walk around the institute in blankets and dump "hot water" on the sly. That did, indeed, seem like twists enough for one career.
"Arkady, are you there?"
"Yes. Call Petrovka –"
"In Moscow?"
"Yes. Call headquarters and see if there's any record of a suicide attempt by the son, Alexander."
"What makes you think there will be?"
"Because there will. Did you get anywhere with his off-time work in Moscow?"
"Sorry. I called, at Bobby's expense, every major hotel in Moscow. Nine have business centers offering interpreting, translation, PCs and fax. But none round the clock, and none employed an Alex Gerasimov. To put not too fine a point on it, a dead end. Lyuba says you're exploiting me."
"Yes, that's why you're in Kiev and I'm in Chernobyl. Any sight of Anton?"
"I have my notes right here." There was a rush of papers falling. "Shit! Fuck your mother! I have to call you back."
Victor really wasn't meant for the hushed confines of a library, Arkady decided. He looked at the doll in the window. Her face was bleached off, but the contours and a ponytail of golden filaments remained, and he glimpsed a shelf of more dolls, as if the house had been entrusted to a second, smaller family. The doorway lured him to the threshold. Close up, the doll's arms bore a gauze of spider-webs that he untangled, and when his mobile phone rang, he almost saw her flinch.
Arkady answered, "Hello, Victor, go ahead."
A raspy voice asked, "Who is Victor?"
"A friend," Arkady said.
"I bet you don't have many. I hear you got someone shot at the cooling pond."
Arkady started again. "Hello, Karel."
It was Katamay, the missing militia officer. Dust motes eddied around the doll as if she were breathing.
"I want to talk to you about the Russian that you found. That's all, nothing else," Arkady said and waited. The gaps were so long it was almost like talking to Zhenya.
"I want you to leave my family alone."
"I will, but I have to talk to you."
"We're talking."
"In person. Just about the Russian, that's all I'm here for, and then I can go home."
"With your friend Wayne Gretzky?"
"Yes."
A seizure of coughing, followed by "When I heard that, I almost split my side."
"Then I won't bother your grandfather and sister anymore, and Dymtrus can have his gun back."
A long silence.
"Pripyat, the center of the main square, ten tonight. Alone."
"Agreed," Arkady said, but to a dial tone.
Victor rang the next instant. "Okay, Anton was at a couple of casinos by the river."
"Why is he spending so much time here?"
"I don't know. Galina wore this tight outfit."
"Spare me." Arkady was still trying to switch gears from the Katamay call.
"Hey, thank God for our little hygienist, or I'd never see Anton. He picks her up after work every day. Goes up to the office like a real gentleman. Took her to a Porsche showroom, churches and a graveyard."
"A graveyard?"
"Very prestigious. Poets, writers, composers all laid out. He put a pile of roses at a gravestone. I looked at it later. Sure enough, the stone said 'Obodovsky'. His mother died this year."
"I'm interested in where he was born. See if you find any record that he lived in Pripyat."
"Bobby is going to be very interested in this."
"Wonderful. Is Anton doing any business?"
"Not that I can see."
"Then why is he hanging around Kiev? What is he waiting for, going to cemeteries and showrooms?"
"I don't know, but you should see the Porsches."
• • •
Arkady rode down an avenue not of Porsches but of fire engines on one side and army trucks on the other. Few visitors came to the yard except dealers in auto parts. From row to row, the variety changed from cars to armored personnel carriers, from tanks to bulldozers, all too hot to bury but sinking in the mud. Arkady followed the single power line to the trailer office of Bela, the manager.
Bela had few visitors and he was eager to roll up yard maps and share with Arkady the living comforts engineered into his trailer: microwave, minibar, flat-screen TV and videotape collection. A pornographic tape was already playing, pneumatic sex with the sound down, like background music.
Bela picked a hair off his shoulder. In his dirty white suit he looked like a lily beginning to rot.
"I'm seriously thinking of retiring. The demands of this job are too much."
"What demands?"
"Demands. Customers can't just drive into the Zone to shop for auto parts. This is not a showroom. On the other hand, they want to see what they're buying. So I bring them."
"Bring them here?"
"In the back of my van. I have an understanding with the boys at the checkpoint. They have to eat, too. Everyone eats, that's the golden rule."
"And Captain Marchenko?"
"A mass of envy. However, the Zone administrators in their wisdom have given me control of the yard with no interference from the captain because they understand how unreliable the militia is. I am up before dawn every day to make sure things run smoothly. I am, if nothing else, reliable. Hence, this multitude of vehicles outside is all mine."
Now that Arkady thought about it, there was something Napoleonic in the pride Bela took in his army of radioactive vehicles, in his splendid isolation.
"And with every car a free dosimeter?"
"Don't even joke about such things. You should enjoy life's more beautiful things." The manager held up a box that said Moscow Escort Girls. "I can show you Russian porn, Japanese, American. Dubbed, undubbed, not that it makes a great deal of difference. You're a sports enthusiast? Hockey? Football?" Another shelf of tapes. "Classic films, cartoons, natural history. Whatever tickles your fancy. I'll open a tin of biscuits, pour some liqueur and we'll relax." The manager made it sound like the end of a day on a tropical island.
"Actually, I brought one." Arkady handed over Vanko's tape.
"No label. Some amateur action? A little hanky-panky? Bathroom camera?"
"I somehow doubt it."
"But it could be?"
Bela eagerly switched tapes. As he watched Vanko's tape, the yard manager's face expressed first surprise and then disappointment, as if sugar he had shoved into his mouth proved to be salt.
Chapter Fourteen
* * *
The steppe was soft. The steppe was a vast plain that shone with ponds and corkscrew rivers and evoked a wistful sadness. The poetry wa
s stentorian, to rouse a patriotic fervor, but the bread was as plump as pillows, and bread always won over poetry. Ukrainian beauty was the child of history: the luminous doe eyes and fair skin of the Slav set on Tartar cheeks. At least that was the ordinary beauty. Galina was probably like that, Arkady thought.
Eva was not soft. Her pale skin and black hair – black as a cormorant's, liquid to the hand – set a theme of contradiction. Her eyes were dark mirrors. Her body looked slight but was strong as a bow, and Arkady thought she would have made an excellent imp in hell, goading slow and doughy sinners with a pitchfork. She should have come from a landscape of flames and spewing lava. Then he remembered that, in part, she did.
They had kicked the sheet off the bed and lay, skin on skin, enjoying the cool evaporation of the sweat they had produced. Dusk hung outside the window.
She asked, "Why do you have to go?"
"I have to meet a missing man."
"That sounds like a children's rhyme, but it's not, is it? You're still investigating."
"From time to time. I'll be back in a few hours."
"That's up to you." She turned her face to him. Her eyes were too dark to distinguish an iris and they seemed huge. "If you do return, you should know the risks."
"Such as?"
She moved his hand with hers to the scar on her neck. "Cancer of the thyroid, but you knew that." To her breast. "Chornobyl heart, literally a hole in the heart." She played his fingers along her ribs. "Leukemia in the bone marrow." Below the ribs. "Cancer of the pancreas and liver." Across a ruff of pubic hair. "Cancer of the reproductive organs, not to mention tumors, mutations, missing limbs, anemia, rigidity. Not that any of this necessarily matters. Alex says, in the future our main concern will be predators."
"What kinds?"
"All kinds."
"People aren't like that."
"You don't know. When people in Kiev learned about the accident they didn't act with great nobility. Trains were mobbed. Iodine tablets were hoarded. Everyone was drunk and everyone fucked everyone. There were no morals. If you want to know how people will react at the end of the world, this was it. Later, the populations of Pripyat and Chornobyl were farmed out across the country, which didn't want them. Who would want someone radioactive in his home, then or now? They got very good at spotting us, at asking our age and where we were from. I don't blame them a bit. Now do you want me?"
"Yes."
She sighed and stroked his cheek. "Well, you may come back or not, but you've been warned."
• • •
In Pripyat light slowed to a drifting mist. Arkady had arrived on his motorbike on time at ten, and another twenty minutes passed while he heard the occasional whir or glimpsed a moving shadow that meant the Woropay brothers were making sure he had come alone.
The square was fronted by the city hall, hotel, restaurant, school, all shells. The moon made figures out of streetlamps, turned the amusement park Ferris wheel into a huge antenna. Other civilizations, when they vanished, at least left awesome monuments. The buildings of Pripyat were, one after the other, prefabricated ruins.
Dymtrus Woropay popped up like a large sprite at Arkady's side and said, "Leave the bike. Follow me."
Easier said than done. The Woropays wore night-vision goggles and glided on inline skates, clicking over cement and sweeping through the grass. On foot they might be clumsy, but on wheels they swung in graceful arcs. Arkady walked briskly while the brothers circled in and out of shadows to shepherd him along an arcade to a footpath through what had once been a tended garden and now was a maze of branches. Nothing stopped the Woropays; they splashed through standing water and shouldered aside brush to a two-story building with stone columns that supported a mural of organ pipes and atoms: Pripyat's cultural theater. Taras, the younger brother, punched the doors open and whooped as he rolled into a lobby. Dymtrus elbowed his way in and thrust his arms over his head as if he'd scored a goal.
By the time Arkady entered, the Woropays were gone. He heard them, but in the dark it was difficult to see which way they had gone, and the path was obstructed by stage flats stacked in the lobby. What dramas had been left behind, to rest cheek to cheek for eternity? "Uncle Vanya, meet Anna Karenina." Of course, there would have been children's productions, too. "Mouse King, meet Raskolnikov."
A crashing of piano keys came from deep inside the theater, and Arkady pushed through the flats and the clatter of cloakroom racks into a passageway of near-total darkness. He used his cigarette lighter to see along a wall defaced with curses, threats and crude anatomy. He had been in the theater before, but in the daytime. The dark gave no warning of the broken glass that slid underfoot or of the ripped wires that dangled in the face.
Finally Arkady groped his way to a drawn curtain and ropes and the light of a kerosene lamp. A piano with broken and missing keys was onstage, and Taras Woropay played as he sang, " 'You can't always get what you want, but you get what you need!' " while Dymtrus, night goggles flipped up, skated and danced wildly from one side of the stage to the other.
The audience seats were tiers of red benches strewn with broken chairs and tables, bottles and mattresses, like furniture thrown down the steps of a house, while Dymtrus's shadow stamped around the walls. A couch had been dragged to the other side of the piano, where Karel Katamay lay propped by pillows and covered with shawls. Arkady barely recognized the virtual skinhead he had seen in photographs at the grandfather's house. This Karel Katamay wore his hair long and beaded around a chalky face with pink eyes. A hockey shirt – the Detroit Red Wings – swam over him. Small, thoughtful pansies sat in jars of water around the couch, and a liter of Evian was tucked between his legs. Arkady didn't know what he had expected, but not this. He'd read descriptions of the court of Queen Elizabeth. That was what Karel Katamay looked like, a powdered Virgin Queen with two oafish courtiers. A satin pillow cushioned his head; a corner of the pillow was embroidered "Je ne regrette rien." "I regret nothing." When Karel smiled, tickled by the sight of Dymtrus whirling like a dervish, he showed pulpy gums.
" 'Get what you need! need! need!' "
Taras collapsed over the keys while his big brother weaved dizzily on the stage, and Katamay made more a gesture of clapping than actually bringing his hands together.
Dymtrus steadied himself and pointed in Arkady's direction. "Brought him."
"A chair." Katamay's voice was not much more than a whisper, but Dymtrus immediately jumped off the stage to bring a chair from the benches and set it in front of the couch so that Arkady and Karel Katamay would be at the same eye level. Close up, Katamay looked crayoned by a child.
Arkady said, "You don't look well."
"I'm fucked."
Katamay's nose sprang a leak. He pressed a towel against the blood in an offhand, nearly elegant way. The towel, to judge by its blotches of brown, had been used before.
"Summer cold," Katamay said. "So you wanted to know about the dead Russian I found?"
"Yes."
"There's not much to say. Some old fart I found in a village."
The hoarseness of Katamay's voice brought the volume down to a level of intimacy, as if they were theatrical types discussing a production to be presented on this very stage. Katamay said he had never seen the Russian before, and couldn't know the dead man was Russian, since his papers were missing. He was found in the morning lying on his back, his head at the cemetery gate, bloody but not too bloody, stiff from full rigor mortis, disorganized because of wolves. Katamay found the body coincidentally with a squatter he had seen before, a guy called Seva, about forty years old, missing a little finger on his left hand. Arkady took notes in case the Woropays wanted to stomp on anything afterward. Notes were a good target. But around Katamay, they were like dogs under voice command, and he had obviously told them to be still.
"Just a few questions. How was the dead man dressed?"
"He was rich. Expensive gear."
"Nice shoes?"
"Beautiful shoes."
&nbs
p; "Well cared for?"
"Beautifully."
"Not muddy?"
"No."
"His shirt was damp. Was it clean or dirty?"
"A few leaves, I think."
"So he had been turned over?"
"What do you mean?"
"A man who drops dead to the ground doesn't roll around much."
"Maybe he wasn't dead yet."
"More likely someone turned him over to relieve him of his money and threw away the ID later. Did you find anything else on the body? Directions, matches, keys?"
"Nothing."
"No car keys? He left them in the car?"
"I don't know."
"You didn't notice that his throat had been cut?"
"It was under his collar, and there wasn't that much blood. Anyway, wolves had been messing with him."
"Moved him? Torn him up?"
"Didn't move him. Yanked on his nose and face a bit, enough to get an eye."
Lovely picture, Arkady thought. "Do wolves go for eyes?"
"They'll eat anything."
"You saw their tracks?"
"Huge."
"Did you see a car or any tire tracks?"
"No."
"Where were the people in the village, the Panasenkos and their neighbors?"
"I don't know."
"People in black villages don't get a great deal of entertainment. They're pretty nosy about visitors."
"I don't know."
"Why were you there that day?"
Dymtrus said, "That's enough. He's got a million questions."
"It's all right, Dyma," Katamay said. "On the captain's orders, we were taking a count of villagers in the Zone, and items of value."
"Like icons?"
"Yes."
"Would you like to stop for a minute and drink something?"
"Yes." Katamay sipped French water and laughed into his handkerchief. In case he spits up blood, Arkady thought. "I still can't get over Wayne Gretzky. Tell the truth, do you know Gretzky?"
"No," Arkady whispered, "no more than you know a squatter named Seva missing a little finger."
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