The Boy Who Stole From the Dead

by Orest Stelmach

  Nadia and Marko walked for ten minutes to distance themselves from the hunter. They turned left at a cluster of brush and crept up to the side of the road again. Nadia peered around a tree trunk in the direction they’d come from.

  The man was still there. Nadia had counted their steps so she would know how far to double back. She guessed they’d put two hundred yards between them and the hunter. His silhouette was framed by the arc of the power plant lights. She and Marko would be much darker from his perspective, but they would still be visible.

  She told Marko the plan. They squatted side-by-side, waited for the hunter to turn their back to them, and raced across the street. Once they were in the woods, Nadia took the lead. She shined her flashlight to get oriented. Turned it off. She continued to do so every fifteen steps or so, aiming the light downward. Dense evergreens provided thick cover. The hunter on the road was behind them now. There was no risk he’d see the flashlight’s glow.

  Marko followed close on her heels, oar in hand. They were experienced hikers. They both knew the distance they needed to cover. Marko trusted that once they retraced their steps through the woods, Nadia would know the way to the black village. He bounded with confidence. Didn’t ask questions. There was no need to. It was as though they were communicating without speaking.

  They emerged on a trail with two tracks wide enough to accommodate a car. Weeds, grass, and small shrubs covered the middle. It had been a dirt road for vehicles, Karel had told her. Now it was a path for bikes and motorcycles.

  They marched for three quarters of a mile until they came upon a cluster of abandoned homes. Farther down the path they came upon a small gray house with a thatch roof. The windows were blacked out but a light shone under the front door.

  Nadia had been inside the house last year. This was where Karel took her to meet her uncle before he died. It was here that she met Oksana Hauk, the babushka who took care of her uncle and managed the house.

  Nadia suspected the babushka was still inside. Some residents of Chornobyl had returned to their houses even though law forbid anyone to live in the Zone. They loved their homes, lives, and properties. This is my home, the babushka had said. My health is my business.

  Stakes marked the vegetable garden beside the house. The ground had been tilled in preparation for seeding.

  Nadia didn’t need to remind herself that people in abandoned homes in a black village didn’t hear knocks on their door in the night. She pressed her mouth to the edge of the door. Knocked three times, paused, and knocked three times again. Like Karel had done last year.

  “Pani Hauk,” Nadia said, addressing her formally. “Babushka. It’s Nadia Tesla. From America. You remember me. I came here with Karel last year. Nadia Tesla.”

  Nadia counted to five. Prepared to knock again.

  A bolt slid open on the other side of the door. Then a second one. Nadia felt Marko’s hand on her back. He pulled her aside so she wasn’t standing in the doorway. Moved to the opposite side himself.

  The door opened.

  A familiar voice spoke her name. Rosehips, gravel, and grit. “Nadia?”

  Nadia recognized the voice. She stepped to the front. “Babushka.”

  Nadia’s voice faltered before she could finish the word. As soon as she saw the babushka’s face, Nadia knew she’d miscalculated. The babushka looked sturdy and resilient as ever, but the sparkle was gone from her eyes. In its place was a look of dread.

  Footsteps behind them.

  Marko whipped around, oar in hand.

  The rawboned man from Lviv pointed a rifle at them. It had a long curled magazine at the base. It didn’t look like a weapon a hunter used to kill an animal. It looked like a weapon a soldier used to kill another. Nadia remembered how he’d smiled at her when he’d given her the purple pill. He wasn’t smiling now. In fact, he wasn’t exuding any emotion at all. He simply looked efficient, albeit with a slight limp.

  “Drop the oar and get in the house.” His tone was quick and curt.

  Marko dropped the oar. Nadia stepped into the kitchen. Marko followed.

  Two lanterns lit the room. The babushka stood beside the wood-burning brick oven.

  A tall and distinguished man entered the kitchen from the hallway that led to the bedroom. He had a palpable air of entitlement about him, and a hunting rifle with a scope slung over his shoulder. He cast a look of disgust at Marko and then brightened as he measured Nadia.

  “Yes,” he said. “Your head will look quite nice among my other trophies. Quite nice, indeed.”

  CHAPTER 53

  JOHNNY COULD SEE the anguish in the kid’s face. All this time Johnny thought Bobby’s conscience was eating him up about the Valentine killing. But in fact an altogether different event persecuted him. Something that happened two years ago on the opposite side of the world, in a place everyone had heard of but no one wanted to talk about.

  “Gunshots?” Johnny said. “Who was shooting?”

  “The hunters.”

  “What hunters?”

  “The hunters that were there to hunt men.”

  “What men?”

  “Criminals. If a man is in trouble with the police, the Zone is a good place to hide out. No one lives there, except for the squatters. There’s no law. Just the animals. What could be a better place to hide?”

  “Who were these hunters?”

  Bobby shrugged. “I don’t know. Coach told me later they were powerful men. Men who could do whatever they wanted.”

  “And had they done this before?”

  “There were rumors but we never believed them. When they spotted me and Eva from a distance they assumed we were scavengers. Scavenging and poaching in the Zone is illegal. A scavenger is a criminal. That made us no better than the other criminals they were hunting. So they shot at us with their rifles.”

  “And what happened?”

  “They missed. We got away. We ran from the village to Pripyat. It was dark there and we knew the way out of the exclusion zone. We didn’t come in via the main road, though. We came in through the forest. When we saw the car parked behind the cultural center—there are no cars in Pripyat—we knew.”

  “There was another hunter waiting for you.”

  Bobby nodded. “We turned back, cut into the forest and hiked two kilometers back toward the power plant. There are only two places along the perimeter for a scavenger to escape. One path starts at Pripyat. The other one starts on the other side of Chornobyl, half a kilometer before the main entrance to the power plant. That’s how we got in. That’s how we needed to get out.”

  “You and Eva.”

  “When we doubled back, we snuck inside the power plant so we didn’t have to cross the cooling pond. There’s an opening in the fence. A person can sneak through. That way you walk along the cooling pond on the inner bank. By the reactors. You don’t have to cross it. But when we looped around toward the far side of the plant, another hunter was there waiting for us with a rifle. She was the lookout for the cooling pond. We caught her by surprise by coming along the inner perimeter.”

  “She?”

  “One of the hunters was a woman. She pointed her rifle at us and told us to put our hands in the air. She looked confused. She said, ‘You’re not criminals. You’re children. What are you doing here?’ When we didn’t answer, she told me to show her what I had in my knapsack.”

  “What did you have in your knapsack?”

  “Gear shafts from a tractor. They look like darts made out of iron. When she saw them she got angry. She said, ‘Who put you up to this? You poor things. They’re not going to care. Because you’re scavengers. Don’t you see? My husband and the others. They’re not going to care that you’re children.’ And then she said, ‘Go. Run.’ But it was too late. Eva had pulled a knife out of her back pocket and was charging her, trying to catch her by surprise. It was reckless and st
upid but that was Eva’s way. Eva was fast. Very fast. It all happened so quickly. There was no time to think. The woman did what any person would have done if someone with a knife charged them.”

  “She squeezed the trigger,” Johnny said.

  Bobby nodded.

  “And?”

  “Nothing happened.”

  “It was a squib.” Johnny heard the relief in his own voice.

  “When the rifle didn’t fire, all three of us were surprised. None of us understood what had happened. Especially not her. So before she got her senses back, I ran up and shoved her as hard as I could. She wasn’t expecting it. She went flying backward. The rifle fired into the sky as she fell backward—”

  “Delayed discharge,” Johnny said. “Not a squib. Hang-fire.”

  “As she fell backward headfirst into the cooling pond.”

  CHAPTER 54

  NADIA AND MARKO stood against a wall in the kitchen. The same picture Nadia had seen last year hung behind them. It was a picture of a boy in skates holding a hockey stick on a frozen pond. It was the same picture her uncle had sent her mother. It was the first snapshot of her cousin, Adam, she had ever seen.

  The babushka stood between the oven and a portable cabinet. To her left, the rawboned man from Lviv held his assault rifle pointed at Marko and Nadia. The man they called the General sat in a narrow chair, rifle by his side.

  He pulled a radio transmitter out of his pocket. “The game is over. I repeat. The game is over. Report to base camp. We’ll be there shortly.”

  Three men answered sequentially in the affirmative.

  Nadia and Marko exchanged glances. They’d thought there were three men. But there were five. The two in the house, the one they’d encountered on the street, and two more. They had both scavenger trails staked out, Nadia thought.

  “Once you’ve hunted the human,” the General said, “nothing compares. If you tell a person that, they’ll say of course, the target has a chance. The truth is all prey has a chance to survive. If hunting were easy, there would be no sport in it. Men wouldn’t hunt. What’s different with a human is the tactics change. The hunt becomes cerebral on both sides. And that elevates the stakes of the game. And its rewards. For instance, today I hunted you successfully without hunting you at all. I knew what you were going to do. I knew where you were going to go. Can you imagine how gratifying that is?”

  “How did you know where I was going?” Nadia said.

  “I was in charge of clean-up and security at the power plant in 1986 after the explosion. After Ukraine proclaimed independence, they put me on a retainer as a consultant. There are very few people left alive who lived through that first month and can provide an eyewitness account to everything that happened. In my capacity as security consultant, I see every application for special entry into the Zone. Last year a man named Kirilo Andre received entry on the basis of national security from the deputy minister of internal affairs. There was a mention of an American woman, and a criminal thief named Damian Tesla in the report. Kirilo Andre has since disappeared. But I was able to locate his driver. He told me they went to see a house in a black village where an American woman was rumored to have been. From there it wasn’t hard to find the house. The house with bicycles. And weapons.”

  He walked over to the square wooden table beside the stove. Picked up a cleaver from a block of knives. “Sharp weapons,” the General said. He reached behind the table and pulled out an old rifle. “And dull ones.”

  Nadia suppressed her dejection. That was the rifle she’d wanted. It had belonged to her uncle. The babushka had used it to kill the two deranged hunters who’d been sent by the Soviet government to Chornobyl after the explosion. Radioactive dust had landed in pets’ fur and the government had decided to exterminate them. This particular pair of hunters had derived too much joy from their mission. The babushka heard of their abuses, invited them for a drink, and shot them dead. Then she buried them in her root cellar.

  Nadia stared at the General. “He said I’d get answers about Ivan Valentin if I took the pill,” she said, nodding toward the rawboned man from Lviv. “He said I’d get the answers in your theater.”

  “And you did. We just gave you all the answers. You just don’t realize it yet.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “What usually happens in a theater?”

  “Someone puts on a show.”

  “Exactly. Actors re-enact a familiar scene.”

  “You hunted my brother and me. That was a re-enactment? Of what?”

  The General smiled.

  Nadia pictured Bobby helping another boy out of the trunk of a car, just as she had helped Marko. The General had recreated the circumstances under which Bobby had met Valentin, or his son. That meant the General had hunted Bobby.

  “You hunted scavengers?” she said. Simply looking at the man filled her with loathing. “You hunted children?”

  “Children? We never hunted children. We hunted criminals. Men evading the police. Scavengers stealing radioactive automobile parts and selling them to cab drivers in Kyiv. Poachers killing boar raised on radioactive water and selling it to restaurants in Kyiv.”

  Nadia imagined Bobby with a friend of his from school. “And if two of the scavengers happened to be boys?”

  “They weren’t. They were a boy and a girl, but they were both teens. They were old enough to know right from wrong. And besides, they were children from the Zone. We were doing them a favor by trying to kill them. No one wants to be around their deformities. Normal men and women don’t want to marry them. You say I’m a beast for saying so but I’m just admitting what everyone else is thinking. And we don’t need a society of deformed people, do we?”

  Nadia could sense Marko tightening beside her, exercising restraint so as not to say something that would get them shot.

  “What was the connection between Adam Tesla and Ivan Valentin?” Nadia said.

  “The boy killed his ex-wife.”

  “Impossible.”

  “He pushed her into the cooling pond.” The General explained how three members of the Zaroff Seven stumbled upon Adam and his friend scavenging and the pursuit that followed. “She inadvertently drank some of the water and died five months later. She was an agent provocateur with the KGB before he married her. ‘My honey trap,’ he used to call her.”

  “How did Valentin’s son fit into all of this?” Nadia said.

  “Valentin’s son had come home from America and had come along for the hunt. He saw the boy and the girl through his scope. He was the one who fired the initial shots. In that way, he was culpable in his mother’s death. If he were a better marksman, his mother would still be alive. But he wasn’t. So he took a vow of vengeance. His father tried to find out who the two children were but wasn’t successful. Then the boy’s picture turned up in a newspaper in New York. Something about him beating a professional hockey player in a race on skates.”

  “Not a professional hockey player,” Marko said. “The fastest professional hockey player on skates in the world.”

  “Congratulations,” the General said. “Maybe there’s a pond outside the prison where he’ll be spending the rest of his life. Young Valentin promised his father to avenge his mother on his deathbed.”

  Nadia noticed the babushka’s right hand curling around a broomstick. Nadia tapped Marko’s foot.

  “And why bring us here?” Nadia said. “Why go through all this trouble when your men had ample opportunity to kill us in Kyiv or Lviv?”

  “You are the boy’s cousin. You are his guardian. You have to pay for his sin. It is a matter of honor that his death be avenged. As for the method, the vehicle graveyards are empty. There’s nothing left to steal. Chornobyl is changing. Nature is gradually healing itself. Thus there are fewer and fewer criminals to hunt. So I brought you here, tedious as the arrangements were, for the sport o
f it. To recreate the scene and make amends for the one that got away.”

  “There are still poachers,” Nadia said.

  “But they have rifles,” Marko said. “What fun would that be? A fair game.”

  The General glared at Marko and started to reach for his rifle.

  “What about the rest of the Zaroff Seven?” Nadia said.

  The word “Zaroff” distracted him. He forgot the rifle, nodded at the rawboned man from Lviv instead. That made two of them, Nadia thought. “The Valentines are gone. The remaining five of us decided this could not go unpunished. The two of us happily volunteered for the mission.”

  “Is Simeon Simeonovich one of them?” The question rolled off her tongue. Nadia had no reason to suspect him. But she didn’t trust him completely, either. Maybe she was constantly looking for validation he was a good man.

  “That arrogant child? I don’t even like being in the same room with him. He’s a disgrace. He doesn’t know the real Russia. He doesn’t appreciate that it’s Russia’s destiny to recreate the Soviet Union. To take back the so-called independent states and make them her own again.”

  Nadia could hear Marko cringing beside her. A moment of silence passed.

  “I have a question,” the babushka said.

  Everyone in the kitchen glanced in her direction with shocked expressions. No one was expecting her to speak.

  “You said you were in charge of clean-up and security here,” she said. “Were you the one who brought the pet hunters?”

  The General laughed. “Pet hunters? What are you talking about, old woman?”

  “Someone sent pet hunters from Kyiv to kill the pets. Was that you? Are you responsible for my dog’s death? Did you send the butchers? The ones who drove around in trucks guzzling vodka and giving each other points for running over turtles?”