Wolves Eat Dogs (19 page)

The poetry was coarse and blunt, Akhmatova’s words, familiar to Arkady, familiar to any literate man or woman over the age of thirty, before the new poetry of “Billions Served” and “Snickers for Energy!”

She swung her own gaze from Alex to Arkady and hesitated so long that Alex took over the last line:

Alex pulled Eva’s face to his and collected a deep kiss until she pulled away and slapped him hard enough to make even Arkady smart. She stood and plunged out the door. It was like a Russian party, Arkady thought. People got drunk, recklessly confessed their love, spilled their festering dislike, had hysterics, marched out, were dragged back in and revived with brandy. It wasn’t a French salon.

Arkady’s mobile phone rang. It was Olga Andreevna, from the children’s shelter in Moscow.

“Investigator Renko, you have to come back.”

“A second, please.” Arkady gestured apologies to Maria and went outside. Eva was nowhere in sight, although her car hadn’t left.

Olga Andreevna asked, “Investigator, what are you still doing in the Ukraine?

“I am assigned here. I am working on a case.”

“You should be here. Zhenya needs you.”

“I don’t think so. I can’t think of anyone he needs less.”

“He goes and stands by the street, waiting for you and looking for your car.”

“Maybe he’s waiting for the bus.”

“Last week he was gone for two days. We found him sleeping in the park. Talk to him.”

She put Zhenya on the line before Arkady could get off. At least he assumed Zhenya was on; all Arkady heard at his end was silence.

“Hello, Zhenya. How are you doing? I hear you’ve been causing people at the shelter some anxiety. Please don’t do that.” Arkady paused in case Zhenya wanted to offer any response. “So I suppose that’s all, Zhenya.”

He was in no mood and no condition to have another one-sided conversation with the garden gnome. He leaned back to take a breath of cool air and watched clouds cover the moon, slipping the house in and out of shadow. He heard the cow shuffle in her stall and a twig snap and wondered whether it was a night for wolves to be abroad.

“Still there?” Arkady asked. There was no answer; there never was an answer. “I met Baba Yaga. In fact, I’m outside her house right now. I can’t say whether her fence is made of bones, but she definitely has steel teeth.” Arkady heard, or thought he heard, a focusing of attention at the other end. “I haven’t seen her dog or cat yet, but she does have an invisible cow, who has to be invisible because of the wolves. Maybe the wolves wandered in from a different story, but they’re here. And a sea serpent. In her pond she has a sea serpent as big as a whale, with long whiskers. I saw the sea serpent swallow a man whole.” There was unmistakable rustling on the other end now. Arkady tried to remember other details of the fairy tale. “The house is very strange. It is absolutely on chicken legs. Right now the house is slowly turning. I’ll lower my voice in case it hears me. I didn’t see her magic comb, the one that can turn into a forest, but I did see an orchard of poisonous fruit. All the houses around are burned and full of ghosts. I will call in two more days. In the meantime, it’s important that you stay at the shelter and study and maybe make a friend in case we need help. I have to go now, before they see that I’m missing. Let me say a word to the director.”

There was a passing of the phone, and Olga Andreevna came back on. “What did you tell him? He seems much better.”

“I told him that he is a citizen of a proud new Russia and should behave like one.”

“I’m sure. Well, whatever you said, it worked. Are you coming to Moscow now? Your work there surely must be done.”

“Not quite yet. I’ll call in two days.”

“The Ukraine is sucking us dry.”

“Good night, Olga Andreevna.”

As Arkady put the mobile phone away, Eva stepped out of the orchard, silently applauding. “Your son?” she asked.

“No.”

“A nephew?”

“No, just a boy.”

She shifted like a cat getting comfortable. “Baba Yaga! Quite a story. You are an entertainer after all.”

“I thought you were going.”

“Not quite yet. So you’re not with anybody now? A woman?”

“No. And you, are you and Alex married, separated or divorced?”

“Divorced. It’s that obvious?”

“I thought I detected something.”

“The residue of an ancient disaster, the crater of a bomb, is what you detect.” The window light on her was watery, the stamp of linen making her eyes darker. “I still love him. Not the way you loved your wife. I can tell you had one of those great faithful romances. We didn’t. We were more…melodramatic, let’s say. Neither of us was undamaged goods. You can’t be in the Zone without a little damage. How much longer do you plan to stay?”

“I have no idea. I think the prosecutor would like to leave me here forever.”

“Until you’re damaged?”

“At least.”

What was disturbing about Eva Kazka was her combination of ferocity and, as she said, damage. She had been to Chernobyl
and
Chechnya? Maybe disaster was her milieu. Her smile suggested that she was giving him a second chance to say something interesting or profound, but Arkady thought of nothing. He had spent his imagination on Baba Yaga.

The door opened. Alex leaned out to say, “My turn.”

“Our new friend Arkady may not know all the facts. Facts are important. Facts should not be swept aside.”

“You’re drunk,” Eva said.

“It goes without saying. Arkady, do you enjoy comedy?”

“If it’s funny.”

“Guaranteed. This is Russian stand-up comedy,” Alex said. “Comedy with samogon.”

Maria opened a new bottle, releasing the sickeningly sweet smell of fermented sugar, and toddled from guest to guest refilling glasses.

“April twenty-sixth, 1986. The setting: the control room of Reactor Four. The actors: a night shift of fifteen technicians and engineers conducting an experiment—to see whether the reactor can restart itself if all external power for the machinery is cut off. The experiment has been performed before with safety systems on. This time they want to be more realistic. To defeat the safety system of a nuclear reactor, however, is no simple matter. It involves application. You have to disconnect the emergency core cooling system and close and lock the gate valves.” Alex walked rapidly back and forth, attending to imaginary switches. “Turn off the automatic control, block the steam control, disable the pre-sets, switch off design protection and neutralize the emergency generators. Then start pulling graphite rods from the core by remote control. This is like riding a tiger, this is fun. There are a hundred and twenty rods in all, a minimum of thirty to be inserted at all times, because this was a Soviet reactor, a military model that was a little unstable at low efficiency, a fact that was, unfortunately, a state secret. Alas, the power plunged.”

“When does this start to become funny?” Eva asked.

“It’s already funny. It just gets funnier. Imagine the confusion of the technicians. The reactor efficiency is dropping through the floor, and the core is flooding with radioactive xenon and iodine and combustible hydrogen. And somehow they have lost count—they have lost count!—and pulled all but eighteen control rods from the core, twelve below the limit. All the same, there is one last disastrous step to take. They can replace the rods, turn on the safety systems and shut down the reactor. They have not yet turned off the turbine valves and started the actual experiment. They have not pushed the final button.”

Alex mimicked hesitation.

“Let’s pause and consider what is at stake. There is a monthly bonus. There is a May Day bonus. If they run the test successfully they will likely win promotions and awards. On the other hand, if they shut down the reactor, there would certainly be embarrassing questions asked and consequences felt. There it is, bonuses versus disaster. So, like good Soviets, they marched forward, hands over their balls.”

Alex pushed the button.

“In a second the reactor coolant began to boil. The reactor hall started to pound. An engineer hit the panic switch for the control rods, but the rod channels in the reactor melted, the rods jammed, and superheated hydrogen blew off the roof, carrying reactor core, graphite and burning tar into the sky. A black fireball stood over the building, and a blue beam of ionized light shot from the open core. Fifty tons of radioactive fuel flew up, equal to fifty Hiroshima bombs. But the farce continued. Cool heads in the control room refused to believe that they had done anything wrong. They sent a man down to check the core. He returned, his skin black from radiation, like a man who had seen the sun, to report that there was no core. Since this was not an acceptable report, they sacrificed a second man, who returned in the same fatal condition. Now, of course, the men in the control room faced their greatest test of all: the call to Moscow.”

Alex picked up his glass of samogon.

“And what did our heroes say when Moscow asked, ‘How is the reactor core?’ They answered, ‘The core is fine, not to worry, the core is completely intact.’ Moscow is relieved. That’s the punch line. ‘Don’t worry.’ And here is my toast: ‘To the Zone! Sooner or later, it will be everywhere!’ Nobody’s drinking?”

Roman and Maria sat numb and deflated, feet hanging free of the floor. Vanko looked away. Eva pressed her fist to her mouth, then stood and applied the fist to Alex, not slapping him as she had before but hitting him solidly in the chest until Arkady pulled her away. For a moment no one moved, like marionettes gone limp, until Eva bolted again for the door. This time Arkady heard her car start.

Alex’s glass spilled. He refilled and raised it a second time. “Well, it seemed hilarious to me.”

A
s a rule, fresh bodies hang facedown underwater, with their arms and legs dangling in a shallow dive. This one was suspended against the bars of the inlet that fed water from the cooling pond to the smaller holding ponds of the station. Emergency water was still needed; the reactors were full of fuel, and in some ways they weren’t so much dead as in hibernation.

Two men with gaffs were trying to pull the body closer without falling in themselves. Captain Marchenko watched from the wall of the pond with a group of useless but curious militia officers, the Woropay brothers in front. Eva Kazka stood by her car, as far from the proceedings as possible. Arkady noticed that she looked, if possible, wilder and more unkempt than usual. Probably she had just gone home and dropped, in a samogon stupor. She seemed to be drawing the same conclusion about him.

As Marchenko joined Arkady, a shadow broke the surface of the water to display a slick gray head with rubbery lips, then slid back toward the bottom to stir with even larger catfish in the murk.

The captain said, “Taking into account the bad weather yesterday and the dimensions of the cooling pond, I think you’ll agree that it was wise to wait before looking for a body. The way the ponds circulate, everything ends up here at the inlet. Now it’s right in our hands.”

“And now it’s ten in the morning a day later.”

“A fisherman falls off his boat and drowns, it really doesn’t matter whether you find him one day or the next.”

“Like the tree that falls in the forest, does it make a noise?”

“Lots of trees fall in the forest. They’re called accidental deaths.”

Arkady asked, “Is Dr. Kazka the only doctor available?”

“We can’t pull the station doctors. All Dr. Kazka has to do is sign a death certificate.”

“You couldn’t call for a pathologist?”

“They say Kazka was in Chechnya. If that’s the case, she’s seen plenty of dead bodies.”

Eva Kazka tapped out a cigarette. Arkady had never seen such a nervous individual.

“By the way, I meant to ask you, Captain, did you ever find out whose icon we saw stolen the other day?”

“Yes. It belonged to an old couple named Panasenko. Returnees. The militia keeps a record. I understand it was a beautiful icon.”

“Yes.”

So a thief on a motorcycle had stolen the icon of Roman and Maria Panasenko’s, a crime officially recorded, and yet the icon had returned to its corner perch in the Panasenko cabin. Which was, to Arkady, the opposite of a tree falling without a sound.

From the inlet Arkady had a view of half-completed cooling towers that resembled, with the brush that flourished under and around them, temples half-built. The towers had been meant for the planned Reactors Five and Six. Now power went the other direction, at a trickle, to keep lightbulbs and gauges alive.

An ironic cheer went up when the body was finally grappled. As it was lifted, water drained from its pants and sleeves.

“Don’t you have a tarp or plastic to lay the body on?” Arkady asked Marchenko.

“This is not a murder investigation in Moscow. This is a dead drunk in Chornobyl. There’s a difference.” Marchenko cocked his head. “Don’t be shy, take a look.”

The captain’s men moved truculently out of Arkady’s way; the Woropays snickered at the recorder in Arkady’s hand.

“Speak up,” Marchenko said. “We can all learn.”

“Pulled from the water at the inlet of Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant at 1015 hours on July 15, a male apparently in his sixties, two meters tall, dressed in a leather jacket, blue work pants and construction boots.” An ugly man, in fact, his thick features bleached by immersion, brown teeth badly sorted, clothes sodden as a wet sheet. “Extremities are rigid, exhibiting rigor mortis. No wedding ring.” Arms and legs yearned for the sky, fingers open. “Hair brown.” Arkady peeled an eyelid back. “Eyes brown. Left eye dilated. Fully clothed, the body presents no tattoos, moles or other identifying marks. No immediately evident abrasions or contusions. We’ll continue at the autopsy.”

“No autopsy,” Marchenko said.

“We know him,” Dymtrus Woropay said.

Taras said, “He’s Boris Hulak. He scavenges and fishes. He squats in apartments in Pripyat, always moving around.”

“Do you have latex gloves?” Arkady asked.

Marchenko said, “Afraid of getting your hands wet?”

At a nod from the captain, the Woropays unzipped the dead man’s jacket and dug out his booklet of identification papers.

Marchenko read them: “Boris Petrovich Hulak, born 1949, residence Kiev, occupation machinist. With his picture.” The same ugly face with a living glower. This was the Plumber, Arkady was sure of it. Marchenko threw the ID at Arkady. “That’s all you need to know. A social parasite fell off his boat and drowned.”

“We’ll check his lungs for water,” Arkady said.

“He was fishing.”

“Where’s the rod?”

“He caught a catfish. He had consumed an entire bottle of vodka, he was standing in his boat, a catfish bigger than him pulled the rod out of his hands, and he lost his balance and fell in. No autopsy.”

“Maybe the bottle was empty to begin with. We can’t assume he was drunk.”

“Yes, we can. He was a well-known drunk, he was alone, he fished, he fell in.” From his tunic Marchenko pulled the hunting knife he had shown Arkady before, the boar knife. “You want an autopsy? Here’s your autopsy.” He drove the knife into Boris Hulak’s stomach, spewing the sweet gas of digested alcohol. The samogon in Arkady’s own stomach rose to his throat. “That’s drunk.”

Even the Woropays took a step back from the hanging mist. Marchenko wiped his blade on the dead man’s jacket.

Arkady said between shallow breaths, “There’s still the eye.”

“What eye?” the captain asked, his satisfaction interrupted.

“The right eye is normal, but the left eye is fully dilated, which indicates a blow to the head.”

“He’s decomposing. The muscles relax. His eyes could go different directions. Hulak hit his head on the boat as he went over, what does it matter?”

“He’s not a pig. We have to see.”

“The investigator is right,” Eva Kazka said. She had wandered over from her car. “If you want me to sign a death certificate, there should be a cause of death.”

“You need an autopsy for that?”

“Before you stick the body again, I think so,” Eva said.

She wasn’t talkative. Boris Hulak was laid out naked on a steel table with his head propped against a wooden block, and he said about as much as Eva did while she opened his body, first with an incision from his collar to his groin and then in handfuls, moving organs into separate bedpans, all with the brisk dispatch of someone washing dishes. The room was meanly furnished, with little more than the essentials of scales and pails, and she had already spent an hour washing the body and examining it for bruises, tattoos and needle tracks. Arkady had checked Hulak’s clothes at a sink, finding nothing more remarkable in the dead man’s pockets than a purse of loose change and a door key, and nothing in his billfold except a damp twenty-hryvnia note, a photo-booth picture of a boy about six years old and an expired video-club card. Arkady had cut off Hulak’s boots and found hidden under the sole almost two hundred American dollars—not bad for a scavenger of radioactive electrical wiring. While Eva Kazka worked on one side of the table, Arkady worked on the other, drying out fingers wrinkled by immersion and then plumping them with injections of saline to lift the ridges and produce usable prints to compare with those he had lifted from the bottle found in the boat.

Fluorescent lights turned cadavers green, and Boris Hulak was greener than most, a fleshy body wrapped in fat through the middle, hard through the legs and shoulders, exuding a bouquet of ethanol. Eva wore her lab coat, cap and professional demeanor, and she and Arkady smoked as they worked to mask the smell. There were few enough benefits to smoking; this was one.

“Ever wish you hadn’t asked for something?” Eva said. She saw through him, which didn’t make him feel any better. She consulted her autopsy chart. “All I can tell you so far is that between cirrhosis of the liver and necrosis of the kidney, Boris had perhaps two more years to live. Otherwise, he was a hardy specimen. And no, there was virtually no water in the lungs.”

“I think I chased Hulak through Pripyat a few nights ago.”

“Did you catch him?”

“No.”

“And you never would have. Scavengers know the Zone like a magician knows his trapdoors and top hats and radioactive bunnies.” She tapped the scalpel on the table. “Captain Marchenko doesn’t like you. I thought you were great friends.”

“No. I’ve ruined his perfect record. A militia station commander wants no problems, no homicides and, most of all, no unsolved homicides. He certainly doesn’t want two of them.”

“The captain is a bitter man. The story is that he got in trouble in Kiev by turning down a bribe, which embarrassed his superiors, who had taken their share of the money in good faith. He’s been stationed here to give him a glimpse of hell in case he ever thinks of making that mistake again. Then you arrive from Moscow, and he feels more trapped than ever. You were comparing Hulak’s fingerprints to some on a card.”

“From the vodka bottle I found in the boat.”

“And?”

“They’re all Hulak’s.”

“Wouldn’t you say that was fairly strong evidence Hulak was alone? Have you ever known a Russian or a Ukrainian to not share a bottle? He didn’t drown, but I have to tell you that apart from being posthumously stabbed by the captain, I see no signs of recent violence. Maybe he did hook a big fish and hit his head on the boat as he went over. Either way, you made the wrong enemy in Captain Marchenko. It might make him happy if we stopped right here.”

Arkady leaned over the body. Boris Hulak had a pugnacious head with heavy brows, a broad nose mapped in erupted veins, brown hair thick as otter fur and cheeks covered in stubble, no bruising or swelling, no ligature marks around the neck, no defensive wounds on the hands, not a scratch in the scalp. However, there was that dilated iris of the left eye, as open as the stuck shutter of a camera. Also, Arkady had worked his way out of his samogon stupor.

Arkady said, “Then it will make the captain even happier if we prove I’m wrong.”

Most doctors never encountered a cadaver after anatomy class, and forgot the reeking totality of death. But Eva coolly repositioned the block farther down under Hulak’s neck.

He said, “You’ve seen men shot in the head before.”

“Shot in the head with a pistol and shot in the back with a rifle, supposedly in the middle of combat. Either way, there’s usually an entry wound, which your man appears to lack. Last chance to stop.”

“You’re probably right, but let’s see.”

Eva sliced the back of Hulak’s scalp from ear to ear. She folded the flap of skin and hair forward over the eyes to work with a circular saw. A power saw was always heavy and, what with the cloud of white dust it produced, hard to manage in delicate work. She popped the top of his skull with a chisel, reached in with a scalpel to free the brain from the spinal cord and laid the soft pink mass in its glistening sac beside the empty head.

“The captain is not going to like this,” Eva said.

A red line ran across the top, the trail of a bullet that had traversed the brain and then, bouncing off angles, scoured the cranium. Hulak must have gone down instantly.

“Small-caliber?” Eva asked.

“I think so.”

She turned the brain in every direction before choosing one pomegranate-red clot to attack. She cut the sac, sliced into gray matter and squeezed out a bullet like a pip. It pinged as it dropped onto the table. She wasn’t done. She shone a penlight around the inside of the skull until a beam came out the left ear.

“Who is this good a shot?” she asked.

“A sniper, a sable hunter, a taxidermist. I would guess the bullet is five-point-six-millimeter, which is what marksmen use in competitive shooting.”

“From a boat?”

“The water was still.”

“And the sound?”

“A silencer, maybe. A small-caliber doesn’t make that much noise to begin with.”

“So, now, two murders. Congratulations, Chornobyl has killed a million people, and you have added two more. I would say that at death, you’re very good.”

While she was impressed Arkady asked, “What about the first body, the one from the cemetery? Besides the nature of the wound on the throat, was there anything else you could have added to your note?”

“I didn’t examine him. I simply saw the wound and wrote something. Wolves tear and yank, they don’t slice.”

“How bloody was his shirt?”

“From what I saw, very little.”

“Hair?”

“Clean. His nose was bloody.”

“He suffered from nosebleeds,” Arkady said.

“This would have been quite a nosebleed. It was packed.”

“How do you explain that?”

“I don’t. You’re the magician—only you pull up the dead instead of rabbits.”

Arkady was wondering how to respond when there was a knock at the door and Vanko stuck in his head.