case when Arkady saw it on the bed? A shoe sack and a mobile phone recharger. Ivanov might have headed to the apartment office and learned about some disastrous investment? In that case, Arkady pictured a maudlin Ivanov assuaging himself with a Scotch or two before working up the nerve to open the window. What Arkady recalled from the videotape was an Ivanov who emerged reluctantly from his car, entered the building in a rush, bantered with another tenant about dogs, rode the elevator with grim determination and added a valedictory glance at the security camera as he stepped out the door. Was he rushing to meet someone? In his attache case, why a single shoe sack? Because it wasn't being used for shoes. Ivanov had gone to the bathroom, maybe, but he hadn't swilled pills in any suicidal amount. He was the decisive type, not the sort to wait passively for a sedative's effect. He had talked to Dr. Novotny enough to concern her, then skipped his last four sessions. All Arkady really knew about Ivanov's last night was that he had entered his apartment by the door and left by the window and that the floor of his closet was covered with salt. And there had been salt in Pasha's stomach. Pasha had eaten salt.
The bedroom phone rang. It was Colonel Ozhogin.
'Renko, I'm driving over. I want you to leave the Ivanov apartment now and go down to the lobby. I'll meet you there.'
'Why? I don't work for you.'
'Zurin dismissed you.'
'So?'
'Renko, I-'
Arkady hung up.
Ivanov had gone to the bedroom and laid his attache case on the bed. Set his mobile phone on the edge of the bed. Opened the attache case, so intent on the contents that he did not notice having knocked the phone onto the carpet or kicked it under the bed, for Victor to find later. What did Ivanov slip from the shoe sack: a brick, a gun, a bar of gold? Arkady walked through every move, trying to align himself on an invisible track. Pasha had opened the walk-in closet and found the floor covered in salt. Did he know about a coming worldwide shortage of salt? Good men were the salt of the earth. Smart men salted away money. Pasha had rushed home to eat salt, and all he took with him on his ten-story exit was a shaker of salt. Arkady inverted the shoe sack. No salt.
This
The phone rang again.
Ozhogin said, 'Renko, don't hang-'
Arkady hung up and left the receiver off the hook. The colonel's problem was that he had no leverage. Had Arkady been a man with a promising career, threats might have worked. But since he was dismissed from the prosecutor's office, he felt liberated.
Back a step. Sometimes a person thought too much. Arkady returned to the bed, mimed opening the attache case, slipping something from the shoe sack and moving to the closet. As the closet opened, its lights lent a milky glow to the bed of salt still covering the floor. The top of the mound showed the same signs of activity that Arkady had seen before: a scooping here, a setting something down there. Arkady saw confirmation in a brown dot of blood tunneled through the salt, from Ivanov leaning over. Ivanov had removed the
Arkady opened the drawer again and, in the back, beneath the shirts, found a bloody handkerchief wrapped around a radiation dosimeter the size of a calculator. Salt was embedded in the seam of its red plastic shell. Arkady held the dosimeter by the corners to avoid latent fingerprints, turned it on and watched the numbers of the digital display fly to 10,000 counts per minute. Arkady remembered from army drills that an average reading of background radioactivity was around 100. The closer he held the meter to the salt, the higher the reading. At 50,000 cpm the display froze.
Arkady backed out of the closet. His skin was prickly, his mouth was dry. He remembered Ivanov hugging the attache case in the elevator, and his backward glance to the elevator camera. Arkady understood that hesitation now. Pasha was bracing himself at the threshold. Arkady turned the meter off and on, off and on, until it reset. He made a circuit of Pasha's beautiful white apartment. The numbers dramatically shuffled and reshuffled with every step as he picked his way like a blind man with a cane around flames he sensed only through the meter. The bedroom burned, the office burned, the living room burned, and at the open window, curtains dragged by the night wind desperately whipped and snapped to point the fastest way out of an invisible fire.
5
Pripyat had been a city of science built on straight lines for technicians, and it shimmered in the light of a rising moon. From the top floor of the municipal office, Arkady overlooked a central plaza wide enough to hold the city's entire population on May Day, Revolution Day, International Women's Day. There would have been speeches, national songs and dances, flowers in cellophane presented by neatly pressed children. Around the plaza were the broad horizontals of a hotel, restaurant and theater. Tree-lined boulevards spread to apartment blocks, wooded parks, schools and, a mere three kilometers away, the constant red beacon of the reactor.
Arkady sank back into the shadows of the office. He had never thought his night vision was particularly good, but he saw calendars and papers strewn on the floor, fluorescent tubes crushed, file cabinets facedown around a nest of blankets and the glint of empty vodka bottles. A poster on the wall proclaimed something lost in faded letters: confident of the future was all Arkady could make out. In camouflage fatigues, he himself was fairly hard to see. The pinprick of a match being struck drew him closer to the window. He'd missed where. The buildings were blank, streetlamps broken. The forests pressed increasingly closer, and when the wind died, the city was utterly still, without a single light, without the progress of a car or the sound of a footstep. Around the city there was not one human intrusion until the orange bud of a cigarette stirred directly across the plaza in the dark mass of the hotel.
Arkady had to use a flashlight in the stairway because of the debris-bookcases, chairs, drapes and bottles, always bottles, and everything covered by a chalky residue of disintegrating plaster that formed a cavern's worth of stalactites and stalagmites. Even if there had been power, the elevators were rusted shut. From outside, a building might seem intact. Inside, this one resembled a target of artillery, with walls exploded, pipes ruptured and floors heaved by ice.
On the ground floor, Arkady turned off the light and went at a lope around the plaza. The hotel entrance doors were chained together. No matter; he walked through missing panes of glass, turned on the flashlight, crossed the lobby and maneuvered as silently as possible around service trolleys piled on the steps. On the fourth floor, the doors were open. Beds and bureaus materialized. In one room, the wallpaper had curled off in enormous scrolls; in another, the ivory torso of a toilet lay on the carpet. By now he smelled the sourness of a doused fire. In a third room, the window was covered by a blanket that Arkady pulled aside to let moonlight creep in. A box spring had been stripped to the coils and set over a hubcap as a makeshift grill and pan that was filled with coals and water and a ghostly hint of smoke. An open suitcase showed a toothbrush, cigarettes, fishing line, a can of beef and a plastic bottle of mineral water, a plumber's pipe cutter and a wrench wrapped in rags. If their owner had been able to resist a peek out of the blanket, Arkady never would have seen him. He spotted him now, moving at the edge of the plaza.
Arkady went down the stairs two at a time, sliding over an overturned desk, stumbling on the crushed maroon of hotel drapes. Sometimes he felt like a diver plunging through the depths of a sunken ship, his vision and hearing magnified in such faint light. As he hit the ground, he heard a screen door slap shut at the far end of the plaza. The school.
Between the school's two front doors was a blackboard that read APRIL 29, 1986. Arkady ran through a cloakroom painted with a princess and a hippo sailing a ship. The lower rooms were for early grades, with blackboard examples of penmanship, bright prints of farm children with happy cows that smiled amid blown-in windows and desks overturned like barricades. Footsteps pounded the floor above. As Arkady climbed the stairs, a
