everything, and then they were afraid to step on anything. By the time you came, fraternal relations were in the toilet.' Alex was a tall man with a swimmer's broad shoulders and a cynic's long nose. He brightened up as a captain in militia blues entered with two corporals in camos and knit caps. 'Your fan club. They just love the way you've complicated their lives. Do you ever feel like the most unpopular man in the Zone?'
'Am I?'
'By acclamation. You have to pull your head out of your investigation and enjoy life. Wherever you are, that's where you are, as they say in California.'
'Except that they're in California.'
'Good point. Check out Captain Marchenko. With his mustache and uniform, he looks like an actor abandoned in a provincial theater. The rest of the troupe has moved on and left him nothing but the costumes. And the corporals, the Woropay brothers, Dymtrus and Taras, I see them as the boys most likely to have sexual congress with barnyard animals.'
Arkady had to agree that the captain had a classic profile. The Woropays had pasty faces speckled with a late bloom of acne, and their shoulders were broad as barrels. They turned away from Arkady to share a laugh with the captain.
'Why does Marchenko spend his time with them?' Arkady asked.
'The sport here is hockey. Captain Marchenko fields a team, and the Woropays are two of his stars. Get used to it. You're a sitting duck. People say you've been exiled and your boss in Moscow wants to keep you here forever.'
'It would help if I solved the case.'
'But you won't. Wait, I want to hear this.'
The other table started serenading Eva Kazka, and she let her face go blissfully stupid. Researchers were variously described to Arkady as the scientific creme de la creme or washouts, but always as fools because they were volunteers; they didn't have to be here. Alex returned to his friends briefly to bay like a wolf and steal a bottle of brandy before returning to Arkady.
'Because people think you're crazy,' Alex said. 'You go to Pripyat. Nobody gives a damn about Pripyat anymore. You ride through the woods on a bike that glows in the dark. Do you know anything about radioactivity?'
'I went over the bike with a dosimeter. It's clean, and it doesn't glow.'
'No one is going to steal it, let me put it that way. So, Investigator Renko, on this most blighted part of the planet, what are you looking for?'
'I'm looking for squatters. In particular, the squatter who found Timofeyev. Since I don't have a name, I'm questioning all the squatters I can find.'
'You're not serious. You are serious? You're crazy. Over the course of a year, we get all sorts: poachers, scavengers, squatters.'
'The police report said the body was found by a local squatter. That suggests a sort of permanency, someone the militia officer had seen before.'
'What kind of officers can you get at Chernobyl? Look at the Woropays. They can barely write their names, let alone a report. You're married? You have children at home waiting for you?'
'No.' Arkady thought fleetingly of Zhenya, but the boy could hardly have been called family. For Zhenya, Arkady had been nothing but transportation to the park. Besides, Victor was looking in on the boy.
'So, you've given yourself an impossible task in a radioactive wasteland. You're either a compulsive-obsessive or a dedicated investigator.'
'Right the first time.'
'We'll drink to that.' Alex refilled their glasses. 'Do you know that alcohol protects against radiation? It removes oxygen that might be ionized. Of course, deprivation of oxygen is even worse, but then every Ukrainian knows that alcohol is good for you. Red wine is best, then brandy, vodka, et cetera.'
'But you're Russian.'
Alex put his finger to his lips. 'Shhh. I am provisionally accepted as a madman. Besides, Russians also drink precautionary vodka. The real question is, are you a madman, too? My friends and I serve science. There are interesting things to be learned here about the effects of radiation on nature, but I don't think the death of some Moscow businessman is worth spending a minute here, let alone almost a month.'
Arkady had told himself as much many times over the days he'd spent searching the apartments of Pripyat or farmhouses hidden in the woods. He didn't have an answer. He had other questions. 'Whose is?' he asked.
'What do you mean?'
'Whose death is worth it? Only good people? Only saints? How do we decide whose murder is worth investigating? How do we decide which murderers to let go?'
'You're going to catch every killer?'
'No. Hardly any, as a matter of fact.'
Alex regarded Arkady with mournful eyes. 'You are totally lunatic. I am awed. I don't say that lightly.'
'Alex, are you going to dance with me or not?' Eva Kazka pulled him by his arm. 'For old times' sake.'
Arkady envied them. There was a desperate quality to the scene. In general, the troops were not getting healthier for having been posted to Chernobyl. The Ukraine was even poorer than Russia, and hazard pay meant little if it was constantly late or missed entirely, but considering the circumstances, it could hardly be spent better than on getting drunk. The researchers were a different matter. There were several teams carrying out various studies, but as a group the men had long hair, the women were disheveled, and they shared the esprit of scientists on an asteroid hurtling toward Earth. The work had its drawbacks, but it seemed definitely unique.
Kazka laid her head on Alex's shoulder for a slow dance. Although Ukrainian women were said to be beautiful in a soulful, doe-eyed way, Kazka looked like she would bite the head off anyone who flattered her. She was too pale, too dark, too sharp. The way she and Alex moved suggested a past involvement, a momentary truce in a war. Arkady was surprised at himself for even speculating, which he took to be a result of his own social isolation.
Why was he at Chernobyl? Because of Timofeyev? Because of Ivanov? Arkady had finally been convinced of Pasha's suicide. Suicide of an aggravated nature. A radiation team in leaded suits found that the heap of salt in Ivanov's closet was minutely tainted with cesium- 137 in salt form, maybe one grain to a million, but that was enough. It was a needle in a haystack. By appearances, sodium chloride and cesium chloride were indistinguishable. The effect was something else. Handling a gram of pure cesium-137 for three seconds could be fatal, and while a grain of cesium chloride was a smaller, dilute version, it still had a punch. Pashas stomach was so radioactive that the second autopsy had to be halted and the morgue evacuated. He was buried in a lead-lined coffin. The salt-shaker that Victor had found on the pavement under Ivanov was the hottest item of all, a bomb spraying gamma rays so hot they turned the glass gray. Fortunately the shaker had been stored in an unoccupied evidence room, from which it was moved by a team using tongs and placed in a double container of lead ten centimeters thick. Arkady and the team went to the residences that Pasha had left so abruptly and found his mansion and town house baited in the same deadly way. Had Ivanov known? He had ordered the town house and estate left vacant, he let no one into his apartment and he carried a dosimeter. He knew. Arkady thought about the salt he had licked off his fingers at the apartment and felt a chill.
Timofeyev's prerevolutionary palace was the same. He hadn't barred visitors because he didn't have Pasha's strength of character, but the halls and rooms of his gilded abode were a radioactive warren. No wonder about the man's nervousness and loss of weight. After waltzing with dosimeters through Timofeyev's palace, Arkady and Victor took the precaution of visiting the militia doctor, who gave them iodine tablets and assured them that they had suffered no more exposure to radiation than an airline passenger flying from St. Petersburg to San Francisco, although they might want to shower, dispose of their clothes and look out for nausea, loss of hair and, especially, nosebleeds, because cesium affected bone marrow where platelets were formed. Victor asked what to do about nosebleeds. The doctor said to carry a handkerchief.
Ivanov and Timofeyev had lived with this sort of anxiety? Why hadn't either reported to the militia that someone was trying to kill them? Why hadn't they alerted NoviRus Security? Finally, why had Timofeyev driven a thousand kilometers from Moscow to Chernobyl? If it was to save his life, it hadn't worked.
The investigation of Timofeyev's body, once it was found at the village cemetery, had been a farce. The cemetery grounds were radioactive-family members were supposed to visit grave sites only one day a year-and the first thing the lads from the militia did was drag Timofeyev a safe distance away to turn him this way and that.
