An encore by the cat.
The van.
For one more minute, the van.
The same man with the same gear returning to the rear of the van.
The van.
A figure in coveralls and mask climbing into the driver's seat.
The van moving away as the driver removed the mask, his face a blur.
The empty alley.
The cat.
The building's doorman, fists on his hips.
The empty alley.
The cat.
Time 1056:30. Time elapsed, eleven minutes. Seven minutes of risk for the driver.
'When you interrogated the staff, they never mentioned an exterminator, did they?' Hoffman said. 'A fumigator? Bugs?'
'No. Can you enlarge the image of the man moving from the van to the building?'
Hoffman did. How he fit such fat fingers onto the keyboard, Arkady didn't know, but Bobby was quick.
'The head?' Arkady asked.
Hoffman circled the head and magnified a gas mask with goggles and two shiny filters.
'Can you enlarge it more?'
'I can enlarge it all you want, but it's a grainy picture. All you'll get is bigger grains. A fucking exterminator.'
'That's not an exterminator's mask. That's radiation gear. Can you enlarge the tank?'
The tank bore what appeared to be fumigation warnings.
'The suitcase?'
The suitcase was covered with cartoon decals of dead rats and roaches. On the way in the suitcase was rolled. Arkady remembered that on the way out it had been carried.
'It's a delivery. The suitcase arrived heavy, it left light.'
'How heavy?'
'I would guess-fifty or sixty kilos of salt, a grain of cesium and lead-lined suitcase-maybe seventy-five kilos in all. Quite a load.'
'See, this is fun. Working together. This is a breakthrough, right?'
'Can you bring out the license plate?'
It was a Moscow plate. Hoffman said, 'Victor checked it out. This van is from the motor pool of Dynamo Electronics. They install cable TV. Dynamo Electronics is owned by Dynamo Avionics, which is owned by Leonid Maximov. They reported it missing.'
'Victor is on your payroll now?'
'Hey, I'm doing your work for you
'I have been out of touch,' Arkady granted.
'They both always wanted NoviRus.'
Arkady remembered them at the roulette table. Kuzmitch was a risk taker who stacked chips on a number; Maximov, a mathematician, was a methodical, cautious player.
'The Ivanov case is closed,' Arkady said. 'Ivanov jumped. If Kuzmitch drove him to it, then Kuzmitch succeeded. I'm working on the Timofeyev case. Someone cut his throat. That's murder. And the evidence has not been paid for.'
'How much do you want?'
'Much what?'
'Money. How much to drop Timofeyev and concentrate on Pasha? What's your number?'
'I don't have a number.'
Hoffman closed the laptop. 'Let me put it another way. If you won't help, Yakov will kill you.'
Yakov turned and aimed a gun at Arkady. The gun was an American Colt, an antique with a silencer but nicely greased and cared for.
'You'd shoot me here?'
'Nobody would hear a thing. A little messy, that's why the old car. Yakov thinks of everything. Are you in or are you out?'
'I'd have to think about it.'
'Fuck thinking. Yes or no?'
But Arkady was distracted by the sight of Vanko's face pressed against Hoffman's window. Hoffman recoiled. Up front, Yakov was swinging the gun toward Vanko when Arkady raised his hands to reassure him and told Hoffman to open his window.
Bobby demanded, 'Who is this nut?'
'It's okay,' Arkady said.
As the window slid down, Vanko shook a massive ring of keys. 'We can start now. I'll let you in.'
Hoffman and Arkady followed Vanko on foot back the way they had come as Yakov trailed behind. Away from the car, he was a small man dressed like a librarian, in a mended sweater and jacket, but his crushed brow and flattened nose gave him the look of a man who had been run over by a steamroller and not totally reassembled.
'Yakov's not afraid,' Bobby said. 'He was a partisan in the Ukraine during the war and in the Stern Gang in Israel. He's been tortured by Germans, British and Arabs.'
'A walking history lesson.'
'So where is our happy friend with the keys taking us?'
'He seems to think you know,' Arkady said.
Vanko veered toward a solid building in municipal yellow that stood alone, and Arkady wondered whether they were headed to some sort of historical archive. Short of the building, Vanko stopped at a windowless bunker that Arkady had passed a hundred times before and always assumed housed an electrical substation or mechanics of some sort. Vanko unlocked a metal door with a flourish and ushered Hoffman and Arkady in.
The bunker sheltered two open cement boxes, each about two meters long and one wide. There was no electricity; the only light came through the open door, and there was barely enough overhead clearance for Bobby's hat. There were no chairs, no icon or pictures, instructions or decoration of any kind, although the rims of the two boxes were lined with votive candles burned down to tin cups, and the inside of each box was stuffed with papers and letters.
'Who is it?' Arkady asked.
Hoffman took so long to answer that Vanko, the tour guide, did. 'Rabbi Nahum of Chornobyl and his grandson.'
Hoffman looked around. 'Cold.'
Vanko said, 'Holy places are often cold.'
'A religious expert here.' Hoffman asked Arkady, 'What am I supposed to do now?'
'You're the Hasidic Jew. Do what a Hasidic Jew does.'
'I'm just dressed like a Hasidic Jew. I don't do this stuff.'
Vanko said, 'One day a year the Jews all come in a bus. Not alone like this.'
'What stuff?' Arkady asked.
Hoffman picked up a couple of papers from a tomb and held them to the light to read them. 'In Hebrew. Prayers to the rabbi.'
'Oh, yes.' Vanko was emphatic.
'Do that many Jews live here?' Arkady asked.
'Just visitors,' Vanko said.
