smart man.'
The stilt walker was flamboyant in a Cossack's red coat and conical hat; he blew up balloons that he twisted into animals. Anton bought a tubular blue dog for the girl. As soon as the gift was presented, the dentist gave Anton a polite good-bye handshake and pulled her daughter away. Victor and Arkady watched from a table selling CDs, and Arkady wondered whether it would be a lifelong trait of the little girl to be attracted to dangerous men. The hygienist obviously was.
'The hygienist wears a diamond pin with her name, Galina,' Victor said. 'She walked by with that bouncing pin and my erection nearly knocked over the table.'
The dentist and daughter turned toward the metro stop while Anton and Galina continued into a brilliantly lit glass dome where an elevator carried passengers down to an underground shopping mall, a borehole of boutiques selling French fashion, Polish crystal, Spanish ceramics, Russian furs, Japanese computer games, aromatherapy. Victor and Arkady followed on the stairs.
Victor said, 'Anytime I think Russia 's fucked up, I think about the Ukraine, and I feel better. While they were digging the mall, they ran into part of the Golden Gate, the ancient wall of the city, an archaeological treasure, and the city knew if it announced what it had found that work would stop. So they kept mum and buried it. They lost a little identity, but they got McDonald's. Of course, it's not as good as the McDonald's in Moscow.'
A bow wave of fear preceded Anton in each store, and mall guards greeted him with such deference that Arkady considered the possibility that Anton might be a silent partner in a store or two. The beautiful Galina traded in her denim top for a mohair sweater. She and Anton slipped into the changing room at a lingerie shop while Arkady and Victor watched from a rack of cookware in the opposite store. The plate-glass transparency of the modern mall was a gift to surveillance.
'A whole day in the dentist's chair, and all Obodovsky can think of is sex. You've got to give him credit,' Victor said.
Arkady thought that Anton's shopping spree had more the aspect of a public tour, a prince of the streets demanding respect. Or a dog marking his old territory.
'Anton was originally Ukrainian. I need to know from where. Let me know if he stays around. I'm going back to Chernobyl.'
'Don't do it, Arkady. Fuck Timofeyev, fuck Bobby, it's not worth it. Since I got together with Lyuba again, I've been thinking: nobody misses Timofeyev. He was a millionaire, so what? He was a stack of money that blew away. No family. After Ivanov was dead, no friends. Really, I think what happened to him and Ivanov must have been a curse.'
The ride back from Kiev was an obstacle course of potholes on an unlit highway and all he had looked forward to was sleep or oblivion; what he had not expected was Eva Kazka waiting at his door, as if he were late for an appointment. She drew sharply on her cigarette. Everything about her was sharp, the cutting attitude of her eyes, the edge of her mouth. She wore her usual camos and scarf.
'Your friend Timofeyev was dead white. You ask so many questions I thought you'd like to know.'
'Would you like to come in?' Arkady asked.
'No, the hall is fine. You don't seem to have any neighbors.'
'One. Maybe this is the low season for the Zone.'
'Maybe,' she said. 'It's after midnight, and you're not drunk.'
'I've been busy,' Arkady said.
'You're out of step. You have to keep up with the people of Chornobyl. Vanko was looking for you at the cafe.'
They were interrupted by Campbell, the British ecologist, who came out into the hall in an undershirt and drawers. He swayed and scratched. Eva had stepped aside, and he didn't appear to see her at all.
'Tovarich! Comrade!'
'People don't actually say that anymore,' Arkady said. In fact, they rarely had. 'In any case, good evening. How are you feeling?'
'Tip-top.'
'I haven't seen you around.'
'And you won't. I brought a lovely pair of nonradioactive balls here, and I will leave with the same number. Stocked for the duration. Whiskey, mainly. Pop in anytime, although I apologize in advance for the quality of Ukrainian television. Will fix that soon enough. You do speak English?'
'That's what we're speaking.' Although Campbell 's Scottish burr was so thick that he was barely intelligible.
'You're so right. The joke's on me. A standing invite, any hour. We're Scots, not Brits, no formalities with us.'
'You're very generous.'
'Seriously. I'll be badly disappointed if you don't.' Campbell seemed to count to ten before adding, 'Then it's settled,' and disappearing back into his room.
Eva let the air clear for a moment. 'Your new friend? What did he say?'
'I think he said that whiskey was better than vodka for protection against radioactivity.'
'You can't help some people.'
'What do you mean, he was white?'
'It was only an impression I had because Timofeyev was clothed and refrigerated. Even so, he seemed bloodless, drained. I didn't think about it at the time. I've seen wounds like his among the dead in Chechnya. Cut the major arteries of the throat, and there's an effusion of blood. Not your dead friend, though. His shirt was clean, taking into account the mud and rain. His hair was clean, too. However, his nostrils were plugged with clotted blood.'
'He had nosebleeds.'
'This would have been more than a nosebleed.'
'A broken nose?'
'There was no bruising. Of course, the local wolf pack had tugged him this way and that, so I couldn't be sure.'
'Throat slit and an appearance of bloodlessness, but no bloodstains on the shirt or hair, only in the nose. Everything is contradictory.'
'Yes. Also, I should apologize again for the comment about your wife. That was stupid of me. I'm afraid I've lost all sensitivity. It was unforgivable.'
'No, her dying was unforgivable.'
'You blame the doctors.'
'No.'
'I see. You're the self-elected captain of the lifeboat; you think you're responsible for everyone.' She sighed. 'I'm sorry, I must be drunk. On one glass, even. I usually don't get obnoxious quite so fast.'
'I'm afraid there's no one left in the lifeboat, so I didn't do a very good job.'
'I think I should be going.' She didn't, though. 'Who was the boy you were talking to on the phone? Just a friend, you said?'
'For reasons beyond my comprehension, I seem to have become responsible for an eleven-year-old boy named Zhenya who lives in a children's shelter in Moscow. It's a ridiculous relationship. I know nothing about him because he refuses to speak to me.'
'It's a normal relationship. I refused to speak to my parents from the age of eleven on. Is he slow?'
'No, he's very bright. A chess player, and I suspect he might have a mathematical mind. And courage.' Arkady remembered the times Zhenya had run away.
'Spoken like a parent.'
'No. His real father is out there, and that's who Zhenya needs.'
'You like helping people.'
'Actually, when people get to me, they're generally beyond help.'
'You're laughing.'
'But it's true.'
