Maria Panasenko popped up from a corner of the cemetery. Arkady was surprised, because a diamond marker by the gate indicated that the cemetery was too hot to trespass on, and visits were limited to one a year. Maria wore a heavy shawl in case of rain; otherwise, she was the same ancient cherub who had provided the drunken samogon party two nights before. Maria held a short scythe and, over her shoulder, a burlap sack of brambles and weeds she refused to let Arkady relieve her of. Her hands were small and tough, and her blue eyes shone even in the shadows of heavy clouds.
'Our neighbors.' She looked around the graveyard. 'I'm sure they'd do the same for us.'
'It's nicely kept,' Arkady said. A cozy anteroom to heaven, he thought.
She smiled and showed her steel teeth. 'Roman and I were always afraid there wouldn't be a good cemetery plot for us. Now we have our choice.'
'Yes.' The silver lining.
She cocked her head. 'It's sad, all the same. A village dies, it's like the end of a book. That's it, no more. Roman and I may be the last page.'
'Not for many years.'
'It's long enough already, but thank you.'
'I was wondering, what are the militia like around here?'
'Oh, we don't see much of them.'
'Squatters?'
'No.'
'There don't happen to be any Obodovskys in the cemetery?'
Maria shook her head and said she knew all the families from the surrounding villages. No Obodovskys. She glanced up at the sack. 'Excuse me, I should get these in before they get wet. You should stop for a drink.'
'No, no, thank you.' The very threat of samogon made him sweat.
'You're sure?'
'Yes. Another day, if I may.'
He waited until she was gone before he brought his mind back to Lev Timofeyev's death. Arkady was sure of so little: basically that the body had been found faceup in the mud at the cemetery gate, his throat slit, his left eye a cavity, neither his hair nor his shirt bloody but blood packed in his nose. Arkady was nowhere near to asking why; it was all he could do to ask how. Had Timofeyev driven himself to the village or been brought by someone else? Searched out the cemetery or been led to it? Dragged to it dead or alive? If there had been a competent detective at the scene, would he have found tire tracks, a trail of blood, the twin shoe marks of a dragged body or mud inside the dead man's shoes? Or at least footprints; the report cited wolf prints, why not shoes? If it came to why, was Timofeyev the target of a conspiracy, or a plum that happened to fall into the hands of Officer Katamay?
Arkady started again in the village clearing as the most likely place for a car to stop. From there, the way to the cemetery narrowed to a footpath. A curtain shifted at one of the few occupied houses, and before the curtain closed, he caught a glimpse of Maria's neighbor Nina, on a crutch. How could anything have occurred within eyesight of these wary survivors and not be spied? Yet they had all sworn they'd seen nothing.
Walking up the path, Arkady stopped every few feet to brush aside leaves and look for prints or signs of blood, as he had done a dozen times before and with no more success. He paused at the cemetery gate and imagined Timofeyev standing, kneeling, lying on his back. Photographs really would have been helpful. Or a diagram or sketch. At this point Arkady was no better than a dog trying to uncover a stale scent. Yet there was always something. Visitors to the rolling hills of Borodino still felt the breath of French and Russian fusiliers underneath the grass. Why not an echo of Timofeyev's last living moment? And why not the spirits of those buried in this village plot? If ever there were simple lives, there were these, passed within the circuit of a few fields and orchards, almost as far from the rest of the world as another century.
Arkady opened the gate. The cemetery was a second village of plots and crosses separated by wrought-iron fences. A few plots had barely enough room to stand in, while one or two offered the comfort of a table and bench, but there were no impressive crypts or stones; wealth played little part in the life or death of such a community. Maria had industriously cleared around the crosses on one entire side, and on their own, without crosses, stood four glass jars of pansies, purple, blue and white, each at the head of a faintly discernible mound. The light was so thin that Arkady couldn't be sure. He knelt and spread his arms. Four child-size graves hidden by their lack of crosses. Illegal graves. How great a crime was that?
Eva had said that Timofeyev was white, he seemed drained. Frozen bodies could fool, but Arkady was willing to believe that she had seen more violence than most physicians, and Timofeyev's one-eyed stare through a mask of hoarfrost must have reminded her more of Chechnya than of cardiac arrest. Only, when Timofeyev's throat was cut, the blood went where? Right side up, blood should have soaked his shirt. Upside down, his hair. That only his nose was filled with blood suggested that he was inverted and, afterward, his face and hair rinsed. And the eye? Was that a delicacy for wolves?
Unless he was hung by his feet and, afterward, had his hair washed. Despite the draining there still would have been some lividity of settled blood around the head, but that could have been confused with freezer burn.
Arkady stood with his hand on the gate and for a moment caught the glint of something revealed, something lying in front of him and then gone, chased by a patter of raindrops, the light preparation of a hard rain.
The next black village had no inhabitants at all, and its cemetery lay deep in the embrace of brambles and weeds. Arkady had hoped the comparison would lead to some sort of realization, but what he found as he dismounted from the motorcycle and walked around was a deepening gloom of rotting cottages. A loamy toadstool smell vied with the oversweet scent of decaying apples. Where wild boar had dug for mushrooms, the dosimeter in Arkady's pocket spoke up. He heard something shifting in the house ahead and asked himself which was faster to the motorcycle, man or boar? Suddenly he wished he had Captain Marchenko's hunting knife or, better, Yakov's cannon.
The house gave a single-cylinder whine, and a rider in a helmet and camos on a small motorbike came out the front door. The rider pushed through the debris in the yard and over a prostrate picket fence, where he momentarily came to a halt to lower his helmet visor. The bike had no sidecar to stuff an icon in, and it did have a license plate, but it was a blue Suzuki, and the reflector was missing from the rear fender. Arkady had that reflector in his pocket.
'Are you looking for more icons to steal?' Arkady asked.
The thief returned Arkady's gaze as if to say, 'You again?' and started off. By the time Arkady had reached his own motorcycle, the thief was halfway out of the village.
Arkady had the bigger, faster bike, but he simply wasn't as good a rider. The thief left the village on a narrow trail made for gathering firewood. Where branches had half-fallen, he ducked, and where the path was blocked, he deftly slipped by. Arkady crashed through the smaller branches and was swept clean off his saddle by the outstretched arm of an oak. The bike was all right, that was the main thing. He climbed back on and listened for the voice of the Suzuki. Rain pinged the leaves. Birches swayed in the arriving breeze. There was no hint of the thief.
Arkady pushed ahead with his engine off and, at this more deliberate speed, found motorbike tracks in the damp leaves underfoot; moisture made footprints and tire treads easier to read. Where the path forked, he consciously took the wrong trail for fifty meters before cutting through the woods to the right trail, where he saw the thief waiting behind a glistening screen of firs. The forest floor of damp needles was soft, and the thief's attention was fixed entirely on the trail until the steel jaws of a trap sprang from the ground and snapped shut next to Arkady's foot. The thief turned to regard the tableau of Arkady, bike and trap, and in a second was riding back down the trail the way he had come.
The thief kept ahead of Arkady but didn't completely lose him; as long as Arkady kept the smaller bike in sight, he could anticipate obstacles. Also, Arkady took chances he wouldn't have in a saner mood, following a far more expert rider leap for leap, fishtailing on leaves to swing off the path and weave through a stand of pines until they broke back into the village. On the far side was a forestry road with chest-high seedlings of second-growth trees. The thief took them like a slalom skier, leaning one way and then the other. Arkady rode straight over the seedlings, gaining all the time.
