As Arkady drew close, the thief veered off the forestry road into a line of rust-colored pines, the outer reach of the Red Forest, then through onto an undulating field with radiation markers of buried houses, cars and trucks. Arkady plunged into hollows, churned his way out and plunged again, while the thief flew in and out with acrobatic ease. Every way Arkady turned, the thief appeared farther out of reach until a hidden ditch twisted the front wheel of Arkady's bike and sent him over the handlebars. He hauled himself up, but the chase was over. The thief disappeared toward Chernobyl as the horizon went white and shuddered, followed by a thunderclap that announced a storm finally delivered.
As the clouds unloaded, the lights of the town seemed to drown. Arkady rode in at a limp, wet hair wrapped across his brow. He passed the inviting glow of the cafe and heard the splash of people running for its door. The windows were steamed. No one saw him go by. He rode past the dormitory, the parking lot sizzling with rain. He rode under bending branches. He pictured Victor sitting out the storm at a cafe in Kiev, sharing the space with pigeons. Arkady's camos took a clammy grip on his chest and shoulders. A truck went by with windshield wipers thrashing, and he doubted it had noticed him at all.
He turned at the road that led down to the river, where he had a panorama of the storm. Steam rose from the water as rain fell, but Arkady could see that Hoffman, Yakov and their car had deserted the yacht-club dock. Scuttled ships levitated from fog with each lightning strike. The far bank was a hazy sketch of aspens and reeds, but farther upstream the bridge led to the forlorn lights of staff quarters still occupied. Arkady could see well enough by the lightning to keep his own headlight off. He crossed the bridge and passed between the solid brick buildings on spongy soil that came to an end, except for a car track that led along what might once have been a sports field but had sunk under cattails and ferns.
Arkady killed his engine and pushed, following the track around a shadowy stand of trees to a garage fashioned from sheets of corrugated steel. The doors were held shut with a loose padlock. They creaked as he swung them open, but with thunder in every direction, he doubted anyone would hear less than a bomb. Arkady scanned the interior with his penlight. The garage was crammed but orderly: hardware in jars on shelves, hand tools in rows along the walls. In the middle was Eva Kazka's white Moskvich. On one side of the car was a Suzuki bike with the engine still warm; under a tarp on the other side, a disengaged sidecar. From his pocket Arkady took the reflector he had snapped off the rear fender of the icon thief's bike and mated it to the metal stub on Eva's fender. They fit.
Wood smoke led to a cabin set among a blue mass of lilacs. A porch had been converted to a parlor. Through a window Arkady glimpsed an upright piano and bright chinks of fire in a woodstove. He rapped on the door, but thunder had opened up like siege guns, flattening all other sounds. He opened the door as lightning flashed behind him, strobe-lighting a glassed-in porch's assortment of a rug, wicker table and chairs, bookshelves and paintings. The room sank back into the dark. He had taken a step in when the sky above cracked open and filled the room like a searchlight. Eva moved to the middle of the rug with a gun. She was barefoot, in a robe. The gun was a 9mm, and she seemed familiar with it.
Eva said, 'Get out or I'll shoot.'
The door slammed shut in the wind, and for a moment Arkady thought she had fired. She gathered the robe together with her free hand.
'It's me,' he said.
'I know who it is.'
In a momentary dark he moved closer and pushed aside the collar of the robe to kiss her neck on the same fine scar he had found before. She pressed the muzzle of the pistol against his head as he slid open the robe. Her breasts were cold as marble.
He heard a mechanism of the gun at work, easing the hammer down. He felt a tremor run through her legs. She pressed the flat of the gun against his head, holding him.
Her bed was in a room with its own woodstove, which whistled softly with heat. How they had arrived there, he wasn't quite sure. Sometimes the body took over. Two bodies, in this case. Eva rolled on top as he entered until her head rocked back, sweat like kohl around her eyes, her body straining as if she were about to leap, as if all the frenzy he had detected in her before had become a voracious need. No different from him. They were two starving people feeding from the same spoon.
Chaos turned to steady rain. Eva and Arkady sat at opposite ends of the bed. The light of an oil lamp brought out the black of her eyes, hair, curls at the base of her stomach, the gun by her hand.
'Are you going to shoot me?' he asked.
'No. Punishment only encourages you.' She gave his scratches and bruises a professional glance.
'Some of these are thanks to you,' he said.
'You'll live.'
'That's what I thought.'
She gestured vaguely to the bed, as if to a battlefield. 'This didn't mean anything.'
'It meant a great deal to me.'
'You took me by surprise.'
He thought about it. 'No. I took you by inevitability.'
'A magnetic attraction?'
'Something like that.'
'Have you ever seen little toy magnetic dogs? How they attract each other? That doesn't mean they want to. It was a mistake.'
The lamp threw as much shadow as light, but he could see an agreeable mess: an overlap of pillows, books and rugs. A framed photo showing an older couple in front of a different house; Arkady had to look twice to recognize the ruin where Eva had hidden with her bike. A poster for a Stones concert in Paris. A teapot and cups with bread, jams, knife, cutting board and crumbs. All in all, an intimate cabin.
Arkady nodded to the gun. 'I could field-strip that for you. I could field-strip it blindfolded by the age of six. It's about the only thing my father ever taught me.'
'A handy ability.'
'He thought so.'
'You and Alex have more in common than you imagine.'
One item they had in common was obvious, but Arkady felt that Eva had meant more than herself. 'How is that?'
Eva shook her head. She dismissed that line of conversation. Instead, she said, 'Alex said this would happen.'
'Alex is a smart man,' Arkady said.
'Alex is a crazy man.'
'Did you drive him crazy?'
'By sleeping with other men? Not that many. I desperately need a cigarette.'
Arkady found two and an ashtray he put in no-man's-land at the center of the bed.
Eva said, 'What do you know about suicide? Besides cutting down the bodies, I mean?'
'Oh, I come from a long line of suicides. Mother and father. You'd think it would be a short line, but no, they get their procreation done early, and then they kill themselves.'
'Have you…'
'Not successfully. Anyway, here we are in Chernobyl. I think we're making effort enough. And you?'
She balked again, not ready to let him lead. 'So how is your investigation going?'
'Moments of clarity. Millionaires are generally murdered for money. I'm not sure that's the case here.'
'Anything else?'
'Yes. When I first came, I assumed that the deaths of Ivanov and Timofeyev were connected. I still think so, but in a different way. Perhaps more parallel.'
'Whatever that means. What were you doing in the village today?'
'I was at the cemetery at Roman and Maria's, and I began wondering if any of the official fatalities from the accident came from the villages in the Zone. Whether I would recognize names on the crosses. I didn't, but I found four unmarked graves of children.'
'Grandchildren. Of different causes supposedly unrelated to Chornobyl. What happens is the family breaks up,
