Wolves Eat Dogs

later. Sure enough, the stone said 'Obodovsky'. His mother died this year.'

'I'm interested in where he was born. See if you find any record that he lived in Pripyat.'

'Bobby is going to be very interested in this.'

'Wonderful. Is Anton doing any business?'

'Not that I can see.'

'Then why is he hanging around Kiev? What is he waiting for, going to cemeteries and showrooms?'

'I don't know, but you should see the Porsches.'

Arkady rode down an avenue not of Porsches but of fire engines on one side and army trucks on the other. Few visitors came to the yard except dealers in auto parts. From row to row, the variety changed from cars to armored personnel carriers, from tanks to bulldozers, all too hot to bury but sinking in the mud. Arkady followed the single power line to the trailer office of Bela, the manager.

Bela had few visitors and he was eager to roll up yard maps and share with Arkady the living comforts engineered into his trailer: microwave, minibar, flat-screen TV and videotape collection. A pornographic tape was already playing, pneumatic sex with the sound down, like background music.

Bela picked a hair off his shoulder. In his dirty white suit he looked like a lily beginning to rot.

'I'm seriously thinking of retiring. The demands of this job are too much.'

'What demands?'

'Demands. Customers can't just drive into the Zone to shop for auto parts. This is not a showroom. On the other hand, they want to see what they're buying. So I bring them.'

'Bring them here?'

'In the back of my van. I have an understanding with the boys at the checkpoint. They have to eat, too. Everyone eats, that's the golden rule.'

'And Captain Marchenko?'

'A mass of envy. However, the Zone administrators in their wisdom have given me control of the yard with no interference from the captain because they understand how unreliable the militia is. I am up before dawn every day to make sure things run smoothly. I am, if nothing else, reliable. Hence, this multitude of vehicles outside is all mine.'

Now that Arkady thought about it, there was something Napoleonic in the pride Bela took in his army of radioactive vehicles, in his splendid isolation.

'And with every car a free dosimeter?'

'Don't even joke about such things. You should enjoy life's more beautiful things.' The manager held up a box that said Moscow Escort Girls. 'I can show you Russian porn, Japanese, American. Dubbed, undubbed, not that it makes a great deal of difference. You're a sports enthusiast? Hockey? Football?' Another shelf of tapes. 'Classic films, cartoons, natural history. Whatever tickles your fancy. I'll open a tin of biscuits, pour some liqueur and we'll relax.' The manager made it sound like the end of a day on a tropical island.

'Actually, I brought one.' Arkady handed over Vanko's tape.

'No label. Some amateur action? A little hanky-panky? Bathroom camera?'

'I somehow doubt it.'

'But it could be?'

Bela eagerly switched tapes. As he watched Vanko's tape, the yard manager's face expressed first surprise and then disappointment, as if sugar he had shoved into his mouth proved to be salt.

14

The steppe was soft. The steppe was a vast plain that shone with ponds and corkscrew rivers and evoked a wistful sadness. The poetry was stentorian, to rouse a patriotic fervor, but the bread was as plump as pillows, and bread always won over poetry. Ukrainian beauty was the child of history: the luminous doe eyes and fair skin of the Slav set on Tartar cheeks. At least that was the ordinary beauty. Galina was probably like that, Arkady thought.

Eva was not soft. Her pale skin and black hair-black as a cormorant's, liquid to the hand-set a theme of contradiction. Her eyes were dark mirrors. Her body looked slight but was strong as a bow, and Arkady thought she would have made an excellent imp in hell, goading slow and doughy sinners with a pitchfork. She should have feme from a landscape of flames and spewing lava. Then he remembered that, in part, she did.

They had kicked the sheet off the bed and lay, skin on skin, enjoying the cool evaporation of the sweat they had produced. Dusk hung outside the window.

She asked, 'Why do you have to go?'

'I have to meet a missing man.'

'That sounds like a children's rhyme, but it's not, is it? You're still investigating.'

'From time to time. I'll be back in a few hours.'

'That's up to you.' She turned her face to him. Her eyes were too dark to distinguish an iris and they seemed huge. 'If you do return, you should know the risks.'

'Such as?'

She moved his hand with hers to the scar on her neck. 'Cancer of the thyroid, but you knew that.' To her breast. 'Chornobyl heart, literally a hole in the heart.' She played his fingers along her ribs. 'Leukemia in the bone marrow.' Below the ribs. 'Cancer of the pancreas and liver.' Across a ruff of pubic hair. 'Cancer of the reproductive organs, not to mention tumors, mutations, missing limbs, anemia, rigidity. Not that any of this necessarily matters. Alex says, in the future our main concern will be predators.'

'What kinds?'

'All kinds.'

'People aren't like that.'

'You don't know. When people in Kiev learned about the accident they didn't act with great nobility. Trains were mobbed. Iodine tablets were hoarded. Everyone was drunk and everyone fucked everyone. There were no morals. If you want to know how people will react at the end of the world, this was it. Later, the populations of Pripyat and Chornobyl were farmed out across the country, which didn't want them. Who would want someone radioactive in his home, then or now? They got very good at spotting us, at asking our age and where we were from. I don't blame them a bit. Now do you want me?'

'Yes.'

She sighed and stroked his cheek. 'Well, you may come back or not, but you've been warned.'

In Pripyat light slowed to a drifting mist. Arkady had arrived on his motorbike on time at ten, and another twenty minutes passed while he heard the occasional whir or glimpsed a moving shadow that meant the Woropay brothers were making sure he had come alone.

The square was fronted by the city hall, hotel, restaurant, school, all shells. The moon made figures out of streetlamps, turned the amusement park Ferris wheel into a huge antenna. Other civilizations, when they vanished, at least left awesome monuments. The buildings of Pripyat were, one after the other, prefabricated ruins.

Dymtrus Woropay popped up like a large sprite at Arkady's side and said, 'Leave the bike. Follow me.'

Easier said than done. The Woropays wore night-vision goggles and glided on inline skates, clicking over cement and sweeping through the grass. On foot they might be clumsy, but on wheels they swung in graceful arcs. Arkady walked briskly while the brothers circled in and out of shadows to shepherd him along an arcade to a footpath through what had once been a tended garden and now was a maze of branches. Nothing stopped the Woropays; they splashed through standing water and shouldered aside brush to a two-story building with stone columns that supported a mural of organ pipes and atoms: Pripyat's cultural theater. Taras, the younger brother, punched the doors open and whooped as he rolled into a lobby. Dymtrus elbowed his way in and thrust his arms over his head as if he'd scored a goal.