Wolves Eat Dogs

BEFORE PROCEEDING-ARE YOU WEARING YOUR RADIATION pin? Arkady coasted through and found a service road where Bela's van was parked at a gate, not a simple counterweighted pole but a steel gate that was rolled shut. A sign in English said stop. Bela was in the van. Bobby Hoffman and Yakov stood in the middle of the road facing a security wall decked with shiny coils of wire. Each man wore a yarmulke and a tasseled shawl. Arkady couldn't make out what they were saying, though they rocked back and forth to its rhythm.

Beyond the wall was another wire-draped wall and, fifty meters farther on, the sarcophagus, as stained and massive as a windowless cathedral. Dim security lamps glowed here and there. A crane and a chimney stack towered over the sarcophagus, but compared to it, they were insignificant. Connected to the sarcophagus was the more presentable Reactor Two, which was invisible. The sarcophagus was apart, alone, alive.

Bela crept out of the van. 'This is as close as we could get.'

Arkady didn't need to use his dosimeter; he felt his hair rise.

'It's close enough. Why are you here?'

'The fat one insisted.'

'The old guy didn't try to talk him out of it?'

'Yakov? He seemed to expect it. They just waited until dark so it was safer. They seem to have a lot of names. You didn't tell me they were on the run.'

'Does it matter?'

'It drives up the price.'

Arkady looked around. 'Where are the guards?'

Bela pointed to a pair of legs sticking out from the shadow of the gate. 'Just a watchman. I gave him some vodka.'

'You're always prepared.'

'I am.'

It was the night shift, Arkady thought. There were no office or construction workers. A skeleton crew could maintain the three reactors that were shut down, and no one entered the sarcophagus. On the power grid, the Chernobyl station was a black hole, a repository of spent fuel in a bankrupt country. How many guards would there be?

The chanting wasn't loud enough to carry far. Bobby's voice was whispery. Yakov's was deep and worn, and Arkady recognized the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. Their voices overlapped, separated, joined again.

'How long have they been doing this?'

'Half an hour, at least. When I called you.'

'The rest of the time, what did you do all day?'

'Drove into the woods. I found them a hill with nice mobile-phone reception. The fat one called and arranged things.'

'What things?'

'Belarus is just a few kilometers north. Your friends have got visas and a car waiting. They've got every move figured out.'

'Like a game of chess.'

'Exactly like chess.'

Except if they were doing it for Pasha, it was too late, Arkady thought. Arkady was aware of having been manipulated by Bobby and Yakov, but he didn't feel angry. They were escape artists, what else would they do?

'But they let you call me?'

'Yakov suggested it.'

So they should have been on the run to Minsk, gateway to the world, instead of standing outside the corrupted shell of a nuclear disaster, rocking back and forth like human metronomes and intoning the same verses over and over, 'Ose sholom himromov hu yaase sholom.' When they finished the prayer, they simply began again. Arkady told himself he should have known this was coming. Would Bobby have come all this way to repeat his failure? Wasn't this the logical, inevitable outcome, whether Bobby knew it consciously or not? Or was Yakov, like a black angel, forcibly keeping Bobby out of hell?

Arkady moved into their line of vision. Each step brought the sarcophagus closer, too, as if it had been waiting for the right hour to leap the wall, a hard sight to face without a prayer. Yakov acknowledged Arkady with the briefest nod, to say not to worry, that he and Bobby were fine. Bobby clutched a list of names that Arkady could see because of a rising moon that spilled over the station yard. Maybe Bobby and Yakov had planned well and had some luck, but every minute spent at the power plant was a chance taken, and the list looked long. Arkady remembered Eva saying that a complete list would reach the moon. The thought of his cold-blooded rejection of her made him wince. It occurred to him that when she needed him most he had abandoned her, and that he had made an irretrievable mistake.

17

The way to see Pripyat, like the Taj Mahal, was by moonlight. The broad avenues and stately chestnuts. The confident plan of greenery, office towers and residential blocks. The way the central plaza admired the Soviet wreath that topped the city hall. Never mind the empty sockets of the windows or the grass that grew between the pavers.

Arkady left his motorcycle in the plaza. He went to the theater where he had met Karel Katamay, feeling his way again through the flats stacked in the lobby, shining his flashlight on the stage, around the piano, up the tiers of benches. Karel Katamay and the couch were gone, leaving only a few dried drops of blood in the dust.

Arkady couldn't search a city built for fifty thousand people. However, a dying man and his couch could not have gone far, even with the Woropay brothers bearing him on a royal litter. His nosebleeds were small leaks. He was bleeding internally from the lungs, intestinal tract, cerebellum. Faced with that prospect, Pasha Ivanov had chosen the quicker alternative of a ten-story jump.

Back on the plaza, Arkady turned off the chatter of his dosimeter. He had a mental map of the city now: the hot buildings, the alleys to be taken only on the run.

Arkady called out, 'Karel! We should talk.' While we can, he thought.

Something slipped through the grass and disappeared like smoke in the beam of Arkady's flashlight. He swung the light around the front of offices. Where plate glass was still intact, the beam winked back. He swung the light up but decided the Woropay brothers wouldn't have tried to carry Katamay above the ground floor. Anyway, why would Karel want to be in a dark room littered with plaster, sour with squatter's piss, when outside in the balmy air he could touch the moon?

Arkady returned to the center of the plaza and kept going when he saw the amusement park. It had three rides: a Ferris wheel, bumper cars and crazy chairs. In the crazy chairs, children sat in a circle of flower petals that spun until the children were dizzy or nauseated. Half the bumper cars were on their side; the rest were still entangled in traffic. The Ferris wheel was big enough for forty gondolas. Everything was edged and pitted with corrosion; the wheel looked like it had rolled, stopped and rusted in place.

Karel Katamay lay on his couch in front of the crazy chairs. Arkady turned off his flashlight; he didn't need it. Karel was in the same hockey shirt and propped up with cushions, as before. His face was luminously pale, but his hair seemed brushed and freshly beaded. On the ground in front of the couch were plastic flowers, a plastic liter of Evian and a porcelain teacup, no doubt filched from an apartment. Also, a tank of oxygen, a breathing tube and a harness. So the Woropay brothers had made him as comfortable as possible. He did seem a prince of the netherworld.

However, Karel was dead. The eyes, red as wounds, stared through Arkady. The hockey shirt seemed voluminous, twice Karel's size. His hands lay with their palms up on either side of the white satin pillow embroidered Je ne regrette rien. One foot wore a Chinese slipper, the other was bare. There were worse ways to die than peacefully outside on a summer night, Arkady thought.

Arkady found the other slipper two meters away on the other side of the crazy-chairs fence and, honoring the professional rule of 'touch nothing,' left it where it was. He returned to Katamay. Purple bruises consistent with