Arkady had left a motorcycle in a stand of alders. He wasn't a skilled rider, but a Uralmoto bike, unlike some fancier makes, relished punishment. He fishtailed to the highway and, headlights off, rode out of the city.

This quarter of the Ukraine was steppe, flatland edged by trees, and the moon was bright enough to show pines on either side of the road. The trees had turned red-dead where they stood-the day after the accident. Otherwise, the fields swept all the way to the reactors.

Death had been so generous here that there was a graveyard even for vehicles. Arkady coasted to a halt at a fence of wooden stakes and barbed wire and a loosely tied gate with the warnings extreme danger and remove nothing from this site. He untied the rope and rode in.

Trucks were lined up by the thousands. Heavy trucks, tankers, tow trucks, flatbeds, decontamination trucks, fire engines, mess trucks, buses, caravans, bulldozers, earthmovers, cement trucks and row after row of army trucks and personnel carriers. The yard was as long as an Egyptian necropolis, although it was for the remains of machinery, not men. In the headlight of the motorcycle, they were a labyrinth of metal cadavers. A giant spread its arms overhead, and Arkady realized that he had passed under the rotors of a crane helicopter. There were more helicopters, each marked in paint with its individual level of radiation. It was here, tucked in the center of this yard, that Timofeyev's BMW, covered with the dust of the long trip from Moscow, had been found.

A fountain of sparks led Arkady to a pair of scavengers cutting up an armored car with an arc welder. Radioactive parts from the yard were sold illegally in car shops in Kiev, Minsk, Moscow. The men were hidden in coveralls and surgical masks, but they were familiar to Arkady because they had sold him his motorcycle. The yard manager, Bela, a round Hungarian, used a voluminous handkerchief to wipe his brow free of the dust that kicked off the raw earth. Bela's office was a trailer a few meters away. Dust infiltrated the trailer's windows and lined the maps on his worktable. Each map corresponded to a section of the yard, locating every vehicle. Bela culled the yard judiciously, leaving the impression of a full row here, a complete car there. The trailer itself was going nowhere; at this point it was as radioactive as the surrounding vehicles. Bela didn't care that he was king of a poisoned realm; with his canned food, bottled water, television and VCR, he considered himself hermetically sealed where it counted. He waved to Arkady, who rode past, looped around a mountain of tires and went out the gate.

By this point the eye was always pulled to the reactors. Chain link and razor wire surrounded what had been a massive enterprise of cooling towers, water tanks, fuel storage, cooling ponds, the messenger ranks of transmission towers. Here four reactors had produced half the power of the Ukraine, and now sipped power to stay lit. Three reactors looked like windowless factories. Reactor Four, however, was buttressed and encased by ten stories of lead-and-steel shielding called a sarcophagus, a tomb, but it always struck Arkady, especially at night, as the steel mask of a steel giant buried to the neck. St. Petersburg had its statue of the Bronze Horseman. Chernobyl had Reactor Four. If its eyes had lit and its shoulders begun shifting free of the earth, Arkady would not have been totally surprised.

Ten kilometers from the plant was a checkpoint, its gate a crude bar counterweighted by a cinder block. As Arkady was Russian and the guards were Ukrainian, they walked the bar out of his way at half speed.

Past the checkpoint were a dozen "black villages" and fields where scarecrows had been replaced by diamond-shaped warning signs on tall stakes. Arkady swung the bike onto the crusted ruts of a dirt road and rode a jaw-shaking hundred meters around a tangle of scrub and trees into a gathering of one-story houses. All the houses were supposed to be evacuated, and most looked collapsed from sheer emptiness, but others, even in the moonlight, betrayed a certain briskness: a mended picket fence, a sledge for gathering firewood, a haze of chimney smoke. A scarf and candle turned a window red or blue.

Arkady rode through the village and up a footpath through the trees another hundred meters to a clearing surrounded by a low fence. He swung his headlamp, and up jumped a score of grave markers fashioned from iron tubing painted white and decorated with plastic flowers, improbable roses and orchids. No burials had been allowed since the accident; the soil was too radioactive to be disturbed. It was at the cemetery gate that Lev Timofeyev-one week after the suicide of Pasha Ivanov-had been found dead.

The initial militia report was minimal: no papers, no money, no wristwatch on a body discovered by a local squatter otherwise unidentified, cause of death listed as cardiac arrest. Days later, the cause of death was revised to "a five-centimeter slice across the neck with a sharp unserrated blade, opening the windpipe and jugular vein." The militia later explained the confusion with a note that said the body had been disturbed by wolves. Arkady wondered whether the excuse had wandered in from a previous century.

He lifted his ear to the muffled flight of an owl and the soft explosion that marked the likely demise of a mouse. Leaves swirled around the bike. All of Chernobyl was reverting to nature. Sometimes it crept in while he watched.

One way to look at Chernobyl was as a bull's-eye target, with the reactors at the center and circles at ten and thirty kilometers. The dead city of Pripyat fit within the inner circle, and the old town of Chernobyl, for which the reactors were named, was actually farther away, in the outer circle. Together the two circles composed the Zone of Exclusion.

Checkpoints blocked the roads at ten and thirty kilometers, and though the houses of Chernobyl were ostensibly abandoned, dormitories and housing had been found for security troops, and the town's café contained the Zone's social life. The café looked as if it had been slapped together over a weekend. Twenty people fit comfortably, but fifty had pushed their way in, and what was more comforting than the press of other bodies, what tastier than dried fish and candy bars, nuts and chips? Arkady bought peanuts and beer and slipped into a corner to watch couples dance to what was either hip-hop or polka. All the men were in camouflage uniforms they called camos, and the women wore sweats, except for a few younger secretaries who couldn't stand to be drab, even next door to disaster. One of the researchers was having a birthday that required repeated toasts with champagne and brandy. Cigarette smoke was so thick that Arkady felt as if he were on the bottom of a swimming pool.

A researcher named Alex brought Arkady a brandy. "Cheers! How long have you been with us, Renko?"

"Thanks." Arkady downed the glass in a swallow and didn't breathe for fear of detonation.

"That's it. People around you are trying to get drunk. Don't be a prig. How long?"

"Three weeks."

"Three weeks and you're so unfriendly. It's Eva's birthday, and you have yet to give her so much as a kiss."

Eva Kazka was a young woman with black hair that put Arkady in mind of a wet cat. Even she was in camos.

"I've met Dr. Kazka. We shook hands."

"She was unfriendly? That's because your colleagues from Moscow were cretins. First they stepped on everything, and then they were afraid to step on anything. By the time you came, fraternal relations were in the toilet." Alex was a tall man with a swimmer's broad shoulders and a cynic's long nose. He brightened up as a captain in militia blues entered with two corporals in camos and knit caps. "Your fan club. They just love the way you've complicated their lives. Do you ever feel like the most unpopular man in the Zone?"