The investigation of Timofeyev's body, once it was found at the village cemetery, had been a farce. The cemetery grounds were radioactive-family members were supposed to visit grave sites only one day a year-and the first thing the lads from the militia did was drag Timofeyev a safe distance away to turn him this way and that. Since the dead man's billfold and wristwatch were missing, they had no idea of his identity or importance. Because of the rain, they wanted to toss the body in a van and go. Their surmise was that a businessman with, say, an uncle or auntie buried in the cemetery had made a clandestine visit, had a heart attack and dropped. No one asked where his car was or whether his shoes were muddy from walking. Chernobyl had neither detectives nor pathologists, and Kiev showed no interest in a death from natural causes in the provinces. Timofeyev was kept in a refrigerator, and the idea that he was Russian and not Ukrainian hadn't crossed anyone's mind until a BMW with Moscow plates was found in the truck yard two days later. By then someone who had seen Timofeyev in the cooler had the sense to notice that his throat was cut.

There was a great flurry from Moscow. Prosecutor Zurin came personally to Chernobyl with ten investigators-not including Arkady-who joined with their counterparts from Kiev to uncover the truth. They discovered nothing. The scene at the cemetery had been defiled first by wolves and then by the hurried removal of Timofeyev's body. If there had been blood on the ground, it was washed away by rain, so there was no way of telling even if the cemetery was where his throat had been cut. No photographs had been taken of the body in situ. The body itself, declared too hot to autopsy or even burn, was buried in a sealed coffin. The militia officer who made the initial report had disappeared, presumably with Timofeyev's billfold and watch. The longer the investigators from Moscow and Kiev stayed, the unhappier they became about tramping from one radioactive village to another. The old people who had surreptitiously returned to their homes knew they weren't supposed to be there, and since an encounter with officialdom was sure to gain them a one-way bus ticket to some dismal basement in the city, they went to ground like rabbits, to other cabins in other black villages, and after a few weeks the investigators threw in their cards and left, with much less fanfare than when they had arrived. Another prosecutor might have admitted defeat, but here Zurin showed his brilliance, his ability to survive any calamity. He retrieved the situation by volunteering Arkady to the Chernobyl militia, a move that, in one stroke, signified cooperation between fraternal countries, satisfied the demand for further investigation and, incidentally, put a comfortable distance between the prosecutor and his most difficult investigator. At the same time, Zurin made it impossible for Arkady to succeed. On his own, without detectives or access to any friends of Timofeyev, or a sympathetic priest or a masseuse that Timofeyev might have shared his anxiety with, exiled as far from Moscow as Pluto from the sun, Arkady was left chasing ghosts. Faced with Zurin's legerdemain, he was dazzled. "Renko! Last dance!" Alex dragged Arkady from the corner and pushed him into the arms of a burly researcher. "Don't be such a stick! Vanko needs a partner."

With his pallor and stringy hair, Vanko looked more like a crazed monk than an ecologist. "Are you gay?" he asked Arkady. "I don't dance with gays. A straight man is permissible under the circumstances."

"It's okay."

"You're not so bad. Everyone said you'd be gone in a week, like the others. You stuck it out; I have to respect that. Do you want to lead?"

"Whichever."

"Doesn't matter, I agree. Not here. This is the café at the end of the world. If you want to know what the end of the world will be like, this is it. Not so bad."

Captain Marchenko steered with one finger and waved a radio microphone in his other hand like a tank commander. "This is good. We will prove there is law and order in the Zone. Even here! These vultures go into the village churches and steal the church icons, or go into the houses of simple people and take the icons there. Well, we have him now. The fields are too boggy to cross, and there isn't much traffic on this road. Aha, there he is! The vulture is in sight!"

A dot on the horizon was developing into a motorcycle and sidecar, not a powerful bike, more what a farmer might use to transport chickens. Gray sky swept by. Red firs lined the road, and markers showed where houses and barns too hot to truck away or burn were buried.

Captain Marchenko had swung by in a militia car and invited Arkady to help pursue a thief who had escaped a checkpoint with an icon in the sidecar of his motorcycle. From exchanges on the radio, Arkady gathered that another car was posted ahead. It was clear that it gave the captain pleasure to turn an investigator from Moscow into a captive audience. "We may not have investigators like in Moscow, but we know what we're about."

"I'm sure that Chernobyl holds its own."

"Ch'o'rnobyl. The Ukrainian pronunciation is Ch'o'rnobyl."

Much of the topsoil had been buried under sand; up to the woods the ground was bulldozed flat, a chute for a headwind that made the motorcycle skitter from one side of the road to the other, not over a hundred meters ahead, and although the rider hunched down, the car was gaining. Arkady could see that the bike was small, maybe 75cc, blue, the license plate taped over.

"They're criminals, Renko. This is the way you have to treat them, not like you do, making friends, leaving food and money like it's everybody's birthday. You think you're going to find informants? You think that one dead Russian is more important than regular policing? Maybe he was a big man in Moscow, but he was nothing here. His office called. A Colonel Ozhogin said to keep an eye on you. I told him you were getting nowhere."

To locate the local squatter, Arkady had, over three weeks, created a registry of Zone illegals: old folks, squatters, scavengers, poachers and thieves. The old people were hidden but stationary. Scavengers operated out of cars and trucks. Poachers were usually restaurant employees from Kiev or Minsk, looking for venison or boar. Icon thieves were hit-and-run and harder to net.

Arkady said, "Then why was Timofeyev here? What was the connection between him and Chornobyl? What was the connection between him and Ivanov and Chornobyl? How many murders do you hive here?"

"None. Only your Timofeyev, only a Russian. I would have a perfect record otherwise. I might be out of here with a clean record. How do we know he was killed by someone from here? How do we know he was even here before in his life?"

"We ask. We find local people and ask, although I'll grant you, it isn't easy when officially no one is here."

"That's the Zone."

Sometimes Arkady thought of the Zone as an amusement-park mirror. Things were different in the Zone. He said, "I still wonder about the body. An Officer Katamay turned in the first report. I haven't been able to interview him, because he quit the militia. Do you have any idea where Katamay is?"

"Try the Woropay brothers. He was close to them."

"The Woropays were not responsive." The brothers Woropay knew that Arkady had no authority. They had been both dull and sly, smirking to each other, going heavy-lidded and silent. "I'd like to find Katamay, and I'd like to know who led him to the body."

"What does it matter? The body was a mess."

"How so?"

"Wolves."

"Specifically what did the wolves do?"

"They ate his eye."

"Ate his eye?" No one had mentioned that before.

"The left eye."

"Wolves do that?"