"Did you understand any of that?" he asked Arkady.

"Enough. Is Alex trying to be dismissed?"

"They wouldn't dare." Vanko ladled the soup slowly. "This is my grandmother's remedy for a hangover. You don't even have to chew."

"Why wouldn't they?"

"He's too famous."

"Oh." Arkady felt suddenly ignorant.

"He is Alex Gerasimov, son of Felix Gerasimov, the academician. With Alex, the Russians will fund the study; without him, they won't."

"Why doesn't he just leave?"

"The work is too interesting. He says he'd rather leave with his head off than on. Last night was fun. You shouldn't have left."

"They closed the café."

"The party continued. It was a birthday. You know who can really drink?"

"Who can really drink?" Coming from Vanko, this sounded like high praise.

"Dr. Kazka. She's tough. She was in Chechnya, a volunteer. She saw real action." Vanko mopped up the soup with bread. Alex seemed to be having a grand time at the long table, urging his guests to dig in.

"You mentioned something last night about poachers," Arkady said.

"No, you mentioned poachers," Vanko said. "I thought you were looking for the squatter who found that millionaire from Moscow."

"Maybe. The note said squatter, but squatters tend to stay in Pripyat. They like apartments. I get the impression that black villages are more for old folks."

A salad swimming in oil replaced Vanko's soup. He didn't raise his head again until he had wiped the last piece of lettuce from his chin. "Depends on the squatter."

"I don't think squatters spend much time at cemeteries. There's nowhere to sleep and nothing to steal."

"Are you going to eat your potatoes? They're locally grown."

"Help yourself." Arkady pushed his plate over. "Tell me about poachers."

Vanko talked between mouthfuls. The good poachers were local. They had to know their way around, or they could walk into some very hot spots. They might be adding some meat to their diet, or they might be called by a restaurant so a chef could put game on the menu.

"A restaurant in Kiev."

"Maybe Moscow. Gourmets love wild boar. The problem is that wild boars love to root for big fat radioactive mushrooms. Stick to pigs that eat slops, and you'll be fine."

"I'll keep that in mind. You study wild boar?"

"Boar, elk, mice, kestrels, catfish and shellfish, tomatoes and wheat, to name a few."

"You must know some poachers," Arkady said.

"Why me?"

"You set traps."

"Of course."

"Poachers set traps. Maybe they even rob your traps from time to time."

"Yeah." Vanko's eating slowed to a ruminative pace.

"I don't want to arrest anyone. I only want to ask about Timofeyev, exactly when he was found, his position and condition, whether his car was ever nearby."

"I thought his car was found in Bela's yard. A BMW."

"Timofeyev got there somehow."

"The path to the village cemetery is too narrow for a car."

"See, that's exactly the kind of information I need."

Meanwhile, Alex got to his feet again. "To vodka, the first line of radiation defense."

Everyone drank to that.

Pripyat was worse in the light of day, when a breeze stirred the trees and lent a semblance of animation. Arkady could almost see the long lines of people and the way they must have looked over their shoulders at their apartments and all their possessions, their clothes, televisions, Oriental rugs, the cat at the window. Families must have pulled the reluctant young and pushed the confused elderly and shielded babies from the sun. Ears had to close to the question "Why?" Patience must have been an asset as the doctors handed iodine tablets to every child, too late. Too late because, at the beginning, although everyone saw the fire at Reactor Four, only two kilometers away, the official word was that the radioactive core was undamaged. Children went to school, though they were drawn to the spectacle of helicopters circling the black tower of smoke and fascinated by the green foam covering the streets. Adults recognized the foam as the plant's protection against an accidental release of radioactive materials. Children waded though the foam, kicked it, packed it into balls. The more suspicious parents called friends outside Pripyat for news that might have been withheld, but no, they were told that May Day preparations were in full swing in Kiev, Minsk, Moscow. Costumes and banners were finished. Nothing was canceled. Still, those people with binoculars went to the roofs of their apartment blocks and watched firemen scramble off giant ladders onto the reactor and carry back blocks of indeterminate material, no fireman staying longer than sixty seconds. No one was allowed out of Pripyat except to fight the fire, and those who returned from the plant were dizzy, nauseated, mysteriously tanned. Supermarket stocks of iodine tablets sold out. Children were sent home from school with instructions to shower and ask Mommy to wash their clothes, even though all the city's water had been diverted to the fire. The news broadcast from Moscow said that there had been an incident at Chernobyl, but measures were being taken and the fire was contained. Finally, no one in Pripyat was allowed outside. Three days passed between the accident and the sudden evacuation of the city. Eleven hundred buses took away the fifty thousand inhabitants. They were told they were going to a resort, to bring casual clothes, documents, family pictures. As the buses departed, loose pictures scattered, and children waved at the dogs running behind.

So any stir of the trees or tall grass created a false sense of resurrection, until Arkady noticed the stillness at doors and windows and recognized that the sound traveling from block to block was the moving echo of his motorcycle. Sometimes he imagined Pripyat not so much as a city under siege but as a no-man's-land between two armies, an arena for snipers and patrols. From the central plaza he rode up one avenue to the town stadium and back on another, amid headless streetlamps, over a black crust of roads undergoing a slow upheaval. Outdoor murals of Science, Labor and the Future peeled off office fronts.

A movement at a corner window made Arkady swing the motorcycle to an apartment block, park and climb the stairs to the third floor, a living room with tapestries on the wall, a reclining chair, a collection of decanters. A bedroom was heaped with clothes. A little girl's room had a pink theme, school awards and a pair of ice skates hanging from the wall. In a boy's room an intricate skeleton curled in a glass tank under posters of Ferraris and Mercedeses. Photographs were everywhere, color pictures of the family caravanning in Italy, and older black-and-white portraits of a previous generation of mustached men and tightly buttoned women. The photos seemed trampled, suggesting violent disagreement or grief. A doll dangling from a cord tapped the sash of a broken window-the movement Arkady had seen. Scavengers had come and gone, punching in walls to rip out electrical wiring. Every time he left an apartment like this, he felt he was stepping from a tomb, in a city of tombs.

He rode back to the main plaza and to the office where he had spotted the scavenger the night before. The suitcase and makeshift grill were gone. So was the note with Arkady's mobile-phone number and the dollar sign. He didn't know whether he was hunting or fishing, but he was doing what he could, and that, he had to admit, was where Zurin was so brilliant. The prosecutor knew that where another, more balanced individual would say that if the Chernobyl nuclear accident had caused forty or four million deaths-depending on who was counting-who would care what had happened to a single man? So what if Arkady found a connection between Timofeyev and Chernobyl? Russians, Byelorussians, Ukrainians, Danes, Eskimos, Italians, Mexicans and Africans touched by the poison as it spread around the world had no connection to Chernobyl, and they would die, too. The first ones, Pripyat's firemen, irradiated inside and out, died in a day. The rest would die obliquely over generations. On that scale, what did Timofeyev or Ivanov matter? Yet Arkady couldn't stop himself. In fact, riding a motorcycle through the abandoned streets of Pripyat, he found himself more and more at home.