"I talked to a poacher who was caught with his crossbow. He said another man whom he took to be a hunter had put a rifle to his head and warned him off. He described the man as about two meters tall; lean; gray eyes; short dark hair." That pretty much described Alex Gerasimov. Arkady leaned back for a better view of the rifle bouncing in the van's rear seat. "He said the rifle was a Protecta twelve-millimeter with a barrel clip."

"A good all-purpose rifle. These characters use crossbows so they can hunt without making a lot of noise, but they're hardly the marksmen they imagine they are. Usually they botch the job, the animal escapes and takes days of agony to bleed to death. To put the barrel of a rifle to someone's head, though-that is a little extreme. This poacher, will he prosecute?"

"How can he, without admitting he was breaking the law himself?"

"A real dilemma. You know, Renko, I'm beginning to see why Vanko is afraid of you."

"Not at all. I appreciate the ride. Sometimes activity prompts a memory. You might empty a trap today and remember that you ran into such-and-such a man right there."

"I might?"

"Or perhaps a person came to you with a moose he accidentally hit with his car, to ask whether it was safe to eat, the moose already being dead and food a shame to waste."

"You think so? There wouldn't be much car left after hitting a moose."

"Just a possibility."

"And I wouldn't advise going in those woods at all."

A wall of rusting pines stretched as far as Arkady could see, from left to right. Being dead, the branches held no cones and no squirrels; except for the flit of a bird, the trees were as still as posts. Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well. Arkady could picture a skull on each post. Something ghostly did a pirouette in front of the trees. It fluttered like a handkerchief and darted away.

"A white swallow," Alex said. "You won't see many of those outside of Chernobyl."

"Do poachers come here?"

"No, they know better."

"Do we?"

"Yes, but it's irresistible, and we do it anyway. In the wintertime you should see it, the ground covered with snow, like a belly dimpled with mysterious scars, and the trees bright as blood. People call it the red forest or the magic forest. Sounds like a fairy tale, doesn't it? And not to worry-as the authorities always say, Appropriate measures will be taken, and the situation is under control.' "

They moved along the face of the red forest to an area replanted with new pine trees, where Alex hopped out of the truck and brought back the end of a bough.

"See how stunted and deformed the tip is. It will never grow into a tree, only scrub. But it's a step in the right direction. The administration is pleased with our new pines." Alex spread his arms and announced, "In two hundred and fifty years, all this will be clean. Except for the plutonium; that will take twenty-five thousand years."

"Something to hope for."

"I believe so."

Still, Arkady found himself breathing easier when the red pines gave way to a mix of ash and birch. At the base of a tree, Alex brushed back high grass to reveal a tunnel leading to a cage of what looked to Arkady like squirming field mice.

"Clethrionomys glareolus," said Alex. "Voles. Or maybe super voles. The rate of mutation among our little friends here has accelerated by a factor of thirty. Maybe they'll be doing calculus next year. One reason voles have such a fast rate of mutation is that they reproduce so quickly, and radiation affects organisms when they are growing much more than it does when they're adult. A cocoon is affected by radiation, a butterfly is not. So the question is, How does radiation affect this fellow?" Alex opened the top of the cage to lift out a vole by its tail. "The answer is that he does not worry about radionuclides. He worries about owls, foxes, hawks. He worries about finding food and a warm nest. He thinks that radiation is by far the smallest factor in his survival, and he's right."

"And you, what is the largest factor in your survival?" Arkady asked.

"Let me tell you a story. My father was a physicist. He worked at one of those secret installations in the Urals where spent nuclear fuel was stored. Spent fuel is still hot. Insufficient attention was paid, and the fuel exploded, not a nuclear explosion but very dirty and hot. Everything was done secretly, even the cleanup, which was fast and messy. Thousands of soldiers, firemen, technicians waded through debris, including physicists led by my father. After the accident here, I called my father and said, 'Papa, I want you to tell me the truth. Your colleagues from the Urals accident, how are they?' My father took a moment to answer. He said, 'They're all dead, son, every one. Of vodka.' "

"So you drink and smoke and ride around a radioactive forest."

Alex let the vole drop into the cage and switched the full cage with an empty. "Statistically, I admit that none of these are healthy occupations. Individually, statistics mean nothing at all. I think I will probably be hit by a hawk of some kind. And I think, Renko, that you're a lot like me. I think you are waiting for your own hawk."

"Maybe a hedgehog."

"No, trust me on this, definitely a hawk. From here we walk a little."

Alex carried the rifle, and Arkady carried a cage that had a one-way gate baited with greens. Step by step, the woods around them changed from stunted trees to taller, sturdier beeches and oaks that produced a dappling of birdcalls and light.

Arkady asked, "Did you ever met Pasha Ivanov or Nikolai Timofeyev?"

"You know, Renko, some people leave their problems behind them when they go into the woods. They commune with nature. No, I never met either man."

"You were a physicist. You all went to the Institute of Extremely High Temperatures."

"They were older, ahead of me. Why this focus on physicists?"

"This case is more interesting than the usual domestic quarrel. Cesium chloride is not a carving knife."

"You can get cesium chloride at a number of labs. Considering the economic health of the country, you can probably persuade a scientist to siphon off a little extra for either terrorism or murder. People steal warheads, don't they?"

"To transport cesium chloride would take professional skill, wouldn't it?"

"Any decent technician could do that. The power plant still employs hundreds of technicians for maintenance. Far too many for you to question."

"If the person who used cesium in Moscow is the same person who killed Timofeyev here, wouldn't that narrow the field?"

"To those hundreds of technicians."

"Not really. The technicians live an hour away. They commute by train to the plant, work their shift and go directly home. They don't wander around the Zone. No, the person who cut Timofeyev's throat is part of the security staff, or a squatter or poacher."

"Or a scientist living in the Zone?" Alex said.

"That's a possibility, too." There weren't many of those, Arkady thought. There was no scientific glory work being done at Chernobyl. Everything was cleanup or observation.

"Cesium is a complicated way to kill someone or drive them crazy."

"I agree," said Arkady. "And hardly worth the effort, unless you're sending a message. The fact that neither Ivanov nor Timofeyev complained to the militia or their own security, in spite of a threat to their lives, suggests that some sort of message was understood."

"Timofeyev had his throat cut. Where's the subtle message in that?"

"Maybe it was in where he was found-at the threshold of a village cemetery. Either he drove all the way from Moscow just to go to that graveyard, or someone went to a great deal of trouble to put him there. Who noticed his throat was cut?"

"I suppose someone who went into the freezer. I can tell you that people were very unhappy there was a body inside. They had to clean everything else out."