"You wanted to talk, and you're willing to pay money?"

"That's right."

As Oksana slipped away onto the plaza, she whispered, "You're very nice, very nice. Just… don't stay too long."

"What about?"

"The body of a Moscow businessman was found in a village near Chernobyl two months ago. I'm looking into it."

"Can you pay in American dollars?"

"Yes."

"Then you're a lucky man, because I can help you."

"What do you know?"

"More than you do, I bet, because you've been here a month, and you don't know anything."

The longer they spoke, the more Arkady heard a sibilant S and the scratchiness of an unshaved chin. Arkady gave him a name: the Plumber.

"Like what?"

"Like your businessman was really rich, so there's a lot of money involved."

"Maybe. What do you know?"

Arkady saw Oksana run past the supermarket and vanish around a corner.

"Oh no, not over the phone," the Plumber said.

"We should meet," Arkady said. "But you have to give me some idea of what you know so that I'll know how much money to bring."

"Everything."

"That sounds like nothing." And that was Arkady's impression of the Plumber. A blowhard.

"A hundred dollars."

"For what?"

The Plumber hurried. "I'll call you in the morning and tell you how we'll meet."

"Do that," Arkady said, although the Plumber had already hung up.

On the ride back, the train carried the smaller crew of the night shift, all men and most napping, chins on their chests. What was there to see? The moon was obscured by clouds, and the coach moved in a black terrain of evacuated farms and villages, only a rattling of the rails to indicate forward motion. Then a signal light would plunge by like a face at the window, and Arkady would be thoroughly awake.

Pasha's death was complicated because he had been dying already. He had a dosimeter. He knew that he was dying and what he was dying from. That was part of the ordeal. Arkady tried to imagine the first time Pasha became aware of what was happening. He had been a social animal, the sort who took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves, as Rina put it, to have a good time. How did it start? In the blurred confusion of a party, had someone slipped a salt-shaker and a dosimeter into his jacket pocket? The meter's sound would have been turned off. Arkady pictured Pasha's face when he read the meter, and the fast, tactful exit away from everyone else. The dose wouldn't have been too high, more like the first probe of artillery. "We flushed the radioactive water right into the Moscow River," Timofeyev had said, so there was a precedent for tossing the shaker overboard. But from then on, Ivanov was vulnerable. There was no way to tell cesium chloride from salt without a meter, and salt came in his food or sprinkled on top, sat in a plastic shaker in the lowest dive or in crystal in the most elegant restaurant. How did he dare eat? Or have any contact with the outside world, when a barely visible grain could arrive in a letter or be transferred onto clothing as someone brushed by in the street? Finally, what to do when he found a gleaming mound of salt in his closet? How to find one grain of poison among a million pure?

And it would go on. Timofeyev was also under attack. So, by sheer proximity, was Rina. Ivanov and Timofeyev had both had cesium pallor. Their bloody noses were signs of platelet failure. They couldn't eat or drink. Each day they were weaker and more isolated. And in the sanctuary of Ivanov's apartment, in the closet of his bedroom was this shining floor of salt. With a saltshaker. It hadn't matched any pepper shaker in the apartment, and Arkady guessed that it had sat on top of the pile like a tiny lighthouse, pulsating gamma rays. Suicides had a pattern, first fatigue and then a manic energy. Here's the chair, where's the rope? Here's the razor, where's the bath? How to dispose of radioactive salt? Eat it. Eat it with wads of bread. Choke it down with sparkling water. The dosimeter screams? Turn it off. The nosebleeds? Wipe it off, wrap the handkerchief around the meter and place them in the shirt drawer. Neatness counts, but hurry. Momentum is important. The stomach wants to throw back what you've fed it. Open the window. Now grasp the saltshaker, climb high above the world, curtains flapping, and fix your eye on the bright horizon. It's easier to die if you're already dead.

Morning rain fell on the Chernobyl Yacht Club, a gap-toothed dock on the Pripyat River. Planks had dropped through, leaving a slippery checkerboard for Arkady and Vanko to cross with the aluminum rowboat that Arkady was renting for the day from Vanko. Vanko had offered for an extra bottle of vodka to come along and point out this place or that to fish, but Arkady had no intention of fishing. He had borrowed a rod and reel for form's sake only.

Vanko said, "That's all you've got? No bait?"

"No bait."

"A light rain like this can be good fishing."

Arkady changed the subject. "There really used to be a yacht club here?"

"Sailboats. They sailed away after the accident. Now they're all sold to rich people on the Black Sea." The idea seemed to delight Vanko.

Vapors drifted around a fleet of commercial and excursion boats scuttled or run aground, rusting from white to red. An explosion seemed to have lifted ferries, dredgers and scows, coal barges and river freighters out of the water and set them haphazardly along the river's edge. The dock's end was guarded by a padlocked gate and signs that read high radiation! and no swimming and no diving. Taken together, the signs were, it seemed to Arkady, redundant.

"Eva lives up there in a cabin." Vanko pointed across the bridge toward a brick apartment block. "Way back. You'd never find it."

"I'll take your word for it."

Vanko had a key for the boat's padlock and helped Arkady portage the boat over a floodgate and bridge to the north arm of the river. Arkady had noticed before that Vanko, with his stolid manner and calflike fringe of hair, seemed to have keys to everything, as if he were the town custodian. "Chornobyl was a busy port once. A lot of business went up and down the river when we had Jews."

Arkady thought that conversations with Vanko sometimes skipped a groove. "So you haven't had Jews here since the war? Since the Germans?"

They scrambled down to the water. Vanko slid the rowboat in and gripped it by the stern. "Something like that."

As Arkady got in with the oars, he gave a last glance at the posted warnings. "How radioactive is the river?"

Vanko shrugged. "Water accumulates radiation a thousand times more than soil."

"Oh."

"But it settles to the bottom."

"Ah."

"So avoid the shellfish." Vanko still held the boat. "That reminds me. You're invited to the old folks' tonight for dinner. Remember Roman and Maria from the village?"

"Yes." The old woman with the bright blue eyes and the old man with the cow.

"Can you come?"

"Of course." Dinner in a black village. Who could pass that up?

Vanko was pleased. He gave a push. Arkady slipped the oars into the oarlocks and pulled a first long stroke, then another, and the boat eased into the sluggish current of the Pripyat.

He was here because the Plumber had kept his promise and called in the morning with instructions: Arkady was to come alone in a rowboat to the middle of the cooling pond behind the Chernobyl power plant and bring the money.

Arkady's camos and cap were reasonably water-resistant, and as he settled into even strokes, he soon had the rowboat clear of shipwrecks and decaying piers. He dipped his hand in. The water was glassy, brown from peat bogs far upstream and dimpled with light rain. The land ahead was low-lying, riddled by the myriad channels of an ancient river and softened by pines and willows. It was four kilometers against the current from the yacht-club dock to even reach the cooling pond. Arkady checked his watch. He had two hours to cover the full distance, and if he was a little late, he figured the Plumber would probably wait for a hundred dollars.