Arkady didn't have the money, but he couldn't miss the chance to make contact. In fact, he thought his lack of money might be his safe passage out if the Plumber's only interest was robbery.

Mist steamed from the riverbanks, snagged on birches, drifted free. Frogs plopped for cover. Arkady found that the discipline of rowing led to a trancelike state that left whirlpools of oar strokes behind. A swan cruised by, a white apparition that deigned to turn its head in Arkady's direction. There were, as Vanko might have said, worse ways to spend a day.

Sometimes the river silted and broadened, sometimes narrowed to a tunnel of trees, and much of the time Arkady wondered what he was doing. He wasn't in Moscow, he wasn't even in Russia. He was in a land where Russians were not missed. Where a dead Russian was kept for weeks on ice. Where a black village was a perfect place for dinner.

An hour later, Arkady had fallen into such a rhythm that it took him a moment to react to a crowd of radiation signs on a sandy beach. His target. He gathered speed, drove the boat onto the beach and jumped out, dragging the boat over the sand and up to the crown of a causeway that separated the river from the man-made reservoir of the cooling pond. The pond was twelve kilometers long and three wide; it took a lot of water to cool four nuclear reactors. When the plant had been active-when Chernobyl had four reactors online and two more under construction-water had constantly circulated from the pond, around the power plants in a grid of channels and out a discharge main back to the pond. Now it was a block of granite-black water wreathed in fog.

A causeway road was blocked by a chain-link fence, bent on one side as if to say, "Come this way." Saplings had uprooted the cement slabs that were the walls of the pond; at one point a red shirt tied to a tree marked where slabs had shifted and, in their disrepair, become stairs down to the water. Arkady checked his meter, which ticked with increasing interest; then he lowered the rowboat onto the surface and pushed off as he stepped in.

In fair weather, the cooling pond might have been a clever rendezvous. With binoculars, the Plumber could have made sure Arkady was alone, in a rowboat and far from help. No doubt the Plumber would have the advantage of an outboard engine. Whatever the plan, Arkady didn't like approaching with his back turned, bent over oars. And it was raining harder; visibility was down to a hundred meters and closing in. People made mistakes when they couldn't see clearly. They misconstrued what they did see, or saw what wasn't there. What did he know about the Plumber? The brief phone conversation suggested that he was hardly an experienced professional, more a slovenly middle-aged Ukrainian male with bad dental work. He had probably lived in Pripyat and, to judge from his choice of rendezvous, had probably worked at the power plant. A scavenger rather than a poacher, a man likely to carry a hammer rather than a gun, if that was a comfort.

Arkady stayed in sight of the causeway to keep his bearings and checked his watch to determine how far he had come. For a moment he thought he'd caught the throb of an outboard engine ahead in the rain, but he couldn't honestly say which way it came from, or whether he'd really heard it. All he heard for certain was his own oars ladling water.

He had rowed for half an hour along the causeway when he glimpsed, over his shoulder, two red-and-white chimneys hanging in the fog. Mist closed in, but not before he had a new bearing, directly toward the reactor stacks. He rowed and coasted until he got a new sighting, rowed and coasted again. Perhaps it was going to work out after all. The Plumber would putt-putt into view, and they would talk.

Arkady rowed to what he guessed was halfway across the pond and waited, turning the boat every minute or two for a different view. He was aware of boats far off on the periphery, but not a single one approached. Ten minutes passed. Twenty. Thirty. By then he wished he had a cigarette, damp or otherwise.

He was about to quit when he heard a metallic rattle and an empty boat drifted sideways out of the rain. It was an aluminum tub like his, with a small outboard engine clamped to the stern and a chain swinging at the bow. The engine was off. An empty vodka bottle rolled forward as Arkady stopped the boat. Nothing else was in it, not a cigarette butt, not a fishing rod, not a paddle.

Arkady tied the empty boat to the back of his and started rowing to another boat he saw on the reactor side of the pond. He couldn't imagine why anyone besides the Plumber or Vanko would be out in such weather, but maybe the other boat's occupant had seen someone or knew whose boat this was. Towing the boat was awkward; with every pull, it snapped against Arkady's boat and produced the sound of a bass drum lightly kicked, the perfect acclaim for a day wasted.

There were two men in the boat, fifty meters off, and every ten meters the rain got worse, veiling the boat even as Arkady approached. The Woropays. Dymtrus stood and Taras sat, all their attention on the water directly by their boat until Dymtrus knelt and hauled a body out of the water. It was a woman with long black hair. Her gray skin suggested a long immersion, but she was slim and sleek, her face secretively turned away, a dress adhering to her arms and the smoothness of her back. She was still one moment, and the next she thrashed and nearly capsized the boat.

Taras leaned on a gunwale to keep the boat steady. He noticed Arkady through the rain and shouted, "She likes to fight."

Arkady had stopped rowing. The woman was gone, replaced by a catfish weighing at least sixty kilos, a slippery, scaleless monster that thrashed this way and that and turned its blunt face and jelly eyes to Arkady. Oriental whiskers spread from its lips, and what looked like sopping embroidery fell into the water.

"You netted it?" Arkady asked.

"They're too heavy to pull up otherwise," said Dymtrus.

"Chornobyl giants," said Taras. "Mutants. Glow in the dark."

"Then don't catch them." Arkady noticed that the Woropays had sidearms. He supposed he was lucky they weren't fishing with grenades. "Let it go."

Dymtrus opened his arms. The fish dropped with a great splash into the water, swirled to the surface and then sank ponderously out of sight. "Relax, it's just for fun. There are bigger fish down there."

Taras said, "Twice as big."

The brothers wore slack, calculating smiles.

"We wouldn't cat one," Dymtrus said. "They're loaded with all sorts of radioactive shit."

"We re not crazy."

Arkady felt his heart rate start to slow. He pointed to the empty boat. "I'm looking for the man who came in that."

The Woropays shrugged and asked how Arkady knew there had been someone in it. People hid boats around the cooling pond. The wind could have blown the boat in. And since when did they take orders from fucking Russians? And maybe they could use a fucking outboard engine of their own. They made the last comment too late, after Arkady had switched boats and retied the lines and was towing Vanko's boat away, under power, into the face of a squall that drenched any idea of pursuit.

Arkady switched boats again at the causeway to take Vanko's back downstream. At least this time he would have the current working with him. A stork with a red beak as sharp as a bayonet and white wings trimmed in black sailed by and passed over another stork that waded in slow motion along the edge of the river, painstakingly stalking a victim. The streets of Chernobyl were empty, but the river was full of life. Or murder, which was sometimes the same thing.

As he began to row, however, the mist cleared enough for the apartment blocks of Pripyat to loom like giant headstones. Hadn't Oksana Katamay described her block in Pripyat as overlooking the river? He swung the boat around.