Even the Woropays took a step back from the hanging mist. Marchenko wiped his blade on the dead man's jacket.

Arkady said between shallow breaths, "There's still the eye."

"What eye?" the captain asked, his satisfaction interrupted.

"The right eye is normal, but the left eye is fully dilated, which indicates a blow to the head."

"He's decomposing. The muscles relax. His eyes could go different directions. Hulak hit his head on the boat as he went over, what does it matter?"

"He's not a pig. We have to see."

"The investigator is right," Eva Kazka said. She had wandered over from her car. "If you want me to sign a death certificate, there should be a cause of death."

"You need an autopsy for that?"

"Before you stick the body again, I think so," Eva said.

She wasn't talkative. Boris Hulak was laid out naked on a steel table with his head propped against a wooden block, and he said about as much as Eva did while she opened his body, first with an incision from his collar to his groin and then in handfuls, moving organs into separate bedpans, all with the brisk dispatch of someone washing dishes. The room was meanly furnished, with little more than the essentials of scales and pails, and she had already spent an hour washing the body and examining it for bruises, tattoos and needle tracks. Arkady had checked Hulak's clothes at a sink, finding nothing more remarkable in the dead man's pockets than a purse of loose change and a door key, and nothing in his billfold except a damp twenty-hryvnia note, a photo-booth picture of a boy about six years old and an expired video-club card. Arkady had cut off Hulak's boots and found hidden under the sole almost two hundred American dollars-not bad for a scavenger of radioactive electrical wiring. While Eva Kazka worked on one side of the table, Arkady worked on the other, drying out fingers wrinkled by immersion and then plumping them with injections of saline to lift the ridges and produce usable prints to compare with those he had lifted from the bottle found in the boat.

Fluorescent lights turned cadavers green, and Boris Hulak was greener than most, a fleshy body wrapped in fat through the middle, hard through the legs and shoulders, exuding a bouquet of ethanol. Eva wore her lab coat, cap and professional demeanor, and she and Arkady smoked as they worked to mask the smell. There were few enough benefits to smoking; this was one.

"Ever wish you hadn't asked for something?" Eva said. She saw through him, which didn't make him feel any better. She consulted her autopsy chart. "All I can tell you so far is that between cirrhosis of the liver and necrosis of the kidney, Boris had perhaps two more years to live. Otherwise, he was a hardy specimen. And no, there was virtually no water in the lungs."

"I think I chased Hulak through Pripyat a few nights ago."

"Did you catch him?"

"No."

"And you never would have. Scavengers know the Zone like a magician knows his trapdoors and top hats and radioactive bunnies." She tapped the scalpel on the table. "Captain Marchenko doesn't like you. I thought you were great friends."

"No. I've ruined his perfect record. A militia station commander wants no problems, no homicides and, most of all, no unsolved homicides. He certainly doesn't want two of them."

"The captain is a bitter man. The story is that he got in trouble in Kiev by turning down a bribe, which embarrassed his superiors, who had taken their share of the money in good faith. He's been stationed here to give him a glimpse of hell in case he ever thinks of making that mistake again. Then you arrive from Moscow, and he feels more trapped than ever. You were comparing Hulak's fingerprints to some on a card."

"From the vodka bottle I found in the boat."

"And?"

"They're all Hulak's."

"Wouldn't you say that was fairly strong evidence Hulak was alone? Have you ever known a Russian or a Ukrainian to not share a bottle? He didn't drown, but I have to tell you that apart from being posthumously stabbed by the captain, I see no signs of recent violence. Maybe he did hook a big fish and hit his head on the boat as he went over. Either way, you made the wrong enemy in Captain Marchenko. It might make him happy if we stopped right here."

Arkady leaned over the body. Boris Hulak had a pugnacious head with heavy brows, a broad nose mapped in erupted veins, brown hair thick as otter fur and cheeks covered in stubble, no bruising or swelling, no ligature marks around the neck, no defensive wounds on the hands, not a scratch in the scalp. However, there was that dilated iris of the left eye, as open as the stuck shutter of a camera. Also, Arkady had worked his way out of his samogon stupor.

Arkady said, "Then it will make the captain even happier if we prove I'm wrong."

Most doctors never encountered a cadaver after anatomy class, and forgot the reeking totality of death. But Eva coolly repositioned the block farther down under Hulak's neck.

He said, "You've seen men shot in the head before."

"Shot in the head with a pistol and shot in the back with a rifle, supposedly in the middle of combat. Either way, there's usually an entry wound, which your man appears to lack. Last chance to stop."

"You're probably right, but let's see."

Eva sliced the back of Hulak's scalp from ear to ear. She folded the flap of skin and hair forward over the eyes to work with a circular saw. A power saw was always heavy and, what with the cloud of white dust it produced, hard to manage in delicate work. She popped the top of his skull with a chisel, reached in with a scalpel to free the brain from the spinal cord and laid the soft pink mass in its glistening sac beside the empty head.

"The captain is not going to like this," Eva said.

A red line ran across the top, the trail of a bullet that had traversed the brain and then, bouncing off angles, scoured the cranium. Hulak must have gone down instantly.

"Small-caliber?" Eva asked.

"I think so."

She turned the brain in every direction before choosing one pomegranate-red clot to attack. She cut the sac, sliced into gray matter and squeezed out a bullet like a pip. It pinged as it dropped onto the table. She wasn't done. She shone a penlight around the inside of the skull until a beam came out the left ear.

"Who is this good a shot?" she asked.

"A sniper, a sable hunter, a taxidermist. I would guess the bullet is five-point-six-millimeter, which is what marksmen use in competitive shooting."

"From a boat?"

"The water was still."

"And the sound?"

"A silencer, maybe. A small-caliber doesn't make that much noise to begin with."

"So, now, two murders. Congratulations, Chornobyl has killed a million people, and you have added two more. I would say that at death, you're very good."

While she was impressed Arkady asked, "What about the first body, the one from the cemetery? Besides the nature of the wound on the throat, was there anything else you could have added to your note?"

"I didn't examine him. I simply saw the wound and wrote something. Wolves tear and yank, they don't slice."

"How bloody was his shirt?"

"From what I saw, very little."

"Hair?"

"Clean. His nose was bloody."

"He suffered from nosebleeds," Arkady said.

"This would have been quite a nosebleed. It was packed."

"How do you explain that?"

"I don't. You're the magician-only you pull up the dead instead of rabbits."

Arkady was wondering how to respond when there was a knock at the door and Vanko stuck in his head.

"The Jews are here!"

"What Jews?" Arkady asked. "Where?"

"In the middle of town, and they're asking for you!"

The afternoon sun detailed Chernobyl 's drab center: café, cafeteria, statue of Lenin amid candy wrappers. A pair of militia stepped out of the cafeteria to look up the road; they stared so hard, they leaned. Vanko ran off, to what purpose Arkady didn't know. All he saw was a man walking with familiar flat-footed arrogance ahead of a car. He was dressed in a Hasidic Jew's black suit, white shirt and fedora, although in place of a full beard was red stubble.