The steppe was soft. The steppe was a vast plain that shone with ponds and corkscrew rivers and evoked a wistful sadness. The poetry was stentorian, to rouse a patriotic fervor, but the bread was as plump as pillows, and bread always won over poetry. Ukrainian beauty was the child of history: the luminous doe eyes and fair skin of the Slav set on Tartar cheeks. At least that was the ordinary beauty. Galina was probably like that, Arkady thought.

Eva was not soft. Her pale skin and black hair-black as a cormorant's, liquid to the hand-set a theme of contradiction. Her eyes were dark mirrors. Her body looked slight but was strong as a bow, and Arkady thought she would have made an excellent imp in hell, goading slow and doughy sinners with a pitchfork. She should have feme from a landscape of flames and spewing lava. Then he remembered that, in part, she did.

They had kicked the sheet off the bed and lay, skin on skin, enjoying the cool evaporation of the sweat they had produced. Dusk hung outside the window.

She asked, "Why do you have to go?"

"I have to meet a missing man."

"That sounds like a children's rhyme, but it's not, is it? You're still investigating."

"From time to time. I'll be back in a few hours."

"That's up to you." She turned her face to him. Her eyes were too dark to distinguish an iris and they seemed huge. "If you do return, you should know the risks."

"Such as?"

She moved his hand with hers to the scar on her neck. "Cancer of the thyroid, but you knew that." To her breast. "Chornobyl heart, literally a hole in the heart." She played his fingers along her ribs. "Leukemia in the bone marrow." Below the ribs. "Cancer of the pancreas and liver." Across a ruff of pubic hair. "Cancer of the reproductive organs, not to mention tumors, mutations, missing limbs, anemia, rigidity. Not that any of this necessarily matters. Alex says, in the future our main concern will be predators."

"What kinds?"

"All kinds."

"People aren't like that."

"You don't know. When people in Kiev learned about the accident they didn't act with great nobility. Trains were mobbed. Iodine tablets were hoarded. Everyone was drunk and everyone fucked everyone. There were no morals. If you want to know how people will react at the end of the world, this was it. Later, the populations of Pripyat and Chornobyl were farmed out across the country, which didn't want them. Who would want someone radioactive in his home, then or now? They got very good at spotting us, at asking our age and where we were from. I don't blame them a bit. Now do you want me?"

"Yes."

She sighed and stroked his cheek. "Well, you may come back or not, but you've been warned."

In Pripyat light slowed to a drifting mist. Arkady had arrived on his motorbike on time at ten, and another twenty minutes passed while he heard the occasional whir or glimpsed a moving shadow that meant the Woropay brothers were making sure he had come alone.

The square was fronted by the city hall, hotel, restaurant, school, all shells. The moon made figures out of streetlamps, turned the amusement park Ferris wheel into a huge antenna. Other civilizations, when they vanished, at least left awesome monuments. The buildings of Pripyat were, one after the other, prefabricated ruins.

Dymtrus Woropay popped up like a large sprite at Arkady's side and said, "Leave the bike. Follow me."

Easier said than done. The Woropays wore night-vision goggles and glided on inline skates, clicking over cement and sweeping through the grass. On foot they might be clumsy, but on wheels they swung in graceful arcs. Arkady walked briskly while the brothers circled in and out of shadows to shepherd him along an arcade to a footpath through what had once been a tended garden and now was a maze of branches. Nothing stopped the Woropays; they splashed through standing water and shouldered aside brush to a two-story building with stone columns that supported a mural of organ pipes and atoms: Pripyat's cultural theater. Taras, the younger brother, punched the doors open and whooped as he rolled into a lobby. Dymtrus elbowed his way in and thrust his arms over his head as if he'd scored a goal.

By the time Arkady entered, the Woropays were gone. He heard them, but in the dark it was difficult to see which way they had gone, and the path was obsructed by stage flats stacked in the lobby. What dramas had been left behind, to rest cheek to cheek for eternity? "Uncle Vanya, meet Anna Karenina." Of course, there would have been children's productions, too. "Mouse King, meet Raskolnikov."

A crashing of piano keys came from deep inside the theater, and Arkady pushed through the flats and the clatter of cloakroom racks into a passageway of near-total darkness. He used his cigarette lighter to see along a wall defaced with curses, threats and crude anatomy. He had been in the theater before, but in the daytime. The dark gave no warning of the broken glass that slid underfoot or of the ripped wires that dangled in the face.

Finally Arkady groped his way to a drawn curtain and ropes and the light of a kerosene lamp. A piano with broken and missing keys was onstage, and Taras Woropay played as he sang, " 'You can't always get what you want, but you get what you need!' " while Dymtrus, night goggles flipped up, skated and danced wildly from one side of the stage to the other.

The audience seats were tiers of red benches strewn with broken chairs and tables, bottles and mattresses, like furniture thrown down the steps of a house, while Dymtrus's shadow stamped around the walls. A couch had been dragged to the other side of the piano, where Karel Katamay lay propped by pillows and covered with shawls. Arkady barely recognized the virtual skinhead he had seen in photographs at the grandfather's house. This Karel Katamay wore his hair long and beaded around a chalky face with pink eyes. A hockey shirt-the Detroit Red Wings-swam over him. Small, thoughtful pansies sat in jars of water around the couch, and a liter of Evian was tucked between his legs. Arkady didn't know what he had expected, but not this. He'd read descriptions of the court of Queen Elizabeth. That was what Karel Katamay looked like, a powdered Virgin Queen with two oafish courtiers. A satin pillow cushioned his head; a corner of the pillow was embroidered "Je ne regrette rien." "I regret nothing." When Karel smiled, tickled by the sight of Dymtrus whirling like a dervish, he showed pulpy gums.

" 'Get what you need! need! need!' "

Taras collapsed over the keys while his big brother weaved dizzily on the stage, and Katamay made more a gesture of clapping than actually bringing his hands together.

Dymtrus steadied himself and pointed in Arkady's direction. "Brought him."

"A chair." Katamay's voice was not much more than a whisper, but Dymtrus immediately jumped off the stage to bring a chair from the benches and set it in front of the couch so that Arkady and Karel Katamay would be at the same eye level. Close up, Katamay looked crayoned by a child.

Arkady said, "You don't look well."

"I'm fucked."

Katamay's nose sprang a leak. He pressed a towel against the blood in an offhand, nearly elegant way. The towel, to judge by its blotches of brown, had been used before.

"Summer cold," Katamay said. "So you wanted to know about the dead Russian I found?"

"Yes."

"There's not much to say. Some old fart I found in a village."

The hoarseness of Katamay's voice brought the volume down to a level of intimacy, as if they were theatrical types discussing a production to be presented on this very stage. Katamay said he had never seen the Russian before, and couldn't know the dead man was Russian, since his papers were missing. He was found in the morning lying on his back, his head at the cemetery gate, bloody but not too bloody, stiff from full rigor mortis, disorganized because of wolves. Katamay found the body coincidentally with a squatter he had seen before, a guy called Seva, about forty years old, missing a little finger on his left hand. Arkady took notes in case the Woropays wanted to stomp on anything afterward. Notes were a good target. But around Katamay, they were like dogs under voice command, and he had obviously told them to be still.