The way to see Pripyat, like the Taj Mahal, was by moonlight. The broad avenues and stately chestnuts. The confident plan of greenery, office towers and residential blocks. The way the central plaza admired the Soviet wreath that topped the city hall. Never mind the empty sockets of the windows or the grass that grew between the pavers.

Arkady left his motorcycle in the plaza. He went to the theater where he had met Karel Katamay, feeling his way again through the flats stacked in the lobby, shining his flashlight on the stage, around the piano, up the tiers of benches. Karel Katamay and the couch were gone, leaving only a few dried drops of blood in the dust.

Arkady couldn't search a city built for fifty thousand people. However, a dying man and his couch could not have gone far, even with the Woropay brothers bearing him on a royal litter. His nosebleeds were small leaks. He was bleeding internally from the lungs, intestinal tract, cerebellum. Faced with that prospect, Pasha Ivanov had chosen the quicker alternative of a ten-story jump.

Back on the plaza, Arkady turned off the chatter of his dosimeter. He had a mental map of the city now: the hot buildings, the alleys to be taken only on the run.

Arkady called out, "Karel! We should talk." While we can, he thought.

Something slipped through the grass and disappeared like smoke in the beam of Arkady's flashlight. He swung the light around the front of offices. Where plate glass was still intact, the beam winked back. He swung the light up but decided the Woropay brothers wouldn't have tried to carry Katamay above the ground floor. Anyway, why would Karel want to be in a dark room littered with plaster, sour with squatter's piss, when outside in the balmy air he could touch the moon?

Arkady returned to the center of the plaza and kept going when he saw the amusement park. It had three rides: a Ferris wheel, bumper cars and crazy chairs. In the crazy chairs, children sat in a circle of flower petals that spun until the children were dizzy or nauseated. Half the bumper cars were on their side; the rest were still entangled in traffic. The Ferris wheel was big enough for forty gondolas. Everything was edged and pitted with corrosion; the wheel looked like it had rolled, stopped and rusted in place.

Karel Katamay lay on his couch in front of the crazy chairs. Arkady turned off his flashlight; he didn't need it. Karel was in the same hockey shirt and propped up with cushions, as before. His face was luminously pale, but his hair seemed brushed and freshly beaded. On the ground in front of the couch were plastic flowers, a plastic liter of Evian and a porcelain teacup, no doubt filched from an apartment. Also, a tank of oxygen, a breathing tube and a harness. So the Woropay brothers had made him as comfortable as possible. He did seem a prince of the netherworld.

However, Karel was dead. The eyes, red as wounds, stared through Arkady. The hockey shirt seemed voluminous, twice Karel's size. His hands lay with their palms up on either side of the white satin pillow embroidered Je ne regrette rien. One foot wore a Chinese slipper, the other was bare. There were worse ways to die than peacefully outside on a summer night, Arkady thought.

Arkady found the other slipper two meters away on the other side of the crazy-chairs fence and, honoring the professional rule of "touch nothing," left it where it was. He returned to Katamay. Purple bruises consistent with tissue breakdown and lack of clotting spotted Karel's skin. Blood smeared his chin and rouged his cheeks. When had he died? He was still warm, but he had mentioned infections, and a fever could burn in a body for an hour or more. He had probably lived on nothing but water and morphine for weeks. Actually, Arkady thought he might have lived a minute ago.

Why would a peacefully expiring man kick off a slipper? Katamay's mouth relaxed a little and let the tongue peek out. The satin pillow between his hands was spotless. Arkady broke his rule and turned the pillow over. The opposite side was soaked with blood only starting to brown. Blood from two sources, it seemed, mouth and nose, and what a brief struggle that must have been.

Arkady became aware of Dymtrus Woropay standing on the other side of the crazy chairs. Woropay held a cardboard box that looked heavy with bottles and flowers and trailed the sort of tinsel used to decorate at the holidays. Arkady also saw what the scene looked like to Dymtrus: Arkady standing over Karel Katamay with a bloody pillow.

"What the fuck are you doing?"

"I found him like this."

"What the fuck did you do?"

Dymtrus dropped the box and let the bottles explode. He swung himself directly over the fence on the other side and bulled through the crazy seats. Arkady put the pillow between Katamay's hands and moved away.

Dymtrus snapped the gate chain. He knelt by the couch, touched the dead man's face, picked up the pillow.

"No! No!" He got to his feet and bellowed, "Taras!" His voice went around the plaza. "Taras!"

Arkady ran.

He ran for his motorbike, but another figure closed fast from the side, parting the grass with his arms, striding from paver to paver: Taras Woropay on skates. Arkady jumped on the bike and started it. He told himself that if he reached the highway, he would be safe. Dymtrus threw something shiny. A shopping cart. Arkady outraced it and was back on the plaza, headed for the road, when his rear tire popped and took Arkady to the ground. He rolled free and looked back at Taras on one knee with a gun. A good shot.

Arkady was on foot. When he was a boy and his father took him hunting, the general would shout, "Run, rabbit!," because shooting a standing rabbit was so little fun. "Wave," he'd tell Arkady. "Damn it, wave." Arkady would wave, the rabbit would bolt and the old man would drill it.

Dymtrus followed Arkady into the school, by the hanging chalkboard. Arkady tripped in the dark over gas masks on the lobby floor. They flopped out of the crate like rubber fish. He moved by memory as much as sight, heading for the kitchen in the back of the building. White tiles lined the kitchen walls. A dough bowl the size of a wheelbarrow stood on its legs. All the oven doors were open or broken off. The back door, however, had been boarded up in the last week. We should have rehearsed, the comic in him said. He looked out a window at chairs set on the ground for staff to use while smoking. He considered breaking the window with a loose oven door, until he saw Dymtrus waiting behind a birch. Arkady returned to the lobby and looked out the front window. Skates off, Taras was stepping up to the door.

Arkady went up the stairs two at a time, kicking bottles and debris aside. Taras was inside, at the bottom of the stairwell. Arkady knocked a loose bookcase down toward him. Copybooks fluttered down. Taras didn't have to shout to his brother where Arkady was. Anyone could hear.

Second floor. The music room. A piano leaning like a drunk against a loose keyboard. The tub-thumping sound of a drum accidentally kicked. All the notes a xylophone could make when stumbled into. A one-man band. Heavier feet on the stairs. Dymtrus. The next room was a flood of books, desks, children's benches. The door frame next to Arkady's head split open before he heard the shot. He javelined a bench down the hall and knew he had caught someone when he heard a curse. The last room was a nap center of dolls asleep on white beds. Arkady gathered a mattress around himself and dove through the glass of the window.

He landed on his back between seesaws, rolled to the trees and crawled under a thorn bush, feeling a prick or two, also aware of blood running down the back of his neck and into his camos, but there was no time to take inventory. In the moonlight he saw the brothers scanning trees from the broken window. He thought he might get away. He would have at least the time it would take them to go the length of the hall, down the stairs and out the front while he went the opposite direction. But they were athletes. Dymtrus stepped up on the sill and jumped. He hit the mattress and rolled off. Taras followed suit, and they were close enough for Arkady to hear their breathing. Close enough to smell a mixture of vodka and cologne.