Wolves Eat Dogs

Martin Cruz Smith

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780671775957
• eBook ISBN: 9780743275330
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Crime & Mystery Literature
• Index: Literature

A Moscow detective is sent to Chernobyl for a frightening case in the most spectacular entry yet in Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko series.

In his groundbreaking Gorky Park, Martin Cruz Smith created an iconic detective of contemporary fiction. Quietly subversive, brilliantly analytical, and haunted by melancholy, Arkady Renko survived, barely, the journey from the Soviet Union to the New Russia, only to find his transformed nation just as obsessed with corruption and brutality as was the old Communist dictatorship.

In Wolves Eat Dogs, Renko returns for his most enigmatic and baffling case yet: the death of one of Russia’s new billionaires, which leads him to Chernobyl and the Zone of Exclusion—closed to the world since 1986’s nuclear disaster. It is still aglow with radioactivity, now inhabited only by the militia, shady scavengers, a few reckless scientists, and some elderly peasants who refuse to relocate. Renko’s journey to this ghostly netherworld, the crimes he uncovers there, and the secrets they reveal about the New Russia make for an unforgettable adventure.

1

Moscow swam in color. Hazy floodlights of Red Square mixed with the neon of casinos in Revolution Square. Light wormed its way from the underground mall in the Manezh. Spotlights crowned new towers of glass and polished stone, each tower capped by a spire. Gilded domes still floated around the Garden Ring, but all night earthmovers tore at the old city and dug widening pools of light to raise a modern, vertical Moscow more like Houston or Dubai. It was a Moscow that Pasha Ivanov had helped to create, a shifting landscape of tectonic plates and lava flows and fatal missteps.

Senior Investigator Arkady Renko leaned out a window the better to see Ivanov on the pavement ten floors below. Ivanov was dead but not particularly bloody, arms and legs at odd angles. Two black Mercedeses were at the curb, Ivanov’s car and an SUV for his bodyguards. It sometimes seemed to Arkady that every successful businessman and Mafia hood in Moscow had been issued two Nazi-black Mercedeses.

Ivanov had arrived at 9:28 P.M., gone directly up to the safest apartment in Moscow and at 9:48 P.M. plunged to the sidewalk. Arkady had measured Ivanov’s distance from the building. Homicides generally hit close, having expended their energy in trying not to fall. Suicides were single-minded and landed farther out. Ivanov had almost reached the street.

Behind Arkady, Prosecutor Zurin had brought drinks from the wet bar to a NoviRus senior vice president named Timofeyev and a young blonde in the living room. Zurin was as fussy as a maître d’; he had survived six Kremlin regimes by recognizing his best customers and smoothing out their problems. Timofeyev had the shakes and the girl was drunk. Arkady thought the gathering was a little like a party where the host had suddenly and inexplicably dived through the window. After the shock the guests carried on.

The odd man out was Bobby Hoffman, Ivanov’s American assistant. Although he was worth millions of dollars, his loafers were split, his fingers were smudged with ink and his suede jacket was worn to a shine. Arkady wondered how much more time Hoffman had at NoviRus. An assistant to a dead man? That didn’t sound promising.

Hoffman joined Arkady at the window. “Why are there plastic bags around Pasha’s hands?”

“I was looking for signs of resistance, maybe cuts on the fingers.”

“Resistance? Like a fight?”

Prosecutor Zurin rocked forward on the sofa. “There is no investigation. We do not investigate suicides. There are no signs of violence in the apartment. Ivanov came up alone. He left alone. That, my friends, is a suicide in spades.”

The girl lifted a dazed expression. Arkady had learned from the file he had on Pasha Ivanov that Rina Shevchenko was his personal interior designer, a twenty-year-old in a red leather pantsuit and high-heeled boots.

Timofeyev was known as a robust sportsman, but he could have been his father, he had shrunk so much within his suit. “Suicides are a personal tragedy. It’s enough to suffer the death of a friend. Colonel Ozhogin—the head of NoviRus Security—is already flying back.” He added to Arkady, “Ozhogin wants nothing done until he arrives.”

Arkady said, “We don’t leave a body on the sidewalk like a rug, even for the colonel.”

“Pay no attention to Investigator Renko,” Zurin said. “He’s the office fanatic. He’s like a narcotics dog; he sniffs every bag.”

There won’t be much left to sniff here, Arkady thought. Just out of curiosity, he wondered if he could protect the bloody prints on the windowsill.

Timofeyev pressed a handkerchief against his nose. Arkady saw spots of red.

“Nosebleed?” asked Zurin.

“Summer cold,” said Timofeyev.

Opposite Ivanov’s apartment was a dark office building. A man walked out of the lobby, waved to Arkady and gave a thumbs-down.

“One of your men?” Hoffman asked.

“A detective, in case someone over there was working late and might have witnessed something.”

“But you’re not investigating.”

“I do whatever the prosecutor says.”

“So you think it was suicide.”

“We prefer suicides. Suicides don’t demand work or drive up the crime rate.” It also occurred to Arkady that suicides didn’t expose the incompetence of investigators and militia who were better at sorting out dead drunks from the living than solving murders committed with any amount of forethought.

Zurin said, “You will excuse Renko, he thinks all of Moscow is a crime scene. The problem is that the press will sensationalize the death of someone as eminent as Pasha Ivanov.”

In which case, better the suicide of an unbalanced financier than assassination, Arkady thought. Timofeyev might lament the suicide of his friend, but a murder investigation could place the entire NoviRus company under a cloud, especially from the perspective of foreign partners and investors who already felt that doing business in Russia was a dip in murky water. Since Zurin had ordered Arkady’s financial investigation of Ivanov, this U-turn had to be executed with dispatch. So, not a maître d’, Arkady thought, but more a skillful sailor who knew when to tack.

“Who had access to this apartment?” Arkady asked.

“Pasha was the only one allowed on this level. The security was the best in the world,” Zurin said.

“Best in the world,” Timofeyev agreed.

Zurin said, “The entire building is covered by surveillance cameras, inside and out, with monitors that are watched not only at the reception desk here but, as a safeguard, also by technicians at the headquarters of NoviRus Security. The other apartments have keys. Ivanov had a keypad with a code known only to him. He also had a lock-out button by the elevator, to keep out the world when he was in. He had all the security a man could wish for.”

Arkady had been in the lobby and seen the monitors tucked into a round rosewood desk. Each small screen was split in four. The receptionist also had a white phone with two outside lines and a red phone with a line direct to NoviRus.

“The building staff doesn’t have Ivanov’s code?” Arkady asked.

“No. Only the central office at NoviRus.”

“Who had access to the code there?”

“No one. It was sealed, until tonight.”

According to the prosecutor, Ivanov had ordered that no one enter the apartment but him—not staff, not a housecleaner, not a plumber. Anyone who tried would appear on monitors and on tape, and the staff had seen nothing. Ivanov did his own cleaning. Gave the elevator man the trash, laundry, dry cleaning, lists for food or whatever, which would be waiting in the lobby when Ivanov returned. Zurin made it sound like many talents.

“Eccentric,” Arkady said.

“He could afford to be eccentric. Churchill wandered around his castle naked.”

“Pasha wasn’t crazy,” Rina said.

“What was he?” Arkady rephrased the question. “How would you describe him?”

“He had lost weight. He said he had an infection. Maybe he had a bad reaction to medication.”

Timofeyev said, “I wish Ozhogin were here.”

Arkady had seen a glossy magazine cover with a confident Lev Timofeyev sailing a yacht in the Black Sea, carving through the waves. Where was that Timofeyev? Arkady wondered.

An ambulance rolled discreetly to the curb. The detective crossed the street with a camera and shot flash pictures of Ivanov being rolled into the body bag and of the stain on the pavement. Something had been concealed under Ivanov’s body. From Arkady’s distance it looked like a drinking glass. The detective took a picture of that, too.

Hoffman watched Arkady as much as the scene below.

“Is it true, you treat Moscow like a crime scene?”

“Force of habit.”

The living room would have been a forensic technician’s dream: white leather sofa and chairs, limestone floor and linen walls, glass ashtray and coffee table, all excellent backgrounds for hair, lipstick, fingerprints, the scuff marks of life. It would have been easy to dust and search before Zurin genially invited in a crowd and tainted the goods. Because with a jumper, there were two questions: was he alone, and was he pushed?

Timofeyev said to no one in particular, “Pasha and I go far back. We studied and did research together at the institute when the country suffered its economic collapse. Imagine, the greatest physics laboratory in Moscow, and we worked without pay. The director, Academician Gerasimov, turned off the heat in the buildings to save money, and of course, it was winter and the pipes froze. We had a thousand liters of radioactive water to discharge, so we sent it into the river in the center of the city.” He drained his glass. “The director was a brilliant man, but you would sometimes find him inside a bottle. On those occasions he relied on Pasha and me. Anyway, we dumped radioactive water in the middle of Moscow, and no one knew.”

Arkady was taken aback. He certainly hadn’t known.

Rina took Timofeyev’s glass to the bar, where she paused by a gallery of photographs in which Pasha Ivanov was not dead. Ivanov was not a handsome individual, but a big man full of grand gestures. In different pictures he rappelled off cliffs, trekked the Urals, kayaked through white water. He embraced Yeltsin and Clinton and the senior Bush. He beamed at Putin, who, as usual, seemed to suck on a sour tooth. He cradled a miniature dachshund like a baby. Ivanov partied with opera tenors and rock stars, and even when he bowed to the Orthodox patriarch, a brash confidence shone through. Other New Russians fell by the wayside: shot, bankrupted or exiled by the state. Pasha not only flourished, he was known as a public-spirited man, and when construction funds for the Church of the Redeemer ran low, Ivanov provided the gold foil for the dome. When Arkady first opened a file on Ivanov, he was told that if Ivanov was charged with breaking the law, he could call the senate on his mobile phone and have the law rewritten. Trying to indict Ivanov was like trying to hold on to a snake that kept shedding skin after skin and grew legs in the meantime. In other words, Pasha Ivanov was both a man of his time and a stage in evolution.

Arkady noticed a barely perceptible glitter on the windowsill, scattered grains of crystals so familiar he could not resist pressing his forefinger to pick them up and taste them. Salt.

“I’m going to look around,” he said.

“But you’re not investigating,” Hoffman said.

“Absolutely not.”

“A word alone,” Zurin said. He led Arkady into the hall. “Renko, we had an investigation into Ivanov and NoviRus, but a case against a suicide doesn’t smell good in anybody’s nostrils.”

“You initiated the investigation.”

“And I’m ending it. The last thing I want is for people to get the idea that we hounded Pasha Ivanov to death, and still went after him even when he was in the grave. It makes us look vindictive, like fanatics, which we aren’t.” The prosecutor searched Arkady’s eyes. “When you’ve had your little look around here, go to your office and collect all the Ivanov and NoviRus files and leave them by my office. Do it tonight. And stop using the phrase ‘New Russian’ when you refer to crime. We’re all New Russians, aren’t we?”

“I’m trying.”

Ivanov’s apartment took up the entire tenth floor. There weren’t many rooms, but they were spacious and command...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12
• Chapter 13
• Chapter 14
• Chapter 15
• Chapter 16
• Chapter 17
• Chapter 18
• Chapter 19
• Acknowledgments
• ‘Tatiana’ Teaser
• About the Author
• Copyright