WOLVES EAT DOGS •
By Martin Cruz Smith
Simon & Schuster. 337 pp. $25.95
Martin Cruz Smith
(Menuez Pictures)
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The hero of Martin Cruz Smith's Wolves Eat Dogs, Arkady Renko, comes with one of the most illustrious pedigrees in thriller fiction.
Many storytellers saw in the Cold War an opportunity not seen since Homer sang the siege of Troy, but, so far as I know, Smith was the only American writer who dared think out of the box to the point of making his hero a genuine communist. And what a magnificent protagonist Arkady is: zealous investigator for the state prosecutor in Moscow, a Russian to his fingertips, wittily acerbic, sickly pale, rail-thin because he is nourished mostly on nicotine, deeply committed to the lost egalitarian principles of socialism and therefore at odds with both the Party and the West, sardonically pursuing his true love, Irina, across oceans. We come across him first in that towering work Gorky Park, where Smith revealed another talent that set him apart from the rest: a passion for authentic detail.
After a raft of near-death experiences, a fugitive Arkady re-emerges in Polar Star as the lowest ranking seaman on a Soviet factory ship, where life is even tougher for a man of integrity than in Moscow. From the frozen wastes of the North Sea he takes us to opulent West Germany (Red Square), where Irina is inclined to dump him in favor of better-dressed men. By the time we get to Cuba (Havana Bay), Irina is dead and Arkady suicidal. Now, inevitably perhaps, in Wolves Eat Dogs the haggard but still chain-smoking Arkady takes us for a strictly unofficial tour of the Zone: "One way to look at Chernobyl was as a bull's-eye target, with the reactors at the center and circles at ten and thirty kilometers. . . . Together the two circles composed the Zone of Exclusion."
Smith has not lost his knack for distilling telling aspects of a culture into a single phrase: "Evgeny Lysenko, nickname Zhenya, age eleven, looked like an old man waiting at a bus stop"; and: "Didn't someone say that every great fortune started with a crime? Russia already had over thirty billionaires, more than any other country. That was a lot of crime."
We begin in Moscow, where the oligarch and thoroughly New Russian, Pasha Ivanov, appears to have taken his life by jumping from a high window. At first Arkady doubts that it was suicide, for there are simply too many inexplicable peculiarities: a huge quantity of salt lies piled up in Ivanov's apartment, there is salt on the window ledge from which he jumped, and a salt-shaker is found under his corpse in the street. Gradually Arkady comes to a more disturbing conclusion: suicide, yes, but as the result of a demonic form of psychological torture involving an isotope called Cesium 137. It is so radioactive that handling a gram of it for three seconds will kill you. Even its milder form, cesium chloride, will send your dosimeter screaming at 50,000 counts per second. Try looking for this isotope in a pile of salt; even while searching, you are ruining your health. No wonder Ivanov freaked, but who hated him enough to go to such sadistic lengths as to dump 50 kilos of salt in his walk-in closet with a single grain of cesium buried somewhere in the middle of it? And what was he doing with a dosimeter in Moscow in the first place? And why jump when he could simply have run?
When Ivanov's close associate Timofeyev develops a nose bleed (a sure sign of platelet damage in this toxic context) and is subsequently found dead in the Zone, the trail leading to Chernobyl is too tempting for Arkady to resist, even though the Ukraine is no longer part of the Russian empire and his investigative powers there are strictly limited.
Smith expertly establishes the eerie, almost extraterrestrial, ambience of this nuclear wasteland where dosimeters are more common than cell phones and even Arkady's love interest, the irascible-but-saintly doctor Eva Kazka, bears a scar from a thyroid operation. Stories of animal mutations abound, but a hunter makes an interesting ecological point: Exactly because almost all the people have fled, nature in its fullness is returning. Since the Zone is expected to remain poisoned for 50,000 years, the prospects for a long-term, humanity-free, radioactive wildlife sanctuary are pretty good.
Officially the Zone is uninhabited, and those few who live there by choice tend to mutate socially and psychologically, even if they manage to escape thyroid cancer and leukemia. They follow their own laws. Only a true masochist like Arkady would risk his health investigating a murder or two in such a dangerous region when his own boss is demanding a whitewash. Arkady, though, will not rest until he has penetrated to the very heart of that molten monster called Reactor Four. The conclusion is surprisingly tragic in a way that momentarily lifts the book above the thriller genre and into the realm of more serious works.Smith is in a class of his own, probably because his books are genuine novels as well as thrillers. When he rides these two horses perfectly, he produces masterpieces like Gorky Park and Polar Star. Wolves Eat Dogs is not in this class; the deep and the crass are not so skillfully balanced, so that hockey stick-wielding assassins on skates can seem superfluous among the truly grave -- and truly terrifying -- issues of Chernobyl. It is fissured but still way ahead of the pack and hugely readable. •
John Burdett has published a number of novels, the most recent being "Bangkok 8."
