Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Winter

They walked to the hotel.

“Best hotel in town, but for you is room. Make good price,” Dennis joked. “We go top. Best view.”

They went inside the lobby. There was broken glass everywhere. Walls were torn open with holes where scavengers had removed pipes. Snow had blown in and branches from vines and trees had threaded their way into the hotel through broken windows. Scorpion followed Dennis up the stairs to the top floor. They went to the penthouse suite. The rooms were bare except for an old armchair, its upholstery torn and rotting, and a cracked and tilted picture of Lenin on the wall. All the windows were broken. Icicles dangled from the windowsills and a drift of snow had blown in onto the floor. They looked out over the city through a broken panoramic window. From where they stood they could see the reactor and smokestack and cranes sticking above the tops of the apartment houses in the distance.

Scorpion started to sit in the armchair.

“Don’t!” Dennis said, and put the Geiger counter on the chair. It read 1.397. “We go.”

“Wait,” Scorpion told him. “Let’s stay a while.”

“This is not good place to stay. What you want, mister? Is not tour.”

“I’m looking for someone.”

“Someone here? In Pripyat? Cannot be. Only crazy peoples live in Exclusion Zone.”

“Maybe he’s crazy.”

“Maybe you crazy, mister. We go now,” Dennis said, starting for the open doorway.

“How much do you make?” Scorpion called after him.

Dennis stopped and looked at him.

“What you think, mister? I like radioactive? I think zona nice place? You think I not know I get cancer someday? I was English teacher. I make fifteen hundred hryvnia in one month. Now I am tour guide; with tips I am making more than double; three, four thousand.”

“I’ll give you five thousand just for today,” Scorpion said, taking out a wad of money. Dennis looked suspiciously at the money. “What is this?”

“Five thousand,” Scorpion said, holding it out.

After a long moment Dennis came over, took the money and stuck it in his pocket.

“Okay, what you for sure want?” he asked.

“I’m looking for a man. His first name is Dimitri. I won’t tell you the rest. He would have come sometime within the last four or five days. I have reason to believe he’s somewhere in the Exclusion Zone. Have you heard of anyone coming here recently?”

“No,” Dennis said. “But I am guide. I come, go. Best to asking Pani Mazhalska.”

“Who’s she?”

“Old woman. She is knowing all samosely, is what they call squatters in zona. Lives alone in village, Krasnoe, in little hut in forest.”

“Like Baba Yaga,” Scorpion said, trying a joke, mentioning the old witch in Russian fairy tales.

“Is no joke. People say she has ‘the bad eye,’ ” Dennis said, shifting uncomfortably.

“What about Pripyat? Is it possible he’s hiding in an abandoned apartment here?”

Dennis took off his fur cap and scratched his head.

“Is possible. But radioactive in Pripyat not good. Too high.”

“We’re here.”

“Not for days and nights. Also, Pripyat was city of fifty thousand. Many buildings here. How you find someone?”

“I figured we’d wait till dark. See if we could spot any lights. He’d need heat and light,” Scorpion said.

“Wait in hotel?” Dennis said.

Scorpion shook his head. “Other tourists might come. This was the first place you took me. Besides, we need to move the car. It’s best if he doesn’t know we’re looking for him.”

“He don’t want to be found, this guy?”

“He’s hiding in the zona. What do you think?”

They walked down the stairs. Outside, they saw the other tourists, the Dowds and the Germans following Gennadi into a school. The Dowds and the Germans waved and they waved back. Scorpion and Dennis got into the Lada and started to drive through the empty streets.

“I know place behind Palace of Culture. We put car. No one see.”

“What about Gennadi and the others?”

“They think we go back Chernobyl.”

They parked next to a shed behind the Palace of Culture, a large building covered with bare trees and shrubs that had sprouted through the concrete. They walked from the car toward an apartment building near the center of the city.

“You don’t want this guy see car. Is dangerous?”

“It could be.” If Shelayev was Spetsnaz-trained, as Scorpion suspected, he was plenty dangerous. Not to mention the skull-crushing.

Dennis stopped walking.

“Maybe five thousand not enough,” he said.

“Maybe it isn’t, but it’s all you’re getting,” Scorpion said, and kept walking. He spotted Gennadi’s minivan moving through the trees and motioned Dennis to take cover with him behind an abandoned kiosk. They watched the minivan drive away. It was like watching the last vestige of civilization leave, he thought.

They resumed walking toward the tall apartment house. The wind had come up. They could hear the same shutter banging. In another hour or so it would be getting dark. They went into the lobby of the apartment house, the floors as usual covered with snow and broken glass and vegetation growing inside, and climbed the stairs to the top floor.

The door to an apartment overlooking much of the city was missing. It had a balcony with a tree growing in the center of it, its branches extending into the living room. They walked through, stepping carefully on the broken glass. This was no place to get a cut.

There was a broken child’s highchair on its side in the kitchen. In another room they found a discarded Misha bear, stuffing coming out of it, lying on the floor. Whoever once lived here had children, Scorpion thought. Dennis put the Geiger counter to the bear. It registered 3.816. No wonder it had been left behind by scavengers. A yellowing magazine on the floor showed a smiling Gorbachev on the cover. Dennis checked the apartment with the Geiger counter. It averaged 1.05 overall; about as good as they were going to get.

After checking an area of the floor with the Geiger counter, they squatted down. Dennis lit a cigarette. Scorpion retrieved the bottle of Nemiroff from his backpack and they each took a swig.

“This guy,” Dennis said. “What he do to you?”

“Nothing. It’s business.”

“Business you risking life for? Is not business,” Dennis said. “He take your woman?” he asked.

Scorpion shook his head. No, but he took Pyatov’s woman, he thought. That might have been the whole problem right there. He took out the button camcorder-a video camcorder disguised as a coat button-and clipped it to his outer jacket. He set it up to record to a flash drive that he put in an inside pocket. Dennis watched.

“What is this?”

“Video camcorder. I’m a lawyer. I need to take this man’s testimony in a case.”

Dennis’s eyes showed he didn’t believe him. Outside, it was getting dark. In winter in this part of the world, night came early. A hawk landed on the tree on the balcony and stared at them. Scorpion stood and it flew away. He walked over to the balcony and looked out at the city. The buildings were becoming dark shapes. He felt Dennis come beside him.

“We need a 360 degree view,” Scorpion said. “Let’s go up on the roof.” They gathered their things and went up. It was colder in the wind. Scorpion stood on the roof slowly rotating to see in every direction. There was nothing. It was a ghost city. Then Dennis nudged him.

“Look,” he said, pointing toward the apartment building with the hammer and sickle symbol on the roof, its outline only dimly visible in the darkness. There was a light glimmering. Scorpion took out his binoculars. The light appeared to be coming from a lantern or a candle in an apartment on the top floor. He put the binoculars back in his pack and got out the Glock. Dennis stared at the gun.