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Edna Conrad put the fear of Armageddon in me. My seventh-grade teacher was a ban-the-bomber, and she introduced her students to the concept of nuclear peril. It was 1957, the height of the Cold War. The same year, I read Nevil Shute's ON THE BEACH, about the Australian survivors of a worldwide holocaust who succumb one by one to radiation disease. That did it. Long before 9/11, my nightmares were about the big bang. I never learned to stop worrying and love the bomb.
Fast-forward to Chernobyl, nearly 20 years after the deadly 1986 nuclear meltdown: The site of the accident looms as large as any character in WOLVES EAT DOGS, Martin Cruz Smith's fifth novel featuring the Russian detective Arkady Renko, the Hamlet of cops. These books are less police procedurals than reports from the soul of a country in collapse. Renko is a brainy, brooding, rule-breaking, authority-flouting figure; he was an outsider in the Soviet Union and is similarly out of step with the opportunistic mafiosi (mostly former KGB men) and nouveau capitalists of the New Russia. "Some men march confidently from one historical era to the next," he says; "others skid."
When one of Russia's self-made billionaires, Pasha Ivanov, exits through a window of his Moscow condo, Renko stubbornly refuses to call it a suicide. Then a senior vice president in Ivanov's company, one Timofeyev, is found murdered near Chernobyl, and Renko finds himself assigned --- perhaps exiled is a better word --- to the Zone of Exclusion, the 19-mile-radius radioactive area around the reactors.
It's hard to imagine that people still carry on in this grim, contaminated territory, but they do: those who are too old or too damaged to abandon their homes, soldiers and policemen, scientists. It is a life measured by Geiger counters, a life in which death is omnipresent and the work of a homicide detective seems almost beside the point. Smith visited the Zone while researching this book (I heard him speak about it last week at the New York Public Library), and the details of Renko's investigations there are cruelly true to life: An abandoned school, the children's art still on the walls. A pine forest turned blood red, poisoned by the radiation. A death rate twice normal, a cancer rate 65 times normal. And, ironically, in the absence of human predators, a furious proliferation of birds and beasts. The Zone, says an ecologist with whom Renko tours the area, "is the best wild-animal refuge in Europe.... [N]ormal human activity is worse for nature than the greatest nuclear accident in history."
Wolves in particular have come back (they are involved peripherally in Timofeyev's death); watching them stalk deer in the forest, Renko suddenly has a sense of himself as prey. "Wolves eat dogs" is the universal explanation of why nobody owns a dog anymore in Chernobyl. "Wolves hate dogs," an old man says, then makes a fable --- or a philosophy --- of it: "Wolves hunt down dogs because they regard them as traitors. If you think about it, dogs are dogs only because of humans; otherwise they'd all be wolves, right? And where will we be when all the dogs are gone? It will be the end of civilization."
It turns out that Ivanov and Timofeyev were physicists before they became businessmen, and their punishment --- call it murder by radiation --- was designed to fit their crimes. But the whodunit aspect of WOLVES EAT DOGS, while clever, is not what's memorable. When Smith spoke, he kept talking about how necessary this book was, and I'm quite sure he didn't mean that the world required another Arkady Renko novel. What the world does need is a reminder of the consequences of mishandled nuclear power (something of a preoccupation for Smith, who wrote an earlier book, STALLION GATE, about the Los Alamos project). The built-in fatalism of the place --- "the subtle suspense," as Smith said in his talk, "of living in a radioactive landscape" --- overshadows the more artificial tensions of the plot.
And then there is Renko himself. A complex, antiheroic, all-too-human detective is the hallmark of many of the best crime novels. In large part it is Renko's compassion and intelligence that makes the book so satisfying, most significantly in this lonely man's few personal relationships --- with the perversely unresponsive Zhenya, an abandoned 11-year-old chess prodigy who lives in a Moscow children's shelter and who the inspector takes on weekly outings to the park; and with Eva Kazka, a doctor in the Zone who, at 13, was also one of Chernobyl's victims ("First the thyroid and then the tumors," she says, touching her scars).
These days, you don't hear a lot about Chernobyl. It's old news. But the people there, Smith said, don't want to be forgotten. They wanted to talk to him, to tell him the truth. "In two hundred and fifty years, all this will be clean," the ecologist, gesturing to the forest, says to Renko, as he did to Smith in real life. "Except for the plutonium; that will take twenty-five thousand years."
When Smith got home from his visit to the Zone, he told us, he threw away all his clothes. But he kept what he had learned there, and he turned it into art. WOLVES EAT DOGS isn't a happy read, but it is a gripping and important one.
--- Reviewed by Kathy Weissman
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