Wolves Eat Dogs by Martin Cruz Smith Page B

funny or sad. More like he felt, What the hell? Especially toward the end."
    Arkady asked Zhenya, "Is that good, to share qualities with a dead man?" Zhenya pursed his lips. "It depends? I agree."
    Zhenya hadn't eaten. They pulled in at a pirozhki stand and found, on the far side of the stand, an inflated fun house of a homely cabin standing on chicken legs. An inflated fence of bones and skulls surrounded the hut, and on the roof stood the witch, Baba Yaga, with the mortar and pestle on which she flew. In Zhenya's fairy tales, Baba Yaga ate children who wandered to her cabin. This cabin was full of children jumping on a trampoline floor covered with balls of colored foam. Boys and girls slid out one door and ran in another while the mechanical witch cackled hideously above. Zhenya left his chess set and walked into the witch's cabin, spellbound.
    Hoffman said, "Thanks for the ride. I don't drive in Russia. Driving here is like endlessly circling the Arc de Triomphe."
    "I wouldn't know. How is the nose?"
    "Ozhogin pinched it. Wasn't even a punch. Showed me the disk, reached up and popped a blood vessel, just for the humiliation."
    "It's a day for bloody noses. Timofeyev had one, too." Now that Arkady thought about it, on the videotapes, Ivanov had held a handkerchief the same way.
    Hoffman hunched forward. "Did I mention he likes you just as much as me?"
    "I don't know why." The prospect of running into Ozhogin again made Arkady want to lift weights and work out regularly. He lit a cigarette. "Where did you hide the disk?"
    "I knew Ozhogin would look in my apartment, so I put it in my gym locker. I actually taped it upside down. It was invisible. I don't know how he found it."
    "How often do you go to the gym, Bobby?"
    "Once a..." Hoffman shrugged.
    "There you are."
    "Oh, and now that they have the disk, the offer is 'Leave the country or go to jail.' I pissed them off. Fuck them, I'll be back."
    "And Rina?"
    "Let me tell you about Rina." Bobby picked pirozhki crumbs off his jacket. "She is a lovely kid, and Pasha left her well set up, and within a year the most important thing in her life will be fashion shows. And she'll run Pasha's foundation, that'll keep her busy. Everyone wins except you and me. And I'll bounce back."
    "Which leaves me."
    "At the bottom of the food chain. I'll tell you this much: the company's dead."
    "NoviRus?"
    "Kaput. All that held it together was Pasha." Bobby gently touched his nose. "Maybe Timofeyev was a good scientist once upon a time, but in business he is a total dud. No nerve, no imagination. I never understood why Pasha kept him on. Not to mention that Timofeyev is falling apart in front of everyone's eyes. Six months, you know who'll run the show at NoviRus? Ozhogin. He's a cop. Only you can't run a complicated business entity like a cop, you have to be a general. Kuzmitch and Maximov can't wait. When they're done with Ozhogin, you won't be able to find his bones. It's the food chain, Renko. Figure out the food chain, and you figure out the world."
    Arkady watched Zhenya bounce in and out of sight. He asked Hoffman, "What do you know about Anton Obodovsky?"
    "Obodovsky?" Bobby raised his eyebrows. "Tough guy, local Mafia, jacked some of our trucks and drained some oil tanks. He has balls, I'll give him that. Ozhogin pointed him out on the street once. Obodovsky made the colonel nervous. I liked that."
    When Zhenya finally emerged from the fun house, they started home. Hoffman and Zhenya played chess without a board, calling out their moves, the boy piping "e4" from the backseat, followed quickly by Hoffman's confident "c5" up front. Arkady could follow through the first ten moves, and then it was like listening to a conversation between robots, so he concentrated more on his own diminishing prospects.
    It was virtually impossible to be dismissed for incompetence. Incompetence had become the norm under the old law, when prosecutors faced no courtroom challenges from upstart lawyers, and