Wolves Eat Dogs Read Online Free Page A

soda. They ate at an outdoor table while playing chess with pieces that were worn from use, on a board that had been taped together more than once. Zhenya didn’t speak even to say “Mate!” He simply knocked over Arkady’s king at the appropriate time and set the pieces up again.
    “Have you ever tried football?” Arkady asked. “Stamp collecting? Do you have a butterfly net?”
    Zhenya concentrated on the board. The head of the shelter had told Arkady how Zhenya did solitary chess problems every night until lights-out.
    Arkady said, “You may wonder how it is that a senior investigator like myself is free on such a glorious day. The reason is that the prosecutor, my chief, feels that I need reassignment. It’s plain that I need reassignment, because I don’t know a suicide when I see one. An investigator who doesn’t know a suicide when he sees one is a man who needs to be reassigned.”
    Arkady’s move, the retreat of a knight to a useless position on the side of the board, made Zhenya look up, as if to detect a trap. Not to worry, Arkady thought.
    “Are you familiar with the name Pavel Ilyich Ivanov?” Arkady asked. “No? How about Pasha Ivanov? That’s a more interesting name. Pavel is old-fashioned, stiff. Pasha is Eastern, Oriental, with a turban and a sword. Much better than Pavel.”
    Zhenya stood to see the board from another angle. Arkady would have surrendered, but he knew how Zhenya relished a thoroughly crushing victory.
    Arkady said, “It’s curious how, if you study anyone long enough, if you devote enough effort to understanding him, he can become part of your life. Not a friend but a kind of acquaintance. To put it another way, a shadow has to become close, right? I thought I was beginning to understand Pasha, and then I found salt.” Arkady looked for a reaction, in vain. “And well you should be surprised. There was a lot of salt in the apartment. That’s not a crime, although it might be a sign. Some people say that’s what you’d expect from a man about to take his life, a closet full of salt. They could be right. Or not. We don’t investigate suicides, but how do you know it’s a suicide unless you investigate? That is the question.”
    Zhenya scooped up the knight, revealing a pin on Arkady’s bishop. Arkady moved his king. At once, the bishop disappeared into Zhenya’s grasp, and Arkady advanced another sacrificial lamb.
    “But the prosecutor doesn’t want complications, especially from a difficult investigator, a holdover from the Soviet era, a man on the skids. Some men march confidently from one historical era to the next; others skid. I’ve been told to enjoy a rest while matters are sorted out, and that is why I can spend the day with you.” Zhenya pushed a juggernaut of a rook the length of the board, tipped over Arkady’s king and swept all of the pieces into the box. He hadn’t heard a word.
    The last regular event was a ride on the Ferris wheel, which kept turning as Arkady and Zhenya handed over their tickets, scrambled into an open-air gondola and latched themselves in. A complete revolution of the fifty-meter wheel took five minutes. As the gondola rose, it afforded a view first of the amusement park, then of geese lifting from the lake and Rollerbladers gliding on the trails and, finally, at its apogee, through a floating scrim of poplar fluff, a panorama of gray daytime Moscow, flashes of gold from church to church and the distant groans of traffic and construction. All the way, Zhenya stretched his neck to look in one direction and then the other, as if he could encompass the city’s entire population.
    Arkady had tried to find Zhenya’s father, even though the boy refused to supply the first name or help a sketch artist from the militia. Nevertheless, Arkady had gone through Moscow residence, birth and draft records in search of Lysenkos. In case the father was alcoholic, Arkady asked at drying-out tanks. Since Zhenya played so well, Arkady visited