Russian sleuth Renko returns inflawed but well-written 'Wolves'
Wolves Eat Dogs, By Martin Cruz Smith, Simon & Schuster, 352 pp, $32.95
Martin Cruz Smith has been cursed by the fact that his first two mysteries involving memorable Moscow homicide investigator Arkady Renko -- "Gorky Park" and "Polar Star" -- remain his best. Smith deftly plotted both and introduced an utterly original, fully realized, new character to the genre. "Red Square" was fun, and then Smith stumbled five years ago with "Havana Bay."
The good news is Renko is back in fine form in Smith's new mystery, "Wolves Eat Dogs," despite a plot so overwrought that the reader is cross-eyed long before the last page. Smith writes like a dream about anything, and his intelligence ripples across each page. (One of his best books, "Rose," is a thriller that takes place in an English mining village in the 19th century.) So maybe you wait for the paperback.
"Wolves Eat Dogs" opens with the apparent suicide of one of the biggest oligarchs in "the new Russia." That would be today's Russia, full of sharks who amassed illicit fortunes from failing government enterprises and live in a world of bulletproof SUVs, drugs, bottle blondes, and burly bodyguards.
Pasha Ivanov owns a conglomerate called NoviRus, and his tentacles in and out of government compromise everyone they touch. Yet he jumps out of his luxury Moscow apartment to his death. An autopsy reveals a lot of salt in his stomach. Renko finds more of the stuff on Ivanov's closet floor. Then he learns it's radioactive.
Renko is pure "old Russia" -- gloomy, ironic, and complicated. He's a widower now -- his wife died of an allergic reaction to a drug. So we meet a shattered man, still attractive without knowing it, whose forensic nose remains intact. He possesses an acute, intuitive intelligence and is a sly, relentless hunter. He's also honest, which makes him a dangerous man. Renko rose through the ranks on his investigative acumen and a surname burnished by his father, an important general.
He has no life beyond his job and lives on his meager salary. Consider his apartment: "Arkady's view was not of sleek Mercedeses but of a backyard row of metal garages, each secured by a padlock covered by the cutoff bottom of a plastic soda bottle."
Cut to Pripyat, the ghost city next to the Chernobyl nuclear reactors in Ukraine, scene in 1986 of the world's worst nuclear disaster. One reactor exploded, spewing radioactive material into the atmosphere and killing thousands. (The figures are hotly disputed.) The government response, we learn, was scandalous.
After Ivanov's death, one of his associates, Lev Timofeyev, was found dead in Pripyat, his throat cut. Renko arrives to investigate the murder -- dispatched by a superior who intends to keep him in exile and unable to pursue embarrassing leads in Moscow. Renko learns that both Ivanov and his associate had been scientists who worked at an elite nuclear institute. Before his demise, Timofeyev had displayed symptoms of radioactive poisoning.
Smith is fabulous describing this eerie world around Pripyat and the characters who inhabit it. We see security squads consumed by boredom and a cadre of scientists performing post-radiation experiments rendered nuts by their claustrophobic life and consumption of vodka.
There are misfits of all stripes who subsist on this dark side of the moon, unmolested by the outside world. A shifty American with connections to Ivanov named Bobby Hoffman, whom Renko met in Moscow, appears on the scene. There are peasants unaware of the radioactivity in the food they consume. And, wouldn't you know it, there's a beautiful, mercurial woman to torture Renko.
The book needs reading, not describing. It's worth it, on balance, for another encounter with Arkady Renko, and if the story is needlessly byzantine, smart writing still sells.
