Free Wolves Eat Dogs by Martin Cruz Smith Page B

chips, but Kuzmitch and Maximov hunched over the baize like boys at play.
    Arkady had to admit that what often distinguished New Russians was youth and brains. An unusual number of them had been the proteges and darlings of prestigious academies that had gone suddenly bankrupt, and rather than starve among the ruins, they rebuilt the world with themselves as millionaires, each a biography of genius and pluck. They saw themselves as the robber barons of the American Wild West, and didn't someone say that every great fortune started with a crime? Russia already had over thirty billionaires, more than any other country. That was a lot of crime.
    Kuzmitch, as a student at the Institute of Rare Metals, had sold titanium from an unguarded warehouse and parlayed that coup into a career in nickel and tin. Maximov, a mathematician, had been asked to keep the numbers at a public auction; the Ministry of Exotic Chemistry was selling off a lab, and the bidding promised to be chaotic. Maximov had conceived a better idea: an auction at an undisclosed location. The surprise winners, Maximov and a cousin at the ministry, turned the lab into a distillery, the start of Maximov's fortune in vodka and foreign cars.
    The best example of all had been Pasha Ivanov, a physicist, the pet of the Institute of Extremely High Temperatures, who began with nothing but a bogus fund and one day set his sights on Siberian Resources, a huge enterprise of timber, sawmills and a hundred thousand hectares of Mother Russia's straightest trees. It was a minnow swallowing a whale. Ivanov bought some inconsequential Siberian debts and sued in out-of-the-way courts with corrupt judges. Siberian Resources didn't even know about the suits until ownership was awarded to Ivanov. But the management didn't back down. They had their own judges and courts, and a siege developed until Ivanov made a deal with the local army base. The officers and troops hadn't been paid in months, so Pasha Ivanov hired them to break through the sawmill gates. The tanks carried no live rounds, but a tank is a tank, and Ivanov rode the first one through.
    This was the closest Arkady had ever come to the magic circle of the super-rich, and he was fascinated in spite of himself. However, Zhenya was miserable. When Arkady looked at the party through Zhenya's eyes, all color drained. Every other child was wealthier in parents and self-assurance; a shelter boy was, by definition, abandoned. The masquerade Arkady had planned was revealing itself as a cruel and stupid trial. No matter how spiteful or uncommunicative Zhenya was, he didn't deserve this.
    "Going already?" Timofeyev asked.
    "My friend isn't feeling well." Arkady nodded at Zhenya.
    "What a shame, to be so young and not to enjoy good health." Timofeyev made a weak effort at a smile. He sniffed and clutched a handkerchief at the ready. Arkady noticed brown spots on his shirt. "I should have started a charity like this. I should have done more. Did you know that Pasha and I grew up together? We went to the same schools, the same scientific institute. But our tastes were entirely different. I was never the ladies' man. More into sports. For example, Pasha had a dachshund, and I had wolfhounds."
    "You don't anymore?"
    "Unfortunately, no, I couldn't. I... What I told the investigation was that we did the best we could, given the information we had."
    "What investigation?" Not Arkady's.
    "Pasha said that it wasn't a matter of guilt or innocence, that sometimes a man's life was simply a chain reaction."
    "Guilt for what?" Arkady liked specifics.
    "Do I look like a monster to you?"
    "No." Arkady thought that Lev Timofeyev may have helped build a financial giant through corruption and theft, but he was not necessarily a monster. What Timofeyev looked like was a once hale sportsman who seemed to be shrinking in his own clothes. Perhaps it was grief over the death of his best friend, but his pallor and sunken cheeks suggested to Arkady the bloom of