"Olha's mother brought it over for us last night.
I think she works in a meat factory."
Petrov looked at the large bowl of lean hamburger and wondered what two people would do with three kilograms of farsh.
"It smelled fresh and was a real bargain, so I bought it from her," his wife continued. "I'll make zrazy tonight."
The promise of fresh, hot zrazy - savory ground meat encased in potato and pan-fried, made Petrov's stomach growl as he headed out the door of the couple's apartment, headed for work.
Minutes later, as he approached the entrance to the Lybid Metro station, Petrov roused from his hunger-induced reverie to the sound of insistent barking from two dogs: a large German Shepherd mix and a smaller black and white hound of less identifiable lineage. He supposed that they had been lying on the steps leading to the entrance of the Metro station, but now they stood, yapping, in front of an elderly woman who was slowly making her way down the steps with the aid of a cane.
Like many of the city's elderly, this woman was small and frail, a victim of too many years' hard work and too little dietary calcium. Osteoporosis had forced the woman into a permanent stoop, as if her back had been frozen midway through a courtly bow. She walked with the use of a cane held in her left hand. In her right she held the bundle of plastic bags she would sell to the shoppers and commuters who would enter the subway when the morning rush hour started.
The dogs, sensing the woman's nervousness, advanced on her, barking. She mumbled something - Petrov couldn't hear her words from his vantage at the top of the steps - and tried to shoo them away with a swipe of her cane.
The Shepherd dodged the stick, and retaliated with a nip at the woman's leg. Petrov took a quick, involuntary gasp of air as the woman stepped back, nearly stumbling, then catching herself. Warily, the dogs backed off, allowing her to pass, though they continued to assert their territory.
The city's growing population of strays was usually benign, and Petrov was surprised to have seen even this bit of territorial aggression. While he had read that about 2,000 people a year were bitten by the hungry, homeless animals that roamed Kyiv, that figure hadn't seemed terribly high for a city of three million. And Petrov felt sorry for the animals, most of which were or were descended from family pets that had been abandoned for financial reasons. Left to fend for themselves, they subsisted by scavenging in garbage bins, stealing bits of meat from the open-air markets and from the handouts offered by too-few kind souls.
In his four years as a journalist in the city, Petrov had seen few dogfights and little aggression from the beasts. He supposed that they were merely too dispirited, cold and hungry to expend the energy.
There were too many similarities, Petrov thought, between the strays and the city's impoverished retirees. Both were unwanted reminders of an earlier time, when people had jobs and money enough to support a family, a grandparent and a pet. Then, almost overnight, the Soviet Union was gone, and with it the promises it had made. Vanished overnight were the adequate pension, the free flat, the medical care and the revered status of a worker who had given valuable service to a grateful nation.
Many pensioners were compelled to supplement the Hr 75 they received from the successor government by bundling odd scraps of cardboard, collecting bottles and browsing dustbins for castoffs that could be sold or eaten. The high point, Petrov supposed with a wry grin, was that the garbage was better today than it had been during Soviet days. Those who had money now had adopted the West's wastefulness as well as its acquisitiveness.
It was ironic, he thought. In Soviet days, the elderly didn't have to "shop" in garbage bins. But if they had, they wouldn't have found so much worth taking.
Petrov entered the subway system and caught the blue line train to Independence Square, a quick stroll from his newspaper's office. As he settled into his routine, he found his thoughts returning to the old woman and the dogs. In truth, he thought, he was more interested in the dogs.
After the short walk to his office, Petrov dialed from memory the number of a friend at the Interior Ministry. As he did, he recalled one of the odd phrases that his university English teacher, an American, had used.
"I need to see a man about a dog," he thought.
The telephone was answered on the third ring.
"Good morning, Bohdan Myhailovich," Petrov said. "Are our streets safe for honorable souls yet?"
"How should I know?" his friend replied wearily. "I've yet to meet an honorable soul. And, judging by your work, neither have you."
"You sound tired, old friend," Petrov said, "It's only Monday."
"Not tired," Bohdan replied. "Just bored."
"We should have tea later, then," Petrov told his friend. "It should be good at 2 o'clock?"
"Yes, that's possible. I'll meet you at the cafe on Prorizna."
Petrov had known Bohdan since they were in secondary school. As boys, both had been avid fans of detective stories and mysteries, and Petrov supposed they still were. Their career choices had been different, but were rooted in the same inquisitive nature. While Petrov had followed journalism, Bohdan had gone to the security service academy in Kharkiv. His friend was now a mid-level bureaucrat in the ministry's training directorate. It was a job that would have suited Bohdan well, except that there was little money for training. As a result, Bohdan wrote reports and proposals that were rarely acted upon.
The saving grace was that Bohdan's work put him in contact with police agencies throughout the country, and a steady stream of gossip that sometimes yielded the nugget of a story.
Petrov found Bohdan waiting at the cafe - a bar, really, since the food on offer primarily consisted of slabs of dark rye bread slathered with mayonnaise and topped with a thin slice of cheese or ham, or the whole dried and salted fish that went well with beer. Bohdan sat at a white plastic table with a carafe containing 200 grams of vodka and two plastic cups in front of him. Afternoon tea, both men knew, was a euphemism. Petrov poured vodka into the cups.
The bar was little more than a tent, open on one side, allowing patrons at the four tables to watch the traffic pass by. A light breeze subdued the mid-June sun, but had no cooling effect on the vodka that warmed from within.
A dog lay beneath one of the tables, sheltering in the shade. It could have been sleeping, or dead, but Petrov saw that its eyes were open, watching, lest a customer carelessly drop a piece of bread.
"Want to adopt him?" Bohdan's question came from nowhere.
"What?"
"That dog you've been staring at," Bohdan said with a smile. "Take him home, make a proper pet of him."
"You could walk him for me," Petrov said. "It's a great way to meet a girl, walking a dog."
"I'm more likely to meet a dog while walking a girl," Bohdan said. "Or to step on a dog, or his calling card."
"There are enough of them, the poor beggars," Petrov replied, looking at the dog, who had tired of waiting for food and was busy cleaning himself. "Do you know why a dog licks himself?"
"Because he can," said Bohdan, grinning at the joke they both had heard years before.
"There really are too many of them," Petrov said. "They're a sorry nuisance." He told Bohdan of the encounter that the old woman had at the entrance to the Metro earlier that day.
"The city collects some of them, of course," Bohdan said. "But only after they've bitten someone or formed a pack. Mostly there isn't money to pay for dogcatchers, or anywhere to put them once they've been collected. And killing them causes the activists to rise up."
"So we humanely let them starve, or freeze, or kill each other," Petrov said.
"It is a problem among many problems," Bohdan said. "And dogs don't vote."
Bohdan got up and retrieved another 200 grams of vodka from the bar. As he sat down, he looked at Petrov.
"I have heard that there is one program, but it is not talked about much," he said.
The words were a gift to Petrov. "What is this program?" he asked.
"I don't know much, but there are some men - policemen - who work unofficially with people in the state veterinary inspectorate. They are called shershen, hornets."
"Dog catchers?"
"Not officially," Bohdan said. "More like street cleaners. They kill and dispose of the animals. They work at night, so the public doesn't see."
"What the public doesn't know, they can't raise a stink about, right?"
"Their work would be ... controversial, wouldn't it? No, this is a quiet group, doing a public service that is best performed quietly," Bohdan aid.
"Interesting," Petrov mused. "People notice more stray dogs and complain, but nobody would notice fewer strays."
"They don't want publicity, so keep your pen in your pocket. Chase after a parliament deputy, instead," Bohdan advised.
"Still, it would be interesting to know more," Petrov said.
"That's not likely to happen," Bohdan said. After a thoughtful pause, he asked, "What do you think? About these hornets, I mean?"
"I don't approve of vigilantes," Petrov said. "But we live in a time and place where the government either cannot or will not provide some pretty basic public services. I hate to think of these poor bastards being killed, but it does seem to be a solution to a problem of our own making," Petrov said. "But why do they do it? These hornets, I mean. What's in it for them if there's no budget for animal control?"
"Believe it or not, my friend, policemen are people, too." Bohdan refreshed the cups with vodka and took a bite of bread and cheese. "Sure, money's important, and most of us do generate income that isn't handed to us by the government. Who can live on the salary a lieutenant earns? But we become policemen because we want to do something interesting and important. We want to protect people."
"That's why you became a cop, I know," Petrov said. "And neither of us are likely to get rich in our jobs. But are you doing anything interesting and important? I mean no offense, muzhik, but writing training scenarios nobody will use because there are no funds..."
"It is not what I thought it would be," Bohdan replied. "But I am not the only man in Ukraine who has an unchallenging job. It keeps me out of the flat."
"Even late at night?"
"What do you mean?"
"The hornets ... do you work with them, to relieve your boredom?"
"That again!" Bohdan was getting agitated, and Petrov guessed he should change the subject, but something about this clandestine group of bored policemen intrigued him. If they would kill stray dogs as a secret avocation, he thought, what else was possible? Bums? Junkies? No, that was not the Bohdan he knew.
"This operation, I should not have mentioned it to you," Bohdan said slowly.
"But you did," Petrov said. "It intrigues me, I admit.
I would like to know more about it, and meet these men. Not to write about it, necessarily, so much as to understand them."
"I don't know if that it is a good idea," Bohdan said uneasily. "We shall see. But now I must return to my desk, and those reports that are so highly regarded."
The two men left the bar, walking in different directions but sharing similar, disturbing thoughts.
Two nights later, at 10 p.m., Petrov sat in his flat watching a movie on television when his mobile phone chirped. The display indicated that Bohdan was calling.
"The hornets swarm tonight," Bohdan said. "If you are still interested in meeting some of them, show up at the little church in Volodymyrsky Market at 2:00 a.m.. Wear dark clothes and sneakers. No camera, no recorder, not even a pen and paper. Nothing, understand?"
Bohdan hung up without waiting for an answer.
Petrov had the taxi drop him in front of the Ukraine Palace, and from there he walked down the dark side street off Krasnyarmyska to the market and the small Orthodox chapel. He lit a cigarette and waited. A trio of loud, drunken teens were making their way past the market when a black Land Cruiser drove up and stopped at the curb. The window rolled down and Bohdan motioned to him to get in.
"This is my brother, Sasha," he said, introducing Petrov. The three other men in the car said perfunctory hellos, but didn't seem especially welcoming. Bohdan was right, Petrov thought. This group didn't want a lot of people knowing about its work.
As the men drove through the city, a set of small black pistols were distributed, along with a plastic box containing syringe darts.
"You can shoot?" the man seated next to Petrov asked.
"Passably. I take it that we will be at fairly close range?"
"Yes. It is best to be within three meters. Aim for the haunches. They go down quickly and peacefully."
"Where are we going?" Petrov asked.
"Tonight, Podil," the driver said. "We know several places where the strays sleep. If we're lucky, we can get 30 or more off the street."
They did better than that. Over the next two hours, the group found 42 animals, usually in threes and fours. One of the men would approach and toss a few chunks of meat their way. When the dogs converged on the free meal, they were quickly darted.
Petrov rarely fired his darts into the animals, preferring instead to hang back and watch the others work. After the dogs were down, the men moved them into a corner or under a staircase. The leader, Vasyl, would call someone he referred to as "the cleaner" on his mobile phone and relay information on the number and location of the dogs.
In the car between stops, the men discussed football and police gossip, never the work at hand. It became obvious that the driver had been tipped on where to look by local menty. There was no exultation, no outward expression of joy in the morning's work. Instead, it was methodical, workmanlike.
"The darts work quickly," Petrov once ventured.
"They are prepared by the veterinary service. They know what it takes," said one of the men. "Don't shoot yourself in the foot. You won't have time to say, 'ouch.'"
At 4:00 a.m., the group had finished, and was headed to the center. Vasyl invited Petrov to stay with them and have vodka, but he declined, claiming he needed an early start the next day. Petrov parted with them in Podil, where he told them he would catch a taxi home.
Instead of catching a taxi, however, Petrov walked to the spot were the group had left four dogs. They were still there - in a cluster just inside the arch leading to a courtyard off Yaroslavska. Petrov waited for the arrival of the cleaners, who he had been told followed the hornets by about 30 minutes. After all, it wouldn't do to have people stumbling across mounds of dead dogs in the morning, one of the men had told him.
Petrov was standing in the courtyard, smoking, when a truck pulled into the archway. Two women in heavy coats climbed out while a man sat at the wheel. The cleaners had arrived.
The woman leaned down and appeared in the tying strips of cloth to the animals, then loaded them, one by one, into the back of the van. Petrov briskly walked past the truck into the street as the women were finishing their work. Before the doors where shut, Petrov cast a sideways glance into the van.
Petrov tried to conceal his surprise at what he saw: The dogs had rags tied securely around their muzzles.
"Why muzzle a dead dog?" he thought.
Walking quickly to the intersection, Petrov was lucky to see an aging Zhugali approach. He held out his hand, and it stopped as the van drove past.
"I'll give you Hr 30," he said. "Just follow my friends, there, in that van."
It was an odd request, the old driver thought, but for Hr 30...
The old driver patted the seat beside him. "If it is more than a few kilometers..."
"Don't worry," Petrov said. "I'll pay you."
They didn't have far to go. The van headed to the left bank, near Darnytsya, eventually pulling up outside an industrial building. Petrov had the driver continue past and stop around the corner. He paid the man, and backtracked to where the van had stopped.
It was gone.
The building, according to a weathered sign, was the Heroes of Stalingrad Boot Factory - a former state-run enterprise that had gone bankrupt shortly after Ukraine's independence. More than a decade later, the building was one of many such derelicts, unused and crumbling. Petrov walked around the area and found the doorway to a small room that may have been the plant's security office or store. There was no door anymore, and the 100 square-meter room was strewn with garbage. He heard movement in the half-light and turned to find two people sitting on the floor just inside the door. A boy in his late teens was propped with his back to the wall, he head rolled to the side in a narcotic haze. The girl beside him rose to her feet.
"Leave us alone," she said. "Get out of here."
She was pretty and thin, about 17, Petrov guessed. She wore a jacket too heavy for the mild spring weather. In her right hand, held down at her side, she clutched a small bag and a hypodermic needle.
"Just looking for a quiet place to drink," Petrov lied as he moved to the door. "Sorry."
Back on the street, Petrov circled the building, half-convinced that he'd lost the van and wasted his money coming out here and bothering the local narcomen. He found a steel gate leading into the factory's courtyard, and pushed it open. A few meters distant, he saw the van parked by a loading dock.
Petrov approached the vehicle carefully, but there was no sign of activity. The door was open, and he could see that the dogs were no longer in the truck. Petrov climbed the three steps to the loading dock, and ventured inside the old factory.
Lights shone through a doorway to Petrov's left, and he found himself in what had been a large storeroom. He was not prepared for what he saw and recoiled with a mixture of fear and revulsion.
Half the dogs lay in a pile, their muzzles still secured by scraps of cloth. A few stirred, the sedative from the darts beginning to lose effect. About 10 others were hanging suspended from chains, bleeding into a grate in the floor. They had each been neatly decapitated.
Petrov ducked back through the door to the loading dock and took a breath of air. "What the hell?" he muttered to himself.
Cautiously, he ventured back inside the building. Three women - one of them Petrov recognized as from the "cleaning" crew, were at work skinning and butchering carcasses, cutting meat from bones and tossing it, along with heart, liver and kidneys, onto a large wooden table, where another woman worked with an electric meat grinder. A man wielding a snow shovel scraped fur, bones and offal from the floor and deposited it into a large container. None of them noticed Petrov, who stood quietly in the doorway, obscured from the light.
The girl Petrov had seen earlier with the drug addict entered through a door at the far end of the room and crossed to the pile of drugged dogs. She lifted one and deftly slid a large sharp knife across its throat before hanging it to bleed out.
That's when she saw Petrov standing in the doorway.
"You!" she exclaimed, almost as surprised as Petrov. "What the hell are you doing in here?"
Petrov was trying to come up with a suitable answer when he felt a hand firmly clamp down on his shoulder.
"I'll get rid of him, Tanya," Petrov heard a familiar voice behind him. He turned to see his friend, Bohdan. "Come on, let's get out of here."
Petrov proceeded his friend out of the building, across the courtyard, and onto the street. Each time Petrov tried to talk, Bohdan shook his head firmly. Petrov could see that the policeman was frustrated and angry.
Once on the street, the men walked in silence for three blocks through the quiet, dark warehouses and derelict factories. Finally, Bohdan stopped and lit a cigarette.
"Damn you," he said. "I knew you were up to something when you left us early. Why did you have to come over here?"
Bohdan shook his head grimly and continued before Petrov could say anything. "I knew inviting you was a mistake. You don't understand. You can't."
"Try me." It was all Petrov could think of saying. "Tell me about it."
"We have too many strays," Bohdan sighed and leaned against the brick wall of a shuttered building, his cigarette glowing in the dim light. "Too many strays, and too many hungry pensioners."
"Many can't afford kasha, sugar, or tea, much less meat, on what the state pays them," he said. "So we help them."
"We sedate the strays - poisoning them would taint the meat - and the old women do the rest. They get the meat and what they can't use they sell, cheap, to other old people."
Petrov thought of the ground meat that Olha's mother had sold them, and for a moment thought he'd never eat zrazy again.
"But the girl?" Petrov asked. "She was no pensioner."
"She and her boyfriend are addicts," Bohdan said. "They do the one job nobody else wants. They do the killing."
"We do a public service," Bohdan continued. "We help people. We make it possible for them to live, to eat and to buy food. And we relieve the suffering of the strays."
"You can't write about this," Bohdan warned. "Nobody would believe you. The authorities will deny it. And the little factory you saw will be gone tomorrow."
"The only person who would be injured by your story is me," Bogdan said. "Because I screwed up and introduced you to the hornets. They would not be pleased to know I brought a reporter."
Petrov said nothing, but turned and walked down the street, leaving his friend behind, smoking in the shadows.
Four hours later, Petrov sat at his desk and stared into his computer screen. He replayed his friend's words over and over again in his mind before he decided what he would do.
Then his fingers began to flutter over the keyboard.
B. Micto is the pseudonym of a Kyiv writer.
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