Meanwhile, another rumor tells of his connection with the legendary Wimpe, the head salesman for Ostarzneikunde GmbH, a subsidiary of the IG. Because it is common knowledge that IG representatives abroad are actually German spies, reporting back to an office in Berlin known as “NW7,” this story about Tchitcherine is not so easy to believe. If it were literally true, Tchitcherine wouldn’t be here—there’s no possible way his life could have been spared in favor of this somnambulism among the eastern garrison towns.

Certainly he could have known Wimpe. Their lives, for a while, ran close enough in space and time. Wimpe was a Verbindungsmann in the classic style, with a streak of unhealthy enthusiasm: charming, handsome in a way that came at you in shelves or terraces of strength: amiable gray eyes, vertical granite nose, mouth that never quivered, chin incapable of fantasies… dark suits, immaculate leather belts and silver studs, horsehide shoes that gleamed under the skylights in the Czarist entrance-halls and across the Soviet concrete, always dapper, usually correct, informed and passionate about organic chemistry, his specialty and, it’s been suggested, his faith.

“Think of chess,” in his early days around the capital, looking for a comparison that Russians might take to, “an extravagant game of chess.” Going on to show, if his audience was receptive (he had salesman reflexes, knew to steer automatically along lines of least indifference) how each molecule had so many possibilities open to it, possibilities for bonding, bonds of different strengths, from carbon the most versatile, the queen, “the Great Catherine of the periodic table,” down to the little hydrogens numerous and single-moving as pawns… and the brute opposition of the chessboard yielding, in this chemical game, to dance-figures in three dimensions, “four, if you like,” and a radically different idea of what winning and losing meant… . Schwärmerei, his colleagues back home had muttered, finding excuses to drift away into other conversations. But Tchitcherine would have stayed. Foolish and romantic, he would have kept listening, even egged the German on.

How could they have failed to be observed? By and by, as the affair in its repressed and bloodless way proceeded, the Soviet chain of command, solicitous as any 19th-century family, would begin to take simple steps to keep the two apart. Conservative therapy. Central Asia. But in the weeks of vague and soft intelligence, before the watchers quite caught the drift of things… what heads and tails went jingling inside the dark pockets of that indeterminacy? Since his earliest days as a detail man, Wimpe’s expertise had been focused in cyclized benzylisoquinolines. Those of major interest being the opium alkaloids and their many variations. Right. The inner rooms of Wimpe’s office—a suite at an older hotel—were full of samples, German dope in amazing profusion, Wimpe the jinni of the West holding them up, vial after vial, for little Tchitcherine’s face to wonder at: “Eumecon, a 2% solution of morphine… Dionine (we add on an ethyl group, here, to the morphine, as you see) … Holopon and Nealpon, Pantopon and Omnopon, all mixtures of opium alkaloids as the soluble hydrochlorides… and Glycopon, as glycero-phosphates… . Here is Eucodal—a codeine with two hydrogens, a hydroxyl, a hydrochloride”—gesturing in the air around his basic fist—“hanging off different parts of the molecule.” Among these patent medicines, trappings and detailing were half the game—“As the French do with their dresses, nicht wahr? a ribbon here, a pretty buckle there, to help sell a sparer design… . Ah, this? Trivalin!” One of the jewels of his line. “Morphine, and caffeine, and cocaine, all in solution, as the valerates. Valerian, ja—root and rhizome: you may have older relatives who took it years ago as a nerve tonic… a bit of passementerie, you might say—some trimming over these bare molecules.”