He was in the kitchen with a sponge and a can of Ajax, working on deglutinizing the burners on the stove, when he heard a dull thump behind him and turned round to see the professor himself in the doorway, jerking his fists up and down and kicking the wall with one of his heavy black brogans. The professor—he was an expert in Soviet law, as it turned out, and just off the boat after a year in Moscow—looked to be in his forties, clean-shaven, tall and fit, with a pair of Trotskyite glasses pinched over the bridge of his nose. Fitz had never laid eyes on him before. In fact, he was so far removed from all this he’d still been back in New York, in Beacon, wrapping up the school year when the professor had set sail for Leningrad. “You!” the professor snapped. “Who in hell are you?”

“I’m, well, I’m—” Fitz began, momentarily at a loss. He had a bucket in one hand, sponge in the other, and his scalp was prickling as if he’d just stepped out of the shower. He wanted to itch it, but his hands were encased in wet rubber gloves—grease-smeared wet rubber gloves—and so he compressed his neck and rubbed the back of his head against his collar, which was dirty. Everything about him was dirty. “A student,” he said finally.

“A student!” the professor threw back at him as if it were the most preposterous designation in the English language and a lie and a calumny to boot. “Of whom, I’d like to know—Leary? Dr. Leary? The man I—entrusted—this house to?” He kicked the wall once more with a dull booming vibration that rattled all the way down the kitchen counter and into the cracked and mounded dishes on the drainboard. “Where is he? I demand to see him this minute!”

“He’s not here, he’s—in Mexico. And he asked me to give you the key?” He stripped off one glove and began digging in his front pocket until he retrieved the dull brass key and held it up in evidence.

A woman had appeared beside the professor now, elegant, mid-thirties, wearing a fur coat though it was summer. Her eyes were full, her makeup runneled with tears. “Oh, my sweet Jesus,” she wailed. “This is beyond outrageous, it’s, it’s—vandalism.” She turned to her husband, who hadn’t taken his eyes off Fitz, not for a second. “Marty, who is this, what’s going on?”