He stood with his back to Scull, his gaze wandering up and down the street. It seemed somehow appropriate to him that Kaliningrad had taken its name from one of Vladimir Lenin’s less distinguished cronies; on its best days, it was a drab and cheerless place. The cars looked old. The people looked shabby. The streets were a blockish grid of factories, commercial warehouses, and precast concrete apartment buildings. Shoehorned between Poland, Lithuania, and the Baltic States, the region—which had been part of Germany until after World War I—was separated from the rest of Russia by several borders, and valuable primarily for its strategic position as a territorial buffer and port city. Even its attraction to German tourists was unromantic, based not on sightseeing or other leisure activities, but its status as a duty-free import-export zone.

“Might as well head for the bar,” Scull said, turning from the window.

“Hold on, I think we might be in luck.” Perry nodded his head toward the corner, where a street vender had begun unloading crates from the rear hatch of his van. There were fifteen or twenty people clotting the sidewalk around him, most of them women in shapeless gray clothing with big canvas grocery sacks on their arms.

Scull frowned and smoothed down a wisp of his thinning hair. It instantly sprang back out of place. His frown deepened.

“Forget it, I’m not waiting in any goddamn line,” he said, becoming surly. “Let’s go.”

Perry continued to hesitate. A pair of young men in ugly leather jackets—he guessed they were in their twenties—had sidled up to an old woman as she left the entrance to the shop. One of them was very tall, the other about average height. The shorter one was drinking out of a brown paper bag and walking slightly off balance.

Wrapped in a dark, well-worn winter shawl, her grocery bag weighted with goods, the woman tried to brush past them, but they quickly flanked her on both sides, keeping pace with her.

Perry felt a little jolt in the pit of his stomach. It was a sensation he’d experienced often in his days as a New York City detective.

His pale blue eyes locked on the three of them, he tapped Scull on the shoulder and motioned in their direction.

“Tell me, Vince, what’s wrong with that picture?” he said.

Scull stood beside him and looked blank. He was thinking exclusively about getting a drink now.

“Looks to me like a couple black marketeers making a pitch, is all.” He grunted. “Maybe they’ve got herring.”

Perry was shaking his head. “Black marketeers go after tourist cash. You ever see any of them stick to a babushka like that?”