On the other hand, Jaak might be dead, but he was not a bad detective. Arkady looked through all the drawers and under them, and then brought out Jaak’s oversized key. Each undercover detective had his own safe, a locked repository of his work. He tried the key on all four ancient safes in turn, fishing for a tumbler, until the last lock yielded and the iron door swung open to the three private shelves of Jaak’s life. On the lower shelf were dead files tied in red ribbon, a basement of Jaak’s professional memory. On the top shelf were personal items: loose photos of a boy and a man fishing, of the same boy and man holding a model plane, of that boy now grown into an army uniform and recognizable as Jaak posing with a happy but self-conscious woman smoothing her apron. They stood on the steps of a dacha. Light covered Jaak’s eyes, shade covered his mother’s. A picture of soldiers in their tent, singing, the one with the guitar Jaak. Divorce papers, eight years old, torn apart and taped back together. A snapshot of Jaak with Julya in an earlier phase of dark hair, blurred because they were plummeting on an amusement ride, also torn and taped together.

On the middle shelf was a gray criminal code book stuffed with the sloppy addenda of daily changing laws: protocol forms for investigation, search, interrogation; red directory of detectives in the Moscow region; loose Makarov slugs in copper casings. There were a surveillance photo of Rudy, a mug shot of a younger Kim, Polina’s pictures of the black market and of the burned shell of Rudy’s car. Also an interoffice envelope. Arkady opened it and found the German videotape he had given Jaak, along with two developed stills. So Jaak had got the pictures done.

They were individual photographs of the woman in the beer garden. On the reverse side of one, Jaak had written: “Identified by reliable source as ‘Rita,’ emigrated to Israel 1985.”

A romantic name, Rita, short for the flower, marguerite. He guessed Julya was the source. If Rita had married a Jew and got out, Julya would remember her.

Israeli? The combination of blond hair, black sweater and gold chain struck Arkady as a classic German style, added to a full red mouth and line of the cheek that were pure Slav. Why wasn’t she in the Jerusalem tape instead of the Munich one? Why had Arkady seen her in Rudy’s car and intercepted a glance from her that had read him and his Zhiguli as a man and machine all too familiar? Why had he seen her mouth on the tape, “I love you”?

The second picture was identical. On its back, Jaak had written: “Identified by Soyuz clerk as Mrs. Boris Benz. German. Arrived 5-8, departed 8-8.” Two days ago.