The Soyuz Hotel was not one of Moscow’s best, but it was the closest to where he and Jaak had sighted her with Rudy.

The outside line rang. He picked it up.

“Who’s there?” Minin demanded.

Arkady laid the receiver on the desk and softly left.

By now they would be watching his apartment. Arkady drove to the south bank of the river, parked and walked to stay awake.

Moscow was beautiful at night. The other day when he was in the café with Polina, he had recited a poem by Akhmatova. “ ‘I drink to our ruined house, to the dolor of my life, to our loneliness together; and to you I raise my glass, to lying lips that have betrayed us, to dead-cold, pitiless eyes, and to the hard realities: that the world is brutal and coarse, that God in fact has not saved us.’ ” Polina, the romantic, had insisted that he recite it again.

Moscow was the ruined house, a cityscape that looked half-burned at night. Yet a street lamp showed an iron gate open to a court of graceful linden trees around a marble lion on a pedestal. Another light, askew, shone on a church cupola, azure, studded with gold stars. As if in Moscow anything that wasn’t ugly dared display itself only at night.

His own bitterness surprised Arkady. He had been willing to tolerate a background of meanness and corruption if he could carry out his own work at a certain level of efficiency, the way a surgeon might be content with setting bones in the middle of an endless catastrophe. His own honesty had become a shell for him, a way to both deny and accept the general misrule. See the contradiction, Arkady told himself—a lie, to be precise. Still, if he had lost Rudy and Jaak, never even caught sight of Kim and probably been an evil influence on Polina, just how good was he?

What did he want? What he wanted was far away. For years he had been patient, yet for the last week he had felt that every second was like another grain of sand rolling through his fingers, ever since he had heard Irina’s voice on the radio.

If he felt this way, maybe he was in the wrong city. Was it possible to escape from the ruins of his own life?

The Central Telegraph on Gorky Street was open twenty-four hours a day. At four A.M. its grand hall was populated by Indians, Vietnamese and Arabs wiring home, and by equally desperate Soviets trying to reach relatives in Paris, Tel Aviv or Brighton Beach.