Arkady had coffee at a stand-up cafeteria in the train station. Federov was right: outside Russia he didn’t know how to conduct an investigation. He had no Jaak or Polina. Without official authority he couldn’t enlist local police. Minute by minute, he felt more a stranger than at home. The counter was banked with apples, oranges, bananas, sliced sausage and pig’s knuckles, all for sale, yet he found his hand starting to swipe a sugar packet. He stopped. It was the hand of a Soviet cripple, he thought.

At the end of the bar was a man almost identical to him, with the same pallor and disheveled jacket, except that he was stealing both sugar and an orange. The thief gave him a conspiratorial wink. Arkady looked around. At either end of the central hall was a pair of soldiers in gray uniforms with H&K submachine guns. Antiterrorist troops. Munich had its troubles, too.

He fell in with a group of Turks walking by the cafeteria toward the subway. At the steps, he turned and joined the crowd climbing up and hurrying to the station exits. Outside, he balanced on the plaza curb, waiting with all the good Münchners for the light to change, when he suddenly took off on his own against the red, through a gap in the traffic, to an island in the middle of the street, then raced, again alone, toward people who were lined along the far curb and watching him aghast.

Arkady made a detour through an arcade and came out on the pedestrian mall of the day before. He kept moving, checking each passing telephone booth without success for a directory, until at a side-street car park he found a yellow kiosk with a phone, bench and book. A tiny woman whose coat touched her toes stood by the kiosk and looked pointedly at her watch, as if Arkady were late. The phone rang and she glided by him to take possession of the booth.

A sign on the door indicated that this was one of the few German public phones that accepted calls. The woman’s conversation was explosive but quick, ending with a decisive slap of the receiver on the hook. She slid the door open, announced, “Ist frei,” and walked away.

The telephone was his hope. In Moscow, public booths were gutted or out of order. Phones, when they rang, were usually ignored. In Munich, booths were maintained like bathrooms—better than bathrooms. When the phone rang, Germans answered.

Arkady looked up the Bayern-Franconia Bank and asked to speak to Herr Schiller. He imagined he would be stirring up some clerk, but there was a certain hush on the other end that let him know his call had gone to another level.

A different operator asked, “Mit wem spreche ich, bitte?”

Arkady said, “Das Sowjetische Konsulat.”