When they emerged on a boulevard that ran by the psuedo-Greco museum of the Haus der Kunst, Arkady began to recognize where he was. Left was Königinstrasse, the “Queen Street” that Benz lived on. Stas turned right, and then along the park. For the first time Arkady noticed a sign that said ENGLISCHER GARTEN. Stas turned onto a one-way street with the red-clay courts of a tennis club on one side and a high white wall on the other. A dark row of beeches that grew along the wall screened whatever was behind it from the street. Bikes rested against a steel barrier that ran the length of the curb.

Stas said, “When I wake up in the morning, I ask Laika, ‘What’s the most perverse thing I can do today?’ I think today will be one of my most interesting ones.”

Parking was on the diagonal in front of the courts. Stas picked up a briefcase, locked the car and led Arkady across the street and through a gate of steel slats that was monitored by cameras and mirrors. Inside was a compound of white stucco buildings, with more cameras clinging to the walls.

Like anyone who had grown up in the Soviet Union, Arkady had two contradictory images of Radio Liberty. All his life the press had described the station as a front for the American Central Intelligence Agency and its loathsome collection of Russian stooges and traitors. At the same time, everyone knew that Radio Liberty was the most reliable source of information about Russia’s missing poets and nuclear accidents. Still, though Arkady had himself been accused of treason, he felt uneasy about Stas and where they were headed.

He had half-expected American marines, but the guards in the station’s reception foyer were German. Stas showed his ID and gave his briefcase to a guard, who pushed it into the leaded box of an X-ray detector. Another guard motioned Arkady to a desk protected by thick, lead-reinforced glass. The desk was bigger, the chairs plusher; otherwise there was a generic sameness to American and Soviet reception areas, an international design to accommodate the traveling pacifist and the bomb-heaving terrorist.

“Passport?” the guard asked.

“I haven’t got it,” Arkady said.

“His hotel is still holding it,” Stas volunteered. “It’s that fabled German efficiency we hear so much about. This is an important visitor. The studio is waiting for him right now.”

Reluctantly the guard accepted the trade of a Soviet driver’s license in exchange for a visitor’s pass. Stas peeled off the backing and slapped it on Arkady’s chest. A glass door buzzed, and they pushed through into a corridor of cream-colored walls.

Arkady stopped before they went any farther. “Why are you doing this?”

“Yesterday, I told you I didn’t like it when lightning hit the wrong man. Well, you definitely have all the marks of a singed body.”