“But if Renko sticks to it, it’s not bad. He’s Russian, after all. They’re not going to have a year to boil it out of him. And remember, Tommy drove an East German Trabant, not a very roadworthy car. That’s what we zero in on: the car was a death trap.” Michael patted Arkady on the back. “You’re probably lucky to be alive.”

“Losing Tommy must be a blow,” Arkady said to Gilmartin.

“More a personal tragedy. He wasn’t in any decision-making role. Research and translations, right?”

“Yes, sir,” Michael said.

“Though they’re important,” Gilmartin hastened to add. “Michael’s Russian is better than mine, but I think it’s fair to say that without our able translators the Russians on the staff would run amok.”

Gilmartin’s attention moved to his other concern. He pointed his pair of pliers at loose bolts that had rolled into a fold of the diagram. “Know anything about satellite dishes?” he asked Arkady.

“No.”

“I’m afraid I may have moved something out of alignment,” Gilmartin confessed.

“Sir, we’ll think about wind load, check the signal and make sure you didn’t damage any cable,” Michael said. “Looks like a good job.”

“Think so?” Reassured, Gilmartin stepped back for a better view. “You know, this would be even more convincing if we brought chairs out and got people to really use this as an umbrella.”

“Sir, I don’t think you’d actually want people drinking lemonade under a microwave receiver.”

“No,” Gilmartin said. He scratched his chin with the pliers. “Maybe just the neighbors.”

Stas lived alone … and not alone. Moving through the hall meant elbowing Gogol and Gorky. Poets Pushkin through Voloshin resided in a closet. The elevated thoughts of Tolstoy filled shelves above a Swedish sound system, CDs and television set. Newspapers and magazines were stacked by year. The least slip, Arkady thought, and a man could die under an avalanche of stale news, music, fantasy, romance.

Stas said, “I don’t like to think of it as messy. I prefer to think of it as life lived at full tide.”

“It looks like full tide,” Arkady said.

“Hotels are lacking in soul,” Stas said.

Laika sat by the door. Arkady could barely see her eyes through her fur, though he felt them following his every move.

“Thanks, I have someplace to go,” he said.

After the visit to the station president, Arkady had spent the rest of the day watching Benz’s house. It was dusk now and light was seeping from the room. He had decided to ride the subway until it shut down, or to buy a cheap ticket for an early-morning train so he could wait at the station. That way he would at least be more migrant than vagrant. He had come to Stas’s place only for his bag.

One question kept forcing itself to the front of Arkady’s mind. It was so obvious that it was hard work not asking. “Where is Max staying?”