“That’s what I was talking about,” Julya said. She looked around. “This place is so low-class. Did you know that there are fifteen-year-old girls working the sidewalk?” she asked Arkady. “At night girls work the rooms, knocking on doors. I can’t believe Jaak asked me here.”

“Julya works at the Savoy,” Jaak explained. The Savoy was a Finnish venture around the corner from the KGB. It was the most expensive hotel in Moscow.

“The Savoy says they don’t have any prostitutes,” Arkady said.

“Exactly. It’s very high-class. Anyway, I don’t like the word prostitute.”

Putana was the word most often used for high-class hard-currency prostitutes. Arkady had the feeling that Julya wouldn’t like that word either.

“Julya’s a multilingual secretary,” Jaak said. “A good one, too.”

A man in a warm-up suit set his athletic bag on a chair, sat down and ordered a cognac. A few sprints, a little cognac; it sounded like a good regimen. He had the knotty hair of a Chechen, but worn long in back, short on the sides, with curly bangs dyed an off-orange. The bag looked heavy.

Arkady watched the attendant. “He doesn’t seem happy. Rudy was always here when he counted. If Kim killed Rudy, who’s going to protect him?”

Jaak read from a notebook. “According to the hotel, ‘Ten entertainment machines leased by TransKom Services Cooperative from Recreativos Franco, S.A., show total average reported receipts of about a thousand dollars a day.’ Not bad. ‘The tokens are counted daily and checked daily against the meters in the backs of the machines. The meters in the slots are locked in; only the Spanish can get into them and reset them.’ You saw …”

“Twenty sacks,” Arkady said.

Jaak calculated. “Each sack holds five hundred tokens and twenty sacks is twenty-five hundred dollars, so that’s one thousand dollars for the state and fifteen hundred dollars a day for Rudy. I don’t know how he did it, but by the sacks he beat the meters.”

Arkady wondered who TransKom was. It couldn’t be just Rudy. That kind of import-and-lease needed Party sponsorship, some official institution willing to be a partner.

Jaak turned his eyes to Julya. “Marry me again.”

“I’m going to marry a Swede, an executive. I have girlfriends in Stockholm who’ve already done it. It’s not Paris, but the Swedes appreciate someone who’s good with money and knows how to entertain. I’ve had proposals.”

“And they talk about the Brain Drain,” Jaak said to Arkady.

“One gave me a car,” Julya said.

“A car?” Jaak was more respectful.

“A Volvo.”