“Since we’re here, we might as well enjoy it.” Tommy talked in gusts, gathering bravado. “Christ, it will only take a few minutes.”

Arkady was stunned, and felt stupid for being so. Who was he to judge anyone else? In another second, Tommy would be pleading. He took the keys. “I’ll be in the car.”

The Trabi was parked across the highway. From it he saw Tommy head directly to a Jeep, agree instantly to a price and run around to the passenger side. The Jeep backed away into the dark.

Arkady lit a cigarette and found an ashtray, but no radio. What a perfectly Socialist car, designed for bad habits and ignorance, and he was its perfect driver.

Headlights swung on and off the road, creating an ad hoc junction. Perhaps it wasn’t so much a matter of there being no crime in Germany as how crime was defined. In Moscow prostitution was against the law. Here it was a regulated trade.

A Trooper pulled into the slot that the Jeep had abandoned. The driver turned on her red light, primped her curls in the rearview mirror, made up her mouth, adjusted her bra, pushed up her breasts like muscles and then picked up a paperback. The woman in the car ahead stared with eyes that looked as if they were painted on her lids. Neither of them looked like a Tima. Arkady assumed the name was short for Fatima, so he searched for someone vaguely Islamic. At this distance the lights were softened to candle glow. Each windshield looked like a separate icon with a separate virgin bored to distraction.

After twenty minutes he began to get nervous about Tommy. An image of the cars on the far side of the turnout shone in his mind. A car rocking harder and harder on its springs, its curtain closed tight. If ever there was a place where sex and violence could be confused, this was it. The sound of someone being throttled and beaten? From the outside, that could sound like love.

It was an unreasonable fear, but he was relieved to see Tommy darting nimbly back across the road. The American dove into the car and squeezed behind the steering wheel. Breathing hard, he asked, “Was I gone long?”

“Hours,” Arkady said.

Tommy pressed himself back into his seat to tuck in his shirt and button his jacket. The smell of perfume and sweat invaded the small car with his return, like the aroma of a trip to an exotic land. He was so proud of himself, Arkady wondered how often he got up his nerve to approach a prostitute.

“Definitely worth the money. Sure you won’t change your mind?” he asked.

“I’ll take your word for it. Let’s go.”

Arkady’s door opened. Peter Schiller had to crouch to be on a level with them. “Renko, you didn’t answer your phone.”