“A wonderful place if you’re looking for a wasting disease. German law says the women are checked for AIDS every three months, which means they’re more scientific about the beer they drink than the women they sleep with. Anyway, trying to have sex in a Jeep can give you a hunchback and I have enough disabilities as it is. I thought the two of you were going to talk about famous battles of the Great Patriotic War.”

“We did for a little while.”

“Americans always want to talk about the war,” Stas said.

“Do you know Boris Benz?”

“No. Who’s he?”

There wasn’t a hint of deception or a pause for thought. Children performed clownish, wide-eyed lies. Adults gave themselves away with small gestures, casting the eyes toward memory or couching the lie with a smile.

“Could you stop at the train station?” Arkady asked.

When Stas pulled in among the buses and cabs at the north side of the station, Arkady hopped out, leaving his bag behind.

“You’re coming back?” Stas asked. “I have this feeling that you travel light.”

“Two minutes.”

Federov had brains of stale bread, but he might recognize a station locker key when he saw one, and it was even possible that he could remember the number. Arkady’s original deposit had expired and he had to pay the attendant an extra four Deutsche marks to open the locker and retrieve the videotape, which left him with seventy-five Deutsche marks for the rest of his vacation.

When he went outside, a traffic policeman was trying to move Stas’s shabby Mercedes out of the way of an Italian tour bus. The bus was polished like a gondola and had a furious musical horn. The more the bus honked and the policeman shouted, the louder the dog barked back. Stas himself sat behind the wheel and enjoyed a cigarette. “Not opera,” he told Arkady, “but close.”

Arkady was getting his bearings. He knew when Stas turned north toward the museums and east toward the Englischer Garten. He noticed that a white Porsche he had seen at the station was half a block behind them.

“So, who is Boris Benz?” Stas asked.

“I don’t really know. He’s an East German who lives in Munich and travels to Moscow. Tommy said he’d met him. That’s who we were looking for last night.”

“If you and Tommy were together, why weren’t you in the crash? Why didn’t you die too?”

“The police picked me up. I was coming back in a police car when we saw the fire.”

“They didn’t mention that you were along.”

“There was no reason to. An accident report is a short, simple form.”