The guard hung up, welcomed Arkady with a glare and a visitor’s pass. After a buzz at the door he was back in the cream-carpeted hallway of Radio Liberty. The bulletin boards were changed, a sign of a well-run organization. Glossy photographs showed President Gilmartin leading a tour of Hungarian broadcasters and applauding the folkloric dancers from Minsk. Technicians with audiotape trafficked up and down the corridor. Ludmilla’s gray bangs bobbed in and out of a doorway.

“Did you come to bomb the director’s office or Michael’s? How much trouble am I in?” Stas asked.

“Which way is the Red Archive?”

“The stairs are between the soda and the snack machine. Bomb away.”

When Tommy boasted about the Red Archive being the greatest library of Soviet life outside Moscow, Arkady had pictured the lamps and musty stacks of the Lenin Library. As usual, he was unprepared for reality. There were no lamps in the Red Archive, only the aquarium glow of room-length fixtures. No books either, only microfiche files, motorized steel cabinets that glided on tracks. Instead of a reading room there was a machine that enlarged microfiche to legible size. Arkady ran a hand over a file in awe. It was as if Ancient Rus, Peter and Catherine the Great and the storming of the Winter Palace had been reduced to the head of a pin. He was relieved to see something as primitive as a wooden box with file cards in Cyrillic.

All the researchers scribbling away at desks were Americans. A woman with a blouse full of bows was delighted to see a Russian.

“Where was Tommy’s desk?” Arkady asked.

“The Pravda section.” She sighed and pointed to another door. “We miss him.”

“Of course.”

“There’s so much information coming these days,” she said. “There used to be none and now there’s too much. I wish it would just slow down.”

“I know what you mean.”

The Pravda section was a narrow room made smaller by shelves of bound copies of Pravda on one side and Izvestia on the other. At the end of the room a VCR was taping from a color television set. The station had to have a satellite dish because, though the sound was low, Arkady realized that he was watching Soviet news. On the screen, a crowd in shabby clothes was pushing over a truck. When it landed on its side, they swarmed into the back of it. A close-up of the driver showed his bloody nose. A different angle on the truck displayed the name of a cooperative for rendering tallow. People climbed out of it waving bones and black meat. Arkady realized how much he had been conditioned by a few days of ample German beer and food. Was it this bad, he asked himself? Was it really this bad?