“Where did it come from?” Arkady asked. He couldn’t imagine the Russian State Museum lending one of its most valuable possessions to a private gallery.

“Patience,” said Max. “The question is, what will it bring?”

Irina said, “It’s priceless.”

“Only in rubles,” Max said. “The people here have Deutsche marks, yen and dollars.”

Thirty minutes after the doors were opened, security guards herded everyone into the theater section, where the video artist Arkady remembered from Tommy’s party was waiting beside a VCR and a parabolic rear-projection screen. There weren’t enough chairs, so people sat on the floor and crowded the walls. From the back Arkady overheard some of their comments. They were devotees and collectors, far more knowledgeable than he, but one thing even he knew: there was not supposed to be any “Red Square” by Malevich outside Russia.

Irina and Margarita Benz went to the front of the theater while Max joined Arkady. Only when the room was absolutely still did the gallery owner speak. She had a hoarse voice with a Russian accent, and though Arkady’s German wasn’t good enough to catch every word, he understood that she was placing Malevich at the level of Cézanne and Picasso as a founder of modern art, perhaps a little higher as the most relevant and challenging artist, the genius of his age. As Arkady recalled, Malevich’s problem had been that there was another genius residing at the Kremlin, and that genius, Stalin, had decreed that Soviet writers and artists should be “engineers of the human soul,” which in the case of painters meant producing realistic pictures of the proletariat building dams and collective farmers reaping wheat, not mysterious red squares.

Margarita Benz introduced Irina as the author of the catalog, and as she stepped forward Arkady saw her looking over the seated rows at him and Max. Even in his new pullover he was aware that he looked more like an uninvited guest than a patron of the arts, while Max was the opposite, practically a host. Or were he and Max bookends, meant to be a pair?

The lights went out. On the screen was “Red Square,” four times its actual size.

Irina spoke in Russian and German. Russian for him, Arkady knew; German for everyone else. “Catalogs will be available at the door and they will go into much greater detail than anything I say now. It’s important, however, that you have a visual understanding of the study this painting has undergone. There are some details you can see on a screen that you wouldn’t be able to find if we allowed you to pick up the painting and examine it by hand.”

It was both comforting and odd to hear Irina’s voice in the dark. It was like hearing her on the radio.