Peter didn’t argue the point. “When you called yesterday from Zoo Station I was there waiting for you. I followed you around Berlin. You noticed the city has changed?”

“Yes.”

“When the Wall came down there was such intensity of celebration. East and West Berlin back together. It was like a wild night of love-making. Afterwards was like waking in the morning and finding this woman you had yearned for so long was going through your pockets, your wallet, taking the keys to your car. The euphoria was gone. That’s not the only change. We were ready for the Red Army. We weren’t ready for the Russian mafia. I was behind you yesterday. You saw them.”

“It’s like Moscow.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of. Compared to your gangsters, German criminals are a Salzburg choir. German killers clean up after themselves. Russian mafias just shoot each other on the streets. Boutiques are keeping doors locked, hiring private guards, moving to Hamburg or Zurich. It’s bad business.”

“You don’t seem upset.”

“They haven’t reached Munich yet. Life was boring until you came along.”

Arkady felt that once again Peter had taken flight, and all that he could do was see where he would land. He didn’t know how long Peter had followed him, and waited to hear the names of Max Albov, Irina Asanova, Margarita Benz.

Somewhere in the woods, among the cottages and country lanes, the highway crossed the former East German border and Potsdam came into view. At least the part of Potsdam that was proletariat housing and might have appeared promising in an architectural rendering, but in reality was ten stories of anonymous balconies with fractured cement.

Old Potsdam was hidden in a canopy of beech trees. Peter parked on a leafy boulevard in front of a three-story town house. This was the kaiser’s kind of mansion, a wrought-iron gate and portico wide and high enough for a carriage, marble stairs to double doors, classical stone facing, carved scrollwork above the windows that were high enough to show coffered ceilings, an artist’s tower rising above a tiled roof. Except that so much of the facing had fallen off the bricks that a makeshift scaffolding covered the second floor. A wooden ramp ran down one side of the stairs; the other side was broken. Some windows were bricked in, some boarded up. A stunted tree and tall grass grew from the caved-in turret of the tower. The grounds were long abandoned to rubble and weeds of opportunity. A ferrous powder compounded of rust, soot and the dust of decaying bricks covered the gate. But the building was inhabited; from head to foot, the balconies and surviving windows wore boutonnieres of red geraniums, and dim lights and slow movement showed through the glass. By the gate was a sign that said MEDICAL CLINIC.