Red, for example, was for the mafia from Lyubertsy, a workers’ suburb east of Moscow. Kim was unusual for being Korean, but otherwise he was typical of the boys who grew up there. The Lyubers were the dispossessed, the lads without elite schools, academic diplomas and Party connections, who had in the last five years emerged from the city’s metro stations first to attack punkers and then to offer protection to prostitutes, black markets, government offices. Red circles showed Lyubertsy spheres of influence: the tourist complex at Izmailovo Park, Domodedovo Airport, video hawkers on Shabalovka Street. The racetrack was run by a Jewish clan, but they bought muscle from Lyubertsy.

Blue was for the mafia from Long Pond, a northern dead-end suburb of barrack housing. Blue circles marked their interest in stolen cargo at Sheremetyevo Airport and prostitutes at the Minsk Hotel, but their main business was car parts. The Moskvitch auto factory, for example, sat in a blue circle. Rudy’s friend Borya Gubenko had not only risen to the top of Long Pond but had also brought Lyubertsy under his influence.

Islamic green was for the Chechens, Moslems from the Caucasus Mountains. A thousand lived in Moscow, with reinforcements that arrived in motorcades, all answering to the orders of a tribal leader called Makhmud. The Chechens were the Sicilians of the Soviet mafias.

Royal purple was reserved for Moscow’s own Baumanskaya mafia, from the neighborhood between Lefortovo Prison and the Church of the Epiphany. Their business base was the Rizhsky Market.

Finally, there was brown for the boys from Kazan, more a swarm of ambitious hit-and-run artists than an organized mafia. They raided restaurants on the Arbat, moved drugs and ran teenage prostitutes on the streets.

Rudy Rosen had been banker for them all. Just following Rudy in his Audi had helped Arkady to draw this brighter, darker Moscow. Six mornings a week—Monday through Saturday—Rudy had followed a set routine. A morning drive to a bathhouse run by Borya on the north side of town, then a swing with Borya to pick up pastries at Izmailovo Park and meet the Lyubers. Late-morning coffee at the National Hotel with Rudy’s Baumanskaya contact. Even lunch at the Uzbekistan with his enemy, Makhmud. The circuit of a modern Moscow businessman, always trailed by Kim on the motorcycle like a cat’s tail.

The night outside was still white. Arkady wasn’t sleepy or hungry. He felt like the perfect new Soviet man, designed for a land with no food or rest. He got up and left the office. Enough.

There was grillwork at each landing of the stairwell to catch “divers,” prisoners trying to escape. Maybe not only prisoners, Arkady thought on the way down.