She cried with sharp intakes of breath. In the mirror, he saw the wall wiped with his blood. They looked as if they were climbing together from a black pit to the light, on one pair of legs that had never been so strong before. She held on, her fingers curling in his hair.

“Arkasha!” She leaned back while inside he drove closer to a yielding core. She held on as desperately, her mouth on his again, on his cheek and against his ear whispering with a voice as hoarse as his until the last inner resistance dissolved.

As his legs failed, they dropped slowly to their knees to the tiles of the floor, then he on his back and she astride.

There was a moment of softness. She pulled her blouse up over her head. Her breasts were bare, the tips dark and hard. He felt himself grow large again.

He filled his mouth with her breast. Her hair hung in a curtain around her face. Her tears sluiced down her neck and between her breasts to him, a mixed taste of salt and sweet. And forgiveness. This was the absolution from and for herself. When she threw her head back, he saw below her right eye a delicate blue flaw, her own Moscow scar. As she rode, her eyes closed as if he were rising inside along her spine up to her throat.

She twisted to be beneath him and spread to take him even farther in, her legs high, in flight. He drove her along the tiles. Inside, she carried him deeper, as if they could shed their bodies, shed the lost years, shed the pain. Save each other. Two persons in one skin.

They lay on the bathroom floor as if in bed, her head pillowed on his chest, her leg resting over his so that he felt her brush of hair against his thigh, a subtle contract of trust. So what if their flanks were red from the blood on the tiles? If Orpheus and Eurydice had emerged intact from hell, what would they look like?

Even in shadow, Irina looked exhausted. “I think you’re wrong. Max isn’t a killer. He’s smart. As soon as reforms started in Russia, he said it wasn’t reform, it was collapse. He was unhappy because our relationship hadn’t developed the way he’d hoped. He wanted to come back a hero.”

“By defecting again?”

“By making money. He said the people in Moscow needed him more than he needed them.”

“He must have been right.” If he had been wrong, Max never could have returned to Germany.

“He wants to prove he’s smarter than you.”

“He is.”

“Oh, no, you’re brilliant. I said I’d never let you be close to me again, yet here I am.”

“You think Max and I can work out our misunderstanding?”