The pistol came with a folding wire stock that Arkady straightened and put against his shoulder. He pushed the safety-rate selector to full automatic and laid the three other ammo clips in front of him like extra cards. The hall light edged the black rectangle of the door. In this frame the door seemed to vibrate.

In the hall, the elevator stopped. He heard the doors of the car slide open, pause, then shut. The elevator went on up to the sixth floor.

There was a knock. Irina slipped in and shut the door behind her. Her eyes found Arkady. “I knew you weren’t coming up.”

“Did you call?”

“A machine answered. I left a message.”

“You’re missing Max,” Arkady said. “He’s going up right now.”

“I know. I used the stairs. Don’t try to make me leave without you. I did that before. That was my mistake.”

Arkady didn’t take his eyes from the door. Max might be temporarily confused to discover Irina gone, he thought. The elevator stayed on the sixth floor for ten minutes, though, longer than made sense unless Max was quietly coming down the stairs. But when the elevator activated again it went straight down to the garage and seconds later Irina said she saw the Daimler leave, with the Mercedes following.

Irina said, “I always imagined who you were with. I saw someone very young, for some reason. Small and dark, bright, passionate. I thought of places you would walk, what you’d talk about. When I wanted to torture myself, I imagined an entire day at the beach—blankets, sand, sunglasses, the sound of waves. Evening in a cabin. She tunes a shortwave radio looking for romantic music when she happens to hear me. She stops, because the station is Russian, after all. Then she moves the dial and you let her; you don’t say a word. So I imagined my revenge. She gets a trip to Germany. By coincidence we share the same compartment of a train, and as it’s a long trip we talk, and naturally I discover who she is. We usually end up on an icy platform in the Alps. She’s a nice woman. I push her off the platform anyway for taking my place.”

“You kill her, not me?”

“I’m mad, I’m not crazy.”

From the apartment floor, the street had a sound like surf. A wash of headlights moved across the ceiling.

Arkady saw a car park one block north on Friedrichstrasse. He couldn’t tell the make, though he could see that no one got out. A second car parked a block south.