Peter said, “There’s nothing we can do about your finger- and footprints, they’re all over the apartment, but they won’t be easy to match. Your friend says she has no criminal record in Germany and there are no prints on you at all.”

“What about you?”

“I wiped the pistol and the clips, and I didn’t use my own gun.”

“That’s not what I meant. What about you?”

Peter drove for a while before he said, “There’s an official review every time you use a firearm. I don’t want to explain why I shot four men that I didn’t formally identify and warn. Through a wall? They could have been four visitors asking directions, collecting for Greenpeace or Mother Teresa.”

There was dust on Peter’s fingers. He wiped them on his shirt. “I don’t necessarily want to explain how I was helping my grandfather. This is a Russian gang war, I’m not going to let it turn into a public scandal about him.”

“If they do trace this to me, Federov knows your name,” Arkady said.

“With the coup, I think the consulate in Munich has more on its mind than me or you.”

On the police band, a dispatcher ordered ambulances to Friedrichstrasse. The urgency of the voice contrasted with the calm of the Tiergarten, the park’s rounded massing of shadow under morning stars.

Peter said, “You’ve lied to me from the start, but I have to admit that I’ve found out more from your lies than the lies I heard before. What is it about you, I wonder? I still expect the truth.”

Arkady said, “If we go to Savigny Platz, I might be able to show it to you.”

While Arkady sat on an arbor bench, his back tightened. He needed aspirin or nicotine, but he had no pills and didn’t indulge the telltale glow of a cigarette because the hedges around him stayed dark as the sky slowly lightened to gray. From the bench he couldn’t see Peter and Irina, parked a block away. He could see the lights of the gallery, which looked as if they had burned through the night.

In Moscow, under the same roof of clouds, tanks were rolling through the streets. Was it a military putsch? Was the Party reclaiming its role as the vanguard of the people? Had the work of national salvation begun in earnest, with both hands? Just as the Party had protected Prague, Budapest and East Berlin before? There should at least be a rumble of distant thunder.