“He’s keeping the prosecutor’s office in line for the Emergency Committee. The Committee is such a collection of Party hacks and all-out drunks that Rodionov shines by comparison. Of course the Committee will win because people always recognize the crack of a whip. The trouble is that the coup is so unnecessary. Everyone could have been rich. Now we’re going to go back to a system of counting crumbs.”

Arkady nodded at the crates. “Those aren’t crumbs. Why are you moving them if the Committee will win?”

“In the wildly remote unlikelihood that the attack fails, people are going to trace the route of the tanks very quickly. Once they’re here, they’ll go right to the bunkers and we’d lose everything.”

Arkady looked in the direction Borya had gone. “I’d like to see.”

“Why not?” Max jumped off the truck, happy to oblige.

The space inside the bunker was narrow, designed for a dozen men to sweat out a nuclear holocaust and live like apes around a vented generator so that they could radio troops that had been crisped in the field. The generator, throbbing like a Trabi, powered red emergency lights. Borya was covering a painting with an oilcloth.

“It’s tight,” Max said. “We had to get rid of the radiation counters. They didn’t work anyway.”

He played a flashlight. The eye imagines a mine with veins of malachite, lapis or gold twisting into the ground. This was even brighter. Some of the paintings were crated, but most were not, and the beam lit a canvas covered with the primal stripes of Matiushin, in colors as fresh and vivid as the day they were painted. Max moved the beam across a palm tree by Sarian, Vrubel’s swans, radiant suns of Iuon, an angelic cow by Chagall. An ogre by Lissitzky overlapped erotic sketches by Annenkov. Above a kaleidoscope by Popova was a fighting cock, all whirling feathers, by Kandinsky. Arkady felt he had stepped into a mine of images, as if a culture had been buried.