In Makhmud’s stare, Arkady saw black irises locked like the lens of a camera. “In twenty-four hours there wasn’t a Chechen left in the Chechen Republic. Half a million people gone. The trucks put them on trains, in unheated freight cars which traveled for week after week after week in the middle of winter. Thousands died. My first wife, my first three boys. Who knows at what siding the guards threw their bodies out? When the survivors were finally allowed to climb down from the cars they found themselves in Kazakhstan, in Central Asia. Back home, the Chechen Republic was liquidated. Russian names were given to our towns. We were removed from maps, histories, encyclopedias. We disappeared. Twenty, thirty years went by before we managed to return to Grozny, even to Moscow. Like ghosts, we make our way back home to see Russians in our houses, Russian children in our yards. And they look at us and they say, ‘Animals!’ Now you tell me, who’s been the animal? They point fingers at us and shout, ‘Thief!’ Tell me, who’s the thief? When anyone dies, they find a Chechen and say, ‘Murderer!’ Believe me, I would like to meet the murderer. Do you think I should feel sorry for them now? They deserve everything that’s happening to them. They deserve us.”

Makhmud’s eyes became their most intense, dead coals come alive, and then dimmed. His fingers unclenched and released Arkady’s lapel. Fatigue folded into a smile across his face. “I apologize, I wrinkled your jacket.”

“It came wrinkled.”

“Nevertheless, I got carried away.” Makhmud smoothed the jacket. He said, “I’d like nothing more than to find Kim. Grapes?”

Beno handed back a wooden bowl overflowing with green grapes. By now, Arkady could see not so much a family resemblance among him, Ali and Makhmud as a likeness of species, like the bill of a hawk. Arkady took a handful. Makhmud opened a short knife with a hooked blade to carefully slice off a bunch. When he ate, he rolled down the window to spit on the ground.

“Diverticulitis. I’m not supposed to swallow the seeds. It’s a terrible thing to grow old.”

Polina was dusting Rudy’s bedroom for prints when Arkady arrived from the car market. He had never seen her out of her raincoat before. Because of the heat, she wore shorts, had knotted her shirt into a halter and tied her hair up in a kerchief, and with her rubber gloves and little camel’s-hair brush she looked like a child playing house.

“We dusted before.” Arkady dropped his jacket on the bed. “Aside from Rudy’s prints, the technicians got nothing.”

“Then you have nothing to lose,” Polina said cheerfully. “The human mole is in the garage tapping for trapdoors.”