“Admiring it, actually. Here is cheese from cows who graze on grass that grows on dikes a thousand miles away, and it’s not as rare as Russian cheese. Wax is a good medium of prints, isn’t it?”

“Humidity is not the best atmosphere.”

“It’s too humid for you?”

“I didn’t say I couldn’t do it, I just didn’t want to get your hopes up.”

“Do I look like a man with high hopes?”

“I don’t know; you’re different today.” It was not characteristic of Polina to be uncertain about anything. “You—”

Arkady put a finger to his lips. He heard a barely audible noise, like the fan of a refrigerator, except that he was standing by the refrigerator.

“A toilet,” Polina said. “Someone’s relieving themselves on the hour.”

Arkady went to the water closet and touched the pipes. Usually pipes banged and rang like chains. This sound was fainter, more mechanical than liquid, and inside Rosen’s apartment, not out. It stopped.

“On the hour?” Arkady asked.

“On the dot. I looked, but I didn’t find anything.”

Arkady went into Rudy’s office. The desk was undisturbed, the phone and fax silent. He tapped the fax and a red “alert” light blinked. Tapped harder and the button winked as regularly as a beacon. The volume had been turned all the way down. He pulled the desk forward and found facsimile paper that had scrolled between the desk and the wall. “First rule of investigation: pick things up,” he said.

“I hadn’t dusted here yet.”

The paper was still warm. On top was the transmission date and time, one minute ago. The message, typed in Russian, read: “Where is Red Square?”

Anyone with a map could answer that. He read the previous message. The transmission time on it had been sixty-one minutes ago: “Where is Red Square?”

You didn’t need a map. Ask anyone in the world—up the Nile, in the Andes or even in Gorky Park.

There were five messages in all, each sent on the hour, with the same insistent demand: “Where is Red Square?” The first also said, “If you know where Red Square is, I can offer contacts with international society for ten percent finder’s fee.”

A finder’s fee for Red Square sounded like easy money. The machine had automatically printed a long transmitting phone number across the top. Arkady called the international operator, who identified the country code as Germany and the city as Munich. “Do you have one of these?” he asked Polina.

“I know a boy who does.”

Close enough. Arkady wrote on Rudy’s stationery: “Need more information.” Polina inserted the page, picked up the receiver and dialed the number, which answered with a ping. A light flashed over a button that said Transmit, and when she pushed the button the paper started to roll.