“An investigator? I’m not surprised.” Feldman wore a fur hat, carried a briefcase and looked like Trotsky, down to a goat’s beard of snow white. He started a vigorous shuffle toward the river and Arkady fell in step beside him. “I have my own key. I didn’t steal anything. You want to search?”

Arkady ignored the invitation. “How do you know Rudy?”

“It’s the only time to work. I thank God I’m an insomniac. Are you?”

“No.”

“You look like one. See a doctor. Unless you don’t mind.”

“Rudy?” Arkady tried again.

“Rosen? I didn’t. We met once, a week ago. He wanted to talk about art.”

“Why art?”

“I’m a professor of art history. I told you I was a professor on the phone. You’re a hell of an investigator, I can tell already.”

“What did Rudy ask?”

“He wanted to know everything about Soviet art. Soviet avant-garde art was the most creative, most revolutionary period in history, but Soviet man is an ignoramus. I couldn’t educate Rosen in half an hour.”

“Did he ask about any paintings in particular?”

“No. But I catch your point and it is amusing. For years, the Party demanded Socialist Realism and people hung paintings of tractors on their walls and hid avant-garde masterpieces behind the toilet or under the bed. Now they’re dragging them out. Suddenly Moscow is full of art curators. You like Socialist Realism?”

“Socialist Realism is one of my weakest areas.”

“Are you talking about art?”

“No.”

Feldman regarded Arkady with a more wary, interested eye. They were in the park behind the library, where steps ran between trees down to the river near the southwest corner of the Kremlin. Spotlights made the lower branches into lattices of gold that turned to black.

“I told Rosen that what people forget is that there actually was idealism at the beginning of the Revolution. Starvation and civil war aside, Moscow was the most exciting place in the world to be. When Mayakovsky said, ‘Let us make the squares our palettes, the streets our brushes,’ he meant it. Every wall was a painting. There were painted trains, boats, airplanes, balloons. Wallpaper and dinner plates and gum wrappers were all created by artists who genuinely thought they were making a new world. At the same time women were marching for free love. They all believed anything was possible. Rosen asked how much one of those gum wrappers would be worth now.”

“The same question occurred to me,” Arkady admitted.

Feldman stomped down the stairs in disgust.

“Since avant-garde art was not approved, you chose a fairly suicidal specialty. Is that how you got used to working late at night?” Arkady asked.

“Not a totally stupid observation.” Feldman stopped short. “Why is red the color of revolution?”

“It’s traditional?”