The generals rallied, regrouped and crowded round. One push and they would probably collapse and turn to piles of dust, Arkady thought. Who did they see, he wondered? Him, his father, who? This could be his moment of vindictive triumph, a child’s long-awaited fantasy. But it was too pathetic, and the generals, grotesque as they were, also were at their most human in this last stage of fangless dotage. He took the letter. It had a luminous quality and his name printed in spidery letters. It felt light, as if empty, to the hand.

“I’ll read it later,” Arkady said and walked away.

“The Vagankovskoye Cemetery,” Belov called after him. “Ten A.M.”

Or I’ll throw it away, Arkady thought. Or burn it.

The following day was the final one of so-called “hot investigation,” the last day of official alerts at travel points, a peak time for frustration and argument. Arkady and Jaak chased false sightings of Kim north, west and south at all three Moscow airports. On the fourth tip, they headed east toward the dead end known as Lyubertsy.

“A new informant?” Arkady asked. He was driving, which was always a sign of bad humor.

“Totally new,” Jaak insisted.

“Not Julya,” Arkady said.

“Not Julya,” Jaak maintained.

“Borrow her Volvo yet?”

“I will. Anyway, it isn’t Julya, it’s a Gypsy.”

“A Gypsy!” With an effort Arkady stayed on the road.

“You always say I’m prejudiced,” Jaak said.

“When I think of Gypsies, I think of poets and musicians. I don’t think of reliable informants.”

Jaak said, “Well, this guy would sell out his brother and that’s what I call a reliable informant!”

Kim’s motorcycle was there, an exotic midnight-blue Suzuki, propped on a chrome kickstand in back of a five-story apartment house. Arkady and Jaak walked around the machine and admired it from every angle, taking an occasional glance at the building. The upper floors had balconies that were illegally enclosed. The ground was littered with refuse that seemed to have rained down from the windows: paper cartons, mattress springs, broken bottles. The next house was a hundred meters away. It was an incomplete landscape of houses set far apart, sewer pipes lying in open trenches, concrete walkways that intersected among weeds. No one was walking. The sky was soiled with that particular kind of smog which expressed both industrial poison and despair.

Lyubertsy was what all Russians feared, which was to be outside the center, to not be in Moscow or Leningrad, to be forgotten and invisible, as if the steppes started here, only twenty kilometers from the Moscow city limits. This was the vast population that moved on a straight track from day care to vocational school to assembly line to the long vodka line to the grave.