Jaak was embarrassed. “You were taking forever, so I came around to see if there was another way in just as you popped up.”

“I won’t do it again.”

Jaak said, “You should have a gun.”

“If I had a gun, we’d be a suicide pact.”

Arkady still felt dizzy when they went outside.

“Let’s just watch the motorcycle,” Jaak suggested.

When they came around the building, Kim’s beautiful bike was gone.

The militia towed vehicular wrecks to a dock near the South Port, handy to the metal stamps and auto factories of the Proletariat Borough. Whatever was remotely reusable had been stripped from them. These were the bones of cars, and they had a kind of dignity, like dried flowers. The dock had a vista of the entire southern end of Moscow; it was not Paris, granted, but it possessed a certain sweep, the occasional gold cap of a church flashing in the shadow of industrial chimneys.

The evening sky was still lit. Arkady found Polina at the end of the dock working with a brush, cans of paint and squares of pressed wood. She had unbuttoned her raincoat, a concession to the balmy weather.

“Your message sounded urgent,” Arkady said.

“I thought you should see this.”

“What?” He looked around.

“You’ll see.”

He was losing patience. “There’s no emergency? You’re just working?”

“You’re working, too.”

“Well, I lead an obsessed but empty life. Don’t you want to go dancing or see a movie with a friend?” Irina’s newscasts had begun and he knew there was something he would rather be doing.

Polina daubed green paint on a square of wood balanced on the fender of a Zil from which doors and seats had been removed. She herself made rather a pretty picture, Arkady thought. If she had an easel and a little more technique … But she just slapped the paint on.

She seemed to sense his mind wandering. “How did you do with Jaak?”

“It was not a day covered in glory.” He looked over her shoulder. “Very green.”

“You’re a critic?”

“Artists are so temperamental. I meant, as in ‘expansively, generously green.’ ” He stood back to study the cityscape of black river, gray cranes and chimneys melting into a milky sky. “What exactly are you painting?”

“The wood.”

“Ah.”

Polina had four different pots of green paint labeled CS1, CS2, CS3, CS4, separated from four pots of red labeled RS1, RS2, etc. Each pot had its own brush. The green paint had an infernal reek. He searched his pocket, but he had left Borya’s Marlboros in his other jacket. When he did find Belomors, Polina blew the match out. “Explosives,” she said.

“Where?”

“Remember, in Rudy’s car we found traces of red sodium and copper sulfate? As you know, that’s consistent with an incendiary device.”

“Chemistry wasn’t my strong point.”