The second car burst into flame without the explosive force of the first, and the bomb in the third car was even weaker—hardly a blast at all, though it was followed by a steady, hardworking flame. The fourth met the initial standard. By now Arkady was a veteran observer and could appreciate the sequence: the initial eruption of crystallized safety glass, the blinding flare of ignition, the whump of compacted air, and then the two-step flowering of roseate flames and brown, toxic smoke. Polina jotted down notes. She had delicate hands made even smaller by the rolled cuffs of her coat. Her rapid writing was as neat as type.

Belov had said there would be a funeral for his father. Were they going to bury the body or a pot of ashes? They could skip the crematorium and bring the old man out here for a glorious postmortem ride in one of Polina’s flaming chariots. Irina could report it on the news as one more Russian atrocity.

It occurred to Arkady that cars were not meant for Russians. First of all, Russia didn’t have enough roads free of frost heaves and mud wallows. More important, vehicles capable of any speed should not be placed in the hands of people given to vodka and melancholy.

“Did you have something else planned tonight?” Polina asked.

“No.”

The fifth and sixth cars exploded almost simultaneously, then burned very differently, one developing into a bowl of fire and the other, already a burned-out shell, subsiding into guttering flames. No fire engines had arrived yet. The era of night shifts was long over, and at this hour the factories around the dock were empty except for watchmen. Arkady wondered how much of the city he and Polina could torch before anyone noticed.

As she leafed through her notes, Polina said, “I wanted to put dummies in the cars.”

“Dummies?”

“Mannequins. I wanted thermometers, too. I couldn’t even find oven thermometers.”

“Everything’s so hard to find.”

“Because chemical combustion is inexact, especially in the lead time to ignition.”

“It’s my impression that it would have been more exact for Kim to spray Rudy with a submachine gun. Not that I’m not having a wonderful time watching cars blow up. It’s sort of like suttee. You know, how Indian women immolate themselves on their husbands’ funeral pyres? This is like a grand suttee on the Ganges, except that we’re on the Moscow and it’s not the middle of the day, it’s the middle of the night, and we neglected to bring any widows. Even dummies. Otherwise it’s practically romantic.”

Polina said, “That’s hardly an analytical approach.”

“Analytical? I wouldn’t need an oven thermometer. I smelled Rudy. He was done.”