There was no chair in the bedroom. Arkady removed his shoes, sat on the bed and at once had the shock of hearing the complaint of springs that anticipated Rudy’s weight. He packed the pillows behind his back, the way Rudy would have, and flipped through the books.

Every home had a few classics just to prove literacy. Rudy read his. Arkady found underlined the humorous passage in the immortal Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter in which a hussar offers to teach a young man the game of billiards: “ ‘It’s quite essential to us soldiers,’ he said. ‘One can’t always be beating Jews, you know. So there is nothing to it but to go to the inn and play billiards; and to do that one must be able to play.’ ”

“Or beat Jews with cues,” was scribbled below the line. Arkady recognized Rudy’s handwriting from the bankbook.

Deep in Gogol’s Dead Souls, Rudy had marked “For some time, Chichikov made it impossible for smugglers to earn a living. In particular, he reduced Polish Jewry almost to despair, so invincible, so almost unnatural, was the rectitude, the incorruptibility which led him to refrain from converting himself into a small capitalist.” In the margin, Rudy had added, “Nothing changes.”

There had to be more, Arkady thought. Thanks to Jewish emigration, the Moscow mafia had good connections with Israeli criminals. He put on the television set and replayed the Jerusalem videotape, skipping from place to place, from Wailing Wall to casino.

His mind wandered to what Polina had said: “Too much blood.”

He agreed. If gasoline could be thickened with blood, it could also be thickened with a dozen other agents easier to get ahold of. He’d seen blood in some other strange form recently, but couldn’t remember where.