Arkady rewound and ran the scene in the garden again. The tape quality seemed the same, but both the narrator’s voice and the music were absent. In their place was the scraping of chairs and the offscreen sounds of traffic. The sunglasses were a mistake; in a professional tape they would have been off. He went back and forth from Alps to airliner. The clouds were the same. The beer garden scene had been inserted.

The woman raised her glass. Blond hair was brushed back like a mane from her broad brow and broader cheeks, short chin, medium height, mid-thirties. Dark sunglasses, gold necklace, black short-sleeved sweater—contrasts that were more sensual than pretty in any ordinary sense. Red nails. Fair skin. Red lips half-open in the same slack, reckless study she had once given Arkady through a car window lifting a corner of a half-smile. She mouthed, “I love you.”

Her lips were easy to read because her promise was in Russian.

I don’t know,” Jaak said. “You saw her better than I did. I was driving.”

Arkady drew the curtains so that his office was lit only by the glow of the beer garden. On the monitor a glass was lifted and held by the Pause button of the VCR.

“The woman who was in Rosen’s car looked at us.”

“She looked at you,” Jaak said. “My eyes were on the road. If you think she’s the same woman, that’s good enough for me.”

“We need stills. What’s the matter?”

“We need Kim or the Chechens; they killed Rudy. Rudy as good as told you they would. If she’s German, if we drag foreigners in, we have to spread the circle and share with the KGB. You know how that goes: we feed them and they shit on us. You told them?”

“Not yet. When we have more.” Arkady turned off the monitor.

“Like what?”

“A name. Maybe an address in Germany.”

“You’re going to run this one around them?”

Arkady handed Jaak the tape. “We just don’t want to bother them until we have something definite. Maybe the woman is still here.”

Jaak said, “You’ve got brass balls. You must ring when you walk.”

“Like a belled cat,” Arkady said.

“The bastards would just take all the credit anyway.” Jaak reluctantly accepted the tape, then brightened and waved a pair of car keys. “I borrowed Julya’s. The Volvo. After I run your errand, I’m headed for the Lenin’s Path Collective. Remember the truck that sold me the radio? It’s possible they saw something when Rudy was killed.”

“I’ll bring the radio,” Arkady promised.

“Bring it to Kazan Station. I’m meeting Julya’s mother at the Dream Bar at four.”

“Julya won’t be there?”