Some men staggered back with sleeves on fire and, as the crowd spread and Arkady pushed through, he saw Rudy Rosen riding a blazing phaeton, upright, face black, hair aflame, hands clasped to the wheel, brilliant in his own glow but motionless within the thick, noxious storm clouds that whipped from the interior and out the gutted windows of his car. Arkady got near enough to look through the windshield at Rudy’s eyes sinking into the smoke. He was dead. There was that silence, that gutted gaze in the middle of the flames.

Around the burning car other cars were moving. Spilling rugs, gold coins, VCRs, a mass evacuation flowed to the gate. The ambulance lumbered off, plowing over a figure in its headlights, followed by a Chechen motorcade. Cycles split into several streams, searching for gaps in the site fence.

Yet some men stayed and, as the stars drifted overhead, fought to catch them. Arkady himself leaped and plucked from the air a burning Deutsche mark, then a dollar, then a franc, all lined with worms of burning gold.

Although the ground was still in shadow, Arkady could see that the site was a layout of four twenty-story towers around a central plaza; three of the towers were faced in precast concrete while the last was still in a skeletal girders-and-crane phase that in the hopeful light of dawn appeared both gargantuan and frail. On the ground floors, he supposed there would be restaurants, cabarets, perhaps a cinema, and in the middle of the plaza, when the earthmovers and cement mixers were gone, a view of tour buses and taxis. Now, however, there were a forensic van, the Zhiguli and the black shell of Rudy Rosen’s Audi sitting on a black carpet of singed glass. The Audi’s windows were hollow and the heat of the fire had exploded and then burned the tires, so at least it was the stench of burnt rubber that was strongest. As if listening, Rudy Rosen sat stiffly upright.

“Glass seems to be evenly distributed,” Arkady said. Polina followed with her prewar Leica and took a picture every other step. “Glass is melted closer to the car, which is a four-door Audi. Left doors shut. Hood shut, headlights burned out. Right doors shut. Trunk shut, taillights burned out.” There was nothing to do but get on his hands and knees. “Fuel tank is blown. Muffler separated from exhaust pipe.” He got up. “License plate black now but a Moscow number is legible and identified as property of Rudik Rosen. By the wide spread of glass, origin of fire seems to have been inside the passenger compartment, not out.”

“Pending expert reports, of course,” Polina said to maintain her reputation for disrespect. Young and tiny, the pathologist wore one coat and one smirk summer and winter, her hair piled high and stabbed ferociously with pins. “You should get the thing up on a lift.”