Belov’s voice dropped. “He didn’t.”

Arkady stopped. He forced himself to be calm. “You said it was a closed coffin. Why?”

Belov had trouble drawing breath. “At the end the pain was so great. He said the only thing holding him together was cancer. He didn’t want to die that way. He said he preferred the officer’s way out.”

“He shot himself?”

“Forgive me. I was in the next room. I …”

As Belov’s knees gave way, Arkady eased him onto a bench. He felt incredibly stupid; he should have seen what was in the old man’s face before this. Belov dug into his jacket, twisted around and gave Arkady a gun. It was a black Nagant revolver and four squat bullets as polished as old silver. “He wanted you to have this.”

“The general always had a good sense of humor,” Arkady said.

There was brisk business at a kiosk beside Vysotsky’s grave when Arkady got back to the gate. Now that the sun was out, fans were buying pins, posters, postcards and cassettes of the singer, dead ten years and more popular than ever. The number 23 tram stopped right across the street; it was the handiest souvenir run in Moscow. Around the gate were beggars, peasant women with white kerchiefs and sun-browned faces, legless men with crutches and carts. They congregated around worshipers leaving the cemetery’s little yellow church. Coffin lids dressed in crepe and wreaths of sharp-smelling evergreens and carnations rested against the church front. Seminarians sold Bibles from a card table, asking forty rubles for the New Testament.

Carrying his father’s gun in his pocket, Arkady felt a little dizzy and had some difficulty in discriminating. As much as he saw the ceremonies of human grief—a widow polishing the photo on a headstone—he saw just as clearly a robin wrestling a worm from a grave. He had no sense of focus. A funeral bus pulled inside the gate and the family clambered down its front steps. A coffin was slid out the rear, slipped and hit the ground with a bang. A girl in the family made a comic grimace. That was the way Arkady felt. Outside the gate, the Rodionov-Penyagin party was still milling around the sidewalk. Arkady didn’t feel in decent enough shape to talk to either the prosecutor or the general, so he slipped into the church.