There was a crowd inside. All standing, no pews. The atmosphere was like a crowded, colorful train station, with incense for cigarette smoke, and instead of a loudspeaker, an unseen choir whose voices hovered in the vaulted ceiling singing about the lamb of God. Icons—Byzantine, age-darkened faces in cutouts of bright silver—tipped down from the walls. Icon candles were wicks suspended in glass cups of oil. Strategically placed on the floor were cans of oil to keep the flames alight. Votive candles came in thirty-kopeck, fifty-kopeck and one-ruble sizes. Candles burned and sputtered in pools of pearly wax; candle stands glowed like softly burning trees. Lenin had described religion as a hypnotic flame for a reason. Women in black gathered contributions on brass plates covered with red felt. To the left, a store sold postcards of miraculous relics. To the right, three women, also in black dresses and scarves, hands crossed on their breasts, lay in open coffins surrounded by candles on arms of wrought iron and wax.

In a chapel next to the coffins, a priest taught a boy how to bow by pushing down his head. Arkady found himself forced by the sheer press of bodies into the “devil’s corner,” where confessions were heard. A priest in a wheelchair looked up expectantly, his long beard as white as rays of the moon. Arkady felt an interloper because his disbelief was not an institutional attitude, but the fury of a son who had deliberately and in a rage left his father’s camp. Yet his father had not been a believer; for all the good it had done her, it was his mother who had secretly slipped like a bird into the few churches open in Stalin’s Moscow. Kopecks dropped. Wax dripped. Collection plates circulated around the faithful as the glorious music unfolded, descant climbing over descant, appealing to the Almighty: Hear us and watch over us. No, Arkady thought, better to beg that He was deaf and blind. The voices pleaded, And be merciful, be merciful, be merciful. At least mercy was the last thing the general ever wanted.

Arkady looped around the horse track to Gorky Street, stuck the blue light on the car roof, leaned on his horn and raced down the middle lane while traffic officers, like so many semaphores in slickers and batons, cleared the way ahead. The rain had started again, marching in gusts up the street, raising umbrellas on the sidewalk. He wasn’t going anywhere in particular. It was the sound of water tearing under the wheels, the blur of a windshield without wipers, the gondola flow of running lights and the melting of store windows that he pursued. At the Intourist Hotel, prostitutes fluttered for cover like pigeons.