“Me?” Tim smiled and innocently raised a hand. Unfortunately it was the hand that was still holding the knife.

“Why you kill Boris?”

“Actually, I think you mean ‘why did you kill Boris,’” Tim corrected him. “You’ve forgotten the verb . . .”

“I don’t think they want an English lesson, Tim,” I said.

Tim ignored me. “I kill Boris, you kill Boris, he killed Boris!” he explained to the increasingly puzzled clown.

“I didn’t kill Boris!” I exclaimed.

“They killed Boris!” the clown said.

“That’s right!” Tim smiled encouragingly.

“No, we didn’t!” I yelled.

It was too late. The circus performers were getting closer by the second. I didn’t like the way they were looking at us. And there were more of them now. Four muscle-bound brothers in white leotards had stepped out of the shadows. The ringmaster was staring at us from the edge of the tent. I wondered who was entertaining the audience. The entire circus seemed to have congregated outside.

The ringmaster snapped out a brief command in Russian.

“Let’s go, Tim!” I said.

Tim dropped the knife and we turned and fled just as the performers started toward us. As far as they were concerned, Tim had just murdered one of their number, and this was a case of an eye for an eye—or a knife wound for a knife wound. These were traveling performers. They had their own rules and to hell with the country in which they found themselves.

Tim and I took off across the park, trying to lose ourselves in the shadows. Not easy with a full moon. Something huge and solid sailed across the sky, then buried itself in the soft earth. The strong man had thrown his barbell in our direction. We were lucky—he was strong, but he obviously had lousy aim. The barbell would be found the next day sticking out of the grass like a bizarre, iron tree. Two feet to the right and we’d have been found underneath it.

But I quickly realized that this was only the start of our troubles. The entire circus troupe had abandoned the performance in order to come after us. Word had quickly got around. We had killed old Boris and now they were going to kill us. There was a dull whoomph! and a figure shot through the air. It was the man in the crash helmet. This had to be Karl “On Your” Marx, the human cannonball. They had fired him in our direction, and I just had time to glimpse his outstretched fists as he soared through the night sky before I grabbed hold of Tim and threw him onto the grass. Marx whizzed past. We had been standing in front of an oak tree and there was a dull crunch as he hit the trunk, ending up wedged in a fork in the branches.

“Do you think he’s okay?” Tim asked.