Sam climbed down and walked east, staying with streets that looked as though they might be commercial zones. As he walked, the army of ordinary people heading to work appeared and he tried to stay among them. Late in the morning he found a block-long street market. There were numerous small shops with tables in front of them, extending out across the sidewalk. He bought a flat tweed cap with a short brim like the ones American workers wore during the Depression. He had seen just a few of these on the streets of Moscow, mainly on old men, but he needed a hat to make it harder for the people who were watching for him to see his face. He bought a wool-and-polyester sport jacket in a faux herringbone tweed, because he had seen many of these. The cut was too short and too wide for him, so it made him look broader in the shoulders and a bit more muscular. He bought a pair of pants to go with the coat that had a loose cut too. The pale blue shirt he bought was an exact match with some he’d seen on the bus. His last purchases were a pair of shoes with a wide box toe that were comfortable for walking and a bag with a shoulder strap like the ones European students use to carry books. He changed into his new clothes in a curtained dressing stall. And then, as he was walking past another shop, he saw a display of used books in a bin.

Sam leafed through the piles of books, pretending to be casually browsing but actually searching desperately for something in a language other than Russian. He picked up and even pretended to leaf through many that were set in Cyrillic before he finally saw something different, a tourist’s guidebook in French. He immediately clutched it to his side and went to find the cashier.

After a few minutes of leafing through his French book, he found a map that seemed to show the area he was in. He walked away from the market, and kept walking, until he found a small urban park where he could sit on a bench and look at the maps of the Moscow area. After some study, he found that the various stations in the city had trains that went only to specific destinations. The one for Nizhny Novgorod was out of the Kursky Station, which was on the east side.

He folded down the corner of the page of his guidebook so he could easily find the map again, put the book in his shoulder bag with his extra clothes, and began to walk in the direction of the station. He walked steadily, stopping for food and drink at the sort of establishment where he could point at what he wanted and then hand someone a bill with a reasonable expectation of getting the right change.