Which Middleton was prepared to do, except that his musicologist’s sense of harmony was disrupted by two things. First, the oil paintings were wrong. They were Renoirs. Beautiful canvases, no question, rich, glowing, intimate, and worth probably thirty million each. But inappropriate. London club decor was frozen in a time before Renoir ever picked up a brush. Gainsborough or Stubbs or Constable would have been more authentic.

The second thing on Middleton’s mind was exactly the way the plane’s interior recalled the club in the house off Pyatnitskaya Street. He couldn’t get over the way he had pulled the SIG’s trigger and nothing had happened. He had been ripped off. Which wasn’t the end of the world, although it might have been. But it could be the end of the world for Chernayev and people like him.

Middleton said, “Do you own a guy called Volodya?”

“Own?” Chernayev said. “I don’t own people.”

“He’s a gun dealer in an antiques store on the Old Arbat. Right across from where the Praga restaurant was. A guy like that in the new Moscow, someone owns him. Could be you.”

“I know him. That’s all I’ll admit. Did he displease you in some way?”

“He sold me a SIG P229 for two grand. Plus five hundred for the ammunition. The gun didn’t work.”

“That’s not good.”

“Damn right it’s not. Business requires trust. You’ll suffer in the end. You’ll be back in a plain old Gulfstream before you know it.”

“I apologize. I’ll make it up to you. When we’re done I’ll give you a SIG that works.”

“I don’t want a SIG. I prefer Berettas.”

“The American military always did. But you must let me give you something.”

Middleton smiled. “There was a stall selling Russian nesting dolls with foreign leaders’ faces on them. My daughter would like them.”

“Those things? They’re just crude attempts at humor. You know how paranoid Russians are. The assumption is that behind our leaders are other leaders. And behind them, others still. Who do you suppose they paint at the very center?”

“I don’t know,” Middleton said.

The other trouble with stolen laptop computers was that people generally wanted them back. The student from the Sorbonne sure did. Not really because of the euro value of the hardware. But because of the value of the files it stored. His poems were on there. His play. The start of his novel. The stuff that would win him the Prix Goncourt one day. Plus some term papers. Like everyone else in the world, his back-up routine was haphazard.