Her lungs burned and her chest heaved, rebelling against the dead heavy embrace of the ice-cold water. She swallowed and breathed water, feeling it churn in her stomach, waiting for the inevitable darkness. She felt hands dragging her along, under ice, where the starlight did not reach and where she could not hope to reach the surface.

Her skin was so numb from the cold that it took her a while to notice a change in temperature-the water had turned balmy, and the glow on the surface signaled escape. She lunged toward it and did not believe her senses when her head emerged into musty stale air and her lungs convulsed, expelling the ice-cold water of Moscow River into the unknown warm lake. The girls that dragged her there surfaced too, laughing and lisping gentle nonsense. She didn't know where she was, but she knew that her former concerns had fallen away, like crust from the eyes of a cured blind man.

"It's all the same with everyone here, isn't it?” Galina said. “You wanted so badly to escape."

"And we didn't fit in anywhere else,” Elena said.

Galina nodded. “You know, I always hoped that there was a place for me, a promised land-and I could never find it, until someone I love disappeared."

"You know,” Elena said and took a long drag on her cigarette, “people are notoriously bad at discerning what it is they really want. Besides, this is really no promised land-funny you would think that once you stick all the misfits into one place, it would somehow magically become a paradise."

"It seems like one,” Galina said.

Loud splashing and cries turned her attention to the lake, and even Elena stood up and looked over, squinting. The rusalki, several of them at once, wept and cried, and shied away from something in their midst.

"What are they doing?” Galina said.

"No idea.” Elena carefully picked up the hem of her dress, exposing a pair of small but sturdy combat boots. “Let's go see."

The rusalki left the water, and stood on the shore, dripping wet, fear in their eyes that showed no whites. Elena moved among them as if she were at a party, working her way toward the plates with canapés, and Galina followed in her wake. On the bank, they both stopped, looking.

Galina could not quite understand it at first-dark fabric flapped in the water, concealing the outline of its contents, until she saw a hand. And like in a brainteaser where one was supposed to find a hidden figure, everything fell into place-there were two hands and a leg, and a pale face with wide open eyes. She was about to call to the man bobbing in the waves when she realized that his hands were lashed together with blue electrical tape, and that the deep blue shadow around his eye was a bruise, spreading slowly over the left half of his face. A dark smear at the corner of his mouth was undoubtedly blood, but at this point Galina did not need any confirmation of the man's dead state. “Who is it?” she asked Elena, unable to look away from the corpse that neared the bank on which they stood, certain as death. “Why is he here?"

"I don't know.” Elena bent down to tear out a long and stout cattail stem, and reached out, pulling the body closer. “Never seen him before. And his clothes-do they look familiar?"

Galina looked over the sodden leather jacket and track pants, at the buzz cut. “He's a thug,” she said. “What they call a racketeer. There're plenty of them on the surface now."

"I see.” Elena grabbed the lapels of the dead man's jacket, and heaved the body ashore. “Never seen a corpse making it here.” She turned to the rusalki, still huddling in a disturbed clump, like deer. “Did you drag him here?"

They all shook their heads in unison and cried, wringing their hands-it almost looked like ritual mourning, Galina thought.

"Now, this is really strange,” Elena said, looking over the man at her feet thoughtfully. “What, the surfacers don't think they're good enough for us and dump their garbage here?"

"They don't even know about this place,” Galina reminded her.

Elena sighed. “I know. I just don't understand."

"There have been strange things happening on the surface too.” Galina told her about the birds and her sister.

"This is strange,” Elena agreed. “There's magic on the surface and corpses down here-it shouldn't happen. I think someone's breaching the barrier. We better talk to one of the old ones."

"I was looking for Berendey when the rusalka led me here,” Galina said. “Do you know where we could find him?"

Elena snorted. “Berendey? To be sure, he makes things grow; he even steals sunlight from the surface for my plants-see how green they are? But he wouldn't do something like that; he couldn't if he wanted to. Nor Father Frost, no any of the others-they have a link to the surface, but it is subtle. No, we need someone who actually knows what this is all about."

"And who would that be?"

"The Celestial Cow Zemun,” Elena said seriously. “Don't even think of laughing."

Galina didn't feel like laughing, with a dead body almost touching her sneakers. “Can we talk to my friends first? One of them is a cop, and maybe he would know something about this body."

"What is there to know? He's dead.” Elena prodded the corpse with the toe of her boot. “But suit yourself. Go get your cop and come back here as soon as you can."

Galina found Yakov in the back room of the Pub. She paused on the threshold, breathing in its sweet smell of pipe tobacco and fresh sawdust. Yakov and David talked in quiet voices, the silences often stretching between them like clouds of smoke.

Galina hated to interfere with their conversation-she could not make out the words, but the obvious comfort between them clung with the warm air of familiarity, and she sighed to think that she wasn't a part of anything like that. She cleared her throat. “Yakov, there's something I want you to see."

He startled with a guilty look on his face. “I'm sorry,” he told David. “I guess I better go-we did come here for a reason."

"It's quite all right,” David said, and smiled at Galina. “Did you find Berendey?"

"No,” Galina said. “Just a corpse."

Elena waited for them by the lake. On the way, Galina explained the situation to Yakov, and he kneeled by the body, examining it. It struck her that this policeman who always seemed so unsure and so defeated actually knew what he was doing-he examined the cuts and bruises on the face and wrists of the body, and turned out the pockets of the leather jacket.

The passport was sodden and unreadable, but there was also an address book and a wallet with a laminated library card. Yakov grunted and placed his hands behind the corpse's ears. The muscles on his arms tensed, and Galina stepped back instinctively-Yakov's usually placid demeanor had prevented any thought that he was capable of violence. Now, as she watched him wrench the corpse's lower jaw, she grew worried. “What are you doing?” she asked.

"Trying to get his mouth open.” Yakov pointed at the dry trace of blood staining the corner of the dead man's lips and smearing his chin. “He was tortured, I think, and I'm looking for bite marks on his tongue and cheeks, and maybe some broken teeth. Those usually occur with torture."

Galina looked away as the face under Yakov's hands crunched and collapsed. She stared at the calm black water, at the rusalki who still minced at the edge of the lake, at the rustling cattails. Anywhere but where Yakov was doing something to a dead man, something wrong. Galina understood the necessity of such procedures in the surface world, but here it felt almost sacrilegious. Then again, she thought, this was what people did. No matter how remote and magical a place was, there would always be corpses and brutish people with ropy arms messing it all up. No matter how beautiful the view from a rooftop was, there would always be empty bottles and squashed cigarette filters, dirty rags and smells of sweat.