One of them, Slava, a tall lanky guy who used to be in the same class as Sergey and who fixed him up with his current employment, took Sergey to a remote and largely unsupervised railroad branch-a single track picking its way through the few remaining apple orchards and patchy forests of Biryolevo, the wood of the railroad ties exhaling the smell of pitch and creosote in the summer heat, rare grass stems littering the stony ground in between them. The track was used to cart glass granules-small spheres of green, blue and clear glass, two centimeters in diameter-to a nearby glass factory. The granules were transported in open cars, moving with the speed of a vigorous jog, and wouldn't be difficult to get to.

"What do we need these granules for?” Sergey asked. “They're not worth shit."

"But not what you can do with them,” said Slava. “Chechens will shit themselves when they hear that we have this… power. Did you know that glass can trap souls?” Slava was quickly becoming an expert in the occult.

"No,” Sergey said. “Where the fuck do you find this info?"

"I have my sources,” Slava said with a sly smile. “Are you in or not? Once they hear that we can not only kill them but have their souls for eternity, no one will ever mess with us. Ever.” Slava spoke with relish, kicking the rail that sang in a low, resonant voice, and Sergey imagined that the sound of Slava's Adidas running shoe traveled far, to lands unknown, perhaps as far as Europe. “Chechens, they're afraid for their souls, they're Christians."

"Muslims,” Sergey corrected. “Armenians and Georgians are Christians."

"Same difference,” Slava said. “Whatever the fuck it is they believe, as long as they believe in heaven. We can deny it to them. How cool is that?"

A slow train rambled past, and Slava waited until it almost passed, then sprinted along and caught up to one of the open cars. He leapt and grabbed onto the edge. He didn't pull himself up but just reached inside and let go, landing in a squat on the tracks. He returned and showed Sergey a handful of green spheres. “This is cool.” He offered one to Sergey, and held another one close to his eye, squinting up at the sun.

Sergey did the same. The small pockmarks and imperfections on the glass sphere's surface became enlarged, and he felt as if he were looking at the lunar surface, mysterious and luminously green, distorted by the slight curvature of the glass, smoldering with craters. He discovered that if he rotated the sphere in his fingers, the green world rotated with it, showing him its hidden mountains and deep fissures.

"Not a bad place for a soul to be, don't you think?” Slava said to him. “You game?"

And thus Sergey found himself in what they euphemistically called the glass business, and he accumulated a nice collection of souls as Slava and the rest expanded their territory. That is, until he found himself on the wrong end of the glass granule.

He grew increasingly curious about Slava's sources of arcane knowledge, and he asked questions. When the questions proved fruitless, he started to snoop. By then he could afford to ditch the Volga, rusted and heavy with class implications, and bought a Jeep-secondhand, but in better condition than anything he had owned to date. Slava, however, changed his Mercedes for a new one as soon as the ashtrays filled up, and Sergey suspected that his sources of income included other things besides racketeering and soul-trapping. He decided to track Slava's secret dealings.

He took a post at the entrance to Slava's apartment building, a well-appointed old house on Tverskaya; for that expedition, he borrowed an unassuming Zaporozhets (the make that in the city folklore was often compared to a pregnant ninth-grader, since both equaled family disgrace) from a friend, and kept vigil among the equally homely cars parked in the courtyard, with a good view of Slava's maroon Merc. He waited until well after midnight, when Slava emerged from his building, alone; Sergey's heart picked up its beat-the absence of the two meaty bodyguards that followed him everywhere lately indicated that Slava was about to do something secret.

Sergey waited for him to exit the yard and turned on his lights. He followed him through the slow crawling traffic, quite certain that the Zaporozhets was well below Slava's detection threshold. The traffic was dense, and Sergey worried a few times that he would lose his quarry. Once they merged onto the Sadovoe Koltso, the following became easier. Sergey headed south-east, toward Kolomenskoe.

The park was closed, but Slava easily scaled the iron fence.

Sergey parked his car well away from Slava's, and followed over the fence. He followed the winding paths, stumbling in the dark and cursing under his breath, but never losing the sight of Slava's flashlight up ahead, between the trees.

The moon came out, and it was light enough to see some of the commemorative plaques. Sergey surmised that they were going to Peter the Great's shack-a tiny wooden house, transported plank by plank to Kolomenskoe, where it could be properly immortalized. And now, it seemed, it was the scene of some shady dealings.

Slava's flashlight disappeared inside the Peter the Great's shack, and Sergey tiptoed closer. There were voices inside-at first, Slava spoke, and a strange voice answered. Sergey felt cold sweat trickling down his spine, and the weight of silence around him. A small breeze stirred the leaves over his head and he was embarrassingly grateful for this sign that he was still in the park, in the human world, for the voice he had just heard certainly did not belong here.

He could not discern the words and was too spooked to look inside. He backed from the house silently, even more terrified to make a sound. He knew well what Slava was capable of, but the creature he conferred with seemed even more dangerous, unfathomable and otherworldly.

He made his escape and no longer followed Slava on his night expeditions. The change in his demeanor was noticed, and it was his turn to be questioned. He feigned personal preoccupations and even invented a knocked-up girlfriend who wouldn't get an abortion.

"All right,” Slava told him, his eyes still dark with unease. “Just don't let it make you sloppy."

Sergey swore that it wouldn't; he felt relieved at not being found out.

The end came when Slava called him on his cell. “I need you to do something for me,” he said. “Very hush-hush. There's a new hex in town, and I need you to find me a test subject. I don't care what or who it is, just get me a body. Just make sure it is alive."

Sergey drove through the streets of his neighborhood, to an open-air market where sloe-eyed Caucasian nationals sold roses and melons, tomatoes the size of a baby's head and bootlegged American thrillers. It was dusk, and the customers dispersed. Relations with the Caucasian gangs were strained as it was, so he decided to target one of the leaving customers. A middle-aged woman, her hands happily occupied by bulging plastic bags of southern produce, turned down a narrow side street, and Sergey followed. He pressed a gun against her ribs and persuaded her to follow him to the vehicle. He didn't worry about her being able to identify the Jeep-the subjects of Slava's experiments rarely got an opportunity to talk about their experiences afterward.

He called Slava back. “Got one,” he said.

"Meet me at the central entrance,” Slava said.

"I'll be there in half an hour."

He drove to Kolomenskoe, and parked next to the idling Merc. Slava waited inside, a cigarette smoldering in his narrow lips. “Good job,” he told Sergey once he presented the woman, mute with fear and tear-stained. “Come along-I want you to see this."

Sergey and his captive followed. The tourists and the relaxing citizens had cleared out of the park by then, and the paths crossed by long shadows were especially mysterious. Slava kept quiet, and Sergey grew uneasy.