Ozhogin caught up and gripped Arkady's shoulder with a wrestler's thumb that pressed to the bone. "Renko, you'll have to learn manners if you ever want to work for NoviRus Security." The colonel patted Zhenya on the head, and Zhenya clenched Arkady's hand in a hard little knot.

"How dare you come here?" Zurin demanded.

"You told me to ask questions."

"Not at a charity event."

"You know the disk that Hoffman was holding out on us?" Ozhogin let Arkady peek at a shiny CD.

"Ah, that must be it," Arkady said. "Are you breaking arms today, or legs?"

"Your investigation is over," Zurin said. "To sneak into a party and drag in some homeless boy is inexcusable."

"Does this mean I will be reassigned?"

"This means disciplinary action," Zurin said wearily, as if setting down a heavy stone. "This means you're done."

Arkady felt done. He also felt he might have gone a little too far with Zurin. Even sellouts had their pride.

Back he and Zhenya went, away from the circle of important men, past the cosmonauts, cotton candy and smoky grills, the telegenic faces and blue llamas and aliens on stilts. A rocket shot up from the tennis court, rose high into the blue sky and exploded into a shower of paper flowers. By the time the last of the petals had drifted down, Arkady and Zhenya were out the gate. Meanwhile, Bobby Hoffman was waiting at Arkady's car, stuffing a bloody nose with a handkerchief, head tilted back to protect the jacket bequeathed him by Ivanov.

On the drive, Zhenya regarded Arkady with a narrow gaze. Arkady had gone with dizzying speed from the heights of New Russia to a boot out the door. This descent was swift enough to get even Zhenya's attention.

"What's going to happen?" Hoffman asked.

"Who knows? A new career. I studied law at Moscow University, maybe I can become a lawyer. Do you see me as a lawyer?"

"Ha!" Hoffman thought for a second. "It's funny, but there's one thing about you that reminds me of Pasha. You're not as smart, God knows, but you share a quality. You couldn't tell whether he found things funny or sad. More like he felt, What the hell? Especially toward the end."

Arkady asked Zhenya, "Is that good, to share qualities with a dead man?" Zhenya pursed his lips. "It depends? I agree."

Zhenya hadn't eaten. They pulled in at a pirozhki stand and found, on the far side of the stand, an inflated fun house of a homely cabin standing on chicken legs. An inflated fence of bones and skulls surrounded the hut, and on the roof stood the witch, Baba Yaga, with the mortar and pestle on which she flew. In Zhenya's fairy tales, Baba Yaga ate children who wandered to her cabin. This cabin was full of children jumping on a trampoline floor covered with balls of colored foam. Boys and girls slid out one door and ran in another while the mechanical witch cackled hideously above. Zhenya left his chess set and walked into the witch's cabin, spellbound.

Hoffman said, "Thanks for the ride. I don't drive in Russia. Driving here is like endlessly circling the Arc de Triomphe."

"I wouldn't know. How is the nose?"

"Ozhogin pinched it. Wasn't even a punch. Showed me the disk, reached up and popped a blood vessel, just for the humiliation."

"It's a day for bloody noses. Timofeyev had one, too." Now that Arkady thought about it, on the videotapes, Ivanov had held a handkerchief the same way.

Hoffman hunched forward. "Did I mention he likes you just as much as me?"

"I don't know why." The prospect of running into Ozhogin again made Arkady want to lift weights and work out regularly. He lit a cigarette. "Where did you hide the disk?"

"I knew Ozhogin would look in my apartment, so I put it in my gym locker. I actually taped it upside down. It was invisible. I don't know how he found it."

"How often do you go to the gym, Bobby?"

"Once a…" Hoffman shrugged.

"There you are."

"Oh, and now that they have the disk, the offer is 'Leave the country or go to jail.' I pissed them off. Fuck them, I'll be back."

"And Rina?"

"Let me tell you about Rina." Bobby picked pirozhki crumbs off his jacket. "She is a lovely kid, and Pasha left her well set up, and within a year the most important thing in her life will be fashion shows. And she'll run Pasha's foundation, that'll keep her busy. Everyone wins except you and me. And I'll bounce back."

"Which leaves me."

"At the bottom of the food chain. I'll tell you this much: the company's dead."

"NoviRus?"

"Kaput. All that held it together was Pasha." Bobby gently touched his nose. "Maybe Timofeyev was a good scientist once upon a time, but in business he is a total dud. No nerve, no imagination. I never understood why Pasha kept him on. Not to mention that Timofeyev is falling apart in front of everyone's eyes. Six months, you know who'll run the show at NoviRus? Ozhogin. He's a cop. Only you can't run a complicated business entity like a cop, you have to be a general. Kuzmitch and Maximov can't wait. When they're done with Ozhogin, you won't be able to find his bones. It's the food chain, Renko. Figure out the food chain, and you figure out the world."

Arkady watched Zhenya bounce in and out of sight. He asked Hoffman, "What do you know about Anton Obodovsky?"

"Obodovsky?" Bobby raised his eyebrows. "Tough guy, local Mafia, jacked some of our trucks and drained some oil tanks. He has balls, I'll give him that. Ozhogin pointed him out on the street once. Obodovsky made the colonel nervous. I liked that."

When Zhenya finally emerged from the fun house, they started home. Hoffman and Zhenya played chess without a board, calling out their moves, the boy piping "e4" from the backseat, followed quickly by Hoffman's confident "c5" up front. Arkady could follow through the first ten moves, and then it was like listening to a conversation between robots, so he concentrated more on his own diminishing prospects.

It was virtually impossible to be dismissed for incompetence. Incompetence had become the norm under the old law, when prosecutors faced no courtroom challenges from upstart lawyers, and convenient evidence and confessions were always close at hand. Drinking was indulged: a drunken investigator who curled up in the back of a car was treated as gently as an ailing grandmother. Corruption, however, was tricky. While corruption was the lubrication of Russian life, an investigator accused of corruption always drew public outrage. There was a painting called The Sleigh Ride, of a troika driver throwing a horrified girl to a pursuing wolf pack. Zurin was like that driver. He compiled files on his own investigators, and whenever the press got close to him, he tossed them a victim. Arkady had no reason to be horrified or surprised.

He asked Hoffman, "Does Timofeyev have a cold or a bloody nose?"

"He says he has a cold."

"There were spots on his shirt that looked like dried blood."

"Which could have come from blowing his nose."

"Did Pasha have a bloody nose?"

"Sometimes," Hoffman said. He was still engaged in the chess game.

"Did he have a cold?"

"No."

"An allergy?"

"No. Rook takes b3."

Zhenya said, "Queen to d8, check."

"Did he see a doctor?" Arkady asked.

"He wouldn't go."

"He was paranoid?"

"I don't know. I never looked at it that way. It wasn't that obvious, because he was still on top of the business end. King to h7."

"Queen to e7," said Zhenya.

"Queen to d5."

"Checkmate."

Hoffman threw his hands up as if upsetting a board. "Fuck!"

"He's good," Arkady said.

"Who knows, with these distractions?"

Zhenya won two more games before they got to the children's shelter. Arkady walked him to the door, and Zhenya marched through without a backward look, which was both more and less than disdain. Hoffman was closing his mobile phone when Arkady returned to the car.