"Can you help or not?" Arkady repeated.

Oopah! The bus went over with a cheer. Figures swarmed it, kicking in the windshield and dragging the driver out.

"Please don't," she said.

"Can you help or not?"

Too late, a water cannon arrived to clear the field. As the jet drove the crowd back, the stampede in the exits gained the strength of desperation. A second wave of bodies rushed the camera and sucked it under.

"No? Too bad." Arkady ended the call.

The next images were taped later, of police picking over clothes on the field and the empty stands, photographing the scene, maneuvering a tractor crane to lift the toppled bus back on its wheels. An ambulance stood by in case anyone was underneath. There was a special, mutual pain to the conversation, he thought. Hurting her, of course. Also-by ending the call and demonstrating who was in control-denying himself the chance to listen. This way he could enjoy the deep satisfaction of twisting the knife in two people at the same time. It was the sort of pain a man could suck on forever. The bus lurched onto its wheels. No bodies. The final shot was of the score: 0-0. As if nothing had happened at all.

Great minds compartmentalized. Arkady put on Vanko's tape and fast-forwarded, then rewound. The question, he decided, was why the camera had found Bobby, among all the Hasidim. On repeated viewings, it was a little more obvious, and not as a matter of editing. If Vanko had edited, he would have excised the clumsy shot of his run to the tomb. And the virtual close-up of Bobby at the prayer was not hidden well enough. Toward the end of the tape, at the leave-taking of the buses, Arkady could almost feel the camera search for Bobby. He went frame by frame until he saw a reflection in the bus's folded glass door of Vanko handing out business cards. If Vanko hadn't been taping, who had? When had the handover taken place? Before the Kaddish? Or even earlier, before the visit to the tomb?

Arkady heard a car brake hard in the dormitory parking lot and bodies rush into the downstairs hall. A rapid conversation included the bewildered tones of the housekeeper. A moment later, heavy feet ran up the stairs and stopped next door, at the room Arkady had occupied. A key jiggled and they were in. It sounded like they tossed the mattress and drawers, then collected again in the hall.

Arkady slid a chain bolt into the doorplate a moment before someone rapped on the other side.

"Renko? Renko, if you're in there, open up." It was Ozhogin, which gave Arkady the perverse satisfaction of knowing he had been right. At the same time, the door seemed flimsy. Arkady moved back. He heard the housekeeper waddle up the hall and mention the Scotsman, maybe adding a gesture of drinking. She scratched the door and called Campbell's name. A fist knocked less politely.

"Renko," Ozhogin said, "you should have filled out the form. We would have found some kind of job for you. Now it's come to this."

The housekeeper tried the wrong key and apologized. A key was a formality; Arkady knew how simple it was to pop the lock. Anyway, she had the key; it was only a matter of finding her glasses.

"Here we are," she said.

Arkady became aware of someone behind him. Campbell had wandered in from the bathroom in his undershirt and drawers, wet as a duck. The professor punched Vanko's tape out of the machine, replaced it with one marked Liverpool-Chelsea and raised the volume. On his way back to the bathroom, he picked up a bottle that was not completely empty. When the door suddenly opened the length of the chain he paused to shout through the space, "Shut yer fookin' gobs!"

Arkady didn't know how well Ozhogin spoke English but he seemed to get the message. There was a long moment while the colonel decided whether to break in on the drunken Scot. The moment passed. Arkady heard Ozhogin and his men retreat down the hall, confer, then move with dispatch down the stairs and out to their car. Doors slammed and they drove away.

Hours slipped around the window shade. Arkady knew he should sleep; he also knew that as soon as he closed his eyes he would be back on the ground outside Eva's cabin.

Arkady called the children's shelter and asked for Zhenya. Olga Andreevna came on the line. "Are you finally here in Moscow?" she asked.

"No."

"You're impossible. But at least you called him this time, and that's an improvement. His group is in music class now, although Zhenya doesn't actually sing. Wait."

Arkady sat with the phone for ten minutes.

The director came back on and said, "Here he is." Zhenya, naturally, said nothing.

"Do you like music?" Arkady asked. "Any special group? Have you been playing chess? Eating well?" Arkady remembered films of pioneers of flight, the unsuccessful ones with man-made wings who ran and flapped, ran and flapped, and never got off the ground. That was like trying to talk to Zhenya.

"My case here is winding up soon. I'll be back, and if you like, we can go to a soccer game. Or Gorky Park." If Arkady had not met Zhenya, he would have no good reason to believe the boy actually existed. Just for a test, he said, "Baba Yaga has a wolf."

There was a perceptible quickening of the breath on the other end.

"The wolf lives in a red forest with his wife, a human who wants to escape. He doesn't know whether he wants to eat her or keep her, but he does know he'll eat anyone who tries to help her. In fact, the forest is littered with the bones of those who have tried and failed. I wanted your advice on whether I should try. What do you think? Take your time. Consider every possibility, like a chess game. When you know, call me. In the meantime, be good."

He hung up.

Liverpool wore red uniforms, Chelsea white. Zurin called and Arkady didn't answer. Something was right in front of him, dangling and shining like a mirror ball, but every time he reached out, it disappeared. Or skipped along like that Icelandic sprite you could see only from the corner of your eye.

Vanko had said Alex made lots of money. In the belly of the beast, Alex had said. Exactly what beast? Arkady wondered.

Arkady opened his file. On the NoviRus employment application were an Internet site, e-mail address, phone and fax numbers.

Arkady called the phone number, and a woman's musical voice said, "Welcome to NoviRus. How may I direct your call?"

"Interpreting and translation."

"Legal, international or security?"

"Security." He never would have guessed.

"Hold, please."

Arkady held until a brusque male voice answered, "Security."

"I'm calling Alex Gerasimov."

A pause to punch in the name. "You want the accident section."

"That's right."

"Hold."

A Liverpool forward scored on a breakaway, the gift of a bad pass that left the Chelsea goalie naked. Soccer had been Arkady's sport, and goalie had been his position. A goalie's life balanced between anxiety and agony. Once in a while, though, there was the unexpected, undeserved save.

"Accident." A second male voice was not nearly so military.

"Alex Gerasimov?"

"No. He's not on duty for another two weeks."

"Doing interpreting and translation?"

"That's right."

"For the accident section?"

"Yes."

"He was going to explain everything to me."

"Sorry, Alex is not here. I'm Yegor."

A good sign; a man who offered his name invited conversation.

"I apologize for bothering you, Yegor, but Alex was going to tell me about the job."

Arkady heard a rustle like a newspaper being put down.

"You're interested?"

"Very."

"You talked to the people in Employment?"

"Yes, but you know how it is with them, they never give you an honest picture. Alex was going to."

"I can do that."

Yegor explained that NoviRus offered physical security to Russian and foreign clients in the usual form of bodyguards and cars. For foreign clients, they provided standby interpreters who could go to the scene of a traffic accident or an incident involving police or any emergency where their presence could alleviate a dangerous or costly misunderstanding, often with prostitutes, for which there was a discretionary fund. Interpreters were expected to be university-educated, well dressed and fluent in two foreign languages. They worked a twenty-four-hour shift every three days and were paid a handsome ten dollars an hour, perfect for part-time work. What the people in Employment didn't tell applicants was that the twenty-four-hour shift was spent either racing around Moscow, from one scene of confusion to the next, or going nowhere at all, which meant a day and a night in a basement room not much larger than a closet, with three cots, a coatrack and a minibar. The interpreters had been promised real quarters, but they were still stuck like an afterthought behind Surveillance, which, by virtue of all the screens it monitored, had a quarter of the floor.