you and the Azeri once and for all in your favor.”

“And how the fuck is he going to do that?”

Bourne opened his cell phone, played back the MP3 file Boris had sent to him. It was a

conversation between the kingpin of the Azeri and one of his lieutenants ordering the hit

on the RAB Bank executive. It was just like the Russian in Boris to hold on to the

evidence for leverage, rather than go after the Azeri kingpin right away.

A broad grin broke out across Maslov’s face. “Fuck,” he said, “now we’re talking!”

After a time, Arkadin became aware that Devra was standing over him. Without

looking at her, he held up the cylinder he’d taken from Heinrich.

“Come out of the surf,” she said, but when Arkadin didn’t make a move, she sat down

on a crest of sand behind him.

Heinrich was stretched out on his back as if he were a sunbather who’d fallen asleep.

The water had washed away all the blood.

After a time, Arkadin moved back, first onto the dark sand, then up behind the

waterline to where Devra sat, her legs drawn up, chin on her knees. That was when she

noticed that his left foot was missing three toes.

“My God,” she said, “what happened to your foot?”

It was the foot that had undone Marlene. The three missing toes on Arkadin’s left foot.

Marlene made the mistake of asking what had happened.

“An accident,” Arkadin said with a practiced smoothness. “During my first term in

prison. A stamping machine came apart, and the main cylinder fell on my foot. The toes

were crushed, nothing more than pulp. They had to be amputated.”

It was a lie, this story, a fanciful tale Arkadin appropriated from a real incident that

took place during his first stint in prison. That much, at least, was the truth. A man stole a pack of cigarettes from under Arkadin’s bunk. This man worked the stamping machine.

Arkadin tampered with the machine so that when the man started it up the next morning

the main cylinder dropped on him. The result wasn’t pretty; you could hear his screams

clear across the compound. In the end, they’d had to take his right leg off at the knee.

From that day forward he was on his guard with Marlene. She was attracted to him, of

this he was quite certain. She’d slipped from her objective pedestal, from the job Icoupov

had given her. He didn’t blame Icoupov. He wanted to tell Icoupov again that he

wouldn’t harm him, but he knew Icoupov wouldn’t believe him. Why should he? He had

enough evidence to the contrary to make him suitably nervous. And yet, Arkadin sensed

that Icoupov would never turn his back on him. Icoupov would never renege on his

pledge to take Arkadin in.

Nevertheless, something had to be done about Marlene. It wasn’t simply that she’d

seen his left foot; Icoupov had seen it as well. Arkadin knew she suspected the maimed

foot was connected with his horrendous nightmares, that it was part of something he

couldn’t tell her. Even the story Arkadin told her did not fully satisfy her. It might have with someone else, but not Marlene. She hadn’t exaggerated when she’d told him that she

possessed an uncanny ability to sense what her clients were feeling, and to find a way to

help them.

The problem was that she couldn’t help Arkadin. No one could. No one was allowed to

know what he’d experienced. It was unthinkable.

“Tell me about your mother and father,” Marlene said. “And don’t repeat the pabulum

you fed the shrink who was here before me.”

They were out on Lake Lugano. It was a mild summer’s day, Marlene was in a two-

piece bathing suit, red with large pink polka dots. She wore pink rubber slippers; a visor

shaded her face from the sun. Their small motorboat lay to, its anchor dropped. Small

swells rocked them now and again as pleasure boats went to and fro across the crystal

blue water. The small village of Campione d’Italia rose up the hillside like the frosted

tiers of a wedding cake.

Arkadin looked hard at her. It annoyed him that he didn’t intimidate her. He

intimidated most people; it was how he got along after his parents were gone.

“What, you don’t think my mother died badly?”

“I’m interested in your mother before she died,” Marlene said airily. “What was she

like?”

“Actually, she was just like you.”

Marlene gave him a basilisk stare.

“Seriously,” he said. “My mother was tough as a fistful of nails. She knew how to

stand up to my father.”

Marlene seized on this opening. “Why did she have to do that? Was your father

abusive?”

Arkadin shrugged. “No more than any other father, I suppose. When he was frustrated

at work he took it out on her.”

“And you find that normal.”

“I don’t know what the word normal means.”

“But you’re used to abuse, aren’t you?”

“Isn’t that called leading the witness, Counselor?”

“What did your father do?”

“He was consiglieri-the counselor-to the Kazanskaya, the family of the Moscow

grupperovka that controls drug trafficking and the sale of foreign cars in the city and

surrounding areas.” He’d been nothing of the sort. Arkadin’s father had been an

ironworker, dirt-poor, desperate, and drunk as shit twenty hours a day, just like everyone

else in Nizhny Tagil.

“So abuse and violence came naturally to him.”

“He wasn’t on the streets,” Arkadin said, continuing his lie.

She gave him a thin smile. “All right, where do you think your bouts of violence come

from?”

“If I told you I’d have to kill you.”

Marlene laughed. “Come on, Leonid Danilovich. Don’t you want to be of use to Mr.

Icoupov?”

“Of course I do. I want him to trust me.”

“Then tell me.”

Arkadin sat for a time. The sun felt good on his forearms. The heat seemed to draw his

skin tight over his muscles, making them bulge. He felt the beating of his heart as if it

were music. For just a moment, he felt free of his burden, as if it belonged to someone

else, a tormented character in a Russian novel, perhaps. Then his past came rushing back

like a fist in his gut and he almost vomited.

Very slowly, very deliberately he unlaced his sneakers, took them off. He peeled off

his white athletic socks, and there was his left foot with its two toes and three miniature stumps, knotty, as pink as the polka dots on Marlene’s bathing suit.

“Here’s what happened,” he said. “When I was fourteen years old, my mother took a

frying pan to the back of my father’s head. He’d just come home stone drunk, reeking of

another woman. He was sprawled facedown on their bed, snoring peacefully, when

whack!, she took a heavy cast-iron skillet from its peg on the kitchen wall and, without a

word, hit him ten times in the same spot. You can imagine what his skull looked like

when she was done.”

Marlene sat back. She seemed to have trouble breathing. At length, she said, “This

isn’t another one of your bullshit stories, is it?”

“No,” Arkadin said, “it’s not.”

“And where were you?”

“Where d’you think I was? Home. I saw the whole thing.”

Marlene put a hand to her mouth. “My God.”

Having expelled this ball of poison, Arkadin felt an exhilarating sense of freedom, but

he knew what had to come next.

“Then what happened?” she said when she had recovered her equilibrium.

Arkadin let out a long breath. “I gagged her, tied her hands behind her, and threw her

into the closet in my room.”

“And?”

“I walked out of the apartment and never went back.”

“How?” There was a look of genuine horror on her face. “How could you do such a

thing?”

“I disgust you now, don’t I?” He said this not with anger, but with a certain