Was that your first time? Not her. She wasn’t interested in prying his lid open, peering

inside to see what made him tick. She had no need to know. Because he was someone

who had always needed something, he couldn’t tolerate that trait in anyone else.

He was aware of her next to him in a way he was unable to understand. It was as if he

could feel her heartbeat, the rush of blood through her body, a body that seemed frail to

him, even though he knew how tough she could be, after all she’d suffered. How easily

her bones could be broken, how easily a knife slipped through her ribs might pierce her

heart, how easily a bullet could shatter her skull. These thoughts sent him into a rage, and he shifted closer to her, as if she were in need of protection-which, when it came to her

former allies, she most certainly was. He knew then that he’d do everything in his power

to kill anyone who sought to do her harm.

Feeling him edge closer, she turned and smiled. “You know something, Leonid, for the

first time in my life I feel safe. All that prickly shit I give off is something I learned early on to keep people away.”

“You learned to be tough like your mother.”

She shook her head. “That’s the really shitty part. My mother had this tough shell,

yeah, but it was skin-deep. Beneath it, she was a mass of fears.”

Devra put her head against the headrest as she continued, “In fact, the most vivid thing

I remember about my mother was her fear. It came off her like a stink. Even after she’d

bathed, I smelled it. Of course, for a long time I didn’t know what it was, and maybe I

was the only one who smelled it, I don’t know.

“Anyway, she used to tell me an old Ukrainian folktale. It was about the Nine Levels

of Hell. What was she thinking? Was she trying to frighten me or lessen her own fear by

sharing it with me? I don’t know. In any case, this is what she told me. There is one

heaven, but there are nine levels of hell where, depending on the severity of your sins,

you’re sent when you die.

“The first, the least bad, is the one familiar to everyone, where you roast in flames. The

second is where you’re alone on the summit of a mountain. Every night you freeze solid,

slowly and horribly, only to thaw out in the morning, when the process begins all over

again. The third is a place of blinding light; the fourth of pitch blackness. The fifth is a place of icy winds that cut you, quite literally, like a knife. In the sixth, you’re pierced by arrows. In the seventh, you’re slowly buried by an army of ants. In the eighth, you’re

crucified.

“But it was the ninth level that terrified my mother the most. There, you lived among

wild beasts that gorged themselves on human hearts.”

The cruelty of telling this to a child wasn’t lost on Arkadin. He was absolutely certain

that if his mother had been Ukrainian she’d have told him the same folktale.

“I used to laugh at her story-or at least I tried to,” Devra said. “I struggled against

believing such nonsense. But that was before a number of those levels of hell were visited

on us.”

Arkadin felt her presence inside him all the more deeply. The sense of wanting to

protect her seemed to bounce around inside him, increasing exponentially as his brain

tried to come to terms with what the feeling meant. Had he at last stumbled across

something big enough, bright enough, strong enough to put his demons to rest?

After Marlene’s death, Icoupov had seen the writing on the wall. He’d stopped trying

to peer into Arkadin’s past. Instead he’d shipped him off to America to be rehabilitated.

“Reprogrammed,” Icoupov had called it. Arkadin had spent eighteen months in the

Washington, DC, area going through a unique experimental program devised and run by

a friend of Icoupov’s. Arkadin had emerged changed in many ways, though his past-his

shadows, his demons-remained intact. How he wished the program had erased all

memory of it! But that wasn’t the nature of the program. Icoupov no longer cared about

Arkadin’s past, what concerned him was his future, and for that the program was ideal.

He fell asleep thinking about the program, but he dreamed he was back in Nizhny

Tagil. He never dreamed about the program; in the program he felt safe. His dreams

weren’t about safety; they were about being pushed from great heights.

Late at night, a subterranean bar called Crespi was the only option when he wanted to

get a drink in Nizhny Tagil. It was a reeking place, filled with tattooed men in tracksuits, gold chains around their necks, short-skirted women so heavily made up they looked like

store mannequins. Behind their raccoon eyes were vacant pits where their souls had been.

It was in Crespi where Arkadin at age thirteen was first beaten to a pulp by four burly

men with pig eyes and Neanderthal brows. And it was to Crespi that Arkadin, after

nursing his wounds, returned three months later and blew the men’s brains all over the

walls. When another crim tried to snatch his gun away, Arkadin shot him point-blank in

the face. That sight stopped anyone else in the bar from approaching him. It also gained

him a reputation, which helped him to amass a mini real estate empire.

But in that city of smelted iron and hissing slag success had its own particular

consequences. For Arkadin, it was coming to the attention of Stas Kuzin, one of the local

crime bosses. Kuzin found Arkadin one night, four years later, having a bare-knuckle

brawl with a giant lout whom Arkadin called out on a bet, for the prize of one beer.

Having demolished the giant, Arkadin grabbed his free beer, swigged half of it down,

and, turning, confronted Stas Kuzin. Arkadin knew him immediately; everyone in Nizhny

Tagil did. He had a thick black pelt of hair that came down in a horizontal slash to within an inch of his eyebrows. His head sat on his shoulders like a marble on a stone wall. His

jaw had been broken and reconstructed so badly-probably in prison-that he spoke with a

peculiar hissing sound, like a serpent. Sometimes what he said was all but unintelligible.

On either side of Kuzin were two ghoulish-looking men with sunken eyes and crude

tattoos of dogs on the backs of their hands, which marked them as forever bound to their

master.

“Let’s talk,” this monstrosity said to Arkadin, jerking his tiny head toward a table.

The men who’d been occupying the table rose as one when Kuzin approached, fleeing

to the other side of the bar. Kuzin hooked his shoe around a chair leg, dragged it around,

and sat down. Disconcertingly, he kept his hands in his lap, as if at any moment he’d

draw down on Arkadin and shoot him dead.

He began talking, but it took the seventeen-year-old Arkadin some minutes before he

could make heads or tails of what Kuzin was saying. It was like listening to a drowning

man going under for the third time. At length, he realized that Kuzin was proposing a

merger of sorts: half Arkadin’s stake in real estate for 10 percent of Kuzin’s operation.

And just what was Stas Kuzin’s operation? No one would speak about it openly, but

there was no lack of rumors on the subject. Everything from running spent nuclear fuel

rods for the big boys over in Moscow to white slave trading, drug trafficking, and

prostitution was laid at Kuzin’s doorstep. For his own part, Arkadin tended to dismiss the

more outlandish speculation in favor of what he very well knew would make Kuzin

money in Nizhny Tagil, namely, prostitution and drugs. Every man in the city had to get

laid, and if they had any money at all, drugs were far preferable to beer and bathtub