"You don't miss anything," he told her.» But I wonder why you bothered."

"You will accept that this is Pribluda's apartment?"

"It seems to be."

"And that the prints we find here are Pribluda's?"

"We haven't really checked them, but let's say I do."

"Remember at the autopsy you told Captain Arcos it was a strange way for a Russian to fish."

"In an inner tube at sea? Yes, it was a first for me."

The detective led him back to the laundry room and turned on a hanging bulb and this time he saw, besides a stone basin and clothes line, reels of monofilament and wire and, on rough shelves of orange crate, jars that contained tangles of barbed, ugly hooks graded by size. Each jar was dusted and covered with clear prints. Detective Osorio handed Arkady an index card of lifted fingerprints. Immediately, Arkady saw a large print with a distinctive loop crossed by a scar identical with prints on the bottles. On a jar he found the same, carefully dusted print.

"He was right-handed?" Osorio asked.

"Yes."

"From the angles you can see, when he held the jar, the prints on the jar are his right thumb and index fingers and the prints on the glass are his left thumb and index finger. They're over all the rooms, doors, mirrors, everywhere. So you see, your Russian friend was a Cuban fisherman."

"The body, how long was it dead?"

"According to Dr. Bias, maybe two weeks."

"No one's been here in the meantime?"

"I asked the neighbors. No."

"That must be a hungry turtle."

Arkady returned to the front room, out of habit memorizing the apartment layout as he went: balcony, sitting room, laundry room, office, bathroom, bedroom. Inside the refrigerator were yogurt, greens, eggplant, pickled mushrooms, boiled tongue and a half-dozen boxes of color 35-mm film. He fed dillweed to the turtle and glanced at the black doll that filled the corner chair.» I have to admit these are new aspects to the man I knew. Did you find his car?"

"No."

"Do you know the make?"

"Lada." She shook her head a little for emphasis.» It doesn't matter. Your flight is in four hours. The body is being prepared for the plane. You will accompany it. Agreed?"

"I suppose I will."

Osorio frowned, as if she glimpsed a nuance in the answer.

On the ride back she asked, "Tell me, out of curiosity, as an investigator are you any good?"

"Not particularly."

"Why not?"

"Various reasons. I used to have a fair rate of success, as your captain puts it. But that was when murders in Moscow were amateur affairs with steel pipes and vodka bottles. Now they're professional work with heavy artillery. Also, militia work never paid well but it paid. Now, since the militia has not seen its salary in six months, men don't work with the same zeal. And there's the problem that if you do make progress on a contract homicide, the man who ordered the murder takes the prosecutor to lunch and offers him a condominium in Yalta and the case is dropped, so my success ratio is no longer something to be proud of. And, no doubt, my skills are not what they used to be."

"You had so many questions."

"Habit." Going through the motions, Arkady thought, as if his body were a suit that shuffled to the scene of the crime, any crime, anywhere. He was more irritated with himself than with her. Why had he started snooping? Enough! Osorio was right. He felt her eyes on him. Only for a moment, though. Because they were crossing a power blackout she had to proceed on some streets as carefully as steering a boat in the dark. In Arkady's mind, the syringe beckoned, the needle of a compass.

When they halted for goats wandering over the road the headlights illuminated a wall on which was written "Venceremos!" Arkady tried to say it silently but Osorio caught him.

Venceremos!' means 'We will win!' In spite of America and Russia, we will win!"

"In spite of history, geography, the law of gravity?"

"In spite of everything! You don't have signs like that in Moscow anymore, do you?"

"We have signs. Now they say Nike and Absolut."

He got a glance from Osorio no worse than the flame of a blowtorch. When they reached the embassy apartment the detective told him that a driver would gather him in two hours for the airport.» And you will have your friend to travel with."

"Let's hope it really is the colonel." Osorio was stung worse than he'd intended.» A live Russian, a dead Russian, it's hard to tell the difference." "You're right."

Arkady went up alone. A rumba played either in the house or out of the house, he could no longer tell where, all he knew was that constant music made him exhausted.

Unlocking the door, he lit a cigarette, careful not to drop embers on his sleeve. It was a cashmere coat Irina had given him as a wedding present, a soft black wreath of a coat that, she said, made him look like a poet. With the thin Russian shoes and shabby pants that he insisted on wearing he appeared all the more artistic. It was a lucky coat, impervious to bullets. He had walked through a shootout on the Arbat like an armored saint; later, he realized that no one had fired at him precisely because in his miraculous coat he resembled neither gangster nor militia.

More than that, the coat bore the faint lingering perfume of Irina, a secret, tactile sense of her, and when the thought of her became unbearable this scent was a final ally against her loss.

It was odd, Osorio asking whether he was any good. What he hadn't told her was that in Moscow his work suffered from what was officially labeled "inattention." When he went to work at all. He stayed in bed for days, the coat for a coverlet, occasionally rising to boil water for tea. Waiting for night before going out for cigarettes. Ignoring the visits of colleagues at the door. The cracks in the plaster of his Moscow ceiling had a vague outline of West Africa, and staring up he could catch the moment when window light was sideways enough to turn bumps into plaster mountains and turn cracks into a network of rivers and tributaries. Flying a black coat as his flag, his vessel sailed to each port of call.

Inattention was the greatest crime of all. He had seen every sort of victim, from nearly pristine bodies in their beds to the butchered, monstrously altered dead, and he had to say that, in general, they would still be lightly snoring or laughing at a well-told joke if someone had only paid more attention to an approaching knife or shotgun or syringe. All the love in the world could not make up for lack of attention.

Say you were on the deck of a ferry crossing a narrow strait, and although the distance was short, the wind and waves came up and the ship foundered. Into the cold water you go, and the one you love most is in your grasp. All you have to do to save her life is not let go. And then you look and your hand is empty. Inattention. Weakness. Well, the self-condemned lived longer nights than others for good reason. Because they were always trying to reverse time, to return to that receding, fateful moment and not let go. At night, when they could concentrate.

In the dark of the room he saw the polyclinic off the Arbat where he, the solicitous lover, had taken Irina to treat an infection. She had stopped smoking-they both magazine, Elle or Vogue, it didn't matter how old. He remembered the fatuous slap of his shoes as he crossed the room and, outside, the flyers of private vendors stapled to the trees-"For Sale! Best Medicines!"-which could have explained why drugs were in short supply in the clinic. Cottonwood seeds lifted into the evening's summer light. Poised smugly on the clinic steps, what had he been thinking? That they had finally achieved a normal life, a blessed bubble above the general mayhem? Meanwhile the nurse led Irina to the examining room. (Since then he had become more tolerant of killers. The carefully planned ambush, colorful wiring, the car packed with Semtex, the trouble they went to. At least they killed deliberately.) Her doctor explained that the clinic was short of Bactrim, the usual treatment. Was she allergic to ampicillin, penicillin? Yes, Irina always made sure the fact was underlined on her chart. At which point, the doctor's pocket beeped, and he stepped into the hall to talk on his cellular phone with his broker about a Romanian fund that promised a three-for-one return. The nurse in the examining room had heard only minutes before that her apartment had been sold by the city to a Swiss corporation for offices. Who was there to complain to? She had caught the word "ampicillin." Since the clinic was out of oral doses, she gave Irina an intravenous injection and left the room. Executions should be as speedy and thorough.