“There’s racing tomorrow. Trotters and flat. A horse I follow is in with a chance so I’d have been going anyway. If I see him, I’ll approach him. I presume you’d like to know his side of it, if he’ll tell me. I’ll have to let him know who’s asking, of course.”

“It might be better if he were to agree to a face-to-face meeting. That way you wouldn’t hear things you might not wish to.”

Babel shrugged his shoulders as if to say, “Why not?”

“It might be possible and, of course, even a man like me would rather not hear some things. Although I am curious-my God, I’m curious.”

He paused and smiled a cat’s smile, full of speculation and mischief.

“It will have to be quietly done, of course,” he continued. “The first rule in the Thieves’ world is non-cooperation with the Soviet state in any form, you know that. What Ginzburg said-it’s not quite right. Even in the prison system the Thieves bark at the sheep for their own purposes, not because they’re told to. Is there something in it for Kolya?”

“The Thief’s body, perhaps? His tattoos say he was known as Tesak.” It might be done. General Popov would consent if it bought them some information-the body would only be incinerated otherwise. “What do the Thieves do with their dead?”

“Same as the rest of us, I think. Put them in the ground and remember them fondly, or not, as the case may be. But for Kolya to recover Tesak’s body from the police it would have to be handled so as not to make him look like an informer.”

“He can steal it, for all I care.”

“I’ll ask him. Anything else you can offer him?”

Korolev considered for a moment and then decided that if he was going to run the risk of being shot, he might as well be shot for a reason.

“It can be a two-way conversation. He may be as interested in my information as I am in his, particularly if the mutilation was a message with his address on it.”

Babel took another drink of the wine and sighed. “Do you know, when they reopened the Hippodrome after the Civil War I practically lived out there. It’s a place I feel very happy. It’s all about the horses, which is not a bad thing at all.”

A little later, the rest of the wine finished, Korolev said his farewells to Babel and stumbled down the stairs, a paper bag of Shura’s cheese dumplings clutched to his chest. He shut the door to the apartment behind him, taking all the more care when he heard the child Natasha’s voice and then Valentina Nikolaevna’s, quiet and reassuring, in response. He paused for a moment in the shared room and listened to the sound of a distant train’s whistle, then walked over to the window. It was snowing outside and a set of tire tracks in the center of the lane were already losing their shape. The lantern across the street cast its yellow glow and Korolev thought it seemed as peaceful as a scene from an old postcard.

He wouldn’t have seen the watcher in the carriage entrance if the man hadn’t moved. It was just a shift in the darkness, but when he looked more carefully, shielding his eyes from the streetlamp’s glare by placing a hand down the side of his face and looking a little off center-the way he’d learned to do in the trenches-he was sure he detected the outline of a man there in the shadows. Then he noticed the disjointed footprints under the round arch. If there was a watcher, then the cold was making him stamp his boots from time to time. It would be difficult, Korolev thought, for whoever it was to see inside the darkened apartment, but perhaps they’d seen the light from the hallway when he’d entered. The watcher’s eyes would be more attuned to the dark than Korolev’s, and he wouldn’t have made the mistake of looking at the single street lamp that served that part of the lane. Possibly he was looking back at Korolev at this very moment, seeing Korolev’s face in the same street lamp’s glow, which added a slight sheen of silver to the surfaces of the shared room. Another flicker of movement decided the matter. He considered going down and confronting the watcher, then thought better of it. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know who was keeping tabs on him-at least they were only watching at this stage, and not carting him off to Butyrka.

But Korolev didn’t turn the light on as he undressed. And when he lay down to sleep it was with the chair against the door handle and his Walther underneath his pillow.

It tired you out, this kind of work, and it didn’t help that he hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in nearly a week. Of course, it was always difficult when you came home after a job, and busy periods exacerbated the problem. You couldn’t just lie down straight away when you’d finished-humans weren’t light bulbs, after all. They couldn’t just turn themselves off with the flick of a switch. They needed time to adjust to different situations. Like tonight, for example; the contrast between the sleeping domesticity of the apartment and what had happened out in the empty house was too extreme. As a result, he knew he’d have to let sleep come to him. He would have to be patient.

Over the years he’d become more accustomed to the late jobs. Of course, he’d had to; it wasn’t unusual to work past midnight, in fact it was probably the norm. After all, it was ideal for his kind of work-being the time when people were at their lowest, mentally and physically. But he was human also, and it required enormous effort to remain alert and hard and show nothing but strength to a prisoner, particularly if he also was exhausted and at the end of his tether. When it was over, no matter how tired he might feel, turning off that effort was difficult. He’d be driven home-they knew how to conserve his energy-and sometimes he’d drift off in the car, but it was rare. Mostly he just stared out at the empty streets and thought about the human being he’d just broken.

Tonight he’d climbed the stairs carefully, avoiding the steps that creaked, and slipped a soundless key into the apartment door. Once inside, he looked in on his son and touched the curls of his head as he lay there. His fingers looked rough against the boy’s porcelain cheeks, and he tried not to think of the blood he’d shed that night. He stepped back when his son stirred, his lips puffing outward for a moment and a frown forming, but the boy didn’t wake, and he was grateful-who knew what the boy might see in his eyes? He wished then that the boy could stay forever just like this-innocent and safe. Who was to say that the boy might not find himself in just such an empty house as the one he’d just left? And what if he were there too? They might ask that of him some day-to kill his own son. They had asked everything else of him. He sighed and pulled the blankets closer round the sleeping child.

He was never hungry when he came home. He liked to have a drink, it was true, but he didn’t have an appetite for food. Some did, but not him. Instead he’d sit in the kitchen, like tonight, pour himself a glass of vodka and read for a bit. Anything would do. For a while he’d read Shakespeare’s plays but then they’d become difficult. There was too much right and wrong in them, and he lived in a world where such bourgeois considerations were unhelpful. What did so-called virtues like honor, compassion and justice mean in the context of a Revolution? Let their enemies get bogged down with such nonsense-they were meaningless in the prism of predestined historical change. And yet they left awkward questions, the kind of questions his wife had asked before the end. He poured another measure. She’d seen him late at night too many times to have any illusions as to what kind of person he might be. And now nor did he. It was the reason why there was no mirror in the kitchen.

Two more ruffians dealt with tonight-easier with two, as well. The driver had taken them out well past Lefertovo, then down a winding road, and then a track. The two Thieves were trussed like chickens in the boot, and had looked around in confusion when they’d been hauled out. He wondered if it had been the first time they’d seen the moon cut through a forest’s bare branches-they certainly looked as though they’d never left the city before. It was the last time they’d seen the moon, anyway, if they’d bothered to take the chance.