Slava unlocked the doors.

"You want us to get out?" Arkady asked.

Sasha Vaksberg said, "We have umbrellas. You're not afraid of a little rain, are you?"

Anya said, "I'm staying here."

"You will have to forgive me," Vaksberg told Arkady. "I'm paranoid, but when you've been betrayed as many times as I have, you will be paranoid too. It's a sixth sense."

Dima opened an umbrella for Vaksberg as he stepped out of the car. Arkady declined an umbrella and walked up the ramp to a 360-degree view of the city. The lights of the city were as subdued as banked coals. Lightning played in the clouds and it occurred to Arkady that an overpass bristling with steel rebars might not be the safest place to be when great electrical imbalances were being redressed. If he were crisped, he wondered what in life he had left undone. For one thing, he had the key to Victor's Lada. It would fall apart like a wagon in the desert.

Vaksberg tipped his umbrella back to see the rain. "There is no better place for a confidential conversation than outside in the rain."

"Conversation about what?"

"You. You're the man I've been looking for. Intelligent, resourceful and with absolutely nothing to lose."

"That's a harsh assessment."

"It means you're ready for a change of fortune."

"No," Arkady said.

"Wait, you haven't even heard the offer."

"I don't want to hear the offer. Until tomorrow at least, I'm an investigator."

Dima joined them, carrying the Glock openly. He asked Vaksberg, "Is there a problem?"

"No, just a little stubbornness."

Dima asked Arkady, "What are you smiling about?"

"You're carrying a gun in a lightning storm. You're a human lightning rod."

"Go to hell." Perplexity covered the bodyguard's face.

Arkady wondered whether death would make up for a lifetime of sleep deprivation. As for hell, he suspected that it would turn out to be more like Three Stations than fiery pits of brimstone and sulfur.

Through breaks in the clouds were glimpses of blue predawn haze. The storm beat a last drumroll in retreat.

Anya got out of the car and slammed the door. She didn't look happy with anyone.

Vaksberg called, "Anya, you missed us."

She pointed to the trunk.

"This?" Dima pointed at a rope that held the trunk of the Mercedes shut.

Arkady wondered since when did Mercedes use rope to keep their trunks shut?

Dima seemed to have the same question.

As he bent for the rope the trunk popped open and a stowaway sat up in the dark of the lid. At this point bodies moved slowly. The stowaway shot Dima with muzzle flashes one, two, three. Dima tried to return fire and his infallible pistol jammed. Staggering backward, futilely squeezing a trigger that wouldn't give, he absorbed four hits before he dropped.

Slava also had a Glock. The driver's pistol didn't jam and he sprayed the Mercedes until his clip was empty, while the stowaway rolled to the side of the trunk, protected by the car's armor. Just as the idea of retreat seemed to occur to Slava, he went down.

Arkady picked up Dima's pistol. He was not a marksman-his father was an army officer who inspired in Arkady a loathing for guns-but he had grown up stripping and cleaning and generally tending them. A nine-millimeter round stood straight as a smokestack in the feed ramp of the Glock. Arkady cleared it, advanced a fresh round and, because he was a poor shot and the stowaway was hidden in the dark of the trunk, walked directly toward the car. Hurried, the figure in the trunk missed with the last rounds of his rack, strung together some "Fuck"s trying to reload a clip wrong way 'round, corrected and raised his gun when the sky split open. Facing the lightning, the stowaway blinked. The white light at his back, Arkady fired. The stowaway folded, toppled and dropped onto the ramp.

Arkady found a flashlight in the glove compartment. The shooter was a dwarf between thirty and forty years of age, muscular, in fairy-tale tights and a roll-neck sweater right out of Snow White, except for the Makarov nine-millimeter by his hand and a hole as round as a cigarette burn between his eyes.

"It's Dopey," Vaksberg said. "You killed Dopey."

Dima and Slava were also dead, facedown, flat as fish, blurring the water with blood. Arkady felt around the interior of the trunk and found the courtesy light taped over, pulled the tape off and discovered a plastic supermarket bag that held a change of clothes, poncho, shoes and Metro pass. No ID. Nothing worth a ride in a car trunk, let alone murder. Arkady remembered the Spartak athletic bag in the passenger compartment.

"Wait! Let me explain." Vaksberg saw Arkady veer into the car.

As Arkady unzipped the bag, credit-card receipts and dollars and euros in $10,000 rolls spilled out.

Vaksberg said, "They're donations from guests leaving the fair."

"For the Children's Fund," Anya said.

"Good luck. Once it's in militia hands, you may never see it again."

"You can explain to them," Vaksberg said. "As you said, you're still an investigator."

"Not a popular one. How much cash is in the bag?"

"A hundred thousand dollars more or less," Anya said. "The same in credit-card charges."

"Well, believe it or not, to some people that's a lot of money."

"Does the militia have to know how much money?" Vaksberg asked.

"Are you bargaining? After you almost got us killed?"

"Yes. But in my defense, you didn't seem to care one way or the other. I mean, Dopey was blasting away at you and you just walked up to him and shot him in the head."

The lightning display faded to a steady rain. The day was off to a slow start but Arkady knew that sooner or later a patrol car passing the barricade would see a limousine standing on the ramp. If they came closer they would trip over bodies. Highway police accepted bribes for almost everything. Homicide crossed the line, and when Arkady added up the bodies, he still lacked a killer of the world's most lovable dwarf.

Vaksberg asked, "What are you doing?"

Arkady put the Makarov in Vaksberg's hand, aimed at the sky and forced Vaksberg's trigger finger to squeeze off a couple of rounds.

"Making you a hero. That's to prove to a paraffin test that you fired a gun."

"You're incriminating me?"

"Not at all. I'm making you a hero. Tell them what happened just as it happened, except that I wasn't here. Act it out and get your stories straight."

Anya said, "You're leaving us?"

"That's right. The Metro will be running soon. There's a station ten minutes away. I'll find my car. It's not a Mercedes but it has no bullet holes."

Vaksberg considered his role. "So I acted in self-defense. I simply walked up to this assassin and… Bang!"

Arkady said nothing, although he remembered how his father put it in an army manual: In the field, an officer should run only as a last resort and never in retreat. An officer who, under fire, can move calmly and confidently rather than race from one cover to another is worth ten brilliant tacticians.

It was Arkady's ambition to die before he became his father.