"Like brothers."

"Do you share your cut with him?"

Arkady swung out of bed. Anya tried to see him as he disappeared in the living room and reappeared in the kitchen. She watched him approach with something white and she flinched as he thrust it at her.

"What is it?"

"A letter from my friend Prosecutor Zurin. There's a lamp on the end table. Feel free to search the apartment. If you find a hundred thousand dollars, it's yours."

He didn't wait to see if she read it. Arkady woke briefly. In the darkness he became aware of another person not just nearby but radiating warmth. The scent of her was all-enveloping and he was so aroused it hurt. He could tell by her shifting on the sofa that Anya was also awake and anticipation and frustration hung in the air in equal amounts until he brushed them aside as products of his imagination.

When Arkady woke again, at noon, and spread the drapes, Anya was gone. On the pavement umbrellas were open. At his end of the street the pothole was expanding. A battery of workers, all women, shoveled hot asphalt down its maw. He watched a rubber boot go under.

Banners for the Nijinsky Fair sagged like shrouds. Arkady wondered what luxury or sensation was left. A diamond-studded elephant? Human sacrifice? Or would Sasha Vaksberg himself be an added attraction as a defender of the moneyed class? Arkady admitted to himself that he had assumed Vaksberg would protect Anya and that assumption was proving to be wrong. Smug, in fact.

Arkady phoned Willi, who said he couldn't talk. "We've got two boys who crashed on the Ring Road, a sniffer, an indigent pneumonia, a fall from a height, a slashed neck and now this threesome of gunshot victims and they've pressed me back into service."

Arkady asked, "Is one of the three a dwarf?"

Willi took his time answering. Arkady heard the snap of a rib cutter in the background.

"A remarkable guess."

"Tell me about him."

"It's no less work. People think, oh, a dwarf should be fast. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are different types of dwarfs and unusual factors."

"I thought he was shot."

"Yes."

"Isn't that the main factor?"

"Don't get smart. I'm not even supposed to talk to you."

"Who told you that?"

"The director. And Prosecutor Zurin. Zurin said that he was going to dismiss you. Did he?"

"Not yet," Arkady said.

This had to be done delicately. He had no authority. It was like casting a small lure on a lightweight line to a dimple in the water where there might be fish.

"What do you mean?" Willi asked.

"I mean that ordering someone to alter an autopsy report is serious business. You have the power-"

Willi hung up.

Well, that was feeble, Arkady thought. He had used psychology when he should have used blackmail.

His cell phone vibrated. Willi was back.

"Sorry, I had to get a cigarette."

"Take your time."

"This is what happened. Zurin and the director had me cut the girl's lung again. By then the smell of ether had dissipated. They said if I couldn't replicate my findings, the autopsy report had to be revised."

"Couldn't you detect it by other means?"

"Not after they're cremated."

"Already?"

"It was the wish of the family."

"Where's the dwarf?" Arkady asked.

"Here under a sheet. We're waiting for a table."

"Has he been identified?"

"No. We know nothing about him."

"Lift the sheet."

"Oh. Okay," said Willi. "We know something now. He's blue with tattoos from head to toe. He's a con."

Prison tattoos were done with a sharp hook and "ink" made out of urine and soot. Once under the skin, the pigment was blue and slightly blurred, but behind bars, tattoos were more than art; they were autobiography. For anyone who could read the symbols, a tattooed man was an open book.

Arkady said, "Tell me what you see."

"All kinds. Madonna and Child, teardrops, cats, spiderweb, Iron Cross, bloody dagger, barbed wire. The works."

"As soon as we hang up, I want you to take pictures of Dopey's tattoos with your cell phone and send them to me. I have an expert."

20

Itsy's original family was an addicted mother and abusive father. Their house had been like a listing ship, filthy clothes and empty bottles rolled to one side, bills underfoot and electricity cut off half the time.

The old man raised guard dogs for security agencies. Alsatians. Rottweilers. Money in that, but it went down her father's throat. Any money that made it home was an oversight. He smelled like the dogs. Man's best friend. Loyal.

By the time Itsy was twelve, her older brothers had run off. Lost out on the family business, a thriving enterprise that would have gone to them if, God forbid, anything happened to their father. Good real estate too, if Moscow spread in his direction. So he informed anyone trapped between him and a wall.

Times Itsy missed school were when she had no shoes. It didn't bother her father or mother that she didn't know much more than the alphabet and numbers, and when the school sent people to check on her well-being, she hid rather than be seen in rags.

Her job from the age of six was to clean the pens and dog run. Her father fed them. His credo was that "Him what feeds 'em is their muvver." And then he would stagger out in a suit of plastic armor and train them to attack.

With no companions and little else to do, Itsy spent hours with the dogs, playing with them or simply lying with them in a heap. Each dog had his own personality. The dogs were supposed to be kept apart in their own pens, but Itsy let them mix. Their eyes followed everything she did.

One winter evening her father came home early, drunk and bruised, the sullen loser of a street fight, when he found the dogs milling freely around Itsy. The dogs read his mood and drew closer to her.

"Growl at me?" He pulled out his trouser belt and bawled, "Out of the way!"

He might have cowed the pack and gained control if Itsy had not been present, if the first swing of the belt had not drawn a stripe of blood across her cheek.

One moment he was up and the next he was just a pair of legs kicking at the bottom of a frenzy that Itsy could not have stopped if she tried.

After, when the dogs tired of dragging her father's body back and forth, she put each in its pen, washed and dried the bloody money she found in her father's pocket and put on as many clothes as possible. He was too heavy to move, and the ground too hard to dig a grave, however shallow.

Her mother had slept through it all. Itsy would have left a note if she knew how to write. She would have written, "Please Feed the Dogs." Petra had stopped her cart at Aisle 3-Coffee amp; Tea, apparently undecided between bags of Sumatran or Colombian, whole bean or ground. She was nine years old and had the straight hair and broad face of a Romanian princess. She put the Colombian back on the shelf and picked up a French roast.

Strolling on Aisle 5 – Biscuits amp; Cookies, a cigarette cocked by his ear, Leo couldn't help but look like imminent trouble. He carried a "maybe"; a "maybe" was a mesh bag that everyone used to carry in case they saw anything for sale. Leo had long legs and loved to run. He was eleven.

Lisa was in Frozen Foods. She had bow lips, blue eyes, a halo of golden hair and a blank expression. Her best friend, Milka, was in Produce comparing cantaloupes, giving each the sniff test, the knock test, the squeeze. Milka was as plain as Lisa was beautiful, but she wore braces on her teeth, a sign of relative affluence. The girls were ten.

The supermarket was part of a French chain and there was a special emphasis on dishes with Gallic style like pate, cheeses and duck a l'orange ready for the microwave. Rabbits fluffy and skinned hung in a meat department designed to look like a true boucherie. A cafe served crapes and croque-monsieur.