While the initial exit processing was done in Tallinn, the medical exam and visa preparation took place in Helsinki. Applicants with ethnic ties to Estonia were given preference.

Six weeks after their application, Michael and Abby flew to Columbia, South Carolina, and drove an hour west to a small clinic in Springdale. That afternoon, after waiting what seemed like a lifetime in a small waiting room, a nurse walked in carrying two small bundles. The girls were two months old, and they were beautiful.

Michael recalled holding them for the first time. He recalled how everything else swam away, how the sounds in the background blended together into one far off symphony. It was in that moment he knew that everything bad that had happened to him in his life was now part of the past, a dark and terrible prologue to this, the first chapter of his story. It was the happiest day of his life.

They named the girls Charlotte and Emily. Charlotte, after Abby’s father Charles. Emily – and Michael would deny this under oath – because he was a slavish fan of British actress Emily Watson.

As he looked at their tiny faces, at their little fingers, he vowed that nothing bad would happen to them. He would give his own life first.

According to everyone Michael spoke to, the man to whom he had paid ten thousand dollars to broker the adoption – a Queens storefront lawyer who specialized in handling the legal affairs of people of Russian and East European ancestry – was discrete, trustworthy, and above all, appeared to be unconnected to the world of illegal adoption. Or so they had all thought.

That man’s name was Viktor Harkov.

And now that man was dead.

Max Priest told him what he knew. He said that someone had tortured and murdered Viktor Harkov in his office, and had apparently stolen a number of files. If this were all true, Michael knew, investigators would begin looking into motives, into client lists, into the legality and illegality of Viktor Harkov’s dealings, into his files, into his past.

Into Charlotte and Emily.

If that happened – if investigators discovered that the papers regarding the adoption of his little girls were not completely above board, that payoffs were made and documents were forged – the state could take his daughters away, and life would be over.

He could not let it happen.

TOMMY ANSWERED ON the first ring.

“Tommy, it’s Michael.”

“Hey cugino.”

“Can you talk?”

Through the phone, Michael heard Tommy cross his office, shut the door. “What’s up?”

Michael knew enough not to get too specific on an open line. “Have you heard about the homicide in the 114? The lawyer?”

“I heard something,” Tommy said. “No specifics. Why?”

Michael felt as if he was about to crest the first hill of the Cyclone, the Coney Island roller coaster of his youth. He felt his stomach lift and fall. “It was Viktor Harkov.”

Michael heard a short intake of breath, as well as the sounds of Tommy getting on his computer. Tommy knew Harkov professionally, had faced him in court a few times, but he also knew that Michael had had dealings with the man. “Fucking city,” Tommy said. “How did you hear? It was just posted on the site maybe two minutes ago.”

Michael would tell Tommy about the call from Max Priest, but not over the phone. “Who’s got it?”

Michael heard the clicking of keyboard keys. “Paul Calderon.”

“Do you think he’ll give it up?”

Tommy took a few seconds. “Hang on.”

Paul Calderon was good news. When the call had gone out at around 4 AM, it had most likely been a Group Seven notification – the ADA on call, the chief assistant, the executive staff. The ADA, in this case Paul Calderon, would have been awakened, along with a riding assistant, usually a first- or second-year lawyer. It may have been the assigned ADA who supervised everything, but it was the riding assistant who figured out the details, the legal propriety of the warrant, the probable cause, whether or not the information was timely. Staleness was always a concern.

Michael knew that Calderon was no more than a month or two from announcing his retirement, and a case like this, a brutal homicide of a well known figure, was going to take a lot of time and effort, effort Michael was hoping Calderon did not want to expend. The hope, for the moment, was that Tommy could wrest the case away.

Tommy returned a full minute later. “I’m in,” he said. “We have to run it by the boss, but Calderon was happy to let it go.”

“Any warrants?”

“There’s one in the works. It’s already with a judge.”

“I want to ride on this.”

Tommy fell silent. “Uh, aren’t you in court at two?”

“I’ll explain when I see you.”

Tommy knew Michael well enough to let it go. “You know where it is?”

Michael would never forget. “Yeah. 31st and Newtown.”

“That’s it,” Tommy said. “Meet me in front of Angelo’s.”

“Thanks,” Michael said.

Michael clicked off the phone. He took another Advil, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, and brought out a windbreaker with the QDA logo on the back. He scribbled a quick note on the whiteboard in the kitchen, took five hundred dollars in cash from the safe. He took his suit and shirt and new tie, grabbed his briefcase, got into the car, and headed to the train station.

FOURTEEN

Abby spent the early part of the afternoon at the block sale, haggling good-naturedly with other women from the neighborhood, bargaining over glassware, picture frames, jigsaw puzzles, flatware.

She had always thought that garage sale items were nothing more than worthless junk being sold and resold to the same people over and over again. Granted, sometimes there were pearls to be found in the suburban oyster, but rarely.

Earlier in the day she had brought over three large boxes from the house, a good deal of it things she had picked up at garage sales and flea markets over the years, proving her point. One of the boxes was full of paperbacks; yellowed mass-market copies of books she had been shelving and reshelving since college. Colleen McCollough, Harold Robbins, Stephen King. She found it terribly difficult to part with books, but she made herself a promise this time.

At just after one, while talking to Mindy Stillman, who seemed to have an immeasurable trove of anecdotes about her ex-husband’s infidelities, Abby waved over Charlotte and Emily. She needed to get them fed and ready to drop off at the babysitter’s house.

She did not see or hear the black SUV turn the corner, drive up her long driveway, and park behind the garage.

In the distance, the smoke of burning thatch writes the village’s epitaph in the sky. He feels alive, connected to history by the blood beneath his boots, still electrified from the insanity of battle. He checks himself for wounds. He is unscathed. Around him is a meadow sown with the fallen.

He enters the farmhouse. He knows every stone, every timber, every sill. It has lived in his dreams for a long time.

The old woman glances up from her task. She has met Koschei before, knows the centuries of madness in his eyes. Her house is warm, heated by the burning fields, the fires that have brought Grozny to its knees. The kitchen smells of fresh bread and human flesh. The senses are ashamed of their hungers.

“You,” she says softly, the tears rimming her ancient eyes. She draws the knife to her own throat. “You.”

WHILE ABBY FLIPPED through the new issue of Architectural Digest, the girls played in the backyard. In about an hour Abby needed to drop them off at the babysitters, before heading to the clinic. She had a twelve-hour shift coming up and, as much as she had intended to catch up on her sleep, she was tired already. On the days when she worked, and Michael was in court, there was usually a three- or four-hour window where they needed someone to watch the girls.