“This is not a notebook of beer-sized insanity; this merits vodka. To begin with, Arkady, are you crazy? Maybe this is a result of the shooting?”

“These notes are just to jog my memory of certain cases.”

“No. These notes cover cases that were never yours. Kuznetsov chopped by a cleaver, his wife stuffed with her own tongue, the journalist Ginsberg run down and Borodin drunk. These cases were disposed of by Detectives Isakov and Urman as a domestic squabble, a slip on the ice, the dangers of drinking alone and not sharing. But you insinuate murder.”

“Just suggesting they were inadequately investigated.”

“Did you see Ginsberg run down?”

“No.”

“Was there any evidence of foul play with Borodin?”

“No.”

“What have they got to do with the Kuznetsovs?”

“Isakov and Urman.”

“Do you hear the circularity of your argument?”

“The notes are just for me.”

“You had better hope so, because if Isakov and Urman get wind of it your body will be found, but the notebook will not. I feel bad. I got you involved with Zoya Filotova killing and scalping her husband. That blew up in our face.”

“The notes aren’t well organized.”

“Well, you just tossed everyone in.”

“I tried to give everyone their own page and a list of facts and near-facts. Isakov and Urman to start with. Then the Russian Patriot video crew-Zelensky, Petya, and Bora-each got a page.”

“They’re campaigning in Tver today.” Victor paused reverently as a short carafe of vodka arrived, then reached across to flip pages. “You gave Tanya a page.”

“Urman’s girlfriend and handles a garrote well. Bonus points for playing the harp.”

“Here’s Zhenya’s father, Osip Lysenko? What the devil has he got to do with this?”

“Anyone who shoots me automatically earns a page.”

“If you keep this up you will get shot again. Who knows? Isakov and Urman may be the ones to find your body. I thought you had a ticket out of town.”

“So they say.”

Victor turned another page. “The rest of the notes are crazy. Arrows, diagrams, cross-references.”

“Connections. Some are sketchy.”

“You worry me, Arkady. I think you’re coming undone.”

“I wanted to be complete.”

“Is that so? You know whose name I haven’t seen? Eva. Doctor Eva Kazka. I think she deserves a page.”

Arkady was startled by the omission. He wrote Eva’s name on a fresh page and wondered what else about her he had missed.

“I think you have it all now,” Victor said.

Arkady watched a bus roll by advertising a day trip to Suzdal. “See the Soul of Russia.” The trip included lunch.

“There’s a number,” he said.

“What number?”

“I don’t recall the shooting and there are some other blank patches, so I’ve been working on phone numbers, addresses, names. What does thirty-three, thirty-one, thirty-three mean to you?”

“You’re serious? It means nothing.”

“What could it mean?”

Victor took a first sip of vodka like a butcher whetting his knife.

“Not a phone number; that would be seven digits. Maybe the combination to a padlock or a safe. Right twice to thirty-three, left to thirty-one, right to thirty-three, turn latch and open, only…”

“Only I don’t know whose safe or where it is.”

“Visualize the number. Typed? Handwritten? Who wrote it, you or somebody else? A man or a woman’s hand? What was the number originally written on? A paper napkin or a bar coaster? Is it a license plate number? The winning number of a lottery? How can you remember and not remember?”

“Elena Ilyichnina says that bits of my memory will come back. I have to go.”

Arkady paid for Victor’s vodka, the price of his expertise.

“Do you think I drink too much? Be honest.”

“A touch.”

“It could be worse.” Victor looked right and left. “Did Elena Ilyichnina say anything about me?”

“No.”

“Did she recognize me?”

“Why should she?”

Victor pulled back the hair at his temples and revealed a small puckered scar on each side.

“You always astonish me,” Arkady said. “You too?”

“A little different. I had a tiny drug addiction problem about ten years ago, so I had myself drilled.”

“Drilled?”

“On local anesthetic. I talked to the doctor while he took some brain tissue from each hemisphere. A dab. The procedure was a wonderful example of Russian ingenuity. It’s outlawed now because Elena Ilyichnina turned him in, but it worked. I’ve been drug-free since.”

“Congratulations. And the drinking?”

Victor patted his hair down. “It fills the gap. It completes me. It’s my veneer. Everyone has a veneer, even you, Arkady. Everyone sees a peaceful man. There’s nothing remotely peaceful about you. We started off, you and I, investigating two detectives. Now you’re after the Black Berets.”

“Something happened in Chechnya.”

“Horrible things, no doubt; it’s war. But why would heroes like Isakov and Urman come back to Moscow and kill their friends and former comrades in arms? Do you know what this notebook adds up to? Wishful thinking. Ask yourself what you’re after, Isakov or Eva? I speak as the man who killed the man who shot you. What makes you think Eva is unhappy with him?” When Arkady said nothing Victor dredged up half a smile. “Fuck, forget about all this. I’m rambling. I’m drunk.”

“You sound sober to me. Think about thirty-three, thirty-one, thirty-three. I just wonder why my brain chose this number to fix on.”

“Maybe at this point your brain hates your guts.”

With the thaw a moving truck had finally delivered Arkady’s furniture and earthly goods, including a cot, although Zhenya maintained his independence by sleeping on the couch with a backpack ready for instant departure. He still bore the stamp of early malnutrition but he had started lifting weights and developed hard little muscles like knots in a rope.

He did schoolwork quickly so that he could turn on the television and watch a nostalgia channel that ran grainy wartime documentaries on the siege of Leningrad, the defense of Moscow, the carnage and valor of Stalingrad, renamed Volgograd but forever Stalingrad. Also, war films about pilots, tank crews and riflemen who shared snapshots of mothers, wives and children before attacking a machine gun bunker, piloting a burning plane, crawling with a Molotov cocktail toward an enemy tank.

“I’m sorry,” Zhenya said.

Arkady was a little startled. He was at the desk writing in the notebook and hadn’t heard Zhenya approach.

“Thank you. I’m sorry about your father.”

“Did you see it?”

“No, not actually.”

“You don’t remember it?” Zhenya asked.

“No.”

Zhenya nodded, as if that were a good option.

“Do you remember going to Gorky Park?”

“Of course.”

“Remember the Ferris wheel?”

“Yes. Your father ran it.”

Osip Lysenko had hit on a perfect situation for dealing drugs: young people paying in cash for a five-minute ride in the open-air privacy of a gondola. That no one tried to fly from the top of the wheel was a miracle.

“He was never there,” Zhenya said.

Thank God, Arkady thought. Each had gone to the park with a false assumption. Arkady thought that the boy sought a missing father. The boy thought Arkady carried a gun.

One minute was usually the time limit on discourse with Zhenya, but he stood his ground and brightened. “Winter is a bitch.”

“It certainly can be.”

“In the rail yard you could freeze to death. Sniff glue during the day and turn blue at night. That’s when you go to the shelter.”

“Like wintering in the Crimea.”

“The problem is, if a parent shows up they hand you over, even to my father. He said the law was on his side; I’d never get away.”

“You saw him here?”

“Right across the street. He was with a crew filling in a hole.”

“Just bad luck.”

“It was snowing. I didn’t see him when I went out the building. I walked right by him. The wind pushed my hood back and he said my name. He said, ‘Do you still play chess?’ And then he saw my book bag and said, ‘Do you have your chess set with you?’”