“Where was ‘there’?”

“I didn’t notice. You don’t like Nikolai.”

“All I know for certain about Nikolai Isakov is that he’s a poor detective.”

“He’s a different man here. You don’t see the real Nikolai in Moscow or Tver; his natural setting is a battlefield. Do you want to know how we met?”

Arkady didn’t want to know.

“Sure.”

“The Russians were shelling a Chechen village of absolutely no military value. All the village men were in the mountains and only women and children were left, but I think the Russian artillery had a daily quota of houses to destroy. I was picking hot shrapnel out of a baby when Nikolai and Marat arrived with their squad. It was a situation I always dreaded, caught giving aid to the enemy. I half expected to be shot. Instead, Nikolai shared his medical supplies and when the Russians began shelling the village again Nikolai got on the radio and told them to stop. The colonel in charge of the guns said orders were orders. Nikolai asked his name so he could personally punch his teeth in and the shelling stopped at once. All I can tell you, Arkasha, is that Nikolai and I met under strange circumstances. Perhaps we were both at our best. We were people who couldn’t exist in the real world. Anyway, this was all before I met you. It has nothing to do with you. Don’t get involved with Nikolai.”

Something rustled at the front door. Arkady rose from the bed, pulled on pants and looked through the peephole. No one was in the hall but on the apartment floor was a string-tied envelope. He turned on a lamp.

“What is it?” Eva sat up.

He opened the envelope and drew out two glossy photographs. Major Agronsky had delivered and fled.

“Pictures.”

“Of what? Let me see.”

He brought them to the daybed. The first photo was taken from about a hundred meters in the air and included a stream and a stone bridge with a van on one side and an armored personnel carrier on the other. By the APC was a campfire. The picture was grainy and enlarged to the max, but Arkady counted half a dozen bodies slumped around the fire. The Chechens were in sweaters, sheepskin vests, woolen caps, running shoes, boots. Skewers of meat, flatbread and bowls of pilaf were scattered with them. Six more bodies were facedown on the road.

The Black Berets had grown beards and wore a mix of Russian and rebel gear, but their characters shone through. Urman held a Kalashnikov and a skewer of kabobs, Borodin and Filotov waved off the helicopter, Kuznetsov lay wounded and Bora kicked bodies, his pistol ready for a coup de grace. Treetops bowed in the wash of the rotors. In a corner the camera conveniently tagged the time at 13:43. The second photo, tagged 13:47, was virtually identical. The bodies around the campfire were arranged a little differently. There was food enough for a welcome, but not for a feast. The van was gone. Urman had dropped the skewer and aimed his rifle at the helicopter.

“The Sunzha Bridge.”

Eva said, “I thought we were past this.”

“I had some questions.”

“You have an obsession about Nikolai.”

“I want to know what happened.”

“Why? This was war. Are you going to investigate everything that happened in Chechnya? I’m in your bed, but you’re in love with questions.”

Arkady wanted to drop the subject but was drawn by an irresistible gravitational pull. “So I won’t have any more questions, tell me from your point of view what happened. Forget the official report. What happened at the bridge?”

“You know, Nikolai wasn’t even at the bridge. My motorcycle broke down and he drove me on my rounds of the villages, mainly because you never knew where the Russian checkpoints were or how nasty and drunk the men would be. If they thought you were with the rebels they would rape you and kill you. There were times that would have happened without Nikolai’s protection. That’s why neither of us is in the photographs.”

“Isakov deserted his post to serve as your personal driver?”

“I suppose you could put it that way.”

“Did you recognize any of the rebels?”

“They were in bags when we returned to the bridge.”

“You never saw them before?”

“No. I said they were in bags.”

“Then the man in charge at the bridge was Marat Urman? He led the fight?”

“I suppose so.”

“All this time Nikolai Isakov has been taking the credit for Urman’s deeds?”

“Taking responsibility in case there were problems.”

“Why should there be problems?”

“I don’t know.”

“If the Chechens were attacking, why were the bodies in the road shot in the back? Why were the others eating? Where are their weapons?”

“I don’t know.”

“Didn’t Isakov unzip the bags to look at the bodies?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did Urman resent losing the credit?”

“Marat worships Nikolai.”

“Everyone in the squad went along with that story?”

“Everyone worshipped Nikolai.”

“What about you?”

“Yes,” she said.

Arkady felt his heart race with hers. Well, they were working at something both perverse and difficult, the killing of love. That could raise a sweat.

“But this was all before I met you,” Eva said. “If you want to we can get in your car and go. We can do it now, while it’s dark. Take the car and go to Moscow.”

“I can’t,” Arkady said. “I can’t miss Stalin.”

“Are you insane?”

“No, I’m getting closer. I have a feeling this time I might see him.”

“Seriously?”

“He knew my father.”

“Why are you suddenly so mean?”

“Eva, I have a reliable witness who places Isakov at the bridge with bodies on the ground immediately after the fight. In fact, he’s so reliable he’s dead.”

Eva got out of bed and collected her clothes without looking in Arkady’s direction.

“I have to go.”

“I’ll see you at the dig.”

“I won’t be there.”

“Why not? It’s the big event.”

“I’m leaving you and Nikolai.”

“Why both? Choose one.”

“I don’t have to choose, since one of you will kill the other. I don’t want to be here for that. I don’t want to be the prize.”

His father said, “I loved her but your mother was a bitch. She came from a stuck-up family. Intelligentsia.” He said the word as if it were a species of insect. “Musicians and writers. You and I, we live in the real world, right?”

“Yes sir.” Arkady, fourteen, blindfolded with his own Young Pioneers scarf, was assembling a pistol. It was a game his father had invented. As Arkady raced the clock the General would try to distract him, because noise and confusion were an ordinary part of battle. Or move pieces around the table so that Arkady had to relocate them by feel.

“She was very young and wanted to know about women, so I told her in detail. I afforded her a view of sex that was more animal than her fainthearted friends were used to. One evening was devoted to Pushkin. It was a salon. Everyone brought in their favorite verse. Very artsy. I brought Pushkin’s diary. It had all the women he shagged in intimate detail. The man could write. You agree?”

“Yes sir.”

“You like that gun?”

“Yes sir.”

The gun, a Tokarev, came together in Arkady’s hands. He held the slide upside down, inserted the barrel into the recoil spring assembly, one end of the spring hanging loose, cradled the frame into the slide, turned the gun right side up and he was nearly done.

His father said, “I knew a man who swore by the Walther. Now here was an expert. He worked at night in a special room insulated for sound with a felt-lined door. His assistants would bring in a prisoner and he would shoot the prisoner in the back of the head. No conversation or nonsense about last words. All night, every night, one at a time, one hundred executions, two hundred executions, whatever the quota was. The workload was intense and halfway through the night the room was an abattoir. To keep him working, he was given a bottle of vodka. Every night, vodka and blood. The point is, the Walther never misfired, not once.” The General kicked the table. The recoil spring and barrel bushing flew off the table and under the couch he was sitting on. Arkady heard the spring roll over the parquet floor and felt his father’s boots in the way.