ETERNITY AND AFTERWARD

PUNCTUALITY HAD COME to be something of a curse for Viktor Chemayev. Though toward most of his affairs he displayed the typical nonchalance of a young man with a taste for the good life and the money to indulge it, he maintained an entirely different attitude toward his business appointments. Often he would begin to prepare himself hours in advance, inspecting his mirror image for flaws, running a hand over his shaved scalp, trying on a variety of smiles, none of which fit well on his narrow Baltic face, and critiquing the hang of his suit (his tailor had not yet mastered the secret of cutting cloth for someone with broad shoulders and a thin chest). Once satisfied with his appearance he would pace the length and breadth of his apartment, worrying over details, tactical nuances, planning every word, every expression, every gesture. Finally, having no better use for the time remaining, he would drive to the meeting place and there continue to pace and worry and plan. On occasion this compulsiveness caused him problems. He would drink too much while waiting in a bar, or catch cold from standing in the open air, or simply grow bored and lose his mental sharpness. But no matter how hard he tried to change his ways he remained a slave to the practice. And so it was that one night toward the end of October he found himself sitting in the parking lot of Eternity, watching solitary snowflakes spin down from a starless sky, fretting over his appointment with Yuri Lebedev, the owner of the club and its chief architect, from whom he intended to purchase the freedom of the woman he loved.

For once it seemed that Chemayev's anxiety was not misplaced. The prospect of meeting Lebedev, less a man than a creature of legend whom few claimed to have ever seen, was daunting of itself; and though Chemayev was a frequent visitor to Eternity and thus acquainted with many of its eccentricities, it occurred to him now that Lebedev and his establishment were one and the same, an inscrutable value shining forth from the dingy chaos of Moscow, a radiant character whose meaning no one had been able to determine and whose menace, albeit palpable, was impossible to define. The appointment had been characterized as a mere formality, but Chemayev suspected that Lebedev's notion of formality was quite different from his own, and while he waited he went over in his mind the several communications he had received from Eternity's agents, wondering if he might have overlooked some devious turn of phrase designed to mislead him.

The club was located half an hour to the north and west of the city center amidst a block of krushovas, crumbling apartment projects that sprouted from the frozen, rubble-strewn waste like huge gray headstones memorializing the Kruschev era -- the graveyard of the Soviet state, home to generations of cabbage-eating drunks and party drones. Buildings so cheaply constructed that if you pressed your hand to their cement walls, your palm would come away coated with sand. No sign, neon or otherwise, announced the club's presence. None was needed. Eternity's patrons were members of the various mafiyas and they required no lure apart from that of its fabulous reputation and exclusivity. All that was visible of the place was a low windowless structure resembling a bunker -- the rest of the complex lay deep underground; but the lot that surrounded it was packed with Mercedes and Ferraris and Rolls Royces. As Chemayev gazed blankly, unseeingly, through the windshield of his ten-year-old Lada, shabby as a mule among thoroughbreds, his attention was caught by a group of men and women hurrying toward the entrance. The men walked with a brisk gait, talking and laughing, and the women followed silently in their wake, their furs and jewelry in sharp contrast to the men's conservative attire, holding their collars shut against the wind or putting a hand to their head to keep an extravagant coiffure in place, tottering in their high heels, their breath venting in little white puffs.

"Viktor!" Someone tapped on the driver side window. Chemayev cleared away condensation from the glass and saw the flushed, bloated features of his boss, Lev Polutin, peering in at him. Several feet away stood a pale man in a leather trenchcoat, with dark hair falling to his shoulders and a seamed, sorrowful face. "What are you doing out in the cold?" Polutin asked as Chemayev rolled down the window. "Come inside and drink with us!" His 100-proof breath produced a moist warmth on Chemayev's cheeks.

"I'll be along soon," Chemayev said, annoyed by this interruption to his routine.

Polutin straightened and blew on his hands. A big-bellied ursine man of early middle age, his muscles already running to fat, hair combed back in a wave of grease and black gleam from his brow. All his features were crammed toward the center of his round face, and his gestures had the tailored expansiveness common to politicians and actors out in public, to all those who delight in being watched. He introduced his companion as Niall March, a business associate from Ireland. March gave Chemayev an absent nod. "Let's get on in," he said to Polutin. "I'm fucking freezing." But Polutin did not appear to have heard. He beamed at Chemayev, as might a father approving of his child's cleverness, and said, "I promised Niall I'd show him the new Russia. And here you are, Viktor. Here you are." He glanced toward March. "This one..." -- he pointed at Chemayev -- "always thinking, always making a plan." He affected a comical expression of concern. "If I weren't such a carefree fellow, I'd suspect him of plotting against me."

Asshole, Chemayev thought as he watched the two men cross the lot. Polutin liked to give himself intellectual airs, to think of himself as criminal royalty, and to his credit he had learned how to take advantage of society's convulsions; but that required no particular intelligence, only the instincts and principles of a vulture. As for the new Russia, what a load of shit! Chemayev turned his eyes to the nearest of the krashovas no more than fifteen yards away, the building's crumbling face picked out by wan flickering lights, evidence that power was out on some of the floors and candles were in use. The fluorescent brightness of the entranceway was sentried by a prostitute with bleached hair and a vinyl jacket who paced back and forth with metronomic regularity, pausing at the end of each pass to peer out across the wasteland, as though expecting her relief. There, he thought, that was where the new Russia had been spawned. Open graves infested by the old, the desperate, the addicted, perverts of every stamp. They made the stars behind them look false, they reduced everything they shadowed. If the new Russia existed, it was merely as a byproduct of a past so grim that any possible future would be condemned to embody it.

The prospect of spending an evening with his boss, especially this one, when so much was at stake, weighed on Chemayev. He was not in the mood for Polutin's condescension, his unctuous solicitude. But he could think of no way to avoid it. He stepped from the car and took a deep breath of the biting, gasoline-flavored Moscow air. A few hours more, and his troubles would be over. All the wormy, enfeebling pressures of the past year would be evicted from his spirit, and for the first time he'd be able to choose a path in life rather than accept the one upon which he had been set by necessity. Strengthened by this notion, he started across the lot. Each of his footsteps made a crisp sound, as if he were crushing a brittle insect underfoot, and left an impression of his sole in a paper-thin crust of ice.

Chemayev checked his pistols at the entrance to Eternity, handing them over to one of Lebedev's young unsmiling soldiers, and descended in an elevator toward the theater that lay at the center of the complex. The empty holsters felt like dead, stubby wings strapped to his sides, increasing his sense of powerlessness -- by contrast, the money belt about his waist felt inordinately heavy, as if full of golden bars, not gold certificates. The room into which the elevator discharged him was vast, roughly egg-shaped, larger at the base than at the apex, with snow white carpeting and walls of midnight blue. At the bottom of the egg was a circular stage, currently empty; tiers of white leather booths were arranged around it, occupied by prosperous-looking men and beautiful women whose conversations blended into a soft rustling that floated upon a bed of gentle, undulant music. Each booth encompassed a linen-covered table, and each table was centered by a block of ice hollowed so as to accommodate bottles of chilled vodka. The top of the egg, some thirty feet above the uppermost tier, was obscured by pale swirling mist, and through the mist you could see hanging lights -- silvery, delicate, exotically configured shapes that put Chemayev in mind of photographs he'd seen of microscopic creatures found in polar seas. To many the room embodied a classic Russian elegance, but Chemayev, whose mother -- long deceased -- had been an architect and had provided him with an education in the arts, thought the place vulgar, a childish fantasy conceived by someone whose idea of elegance had been derived from old Hollywood movies.

Polutin's booth, as befitted his station, was near the stage. The big man was leaning close to March, speaking energetically into his ear. Chemayev joined them and accepted a glass of vodka. "I was about to tell Niall about the auction," Polutin said to him, then returned his attention to March. "You see, each night at a certain time...a different hour every night, depending on our host's whim. Each night a beautiful woman will rise from beneath the stage. Naked as the day she came into the world. She carries a silver tray upon which there lies a single red rose. She will walk among the tables, and offer the rose to everyone in attendance."

"Yeah?" March cocked an eye toward Polutin. "Then what?"

"Then the bidding begins."

"What are they bidding for?" March's responses were marked by a peculiar absence of inflection, and he appeared disinterested in Polutin's lecture; yet Chemayev had the sense that he was observing everything with unnatural attentiveness. His cheeks were scored by two vertical lines as deep as knife cuts that extended from beneath the corners of his eyes to the corners of his lips. His mouth was thin, wide, almost chimpanzee-like in its mobility and expressiveness -- this at odds with his eyes, which were small and pale and inactive. It was as if at the moment of creation he had been immersed in a finishing bath, one intended to add an invigorating luster, that had only partially covered his face, leaving the eyes and all that lay behind them lacking some vital essential.

"Why...for the rose, of course." Polutin seemed put off by March's lack of enthusiasm. "Sometimes the bidding is slow, but I've seen huge sums paid over. I believe the record is a hundred thousand pounds."

"A hundred grand for a fucking flower?" March said. "Sounds like bollocks to me."

"It's an act of conspicuous consumption," Chemayev said; he tossed back his vodka, poured another from a bottle of Ketel One. "Those who bid are trying to demonstrate how little money means to them."

"There's an element of truth in what Viktor says," Polutin said archly, "but his understanding is incomplete. You are not only bidding for status...for a fucking flower." He spooned caviar onto a silver dish and spread some on a cracker. "Think of a rose. Redder than fire. Redder than a beast's eye. You're bidding for that color, that priceless symptom of illusion." He popped the cracker into his mouth and chewed noisily; once he had swallowed he said to March, "You see, Viktor does not bid. He's a frugal man, and a frugal man cannot possibly understand the poetry of the auction." He worried at a piece of cracker stuck in his teeth. "Viktor never gambles. He picks up a check only when it might prove an embarrassment to do otherwise. His apartment is a proletarian tragedy, and you've seen that piece of crap he drives. He's not wealthy, but he is far from poor. He should want for nothing. Yet he hordes money like an old woman." Polutin smiled at Chemayev with exaggerated fondness. "All his friends wonder why this is."

Chemayev ignored this attempt to rankle him and poured another vodka. He noted with pleasure that the pouches beneath Polutin's eyes were more swollen than usual, looking as if they were about to give birth to fat worms. A few more years of heavy alcohol intake, and he'd be ripe for a cardiac event. He lifted his glass to Polutin and returned his smile.

"To be successful in business one must have a firm grasp of human nature," said Polutin, preparing another cracker. "So naturally I have studied my friends and associates. From my observations of Viktor I've concluded that he is capable of magic." He glanced back and forth between Chemayev and March, as if expecting a strong reaction.

March gave an amused snort. "I suppose that means he's got himself a little wand."

Polutin laughed and clapped March on the shoulder. "Let me explain," he said. "During the early days of glasnost, Yuri Lebedev was the strongest man in all the mafiyas. He made a vast fortune, but he also made enemies. The dogs were nipping at his heels, and he recognized it was only a matter of time before they brought him down. It was at this point he began to build Eternity."

He gobbled the second cracker, washed it down with vodka; after swallowing with some difficulty he went on: "The place is immense. All around us the earth is honeycombed with chambers. Apartments, a casino, a gymnasium, gardens. Even a surgery. Eternity is both labyrinth and fortress, a country with its own regulations and doctrines. There are no policemen here, not even corrupt ones. But commit a crime within these walls, a crime that injures Yuri, and you will be dealt with according to his laws. Yuri is absolutely secure. He need never leave until the day he dies. Yet that alone does not convey the full extent of his genius. In the surgery he had doctors create a number of doubles for him. The doctors, of course, were never heard from again, and it became impossible to track Yuri. In fact it's not at all certain that he is still here. Some will tell you he is dead. Others say he lives in Chile, in Tahiti. In a dacha on the Black Sea. He's been reported in Turkestan, Montreal, Chiang Mai. He is seen everywhere. But no one knows where he is. No one will ever know."

"That's quite clever, that is," March said.

Polutin spread his hands as if to reveal a marvel. "Right in front of our eyes Yuri built a device that would cause him to disappear, and then he stepped inside it. Like a pharaoh vanishing inside his tomb. We were so fascinated in watching the trick develop, we never suspected it was a real trick." He licked a fleck of caviar from his forefinger. "Had Yuri vanished in any way other than the one he chose, his enemies would have kept searching for him, no matter how slim their chances of success. But he created Eternity both as the vehicle of his magical act and as a legacy, a gift to enemies and friends alike. He surrendered his power with such panache.... It was a gesture no one could resist. People forgave him. Now he is revered. I've heard him described as' the sanest man in Moscow.' Which in these times may well serve a definition of God."

Apprehension spidered Chemayev's neck. Whatever parallel Polutin was trying to draw between himself and Yuri, it would probably prove to be a parable designed to manipulate him. The whole thing was tiresome, predictable.... Out of the corner of his eye he spotted a tall girl with dark brown hair. He started to call to her, mistaking her for Larissa, but then realized she didn't have Larissa's long legs, her quiet bearing.

"There is tremendous irony in the situation," Polutin continued. "Whether dead or alive, in the act of vanishing Yuri regained his power. Those close to him -- or to his surrogates -- are like monks. They keep watch day and night. Everything said and done here is monitored. And he is protected not only by paranoia. Being invisible, his actions concealed, he's too valuable to kill. He's become the confidante of politicians. Generals avail themselves of his services. As do various mafiya bosses." He inclined his head, as if suggesting that he might be among this privileged number. "There are those who maintain that Yuri's influence with these great men is due to the fact that his magical powers are not limited to primitive sleights-of-hand such as the illusion that enabled his disappearance. They claim he has become an adept of secret disciplines, that he works miracles on behalf of the rich and the mighty." Polutin's attitude grew conspiratorial. "A friend of mine involved in building the club told me that he came into the theater once -- this very room -- and found it filled with computer terminals. Scrolling across the screens were strings of what he assumed were letters in an unknown alphabet. He later discovered they were Kabalistic symbols. Some weeks later he entered the theater again. There was no sign of the terminals...or of anything else, for that matter. The room was choked with silvery fog. My friend decided to keep clear of the place thereafter. But not long before Eternity opened its doors, curiosity got the best of him and he visited the theater a third time. On this occasion he found the room completely dark and heard hushed voices chanting the same unintelligible phrase over and over." Polutin allowed himself a dramatic pause. "None of this seems to reflect the usual methods of construction."

"What's this got to do with your boy Viktor?" March asked. "He's planning a night club, too, is he?"

"Not that I know of." Polutin's eyes went lazily to Chemayev, like a man reassuring himself that his prize possession was still in its rightful place. "However, I see in Viktor many of the qualities Yuri possessed. He's bright, ambitious. He can be ruthless when necessary. He understands the uses of compassion, but if he wasn't capable of violence and betrayal, he would never have risen to his present position."

"I only did as I was told," Chemayev said fiercely. "You gave me no choice." Furious, he prepared to defend himself further, but Polutin did not acknowledge him, turning instead to March.

"It's in his talent for self-deception that Viktor most resembles Yuri," he said. "In effect, he has made parts of himself disappear. But while Yuri became an adept, a true professional, Viktor is still a rank amateur...though perhaps I underestimate him. He may have some more spectacular disappearance in mind."

Chemayev's feeling of apprehension spiked, but he refused to give Polutin the satisfaction of thinking that his words had had any effect; he scanned the upper tiers of booths, pretending to search for a familiar face.

"If I were to ask Viktor to describe himself," Polutin went on, "he would repeat much of what I've told you. But he would never describe himself as cautious. Yet I swear to you, Viktor is the most cautious man of my acquaintance. He won't admit it, not to you or me. Nor to himself. But let me give you an example of how his mind works. Viktor has a lover. Larissa is her name. She works here at Eternity. As a prostitute."

"Don't tell him my business!" Chemayev could feel the pulse in his neck.

Polutin regarded him calmly. "This is common knowledge, is it not?"

"It's scarcely common knowledge in Ireland."

"Yes," said Polutin. "But then we are not in Ireland. We are in Moscow. Where, if memory serves me, underlings do not dare treat their superiors with such impertinence."

Chemayev did not trust himself to speak.

"Larissa is a beautiful woman. Such a lovely face" -- Polutin bunched the fingers of his left hand and kissed their tips, the gesture of an ecstatic connoisseur -- "your heart breaks to see it! Like many who work here, she does so in order to pay off a debt incurred by someone in her family. She's not a typical whore. She's intelligent, refined. And very expensive."

"How much are we talking about?" March asked. "I've a few extra pounds in me pocket."

Chemayev shot him a wicked glance, and March winked at him. "Just having you on, mate. Women aren't my thing."

"What exactly is your thing?" Chemayev asked. "Some sort of sea creature? Perhaps you prefer the invertebrates?"

"Nah." March went deadpan. "It's got nothing to do with sex."

"The point is this," Polutin said. "Viktor's choice of a lover speaks to his cautious nature. A young man of his status, ambitious and talented, but as yet not entirely on a firm footing...such a man is vulnerable in many ways. If he were to take a wife it would add to his vulnerability. The woman might be threatened or kidnapped. In our business you must be secure indeed if you intend to engage in anything resembling a normal relationship. So Viktor has chosen a prostitute under the protection of Yuri Lebedev. No one will try to harm her for fear of reprisals. Eternity protects its own."

Chemayev started up from the booth, but Polutin beckoned him to stay. "A minute longer, Viktor. Please."

"Why are you doing this?" Chemayev asked. "Is there a purpose, or is it merely an exercise?"

"I'm trying to instruct you," said Polutin. "I'm trying to show you who you are. I think you have forgotten some important truths."

Chemayev drew a steadying breath, let it out with a dry, papery sound. "I know very well who I am, but I'm confused about much else."

"It won't hurt you to listen." Polutin ran a finger along the inside of his collar to loosen it and addressed March. "Why does Viktor hide his cautious nature from himself? Perhaps he doesn't like what he sees in the mirror. I've known men who've cultivated a sensitive self-image in order to obscure the brutish aspects of their character. Perhaps the explanation is as simple as that. But I think there's more to it. I suspect it may be for him a form of practice. As I've said, Viktor and Yuri have much in common...most pertinently, a talent for self-deception. I believe it was the calculated development of this ability that led Yuri to understand the concept of deception in its entirety. Its subtleties, its potentials." Polutin shifted his bulk, his belly bumping against the edge of the table, causing vodka to slosh in all the glasses. "At any rate, I think I understand how Viktor manages to hide from himself. He has permitted himself to fall in love with his prostitute -- or to think he has fallen in love. This affords him the illusion of incaution. How incautious it must seem to the casual eye for a man to fall in love with a woman he cannot possibly have. Who lives in another man's house. Whom he can see only for an hour or two in the mornings, and the odd vacation. Who is bound by contract to spend the years of her great beauty fucking strangers. Is this a tactical maneuver? A phase of Viktor's development. A necessary step along the path toward some larger, more magical duplicity. Or could it be a simple mistake? A mistake he is now tempted to compound, thus making himself more vulnerable than ever." He spread his hands, expressing a stagy degree of helplessness. "But these are questions only Viktor can answer."

"I bet I'm going to like working for you," March said. "You're a right interesting fellow."

"Nobody likes working for me. If you doubt this, ask Viktor." Polutin locked his hands behind his head, thrusting out his belly so that it overlapped the edge of the table; he looked with unwavering disapproval at Chemayev. "Now you may go. When you've regained your self-control, come back and drink some more. I'm told the entertainment this evening will be wonderful."

THE COUNTERTOP of the bar in the lounge adjoining the theater was overlaid with a mosaic depicting a party attended by guests from every decade of the Twentieth Century, all with cunningly rendered faces done in caricature, most unknown to Chemayev, but a few clearly recognizable. There was Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria, the bloody-handed director of the KVD under Stalin, his doughy, peasant features lent a genteel air by rimless pince-nez. He was standing with a man wearing a Party armband and a woman in a green dress -- Beria was glancing up as if he sensed someone overhead was watching him. Elsewhere, a uniformed Josef Stalin held conversation with his old pal Kruschev. Lenin and Gorbachev and Dobrynin stood at the center of small groups. Even old Yeltsin was there, mopping his sweaty brow with a handkerchief. Looking at it, Chemayev, sick with worry, felt he was being viewed with suspicion not only by his boss, but by these historical personages as well. It wasn't possible, he thought, that Polutin could know what he was planning; yet everything he'd said indicated that he did know something. Why else all his talk of disappearances, of Larissa and vulnerability? And who was the Irishman with him? A paid assassin. That much was for sure. No other occupation produced that kind of soulless lizard. Chemayev's heart labored, as if it were pumping something heavier than blood. All his plans, so painstakingly crafted, were falling apart at the moment of success. He touched his money belt, the airline tickets in his suit pocket, half-expecting them to be missing. Finding them in place acted to soothe him. It's all right, he told himself. Whatever Polutin knew, and perhaps it was nothing, perhaps all his bullshit had been designed to impress his new pet snake...whatever he thought he knew, things had progressed too far for him to pose a real threat.

He ordered a vodka from the bartender, a slender man with dyed white hair and a pleasant country face, wearing a white sweater and slacks. The room was almost empty of customers, just two couples chattering at a distant table. It was decorated in the style of an upscale watering hole -- deep comfortable chairs, padded stools, paneled walls -- but the ambiance was more exotic than one might expect. White leather upholstery, thick white carpeting. The paneling was fashioned of what appeared to be ivory planks, though they were patterned with a decidedly univory-like grain reminiscent of the markings on moths' wings; the bar itself was constructed of a similar material, albeit of a creamier hue, like wood petrified to marble. The edging of the glass tabletops and the frame of the mirror against which the bottled spirits were arrayed --indeed, every filigree and decorative conceit -- were of silver, and there were glints of silver, too, visible among the crystal mysteries of the chandeliers. In great limestone fireplaces at opposite ends of the room burned pearly logs that yielded chemical blue flames, and the light from the chandeliers was also blue, casting glimmers and reflections from every surface, drenching the whiteness of the place in an arctic glamour.

Mounted above the bar was a television set, its volume turned so low that the voices proceeding from it were scarcely more than murmurs; on the screen Aleksander Solzhenitsyn was holding forth on his weekly talk show, preaching the need for moral reform to a worshipful guest. Amused to find the image of the Nobel Laureate in a place whose moral foundation he would vehemently decry, Chemayev moved closer to the set and ordered another vodka. The old bastard had written great novels, he thought. But his sermons needed an editor. Some liked them, of course. The relics who lived in the krushovas sucked up his spiritual blah blah blah. Hearing this crap flow from such a wise mouth ennobled their stubborn endurance in the face of food shortages, violent crime, and unemployment. It validated their mulelike tolerance, it gave lyric tongue to their drunken, docile complaining. Solzhenitsyn was their papa, their pope, the guru of their hopelessness. He knew their suffering, he praised their dazed stolidity as a virtue, he restored their threadbare souls. His words comforted them because they were imbued with the same numbing authority, the same dull stench of official truth, as the windbag belches of the old party lions with dead eyes and poisoned livers whom they had been conditioned to obey. You had to respect Solzhenitsyn. He had once been a Voice. Now he was merely an echo. And a distorted one at that. His years in exile might not have cut him off from the essence of the Russian spirit, but they had decayed his understanding of Russian stupidity. People listened, sure. But they heard just enough to make them reach for a bottle and toast him. The brand of snake oil he was trying to sell was suited only for cutting cheap vodka.

"Old Man Russia." Chemayev waved disparagingly at the screen as the bartender served him, setting the glass down to cover Beria's upturned face. The bartender laughed and said, "Maybe...but he's sure as shit not Old Man Moscow." He reached for a remote and flipped through the channels, settling on a music video. A black man with a sullen, arrogant face was singing to tinny music, creating voluptuous shapes in the air with his hands -- Chemayev had the idea that he was preparing to make love to a female version of himself. "MTV," said the bartender with satisfaction and sidled off along the counter.

Chemayev checked his watch. Still nearly three-quarters of an hour to go. He fingered his glass, thinking he'd already had too much. But he felt fine. Anger had burned off the alcohol he'd consumed at Polutin's table. He drank the vodka in a single gulp. Then, in the mirror, he saw Larissa approaching.

As often happened the sight of her shut him down for an instant. She seemed like an exotic form of weather, a column of energy gliding across the room, drawing the light to her. Wearing a blue silk dress that revealed her legs to the mid-thigh. Her dark hair was pinned high and in spite of heavy makeup and eyebrows plucked into severe arches, the naturalness of her beauty shone through. Her face was broad at the cheekbones, tapering to the chin, its shape resembling that of an inverted spearhead, and her generous features -- the hazel eyes a bit large for proportion -- could one moment look soft, maternal, the next girlish and seductive. In repose, her lips touched by a smile, eyes half-lidded, she reminded him of the painted figurehead on his Uncle Arkady's boat, which had carried cargo along the Dvina when he was a child. Unlike most figureheads this one had not been carved with eyes wide-open so as to appear intent upon the course ahead, but displayed a look of dreamy, sleek contentment. When he asked why it was different from the rest his uncle told him he hadn't wanted a lookout on his prow, but a woman whose gaze would bless the waters. Chemayev learned that the man who carved the figurehead had been a drunk embittered by lost love, and as a consequence -- or so Chemayev assumed -- he had created an image that embodied the kind of mystical serenity with which men who are forced to endure much for love tend to imbue their women, a quality that serves to mythologize their actions and make them immune to masculine judgments.

"What are you doing here?" he asked as she came into his arms.

"They told me I don't have to work tonight. You know...because you're paying." She sat on the adjoining stool, her expression troubled; he asked what was wrong. "Nothing," she said. "It's just I can't quite believe it. It's all so difficult to believe, you know." She leaned forward and kissed him on the mouth -- lightly so as not to smear her lipstick.

"Don't worry," he said. "Everything's taken care of."

"I know. I'm just nervous." Her smile flickered on and off. "I wonder what it'll be like...America."

He cupped the swell of her cheek, and she leaned into his hand. "It'll be strange," he said. "But we'll be in the mountains to begin with. Just the two of us. We'll be able to make sense of it all before we decide where we want to end up."

"How will we do that?"

"We'll learn all about the place from magazines...newspapers. TV."

She laughed. "I can't picture us doing much reading if we're alone in a cabin."

"We'll leave the TV on. Pick things up subliminally." He grinned, nudged his glass with a finger. "Want a drink?"

"No, I have to go back in a minute. I haven't finished packing. And there's something I have to sign."

That worried him. "What is it?"

"A release. It says I haven't contracted any diseases or been physically abused." She laughed again, a single note clear and bright as a piano tone. "As if anyone would sue Eternity." She took his face in her hands and studied him. Then she kissed his brow. "I love you so much," she said, her lips still pressed to his skin. He was too dizzy to speak.

She settled back, holding his right hand in her lap. "Do you know what I want most. I want to talk. I want to talk with you for hours and hours."

Chemayev loved to hear her talk -- she wove events and objects and ideas together into textures of such palpable solidity that he could lie back against them, grasped by their resilient contours, and needed only to say "Yes" and "Really" and "Uh huh" every so often, providing a minor structural component that enabled her to extend and deepen her impromptu creations. The prospect that he might have to contribute more than this was daunting. "What will we talk about?" he asked.

"About you, for one thing. I hardly know anything about your family, your childhood."

"We talk," he said. "Just this morning...."

"Yes, sure. But only when you're driving me to school, and you're so busy dodging traffic you can't say much. And when we're at your apartment there's never time. Not that I'm complaining." She gave his hand a squeeze. "We'll make love for hours, then we'll talk. I want you to reveal all your secrets before I start to bore you."

He saw her then as she looked each morning in the car, face scrubbed clean of makeup, the sweetly sad pragmatist of their five hundred days on her way to the university, almost ordinary in her jeans and cloth jacket, ready to spend hours listening to tired astronomers, hungover geographers, talentless poets, trying to find in their listless words some residue of truth, some glint of promise, a fact still empowered by its original energy, something that would bring her a glimpse of possibility beyond that which she knew. For the first time he wondered how America and freedom would change her. Not much, he decided. Not in any essential way. She would open like a flower to the sun, she would bloom, but she would not change. The naivete of this notion did not bother him. He believed in her. Sometimes it seemed he believed in her even more than he loved her.

"What are you thinking?" she asked, and smiled slyly as if she knew the answer.

"Evil things," he told her.

"Is that so?" She drew him close and slid his hand beneath her skirt. Then she edged forward on the stool, encouraging him. He touched her sex with a fingertip and she let out a gasp. Her head drooped, rested on his shoulder. He thrust aside the material of her panties. All her warmth was open to him. But then she pushed his hand away and whispered, "No, no! I can't!" She remained leaning against him, her body tense and trembling. "I'm not ashamed, you understand," she said, the words muffled by his shoulder. "I can't bear the idea of doing anything here." She let out a soft, cluttered sound -- another laugh, he thought. "But there's no shame in me. I'Il prove it to you tonight. On the plane."

He stroked her hair. "You'll be asleep ten minutes after take-off. You always sleep when we travel. Like a little baby."

"Not tonight." She broke from the embrace. Her face was grave, as if she were stating a vow. "I'm not going to sleep at all. Not until I absolutely have to."

"If you say so. But I bet I'm right." He checked his watch again.

"How long?" she asked.

"Less than half an hour. But I don't know how long I'll be with...with whoever it is I'm meeting."

"One of the doubles. There must be a dozen of them. I can't be sure, but I think I can tell most of them apart. They vary slightly in height. In weight. A couple have moles."

"What do you call them?"

"Yuri." She shrugged. "What else? Some of the girls invent funny names for them. But I guess I don't find them funny."

He looked down at the counter. "You know, we've never spoken about what it's like for you here. I know some of it, of course. But your life, the way you spend your days...."

"I didn't think you wanted to talk about it."

"I guess I didn't. It just seems strange...but it's not important."

"We can talk about it if you want." She wrapped a loose curl around her forefinger. "It isn't so bad, really. When I'm not at school I like to sit in the theater mornings and read. There's nobody about, and it's quiet. Peaceful. Like an empty church. Every two weeks the doctor comes to examine us. She's very nice. She brings us chocolates. Otherwise, we're left pretty much to our own devices. Most of the girls are so young, it's almost possible to believe I'm at boarding school. But then...." Her mouth twisted into an unhappy shape. "There's not much else to tell."

Something gave way in Chemayev. The pressures of the preceding months, the subterfuge, the planning, and now this pitiful recitation with its obvious omissions -- his inner defenses collapsed under the weight of these separate travails, conjoined in a flood of stale emotion. Old suffocated panics, soured desires, yellowed griefs, lumps of mummified terror...the terror he had felt sitting alone at night, certain that he would lose her, his head close to bursting with despair. His eyes teared. He linked his hands behind her neck and drew her to him so that their foreheads touched. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry it took so long."

"It wasn't long! It's so much money! And you got it all in less than a year!"

"Every day I see enough money to choke the world. I could have fixed the books, I could have done something."

"Yes...and then what? Polutin would have had you killed. God, Viktor! You amazed me! Don't you understand? You were completely unexpected. I never thought anyone would care enough about me to do what you've done." She kissed his eyes, applied delicate kisses all over his face. "When you told me what you were up to, I felt like a princess imprisoned in a high tower. And you were the prince trying to save me. You know me. I'm not one to believe in fairy tales. But I liked this one -- it was a nice fantasy, and I needed a fantasy. I was certain you were lying to me...or to yourself. I prepared for the inevitable. But you turned out to be a real prince." She rubbed his stubbly head. "A prince with a terrible haircut."

He tried to smile, but emotion was still strong in him and his facial muscles wouldn't work properly.

"Don't punish yourself. Can't you see how happy I am? It's almost over now. Please, Viktor! I want you to be happy, too."

He gathered himself, swallowed back the tight feeling in his throat. "I'm all right," he said. "I'm sorry. I just...I can't...."

"I know," she said. "It's been hard for both of us. I know." She lifted his wrist so she could see his watch. "I have to go. I don't want to, but I have to. Are you sure you're all right?

"I'll be fine," he said. "Go ahead...go."

"Should I wait for you here?"

"Yes," he said. "Yes, wait here, and we'll ride up together. As soon as I'm through with Yuri I'll call my security people. They'll meet us at the Entrance."

She kissed him again, her tongue flirting with his, a lush contact that left him muddled. "I'11 see you soon," she said, trailing her hand across his cheek; then she walked off toward a recessed door next to the fireplace at the far end of the room -- the same door that led to Yuri Lebedev's office and, ultimately, to the inscrutable heart of Eternity.

Without Larissa beside him Chemayev felt adrift, cut off from energy and purpose. His thoughts seemed to be circling, slowly eddying, as the surface of a stream might eddy after the sudden twisting submergence of a silvery fish. They seemed less thoughts than shadows of the moment just ended. On the television screen above the bar a child was sitting in a swing hung from the limb of an oak tree, spied on by an evil androgynous creature with a painted white face and wearing a lime green body stocking, who lurked in the shadows at the edge of a forest. All this underscored by an anxious, throbbing music. Chemayev watched the video without critical or aesthetic bias, satisfied by color and movement alone, and he was given a start when the bartender came over and offered him a drink in a glass with the silver initial L on its side.

"What's this?" Chemayev asked, and the bartender said, "Yuri's private booze. Everybody gets one. Everybody who meets with him." He set down the glass, and Chemayev viewed it with suspicion. The liquid appeared to be vodka.

"You don't have to drink," the bartender said. "But it's Yuri's custom."

Chemayev wondered if he was being tested. The courageous thing to do, the courteous thing, would be to drink. But abstinence might prove the wiser course.

"I can pour you another if you'd like. I can open a new bottle." The bartender produced an unopened bottle; it, too, was embossed with a silver L.

"Why don't you do that?" Chemayev told him. "I could use a drink, but...uh...."

"As you like." The bartender stripped the seal from the bottle and poured. He did not appear in the least disturbed and Chemayev supposed that he had been through this process before.

The vodka was excellent and Chemayev was relieved when, after several minutes, he remained conscious and his stomach gave no sign that he had ingested poison.

"Another?" the bartender asked.

"Sure." Chemayev pushed the glass forward.

"Two's the limit, I'm afraid. It's precious stuff." The bartender lifted the glass that Chemayev had refused, offered a silent toast and drank. "Fuck, that's good!" He dabbed at his mouth with a cocktail napkin. "Almost everyone who tries it comes back and offers to buy a couple of bottles. But it's not for sale. You have to meet with Yuri to earn your two shots."

"Or work as a bartender in Eternity, eh?" Chemayev suggested.

"Privileges of the job. I'm always delighted to serve a suspicious Soul."

"I imagine you get quite a few."

"People have every right to be suspicious. This is a weird place. Don't get me wrong -- it's great working here. But it takes getting used to."

"I can imagine."

"Oh, I wouldn't bet on it. You have no idea what goes on here after hours. But once you've met Yuri" -- the bartender slung a towel over his shoulder -- "you'll probably be able to educate me. Everyone says it's quite an experience."

Chemayev downed the second vodka. Yet another video was showing on the TV, and something was interfering with the transmission. First there was an intense flickering, then a succession of scenes skittered across the screen, as if the video were playing on an old-fashioned projector and the film was breaking free of the spool. He glanced at the bartender. The man was standing at the opposite end of the counter with his head thrown back, apparently howling with laughter; yet though his mouth was open and the ligature of his neck cabled, he wasn't making a sound. His white hair glowed like phosphorus. Unnerved, Chemayev turned again to the TV. On screen, to the accompaniment of a gloomy folk song, two women in white jumpsuits were embracing on a couch, deep in a passionate kiss. As he watched, the taller of the two, a blond with sharp cheekbones, unzipped her lover's jumpsuit to the waist, exposing the slopes of her breasts.... It was at this point that Chemayev experienced a confusing dislocation. Frames began flipping past too rapidly to discern, the strobing light causing him to grow drowsy yet dumbly attentive; then a veneer of opaque darkness slid in front of the screen, oval in shape, like a yawning mouth. There was a moment when he had a claustrophobic sense of being enclosed, and the next instant he found himself standing in the blackness beyond the mouth. He had the impression that this black place had reached out and enveloped him, and for that reason, though he remained drowsy and distanced from events, he felt a considerable measure of foreboding.

From Chemayev's vantage it was impossible to estimate the size of the room in which he stood -- the walls and ceiling were lost in darkness --but he could tell it was immense. Illumination was provided by long glowing silvery bars that looked to be hovering at an uncertain distance overhead, their radiance too feeble to provide any real perspective. Small trees and bushes with black trunks and branches grew in disorderly ranks on every side; their leaves were papery, white, bespotted with curious, sharply drawn, black designs -- like little leaf-shaped magical texts. This must be, he thought, the garden Polutin had mentioned, though it seemed more thicket than garden. The leaves crisped against his jacket as he pushed past; twigs clawed at his trouser legs. After a couple of minutes he stumbled into a tiny clearing choked with pale weeds. Beetles scuttered in amongst them. Fat little scarabs, their chitin black and gleamless, they were horrid in their simplicity, like official notifications of death. The air was cool, thick with the skunky scent of the vegetation. He heard no sound other than those he himself made. Yet he did not believe he was alone. He went cautiously, stopping every so often to peer between branches and to listen.

After several minutes more he came to a ruinous path of gray cobblestones, many uprooted from their bed of white clay, milky blades of grass thrusting up among them. The path was little more than a foot wide, overhung by low branches that forced him to duck; it wound away among trees taller than those he had first encountered. He followed it and after less than a minute he reached what he assumed to be the center of the garden. Ringed by trees so tall they towered nearly to the bars of light was a circular plaza some forty feet in width, constructed of the same gray stones, here laid out in a concentric pattern. In its midst stood the remains of a fountain, its unguessable original form reduced to a head-high mound of rubble, a thin stream of silvery water arcing from a section of shattered lead pipe, splashing, sluicing away into the carved fragments tumbled at its base. Sitting cross-legged beside it, his back to Chemayev, was a shirtless man with dark shoulder-length hair, his pale skin figured by intricate black tattoos, their designs reminiscent of those on the leaves.

"March?" Chemayev took a step toward the man. "What are you doing here?"

"What am I doing here?" March said in a contemplative tone. "Why, I'm feeling right at home. That's what I'm doing. How about yourself?"

"I have a meeting," Chemayev said. "With Yuri Lebedev."

March maintained his yogi-like pose. "Oh, yeah? He was banging about a minute ago. Try giving him a shout. He might still be around."

"Are you serious?" Chemayev took another step forward. "Lebedev was here?"

March came smoothly, effortlessly to his feet -- like a cobra rising from a basket. He cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted, "Hey, Yuri! Got a man wants to see ya!" He cocked his head, listening for a response. "Nope," he said at length. "No Yuri."

Chemayev shrugged off his jacket and draped it over a shoulder. March's disrespect for him was unmistakable, but he was uncertain of the Irishman's intent. He couldn't decide whether it would be safer to confront him or to walk away and chance that March would follow him into the thickets. "Do you know where the door to Yuri's office is?"

"I could probably find it if I was in the mood. Why don't you just poke around? Maybe you'll get lucky."

Confrontation, thought Chemayev, would be the safer choice -- he did not want this man sneaking up on him.

"What is this all about?" He gave a pained gesture with his jacket, flapping it at March. "This thing you're doing. This...Clint Eastwood villain thing. What is it? Have you been sent to kill me? Does Polutin think I'm untrustworthy?"

"My oh my," said March. "Could it be I've made an error in judgment? Here I thought you were just another sack of fish eggs and potato juice, and now you've gone all brave on me." He extended his arms toward Chemayev, rotated them in opposite directions. The tattoos crawled like beetles across his skin, causing his muscles to appear even more sinewy than they were. In the half-light the seamed lines on his face were inked with shadow, like ritual scarifications. "Okay," he said. "Okay. Why don't we have us a chat, you and I? A settling of the waters. We'll pretend we're a coupla old whores tipsy on lager and lime." He dropped again into a cross-legged posture and with a flourish held up his right hand -- palm on edge -- by his head. Then he drew the hand across his face, pretending to push aside his dour expression, replacing it with a boyish smile. "There now," he said. "What shall we talk about?"

Chemayev lowered into a squat. "You can answer my questions for a start."

"Now that's a problem, that is. I fucking hate being direct. Takes all the charm out of a conversation." March rolled his neck, popping the vertebrae. "Wouldn't you prefer to hear about my childhood?"

"No need," said Chemayev. "I used to work in a kennel."

"You're missing out on a grand tale," said March. "I was all the talk of Kilmorgan when I was a lad." He gathered his hair behind his neck. "I foresee this is not destined to be a enjoyable conversation. So I'll tell you what I know. Your Mister Polutin feels you're on the verge of making a serious mistake, and he's engaged me to show you the error of your ways."

"What sort of mistake?"

"Ah! Now that, you see, I do not know." March grinned. "I'm merely the poor instrument of his justice."

Chemayev slipped off his shoulder harness, folded it on top of his coat; he did the same with his money belt. "So Polutin has sent you to punish me? To beat me?"

"He's left the degree of punishment up to yours truly," March said. "You have to understand, I like to think of myself as a teacher. But if the pupil isn't capable of being taught...and you'd be surprised how often that's the case. Then extreme measures are called for. When that happens there's likely to be what you might call a morbid result." He squinted, as if trying to make out Chemayev through a fog. "Are you afraid of me?"

"Petrified," said Chemayev.

March chuckled. "You've every right to be confident. You've got about a yard of height and reach on me. And what...? Maybe a stone and a half, two stone in weight? By the looks of things I'm vastly overmatched."

"How much is Polutin paying you?"

"Let's not go down that path, Viktor. It's unworthy of you. And disrespectful to me as well."

"You misunderstand." Chemayev tossed his shirt on top of the money belt. "I simply wish to learn how much I'll profit from breaking your neck."

March hopped to his feet. "You're a hell of a man in your own back yard, I'm certain. But you're in a harsher world now, Viktor old son." He gave his head a shake, working out a tightness in his neck. "Yes, indeed. A world terrible, pitiless, and strange. With no room a'tall for mistakes and your humble servant, Niall March, for a fucking welcome wagon."

Chemayev took great satisfaction in resorting to the physical. In a fight all of the vagueness of life became comprehensible. Frustration made itself into a fist; nameless fears manifested in the flexing of a muscle. The pure principles of victory and defeat flushed away the muddle of half-truths and evasions that generally clotted his moral apparatus. He felt cleansed of doubt, possessed of keen conviction. And so when he smiled at March, dropping into a wrestler's crouch, it was not only a show of confidence but an expression of actual pleasure. They began to circle one another, testing their footing, feinting. In the first thirty seconds March launched a flurry of kicks that Chemayev absorbed on his arms, but the force of each blow drove him backward. It had been plain from the outset that March was quick, but Chemayev hadn't realized the efficiency with which he could employ his speed. The man skipped and jittered over the uneven terrain, one moment graceful, dancing, then shuffling forward in the manner of a boxer, then a moment later sinking into an apelike crouch and lashing out with a kick from ground level. Chemayev had intended to wait for the perfect moment to attack, but now he understood that if he waited, March was likely to land a kick cleanly; he would have to risk creating an opening. And when March next came into range he dove at the man's back leg, bringing him down hard onto the stones.

The two men grabbed and countered, each trying to roll the other and gain the upper position, their breath coming in grunts. March's quickness and flexibility made him difficult to control. After a struggle Chemayev managed to turn him onto his back and started to come astride his chest; but March's legs scissored his waist, forcing him into a kneeling position, and they were joined almost like lovers, one wobbling above, the other on his back, seemingly vulnerable. Chemayev found he was able to strike downward at March's face, but his leverage was poor, the blows weak, and March blocked most of them with his arms, evaded others by twitching his head to the side. Soon Chemayev grew winded. He braced himself on his left hand, intending to throw a powerful right that would penetrate the Irishman's guard; but with a supple, twisting movement, March barred Chemayev's braced arm with his forearm, holding it in place, and levered it backward, dislocating the elbow.

Chemayev screamed and flung himself away, clutching his arm above the elbow, afraid to touch the injury itself. The pain brought tears to his eyes, and for a moment he thought he might faint. Even after the initial burning shock had dissipated, the throbbing of the joint was nearly unbearable. He staggered to his feet, shielding the injury, so disoriented that when he tried to find March, he turned toward the trees.

"Over here, Viktor!" March was standing by the fountain, taking his ease. Chemayev made to back away, got his feet tangled, and inadvertently lurched toward him -- the jolt of each step triggered a fresh twinge in his arm. His brain was sodden, empty of plan or emotion, as if he were drunk to the point of passing out.

"What d'ye think, sweetheart?" said March. "Am I man enough for you, or are you pining yet for young Tommy down at the pub?" He took a stroll away from the fountain, an angle that led him closer to Chemayev but not directly toward him. He spun in a complete circle, whirling near, and kicked Chemayev in the head.

A white star detonated inside Chemayev's skull and he fell, landing on his injured elbow. The pain caused him to lose consciousness and when he came to, when his eyes were able to focus, he found March squatting troll-like beside him, a little death incarnate with curses in the black language scrawled across his skin and long dark hair hiding his face like a cowl.

"Jesus, boyo," he said with mock compassion. "That was a bad 'un. Couple more like that, we'll be hoisting a pint in your honor and telling lies about the great deeds you done in your days of nature."

Chemayev began to feel his elbow again -- that and a second pain in the side of his face. He tasted blood in his mouth and wondered if his cheekbone was broken. He closed his eyes.

"Have you nothing to say? Well, I'll leave you to mend for a minute or two. Then we'll have our chat."

Chemayev heard March's footsteps retreating. A thought was forming in the bottom of his brain, growing strong enough to sustain itself against grogginess and pain. It pushed upward, surfacing like a bubble from a tar pit, and he realized it was only a mental belch of fear and hatred. He opened his eyes and was fascinated by the perspective -- a view across the lumpy rounded tops of the cobblestones. He imagined them to be bald gray midgets buried to their eyebrows in the earth. He pushed feebly at the stones with his good arm and after inordinate labor succeeded in getting to his hands and knees. Dizzy, he remained in that position a while, his head hung down. Blood dripping from his mouth spotted the stones beneath him. When he tried to stand his legs refused to straighten; he sat back clumsily, supporting himself with his right hand.

"A beating's a terrible thing," said March from somewhere above. "But sometimes it's the only medicine. You understand, don't you, Viktor? I'll wager you've handed out a few yourself. What with you being such a badass and all." He was silent for a couple of ticks. "Polutin assures me you're a bright lad. And I'm inclined to agree...though I'm not sure I'd go so far as saying you're a bloody genius. Which is Polutin's view of the matter. He's an absolute fan of your mental capacities. If mental capacity was rock and roll he'd be front row at all your concerts, blowing kisses and tossing up his room key wrapped in a pair of knickers." Another pause. "Am I getting through to you, Viktor?"

Chemayev nodded, a movement that set his cheekbone to throbbing more fiercely.

"That's good." March's legs came into view. "According to Polutin, your talents lie in your ability to organize facts. He tells me you can take a newspaper, the Daily Slobova or whatever rag it is you boys subscribe to, and from the facts you've gathered in a single read, you're able devise a money-making scheme no one's thought of before. Now that's impressive. I'm fucking impressed, and I don't impress easy. So here's what I'm asking, Viktor. I'm asking you to marshal that massive talent of yours and organize the facts I'm about to present. Can you handle that?"

"Yes," said Chemayev, not wanting to risk another nod. His elbow was feeling stronger and he wondered if the fall might not have jammed the bone back into its socket. He shifted his left arm, and though pain returned in force, he seemed to have mobility.

"All right," said March. "Here we go. First fact. Polutin loves you like a son. That may seem farfetched, considering the crap he rubs in your face. But it's what he tells me. And it's for certain fathers have treated sons a great deal worse than he treats you. Love's too strong a word, perhaps. But there's definitely paternal feelings involved. Why he'd want a son, now, I've no idea. The thought of fathering a child turns my stomach. The little bollocks start out pissing on your hand and wind up spitting in your face and stealing the rent money. But I had a troubled upbringing, so I'm not the best judge of these things."

He paced off to the side, moving beyond Chemayev's field of vision. "Second fact. Whatever game you've been playing, it's over. Terminated. Done. And by the way, I'll be wanting you to tell me exactly what it was. Every last detail. But that can wait till you've got the roses back in your cheeks. Third fact. You've made one mistake. You can't afford another. Are you following me, Viktor? You're on the brink of oblivion with ten toes over the edge. No more mistakes or you're going to fall a long, long way and hit the ground screaming." March's legs came back into view. "Fact number four. God is dead. The certain hope of the Resurrection is a pile of shite. You have my word on it. I've seen to the other side and I know."

Chemayev found he could make a fist with his left hand. To test his strength he tightened it, fingernails cutting into his palm. March's voice was stirring up a windy noise inside his head, like the rush of traffic on a highway.

"There you have it, Viktor. Four little facts. Organize away. Turn 'em over in your mind. See if you can come up with a scheme for living."

Chemayev wanted badly to satisfy March, to avoid further punishment; but the facts with which he had been presented offered little room for scheming. Instead they formed four walls, the walls of the lightless world in which he had been confined before meeting Larissa. It occurred to him that this was exactly what March wished him to conclude and that he could satisfy him by saying as much. But the thought of Larissa charged him with stubbornness. She was the fifth fact he could not ignore, the fact that had shattered those walls. Thanks to her there was a sixth fact, a seventh, an infinity of fact waiting to be explored.

"It's no brainbuster, Viktor. I'm not the least gifted when it comes to organization. Fuck, I can't even balance my checkbook. But even I can figure this one out."

As if his engine had begun to idle out Chemayev's energy lapsed. He grew cold and the cold slowed his thoughts, replaced them with a foggy desire to lie down and sleep. March put a hand on his shoulder, gave him a shake, and pain lanced along his cheekbone. The touch renewed his hatred, and braced by adrenaline, he let hate empower him.

"C'mon, lad." March said with a trace of what seemed actual concern in his voice. "Tell me what you know."

"I understand," said Chemayev shakily.

"Understand what?"

"I have a...a good situation. A future. I'd be a fool to jeopardize it."

"Four stars!" said March. "Top of the charts in the single leap! See what I told you, Viktor? A kick in the head can enlighten even the most backward amongst us. It's a fucking miracle cure." He kneeled beside Chemayev. "There's one more thing I need to tell you. Perhaps you've been wondering why, with all the rude boys about in Moscow, our Mister Polutin hired in a Mick to do his dirty work. Truth is, Russki muscle is just not suited to subtlety. Those boys get started on you, they won't stop till the meat's off the bone. I'm considered something of a specialist. A saver of souls, as it were. You're not my only project. Far from it! Your country has a great many sinners. But you're my top priority. I intend to be your conscience. Should temptation rear its ugly head, there I'll be, popping up over your shoulder. Cautioning you not to stray. Keep that well in mind, Viktor. Make it the marrow of your existence. For that's what it is, and don't you go thinking otherwise." March stood, reached down and took Chemayev's right arm. "Come on now," he said. "Let's get you up."

Standing, it looked to Chemayev that the stones beneath his feet were miles away, the surface of a lumpy planet seen from space. A shadowy floater cluttered his vision. The white leaves each had a doubled image and March's features, rising from the pale seamy ground of his skin, made no sense as a face -- like landmarks on a map without referents.

"Can you walk?" March asked.

"I don't know."

March positioned himself facing Chemayev and examined him with a critical eye. "We better have you looked at. You might have a spot of concussion." He adjusted his grip on Chemayev's shoulders. "I'm going to carry you...just so's you know I'm not taking liberties. I'll come back after and get your things."

He bent at the knees and waist, preparing to pick Chemayev up in a fireman's carry. Without the least forethought or inkling of intent, acting out of reflex or muscle memory, or perhaps goaded by the sour smell of March's sweat, Chemayev slipped his right forearm under March's throat, applying a headlock; then with all his strength he wrenched the Irishman up off his feet. March gurgled, flailed, kicked. And Chemayev, knowing that he only had to hang on a few seconds more, came full into his hatred. He heard himself yelling with effort, with the anticipation of victory, and he dug the grip deeper into March's throat. Then March kicked out with his legs so that for the merest fraction of a second he was horizontal to the true. When his legs swung down again the momentum carried Chemayev's upper body down as well, and March's feet struck the ground. Lithe as an eel, he pushed himself into a backflip, his legs flying over Chemayev's head, breaking the hold and sending them both sprawling onto the stones.

By the time Chemayev recovered March had gotten to his feet and was bent over at the edge of the circle, rubbing his throat. Stupefied, only dimly aware of the danger he faced, Chemayev managed to stand and set off stumbling toward the trees. But the Irishman hurried to cut him off, still holding his throat.

"Are you mad, Viktor?" he said hoarsely. "There's no other explanation. Fuck!" He massaged his throat more vigorously, stretched his neck. "That's as close as I've come. I'll give you that much."

Chemayev's legs wanted to bend in odd directions. It felt as if some organ in his head, a scrap of flesh he never knew existed, had been torn free and was flipping about like a minnow in a bait bucket.

Strands of hair were stuck to March's cheek; he brushed them back, adjusted the waist of his trousers. "It's the girl, isn't it? Liza...Louisa. Whatever her fucking name is. Back when I was of a mood for female companionship, there were more than a few knocked my brains loose. They'll make a man incorrigible. Immune to even the most sensible of teachings."

Chemayev glanced about, groggily certain that there must be an avenue of escape he had overlooked.

"I remember this one in particular," said March as he approached. "Evvie was her name. Evvie Mahone. She wasn't the most gorgeous item on the shelf. But she was nice-looking, y'know. A country girl. Come to Dublin for the university. Wild and red-checked and full of spirit, with lovely great milky bosoms, and a frizzy mane of ginger hair hanging to her ass that she could never comb out straight. I was over the moon ten times round about her. When we were courting we'd sit together for hours outside her dormitory, watching the golden days turn to gray, touching and talking soft while crowds moved past us without noticing, like we were two people who'd fallen so hard for one another we'd turned to stone. Our hearts just too pure to withstand the decay and disappointment of the world." He stepped close to Chemayev, inches away -- a wise white monkey with a creased, pouchy face and eyes as active as beetles. "After we became lovers we'd lie naked in the casement window of her room with a blanket around us, watching stars burn holes in the black flag flying over the Liffey. I swear to God I thought all the light was coming from her body, and there was music playing then that never existed...yet I still hear its strains. Is it like that for you, Viktor? That grand and all-consuming? I reckon it must be."

March clasped Chemayev's shoulder with his left hand, as if in camaraderie; he made a fist of his right. "Love," he said wistfully. "It's a wonderful thing."

Chemayev was not witness to much of the beating that then ensued; a punch he never saw coming broke his connection with painful reality and sent him whirling down into the black lights of unconsciousness. When he awoke he discovered to his surprise that he was no longer in pain -- to his further surprise he found that he was unable to move, a circumstance that should have alarmed him more than it did. It was not that he felt at peace, but rather as if he'd been sedated, the intensity of his possessive attitude toward mortality tuned down several notches and his attention channeled into a stuporous appreciation of the blurred silver beam hanging in the darkness overhead...like a crossbeam in the belly of a great ark constructed of negative energy. He could hear water splashing, and a lesser sound he soon recognized to be the guttering of his breath. He thought of Larissa, then tried not to think of her. The memory of her face, all her bright particularity, disturbed the strange equilibrium that allowed him to float on the surface of this pain-free, boundless place. But after a while he became able to summon her without anxiety, without longing overmuch, content to contemplate her the way an Orthodox saint painted on an ikon might gaze at an apparition of the Virgin. Full of wonder and daft regard. Soon she came to be the only thing he wanted to think of, the eidolon and mistress of his passage.

Things were changing inside him. He pictured conveyor belts being turned off, systems cooling, microbes filing out of his factory stomach on the final day of operation, leaving their machines running and all the taps going drip drip drip. It was amusing, really. To have feared this. It was easier by far than anything that had preceded it. Though fear nibbled at the edges of his acceptance, he remained essentially secure beneath his black comforter and his silver light and his love. The thought of death, once terrifying, now seemed only unfortunate. And when he began to drift upward, slowly approaching the light, he speculated that it might not even be unfortunate, that March had been wrong about God and the hope of the Resurrection. Beneath him the garden and its pagan central element were receding, and lying with its arms out and legs spread not far from the ruined fountain, his bloody, wide-eyed body watched him go. He fixed on the silver light, expecting, hoping to see and hear the faces and voices of departed souls greeting him, the blissful creatures that patrolled the border between life and true eternity, and the white beast Jesus in all Its majesty, crouched and roaring the joyful noise that ushered in the newly risen to the sacred plane. But then he sensed an erosion, a turmoil taking place on some fundamental level that he had previously failed to apprehend. Fragments of unrelated memory flew at him in a hail, shattering his calm. Images that meant nothing. A wooden flute he'd played as a child. An old man's gassed, wheezing voice. Sparks corkscrewing up a chimney. Pieces of a winter day in the country. Shards of broken mental crockery that shredded the temporary cloth of his faith, allowing terror to seep through the rents. Real terror, this. Not the fakes he'd experienced previously, the rich fears bred in blood and bone, but an empty, impersonal terror that was itself alive, a being larger than all being, the vacuous ground upon which our illusion breeds, that we never let ourselves truly believe is there, yet underlies every footstep ever taken...gulping him down into its cold and voiceless scream, while all he knew and loved and was went scattering.

TREMBLING AND SWEATY, Chemayev stared at the television set above the bar. A brown-haired teenage girl in a denim jacket and jeans was hitchhiking on a desert road, singing angrily -- if you could judge by her expression -- at the cars that passed her by. He watched numbly as she caught a ride in a dusty van. Then, astounded by the realization he was alive, that the girl was not part of the storm of memory that had assailed his dying self, he heaved up from the barstool and looked avidly about, not yet convinced of the authenticity of what he saw. About a dozen people sitting at various tables; the bartender talking to two male customers. The recessed door beside the fireplace opened and a woman in a black cocktail dress came into the lounge and stood searching the tables for someone. Still shaky, Chemayev sat back down.

All that had happened in the garden remained with him, but he could examine it now. Not that examination helped. Explanations occurred. He'd been given a drug in a glass of Yuri's special reserve -- probably a hypnotic. Shown a film that triggered an illusion. But this fathered the need for other explanations. Was the object of the exercise to intimidate him? Were the things March had said to him about Polutin part of the exercise? Were they actual admonitions or the product of paranoia? Of course it had all been some sort of hallucination. Likely an orchestrated one. He could see that clearly. But despite the elements of fantasy -- March's lyric fluency, the white trees, and so on -- he couldn't devalue the notion that it had also had some quality of the real. The terror of those last moments, spurious though they had been, was still unclouded in his mind. He could touch it, taste it. The greedy blackness that had been about to suck him under...he knew to his soul that was real. The memory caused his thoughts to dart in a hundred different directions, like a school of fish menaced by a shadow. He concentrated on his breathing, trying to center himself. Real or unreal, what did it matter? The only question of any significance was, Who could have engineered this? It wasn't Polutin's style. Although March surely was. March was made to order for Polutin. The alternative explanations -- magical vodka, mysterious Lebedevian machinations -- didn't persuade him; but neither could he rule them out.... Suddenly electrified with fright, remembering his appointment, thinking he'd missed it, he peered at his watch. Only eleven minutes had passed since he'd drunk the vodka. It didn't seem possible, yet the clock behind the bar showed the same time. He had fifteen minutes left to wait. He patted his pocket, felt the airline tickets. Touched the money belt. Pay Yuri, he told himself. Sign the papers. There'd be time to think later. Or maybe none of it was worth thinking about. He studied himself in the mirror. Tried a smile, straightened his tie unnecessarily, wiped his mouth. And saw Niall March's reflection wending his way among the tables toward the bar. Toward him.

"I was hoping I'd run into you," March said, dropping onto the stool beside Chemayev. "Listen, mate. I want to apologize for giving you a hard time back there in the fucking ice palace. I wasn't meself. I've been driving around with that bastard Polutin all day. Listening to him jabber and having to kiss his fat ass has me ready to chew the tit off the Virgin. Can I buy you a drink?"

Totally at sea, Chemayev managed to say, no thanks, he'd had enough for one evening.

"When I can no longer hear that insipid voice, that's when I'll know I've had enough." March hailed the bartender. "Still and all, he's a fair sort, your boss. We held opposing positions on a business matter over in London a while back. He lost a couple of his boys, but apparently he's not a man to let personal feelings intrude on his good judgment. We've been working together ever since."

Chemayev had it in mind to disagree with the proposition that Polutin did not let personal feelings interfere with judgment -- it was his feeling that the opposite held true; but March caught the bartender's eye and said, "You don't have any British beer, do you? Fuck! Then give me some clear piss in a glass." The bartender stared at him without comprehension. "Vodka," said March; then, to Chemayev: "What sorta scene do you got going on here? It's like some kind of fucking czarist disco. With gangsters instead of the Romanovs. I mean, is it like a brotherhood, y'know? Sons of the Revolution or some such?"

The bartender set down his vodka. March drained the glass. "No offense," he said. "But I hate this shit. It's like drinking shoe polish." He glanced sideways at Chemayev. "You're not the most talkative soul I've encountered. Sure you're not holding a grudge?"

"No," said Chemayev, reigning in the impulse to look directly at March, to try and pierce the man's affable veneer and determine the truth of what lay beneath. "I'm just...anxious. I have an important meeting."

"Oh, yeah? Who with?"

"Yuri Lebedev."

"The fucking Buddha himself, huh? Judging by what I've seen of his establishment, that should be a frolic." March called to the bartender, held up his empty glass. "Not only does this stuff taste like the sweat off a pig's balls, but I seem immune to it."

"If you keep drinking...." Chemayev said, and lost his train of thought. He was having trouble equating this chatty, superficial March with either of the man's two previous incarnations -- the sullen, reptilian assassin and the poetic martial arts wizard.

"What's that?" March grabbed the second vodka the instant the bartender finished pouring and flushed it down.

"Nothing," said Chemayev. He had no capacity for judgment left; the world had become proof against interpretation.

March turned on his stool to face the tables, resting his elbows on the bar. "Drink may not be your country's strong suit," he said, "but I'm forced to admit your women have it all over ours. I'm not saying Irish girls aren't pretty. God, no! When they're new pennies, ah...they're such a blessing. But over here it's like you've got the fucking franchise for long legs and cheekbones." He winked at Chemayev. "If Ireland ever gets an economy, we'll trade you straight-up booze for women -- that way we'll both make out." He swiveled back to face the mirror, and looked into the eyes of Chemayev's reflection. "I suppose your girlfriend's a looker."

Chemayev nodded glumly. "Yes...yes, she is."

March studied him a moment more. "Well, don't let it get you down, okay?" He gave Chemayev a friendly punch on the arm and eased off the stool. "I've got to be going." He stuck out his hand. "Pals?" he said. With reluctance, Chemayev accepted the hand. March's grip was strong, but not excessively so. "Brothers in the service of the great ship Polutin," he said. "That's us."

He started off, then looked back pleadingly at Chemayev. "Y'know where the loo...the men's room is?"

"No," said Chemayev, too distracted to give directions. "I'm sorry. No."

"Christ Jesus!" March grimaced and grabbed his crotch. "It better not be far. My back teeth are floating."

THE WALLS of the corridor that led to Yuri's office were enlivened by a mural similar to the mosaic that covered the bar in the lounge -- a crowd of people gathered at a cocktail party, many of them figures from recent Russian history, the faces of even the anonymous ones rendered with such a specificity of detail, it suggested that the artist had used models for all of them. Every thirty feet or so the mural was interrupted by windows of one-way glass that offered views of small gaudy rooms, some empty, others occupied by men and women engaged in sex. However, none of this distracted Chemayev from his illusory memory of death. It dominated his mental landscape, rising above the moil of lesser considerations like a peak lifting from a sea of clouds. He couldn't escape the notion that it had been premonitory and that the possibility of death lay between him and a life of comfortable anonymity in America.

He rounded a bend and saw ahead an alcove furnished with a sofa, a coffee table, and a TV set -- on the screen a husky bearded man was playing the accordion, belting out an old folk tune. Two women in white jumpsuits were embracing on the sofa, unmindful of Chemayev's approach. As he walked up the taller of the two, a pale Nordic blond with high cheekbones and eyes the color of aquamarines, unzipped her lover's jumpsuit to expose the swells of her breasts...and that action triggered Chemayev's memory. He'd seen this before. On the TV in the bar. Just prior to entering the garden where he had fought with March. The same women, the same sofa. Even the song was the same that had been playing then -- the lament of a transplanted city dweller for the joys of country life. He must have cried out or made a noise of some sort, for the smaller woman -- also a blond, younger and softer of feature -- gave a start and closed her jumpsuit with a quick movement, making a tearing sound with the zipper that stated her mood as emphatically as her mean-spirited stare.

"You must be Viktor," the taller woman said cheerfully, getting to her feet. "Larissa's friend."

Chemayev admitted to the fact.

"I'm Nataliya." She extended a hand, gave his a vigorous shake. The sharpness of her features contrived a caricature of beauty, the hollows of her pale cheeks so pronounced they brought to mind the fracture planes of a freshly calved iceberg. "I am also friends with Larissa," she said. "Perhaps she has told you about me?"

"I don't know," Chemayev said. "Perhaps. I think so."

Before he could voice any of the questions that occurred to him she caught his arm and said, "Come. I'll take you to Yuri." Then turning to her lover, she said, "I'll be back as soon as I can." The smaller woman let out an angry sniff and pretended to be absorbed in watching the TV.

Nataliya led him along the corridor, chattering about Larissa. What a sweetheart she was, how kind she was to the other girls, even those who didn't deserve it. God knows, there were some impossible bitches working here. Take that cunt Nadezhda. This scrawny redhead from Pyatigorsk. Her father had stolen from Yuri and now his little darling was keeping him alive by faking orgasms with drunks and perverts. You should have seen her the day she arrived. A real mess! Weeping and shivering. But after a couple of weeks, after she realized she wasn't going to be raped or beaten, she started acting like Catherine the Great. Lots of girls went through a phase like that. It was only natural. Most came from awful situations and once they felt they had a little power, you expected them to get a swelled head. But Nadezhda had been here a year and every day she grew more intolerable. Putting on airs. Bragging about the rich men who wanted to set her up in an apartment or buy her a dacha. And now --Nataliya's laugh sounded as if she were clearing her throat to spit --now she claimed some mystery man was going to pay her debt to Yuri and marry her. Everyone tried to tell her these things never worked out. Hadn't lying beneath a different man every night taught her anything? In the first place, why would a man take a whore to wife when he could have what he wanted for a far less exacting price? Love? What a joke! Men didn't love women, they loved the way women made them feel about themselves. Most of them, that is. The ones who did fall in love with you, the ones who were fool enough to surrender their power to a woman....because that's what love was in essence, wasn't it? A kind of absolute surrender. Well, you had to be suspicious of those types, didn't you? You had to believe some weakness of character was involved.

To this point Chemayev had been listening with half an ear, more concerned with the significance of having run into these women from his dream, trying fruitlessly to recall how the dream had proceeded after he had seen them, and thinking that he should turn back so as to avoid what might prove to be a real confrontation with March; but now he searched Nataliya's face for a sign that she might be commenting on his particular situation. She did not appear to notice his increased attentiveness and continued gossiping about the pitiful Nadezhda. She'd never liked the bitch, she said, but now she was about to get her comeuppance, you had to feel badly for her. Maybe she wasn't really a bitch, maybe she was just an idiot. And maybe that was why Larissa had befriended her.... Nataliya stopped as they came abreast of yet another window, touched Chemayev on the shoulder, and said, "There's Yuri now."

In the room beyond the glass, its walls and furniture done in shades of violet, a pasty round-shouldered man with a dolorous, jowly face and thin strands of graying hair combed over a mottled scalp stood at the foot of a large bed, seeming at loose ends. He had on slacks and an unbuttoned shirt from which his belly protruded like an uncooked dumpling, and he was rubbing his hips with broad, powerful-looking hands. Chemayev had seen Yuri on numerous occasions -- or rather he had seen the man who officiated at the nightly auctions -- but he had never been this close to any of the doubles, and despite the man's unprepossessing mien, or perhaps because of it, because his drab commonality echoed that of the old Soviet dinosaurs, the Kruschevs, the Andropovs, the Malenkovs, he felt a twinge of fear.

"Is that him?" he asked Nataliya.

She looked uncertain, then brightened. "You mean the one you're expecting to meet? He's upstairs. At the party."

"What are you talking about? What party?"

"At Yuri's place."

"His office?"

"His office...his apartment. It's all the same. He's got an entire floor. The party's been going on since Eternity opened. Eleven, twelve years now. It never shuts down. Don't worry. You'll do your business and meet some fascinating people."

Chemayev studied the double, who was shuffling about, touching things, pursing his lips as though in disapproval. He did not appear to be the magical adept of Polutin's description, but of course this was not the real Yuri -- who could say what form he'd taken for himself?

"If you want to finish by the time Larissa gets off work," Nataliya said, "we'd better hurry."

"She's not working tonight," Chemayev said, still intrigued by the double.

"Sure she is. I saw her not half an hour ago. She was this young blond guy. A real pretty boy. Her last client of the night...or so she said."

She said this so off-handedly, Chemayev didn't believe she was lying. "She told me she didn't have to work tonight."

"What's she supposed to tell you? She's going to throw some asshole a fuck? You know what she does. She cares for you, so she lied. Big surprise!"

What Nataliya had told him seemed obvious, patently true; nonetheless Chemayev was left with a feeling of mild stupor, like the thick-headedness that comes with the onset of flu, before it manifests as fever and congestion. He leaned against the wail.

"The amazing thing is, you believed her," she said. "Who'd you think you were involved with? Lying's second nature to a whore."

"She's not a whore," he said, half under his breath.

Nataliya pushed her sharp face close to his. "No? What could she be then? A missionary? A nurse?"

"She didn't have a choice. She...."

"Sure! That explains it! Every other girl who becomes a whore has a choice, but not sweet Larissa." Nataliya made a dry sound in the back of her throat, like a cat hissing. "You're pathetic!"

Chemayev hung his head, giving in to the dead weight of his skull. To graphic images of Larissa in bed. It was unreasonable to feel betrayed under such circumstances, yet that was how he felt. He wanted to run, to put distance between himself and the corridor; but the violet room seemed to exert a tidal influence on his mood, pulling his sense of betrayal into a dangerous shape, and he had the urge to batter the window, to break through and tear Yuri's double apart.

"Want to watch? They're probably going at it in one of the rooms. I bet we can find them." Nataliya tugged at his jacket. "Come on! Treat yourself! I won't say a thing to Larissa."

Chemayev shoved her away, sending her reeling against the opposite wall. "Shut your fucking mouth!"

"0o -- oo -- ooh!" Nataliya pretended to cower, holding her white hands like starfish in front of her face, peering through the gaps between her long fingers. "That was very good! Just like a real man!"

Chemayev's head throbbed. "You don't understand," he said. "I'm paying off her debt. We're planning to go away...to marry."

Nataliya was silent for a bit, then: "And now you're not? That's what you're saying? Now you've realized your whore is really a whore, you intend to abandon her?"

"No...that's not it."

"Then why waste time? Keep your appointment. Pay the money. You'll forget about this."

Chemayev thought this was good advice, but he couldn't muster the energy to follow it. His mental wattage had dimmed, as if he were experiencing a brown-out.

Nataliya leaned against the wall beside him.. "What I said about Nadezhda...about her telling us someone was going to pay her debt. I bet Larissa told her about you, and she took the story for her own. She does that sort of thing. Takes scraps of other people's lives and sews them into an autobiography." She looked off along the corridor. "I'm sorry for what I said. If I'd known it was you and Larissa...." Her voice lost some value, some richness. "Maybe it'll be different for you two."

Her solicitude, which Chemayev suspected was only prelude to further abuse, snapped him out of his funk. "No need to apologize," he said. "I haven't taken anything you've said seriously." He headed off along the corridor.

"Oh...right! You have the surety of love to support your convictions." Nataliya fell into step beside him. "I'm curious about love. Me, I've never experienced it. Mind telling me what it's like?"

Chemayev's headache grew worse; he increased his pace. They came round a sharp bend and he saw an elevator door ahead.

"All I want's a hint, you understand, lust tell me something you know about Larissa. Something only you with your lover's eye can see."

Enraged, Chemayev spun her about to face him. "Don't talk anymore! Just take me to Yuri!"

Half-smiling, she knocked his hands away and walked toward the elevator; then she glanced back, smiling broadly now. "Is this how you treat her? No wonder she lies to you."

Inside the cramped elevator, chest-to-chest with Nataliya, Chemayev fixed his eyes on a point above the silky curve of her scalp and studied the image of Stalin's KVD chief, Beria -- the mural on the walls repeated the motif of those in the corridor and the bar, but here the figures were larger, giving the impression that they were passengers in the car. Contemplating this emblem of Soviet authority eased the throbbing in his head. Maybe, he thought, in the presence of such an evil ikon his own sins were diminished and thus became less capable of producing symptoms such as anxiety and headaches. The old thug looked dapper, dressed in a double-breasted blue suit, sporting a red flower in his lapel instead of a hammer-and-sickle pin, quite different from the photographs Chemayev had seen in which he'd worn executioner's black. His quizzical expression and pince-nez gave him the air of a schoolteacher, stem yet caring, a man whom you'd detest when you studied under him, but whom you would respect years later when you realized the value of the lessons he'd taught. Not at all the sort of character to preside over purges and summary executions, watching from a distance, betraying no more emotion than would a beetle perched on a leaf.

Inching upward, the elevator creaked and groaned -- the sounds of a torture chamber. The exhausted cries of victims, the straining of mechanical torments. Nothing like the noiseless efficiency of the one that had brought him to the theater. The car lurched, passing a floor, and Chemayev's thoughts, too, lurched. He reawakened to Nataliya's presence, felt her eyes on him. Bitch. He wanted to beam the word into her brain. What right did she have to ask him personal questions? Tell me something you know about Larissa, something only you with your lover's eye can see. What did she expect? That he'd bare his soul to her? Fat chance! There were lots of things he could have told her, though. A year and-a-half's worth of things. Thousands of intimate observations. The problem was, his head hurt too much at the moment for him to think of any.

The elevator door rattled open and Chemayev stepped out into a corridor with cement walls, smelling of urine and vomit, illuminated by the ghastly dim light from an overhead bulb. The floor was littered with empty bottles, crushed plastic containers, soggy newspapers, dead cigarette packs, used condoms. Partially unearthed from a mound of debris, a crumpled Pepsi can glittered like treasure. Heavy metal blasted from somewhere close by. At the far end of the corridor a lumpish old man with stringy gray hair falling to his shoulders was wielding a mop, feebly pushing a mound of trash into the shadowy space beneath a stairwell. Along the walls stood buckets of sand -- for use in case of fire. Chemayev turned to Nataliya, who gestured for him to proceed. As they passed, the old man peered at him through the gray snakes of his hair, his face twisted into a frown, and he smacked his lips as if trying to rid himself of a nasty taste.

If Chemayev had any doubt as to where he stood, it was dispelled by what he saw from the window at the foot of the stairs -- he was gazing down onto the parking lot of Eternity, a view that could only be achieved from high up in one of the krushovas. This surprised him, but he was becoming accustomed to Yuri Lebedev's curious logic. As he started up the stairs, the music was switched off and he heard voices in the corridor above. At the top of the stairs, lounging against a wall, were two men in jeans and leather jackets, one with a shaved scalp, nursing a Walkman to his breast, and the other with a mohawk that had been teased into a rooster's crest. They eyed Chemayev with contempt. The man with the Mohawk blew Nataliya a kiss. His face was narrow, scarcely any chin and a big nose, looking as if it had been squeezed in a vise. A pistol was stuck in his belt.

"Private party," he said, blocking Chemayev's path.

"I've got an appointment with Yuri," Chemayev told him.

The bald guy affected a doltish expression. "Yuri? Which Yuri is that?"

"Maybe Yuri Gagarin," said his pal. "Maybe this pussy wants to be an astronaut."

"Better let him pass," said Nataliya. "My friend's a real assassin. A faggot like you doesn't stand a chance with him."

The man with the pistol in his belt made a twitchy move and Chemayev grabbed his hand as it closed around the pistol grip; at the same time he spun the man about and encircled his neck from behind with his left arm, cutting off his wind. The man let go of the pistol and pried at the arm. Chemayev flicked the safety off, pushed the pistol deeper into the man's trousers.

The man's Adam's apple bobbed. "Go easy, okay!"

Chemayev wrenched the gun free and waved both men back against the wall. "Are you crazy?" he asked Nataliya. "Why did you antagonize him?"

She moved off along the corridor, heading for a doorway thronged with partygoers. "I have so few chances to watch you be masterful. Indulge me."

Chemayev shook his forefinger in warning at the two punks and followed her. The pistol -- a nine-millimeter -- didn't fit his holster; he wedged it in the waistband of his trousers at the small of his back.

The first thing he noticed about the party was that the instant he stepped through the door the stench of the hallway vanished, as if he had penetrated an invisible barrier impermeable to odors. The smells were now those you might expect of any Moscow gathering: perfume, marijuana and cigarette smoke, bad breath, the heat of people pressed together under the sickly lighting, crowded into an unguessable number of rooms. People of every description. Students in sweaters and jeans; old ragged folks with careworn faces, the sort you'd expect to find in the krushovas; beautiful women in couturier gowns; street prostitutes --some equally beautiful -- in vinyl micro-minis and fake furs; men dressed like Chemayev himself, members of a mafiya or businessmen with more-or-less reputable interests; musicians with guitars and violins and horns; homosexuals in drag; uniformed soldiers; jugglers. In one corner several fit-looking men wearing jerseys tossed a soccer ball back and forth; in another two actors played a scene to an audience consisting of a blond middle-aged woman in a lab coat and thick spectacles, a thickset man in a wrinkled suit, the very image of a Party hack, and a pretty adolescent girl wearing leg warmers over her tights, holding a pair of ballet slippers. On occasion, as Chemayev and Nataliya forged a path, being pinched and fondled and grabbed in the process, incredible sights materialized, as fleeting as flashes of lightning. A geisha's painted face appeared between shoulders; she flicked out a slender forked tongue at Chemayev, then was gone. Soon thereafter he caught sight of a small boy whirling as rapidly as a figure skater, transforming himself into a column of dervish blue light. And not long after that they squeezed past a group of men and women attending a giant with a prognathian jaw and a bulging forehead who, kneeling, was as tall as those gathered around him; he reached out his enormous hands and flickering auras manifested about the heads of those he touched. To someone unfamiliar with Eternity these sights might have seemed miraculous; but to Chemayev, who had witnessed similar curiosities on the stage of the theater, they were evidence of Yuri's talent for illusion. He accepted them in stride and kept pushing ahead. Once he saw a brunette who might have been Larissa laughing flirtatiously on the arm of a slender blond man; he called to her, knocked people aside in his determination to reach her, but she disappeared into the crowd. There were so many people milling about it was impossible to keep track of any single person, and they were of such great variety it seemed a contemporary Noah had scavenged the streets of the endangered city for two of every kind and brought them to this place of relative security, a cross between the Ark and the Tower of Babel. The hubbub, comprised of talking, singing, laughing -- indeed, of every sort of human emission -- was deafening, and the only impression Chemayev had of the general aspect of the place was derived from the objects that lined the walls. Overflowing bookcases; side-by-side refrigerators; an ornate China closet containing framed photographs; a massive secretary of golden oak; cupboards, reliquaries, travel posters, portraits, a calendar showing the wrong month and a picture of Siberian wheat fields. Items typical of a middle-class apartment. Smoke dimmed the lighting further, creating an amber haze, twisting with slow torsion into a menagerie of shapes that often appeared identifiable -- ephemeral omega signs and kabalistic symbols and mutant Cyrillic characters --beneath which the closely packed heads of the partygoers bobbed and jerked. In various quarters couples were dancing and due to the heat, many -- both men and women -- had removed their shirts; but because of the overall exuberance and the general lack of attention paid to the topless women, the effect was not truly prurient and had the casual eroticism of a tribal celebration.

Eventually Nataliya and Chemayev forced their way into a large relatively under-populated room. No more than fifteen or sixteen people standing in clusters, some occupying the grouping of couches and easy chairs that dominated the far end. Nataliya drew Chemayev aside. "This is ridiculous," she said. "For all I know we're following Yuri about. Sit down and I'll try to find him."

Oppressed, mentally fatigued, Chemayev was in no mood to argue. Once she had left, he collapsed into an easy chair, let his head fall back and closed his eyes. The workings of his mind were clouded, murky. It was as if the contents of his skull were the interior of a fishbowl that hadn't been cleaned for weeks, the water thickened to a brown emulsion in which a golden glint of movement was visible now and again. Though not altogether pleasant, it was an oddly restful state, and he became irritated when a man's voice intruded, telling a story about two young friends who'd come to Moscow from the north. He tried unsuccessfully to ignore the voice and finally opened his eyes to discover that the room had filled with decrepit, ill-clad men and women, typical denizens of the krushovas. The storyteller was hidden among them and his voice -- a slurred yet authoritative baritone -- was the only one audible.

"There was a special bond between them," the man was saying. "They were both misfits in the life they had chosen -- or rather that had chosen them. They were romantics and their circumstance was the very antithesis of the romantic, suppressing the natural expressions of their hearts and souls. Nicolai -- the livelier of the pair -- he was more grievously affected. He fancied himself a poet. He aspired to be a new Mayakovsky, to give tongue to the millennial monsters taking shape from the funeral smoke of Communism. A talented, personable fellow. Blond, handsome. For all his bloody deeds, he had something inside him that remained untouched. A core of...not innocence exactly, but a kind of youthful arrogance that counterfeited innocence. That made innocence unnecessary. Who knows what he might have achieved in a more forgiving age?"

This reference to someone named Nicolai and the accompanying description charged Chemayev with new anxiety and caused him to shake off his malaise. He sat up and peered about, trying to locate the speaker. An old woman fixed him with a baleful stare, then turned away. Her faded print dress was hiked up in back, revealing a raddled, purple-veined thigh; one of her grimy stockings had sagged about her calf in folds, like a seven league boot.

"The morning in question," the man went on, "they got up well before dawn and drove to an open market north of the city. You know the sort of place. A muddy field where vendors set up stalls. Farmers selling vegetables and such. An old bus was parked at the edge of the field. It served as an office for Aleksander Fetisov, the small-time criminal they'd been sent to kill. Fetisov had grown dissatisfied with picking up the crumbs that fell from the table of the big shots. He had grand ambitions. But neither his strength nor his ingenuity had proved equal to those ambitions. When he stepped out of the bus with his bodyguards our heroes opened fire from behind the bushes where they had hidden themselves. The farmers ran away.

"Nicolai knelt beside Fetisov's body. He needed proof that they'd done the job. A watch, a ring. Some identifiable token. As his friend searched the dead man's clothing Viktor moved up behind him and aimed a pistol at his head. It would have been merciful if he had pulled the trigger right at that second, but he wasn't committed to the act. He was still trying to think of a way out...even though he knew there was none. He couldn't understand why Polutin had ordered him to kill Nicolai. But for Viktor, lack of understanding was not sufficient cause to break ranks. In this he differed from Nicolai. And of course, though he couldn't see it at the time, this was the reason Polutin had ordered Nicolai's death -- he had too much imagination to be a good soldier."

Bewildered and full of dread, Chemayev stood and began making his way toward the sound of the voice. He knew this story, he was familiar with every detail, but how anyone else could know it was beyond him. The elderly men and women shuffled out of his path clumsily, reluctantly --it seemed he was pushing through a sort of human vegetation, a clinging, malodorous thicket comprised of threadbare dresses, torn sweaters, and blotchy, wrinkled skin.

"Nicolai glanced up from the corpse to discover that his friend had become his executioner. For an instant, he was frozen. But after the initial shock dissipated he made no move to fight or to plead for his life. He just looked at Viktor, a look that seemed fully comprehending, as if he knew everything about the moment. The mechanisms that had created it. Its inevitability. And it was the composition of that look, the fact it contained no element of disappointment, as if what was about to occur was no more nor less than what Nicolai might have expected of his friend...that was the spark that prompted Viktor, at last, to fire. To give him due credit, he wept profusely over the body. At one point he put the gun to his head, intending to end his own life. But that, certainly, was an act to which he was not committed."

Standing near the door, his back to Chemayev, the center of the krushova dwellers' attention, was a squat black-haired man in a blue serge suit. Chemayev stepped in front of him and stared into the unblinking eyes of Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria, his clothing identical in every respect to that worn by the painted image in the elevator, complete down to the pince-nez perched on his nose and the red blossom in his lapel. Flabbergasted, Chemayev fell back a step.

"If it were up to me," Beria said, "I'd have you shot. Not because you betrayed your friend -- in that you were only carrying out an order. But your penchant for self-recrimination interferes with the performance of your duty. That is reprehensible." He clicked his tongue against his teeth and regarded Chemayev dourly. "I suspect you'd like to know how I came to hear the story I've been telling my comrades. No doubt you're trying to rationalize my presence. Perhaps you've concluded that if Yuri could create doubles for himself, he might well have created a double for Beria. Perhaps you're thinking that when Lev Polutin sent you and Nicolai to kill Fetisov, he also sent a spy to make certain you did the job right, and that this spy is my source. That would be the logical explanation. At least according to the lights of your experience. But let me assure you, such is not the case."

Having recovered his poise somewhat, Chemayev seized on this explanation as if it were a rope that had been lowered from the heavens to lift him free of earthly confusion. "I'm sick of this shit!" he said, grabbing Beria by the lapels. "Tell me where the fuck Yuri is!"

An ominous muttering arose from the crowd, but Beria remained unruffled. "People have been trying to talk to you all evening," he said. "Trying to help you make sense of things. But you're not a good listener, are you? Very well." He patted Chemayev on the cheek, an avuncular gesture that caused Chemayev, as if in reflex, to release him. "Let's say for the sake of argument I'm not who I appear to be. That I'm merely the likeness of Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria. Not God's creation, but Yuri's. Given Yuri's playful nature, this is a distinct possibility. But how far, I wonder, does playfulness extend? Does he only create doubles of the famous, the notorious? Or might he also create doubles of individuals who're of no interest to anyone...except, perhaps, to Viktor Chemayev?" A meager smile touched his lips. "That doesn't seem reasonable, does it?"

There was a rustling behind Chemayev, as of many people shifting about, and he turned toward the sound. An avenue had been created in the ranks of human wreckage from the krushova and sauntering toward him along it -- the way he used to walk when he spotted you at a bar or on a street corner, and had it in mind to play a trick, his head tipped to the side, carrying his left hand by his waist, as if about to break into a dance step -- was a blond, slender, blue-eyed man in a fawn leather jacket, gray silk shirt, and cream-colored slacks. His boyish smile was parenthetically displayed between two delicately incised lines that helped lend him a look of perpetual slyness. In fact, all the details of his features were so finely drawn they might have been created by a horde of artisan spiders armed with tiny lapidary instruments. It was the face of a sensitive, mischievous child come to a no less sensitive and mischievous maturity. He looked not a day older than he had on the last morning of his life three and a half years before.

"That's right!" Nicolai said, holding out his arms to Viktor. "In the flesh! Surprised?" He wheeled in a circle as if showing off a new suit. "Still the handsome twenty-two-year-old, eh? Still a fucking cloud in trousers."

Logic was no remedy for this apparition. If the floor had opened beneath him to reveal a lake of fire, Chemayev would not have been more frightened. He retreated in a panic, fumbling for the pistol.

"Man! Don't be an asshole! I'm not going to give you any trouble." Nicolai showed Chemayev his empty palms. "We've been down this road once. You don't want to do it again."

Guilt and remorse took up prominent posts along Chemayev's mental perimeters. His breath came shallowly, and he had difficulty speaking. "Nicolai?" he said. "It...it's not you...?"

"Sure it is. Want me to prove it ? No problem." Nicolai folded his arms on his chest and appeared to be thinking; then he grinned. "What's that night club where all the whores dress like Nazis? Fuck! I'm no good with names. But you must remember the night we got drunk there? We screwed everything in sight. Remember?"

Chemayev nodded, though he barely registered the words.

"On the way home we had an argument," Nicolai said. "It was the only time we ever got into a fight. You pulled the car off onto the side of the Garden Ring and we beat the shit out of each other. Remember what we argued about?"

"Yes." Chemayev was beginning to believe that the man might actually be Nicolai. The thought gave him no comfort.

"We argued about whether the goddamn Rolling Stones were better with Brian Jones or Mick Taylor." Nicolai fingered a pack of Marlboros from his shirt pocket, tapped one out. "Stupid bullshit. I couldn't chew for a fucking week." He fired up his cigarette and exhaled a fan of smoke; he closed his right eye, squinted at Chemayev as if assessing the impact of his words. "Want more proof? No problem."

He dropped, loose-limbed, into a nearby chair and began to reel off another anecdote, but no further proofs were necessary. His unstrung collapse; his languid gestures) the way he manipulated the cigarette in his left hand, passing it from one pair of fingers to another like a magician practicing a coin trick -- the entire catalogue of his body language and speech were unmistakably Nicolai's. No actor alive, however skillful, could have achieved such verisimilitude.

As Chemayev looked on, half-listening to Nicolai, a consoling inner voice, a voice of fundamental soundness and fine proletarian sensibilities that had been there all the time but only became audible when essential to mental stability, was offering assurances that beyond the boundaries of his temporary derangement the world was as ever, humdrum and explicable, and no such thing as this could be happening --drugs, alcohol, and stress were to blame -- rambling on and on with increasingly insane calmness and irrelevance, like the whispered litany of a self-help guru suggesting seven simple methods for maximizing spiritual potential issuing from a cassette playing over a pair of headphones fallen from the head of gunshot victim who was bleeding out onto a kitchen floor. Yet simultaneously, in some cramped sub-basement of his brain, urgent bulletins concerning zombie sightings and karmic retribution were being received, warnings that came too late to save the iniquitous murderer of a childhood friend....

"Viktor!" Nicolai was staring at him with concern. "Are you all right? Sit down, man. I know this is fucked up, but we've got some things to talk about."

Unable to think of an acceptable alternative, Chemayev sagged into the chair opposite, but he did not lean back and he rested the pistol on his knee. Overwhelmed with guilt and regret, he had the urge to apologize, to beg forgiveness, but recognized the inadequacy of such gestures. His heart seemed to constrict into a dark nugget of self-loathing.

"You know it's me now, right?" Nicolai asked, "You don't have any doubts?"

Called upon to speak, Chemayev was unable to repress his urge for apology and emitted a sobbing, incoherent string of phrases that, reduced to their essence, translated into an admission of responsibility and a denial of the same on the grounds that he'd had no choice, if he hadn't followed Polutin's orders, Polutin would have killed him, his family.... The shame of the act never left him, but what else could he have done?

Nicolai shifted lower in his chair, reached down to the floor and stubbed out his cigarette. He watched the embers fade. "I never expected to last long in Moscow," he said gloomily. "That's one of the differences between us. You always thought you were going to win the game. Me, I knew it was only a matter of time before I lost." He tapped out another cigarette. "I can't help how you feel. And believe me, I know. I saw your face when you pulled the trigger. I see your face now. You're not hard to read." He lit up again. "You'll never forgive yourself, no matter what I tell you. So why don't we put the subject aside for now. We've more important things to discuss."

Once again Chemayev could think of nothing to say other than to abase himself, to offer further apology. Tears streamed from his eyes, and though the tears were validation of a kind, evidence that his spirit, albeit tarnished, was still capable of normal reactions, they also infused him with shame. He struggled to control himself. "I don't understand," he said. "How is this possible? How can you be here?"

"With Yuri all things are possible," said Nicolai; then his glum mood lifted. "You know those American jokes? The ones with the punch lines that go, 'I've got good news, and I've got bad news'? It's like that. I've got good news, and I've got bad news. Which do you want first?"

This was the old Nicolai, always joking, trying to make light of things. Chemayev relaxed by a degree from his rigid posture.

"Come on!" Nicolai said. "Which do you want?"

"Good."

"Okay. The good news is there is an afterlife. The bad news" -- Nicolai made a sweeping gesture that, for all Chemayev knew, might have been intended to include the apartment, Russia, the universe -- "this is it!"

"What the fuck are you talking about?"

"This place." Nicolai gave a sardonic laugh. "This fucking night club. Eternity."

There must be, Chemayev thought, more to the joke.

"You still don't get it, huh? Christ!" Nicolai leaned forward and gave Chemayev a rap on the knee, like a teacher scolding -- fondly -- a favorite pupil. "For such a genius you're not too quick on the uptake."

"Eternity?" said Chemayev, incredulous, "Yuri Lebedev's Eternity...that's the afterlife? You're not serious?"

"Serious? What the fuck's that? Is Moscow serious? Starving people camped in the subways. Generals selling tanks on the black market. That old fart in the Kremlin swilling down a quart a day and promising us the capitalist paradise. It's no less serious than that." Nicolai wriggled in his chair like a kid with an itch. "Yuri, man...he's...." He gave his head a shake, as if to signify awe. "You don't have to hang around the party long before you learn things about him."

"You mean that horseshit about he's a fucking wizard? A Master of the Mystic East?"

"They're things a guy like you might not be able to swallow. But for a guy like me, with what I've been through, I don't have any choice."

Chemayev looked down at his hands.

"Have you ever met anyone who knew Yuri?" Nicolai asked. "Any of his friends, his associates. Not just someone who used to work for him."

After giving this due consideration Chemayev said he had not.

"That's because they're dead. Grenkov, Zereva, Ashkenazy. All those guys. They're all dead and they're all at the party. Man, you wouldn't believe who's here! It's the goddamn Communist Hall of Fame. Yuri's a big fan of those power-mad old bastards. Lots of generals and shit. Not many poets, though. Yuri was never much of a reader."

"Oh. So it's the party that's the afterlife!" Chemayev gave a scornful laugh. "This is bullshit!"

Nicolai's face hardened. "Bullshit? Well, maybe you'll think this is bullshit too! When you shot me, I went out. One second I was staring at you. At your dumbass face! It looked like you were going to start whimpering. I had time to say to myself, 'Oh, fuck...yeah...of course....' I figured things out, you understand. The way you were pouting -- I knew it meant you'd scrambled over whatever pissy little moral hurdle the job had posed. And then" -- he snapped his fingers --"I wasn't there anymore." He allowed Chemayev time to react and when no reaction was forthcoming he went on: "I don't remember much afterward. But at some point I began to hear a voice. I can't tell you what kind of voice. It was all around me...this enormous sound. As if I was inside the mouth that was speaking. Sometimes it seems I can almost repeat the words it was saying -- they're on the tip of my tongue. But I can't spit them out." He made a frustrated noise. "The next thing I remember for certain, I'm walking down a dingy corridor toward a door. Toward the party. I'm wearing nice clothes. Cologne. It's like I just got out of the shower and I'm ready for a night on the town."

Nicolai took a hit of his cigarette and let smoke leak out between his lips, as if too enervated to exhale properly. "I suppose it does sound like bullshit. I can't explain it. Everybody says that while Yuri was building the club he was hanging out with some strange people. Experts on the Kabbala. Computer scientists. He even brought in a shaman from up near Archangel. They say he went through some drastic changes, and I believe it. Whatever he was like before, I'll bet it wasn't much like he is now."

"You've met him?"

Nicolai coughed, grimaced, butted his cigarette. "You don't meet Yuri. You experience him."

"You experience him." Chemayev gave a sarcastic laugh. "So you're saying he's like a sunset or something."

"A sunset...." Nicolai looked as if he was mulling it over. "It's not a totally inappropriate analogy. But for sure he's not a guy you sit down and have a chat with. The fact is, I don't think he's a guy at all. Not anymore. The things he got into when he was building the club, it transformed him. The club, Yuri, the party...they're all the same somehow." Nicolai smiled crookedly. "That's pretty weak, isn't it? Maybe the best I can do is tell you what it's like being here all the time." He gestured at one of the walls. "Take a look around."

Chemayev had not paid much attention to the room when he had entered, but he was fairly certain the walls had not been covered, as they were now, with a faded earth-toned mural like those found on the walls of factories during the Communist era: determined-looking, square-jawed men and broad-shouldered women with motherly bosoms engaged in the noble state-approved pursuit of dump-truck-assembly, faces aglow with the joy of communal effort, their sinewy arms seemingly imbued with the same iron strength as the mighty girders and grimly functional machinery that framed them. Other than their two chairs, the room was empty of furniture. The krushova dwellers and Beria were gone, and the noise of the party had abated, replaced by a faint roaring, like the sound of blood heard when you put a seashell close to your ear. Chemayev thought he had become inured to apparitions, but a chill spiked in his chest.

"Shit changes all the time," said Nicolai. "Empty rooms fill up with people. You'll be having a talk with someone and it'll just end -- like the rest of the scene was cut out of the movie. Snip! You're in another room, doing something else. You'll be sleeping in a bed, the next second you're dancing with somebody. There's no logic to it, it's all done on a whim. Yuri's whim. The physical laws of the place are his laws. Not God's, not nature's. It's like everyone here is inside him. Part of him. He's become a universe unto himself. One that contains the club and the party.... For all I know he's taken over the fucking world. But the difference between the places I'm familiar with -- the club and the party -- most people in the club are still alive." He started to take out another cigarette, then thought better of it. "We get visitors like you from the real world now and again. And various among us are privileged to visit the club. But...." His mood veered toward exasperation, and Chemayev wondered, with only a touch of cynicism, if Yuri might not be editing his emotions as well as his scenes. "Don't you understand?" Nicolai asked. "Yuri's in control of everything that happens here. We're fucking figments of his imagination. Once you step inside Eternity you're subject to his whims the same as us. I don't know what kind of deal you're hoping to do with him, but take my word, it's not going to be what you expected. You should get the hell out. Right now." He chuckled. "Here I am trying to save your ass. Old habits. Of course" -- he kept his face neutral -- "I'm probably too late."

"If what you say is true," Chemayev said, "then logic would dictate that you're the subject of Yuri's whim at present. That's the reason for this...this confrontation. You must have something to tell me. The lecture on Yuri's power, I assume."

Nicolai jumped up and went to stand facing one of the muralled walls, as if compelled by the heroic figure of a muscular redheaded man holding up an ingot in a pair of tongs, staring at it with such unalloyed devotion, it might have been the sacred light of Mother Russia soon to become an axle joint. "That's what I've been waiting to hear," he said. "The voice of the heartless motherfucker who shot me. I knew it was in you somewhere." He wheeled about, his clever features cinched in fury. "You think this is a confrontation.* My dear friend Viktor! My cherished boyhood companion! Don't you worry. You'll be back here one day...and maybe not just for a visit. Then we'll have a fucking confrontation!" He paced toward Chemayev and stood with his feet apart as if preparing to attack. "I do have something to tell you, but it's got nothing to do with what I said about Yuri. That was for old time's sake. For a while it was like we were friends again, you know. A couple of guys sitting around bullshitting. I can't figure why it happened, but that's how it felt."

Chemayev could relate to Nicolai's confusion. His own feelings, compounded of love, fear, guilt, and much more, were too complex to analyze, like a stew that had been simmering for three and a half years, new ingredients constantly being added, fragrant, rich, and savory, but ultimately indigestible. Nothing could be salvaged here, he realized. "What do you have to tell me?"

Nicolai plucked out his Marlboros, tapped the pack on the back of his hand. "Russian women. Ever think about how tough they are, Viktor? They get the crap beat out of them, they take the best abuse of drunks and addicts. Their fathers fuck them, their boyfriends pimp them. By the time they're sixteen they're world-class ballbusters. They're still sweet, still capable of love. But they've learned to do what's necessary. Most men don't see this. They don't understand that no matter what the woman feels for them, she's going to do what's in her own best interests. She's become just like a Russian man. Sentimental on the outside. Soft. But on the inside they're steel."

"Is this leading somewhere?" asked Chemayev.

"I fucked your woman tonight," Nicolai said. "Your beautiful Larissa. I did her twice. The second time I had her up the ass. She loved it, she went absolutely crazy. I've never considered myself a petty sort, but I must admit it gave me a great deal of satisfaction." He studied the pack of cigarettes, as if using it to focus his thoughts. "You know how it is with some women -- when you make love to them their faces get twisted, distorted. Sex strips away their beauty, revealing the beast. But Larissa, man.... She's amazing. No matter how depraved the act, how degrading your intent, she just gets more beautiful. She had this entranced look. Radiant. Like a saint. Like the more I defiled her, the closer she grew to God." His soft laugh expressed a touch of incredulity. "But none of that's important, is it? She's a whore, after all. So she fucks a guy -- even a dead guy -- what's the big deal? She's doing her job. If she enjoys it a little, all that means is she's a professional." He came closer and perched on the arm of his chair. "After the first fuck we talked a while. She told me this was her last night, she was going away with the man she loved. She told me all about you. What a great guy you were. How much you loved her. All your virtues. I didn't try to illuminate her. I didn't have to. She realizes you're a calculating son-of-a-bitch at heart. She didn't say it, but it was implicit in what she said. She knows you. She loves you. How could she not? She's exactly the same as you. She'll do whatever she has to and there won't be a stain on her conscience." He repocketed the Marlboros without removing one. He stood, adjusted the hang of his jacket. "Okay. That's it. My duty's done."

He seemed to be waiting for a response.

In standing Chemayev was unsteady as an old man, he had to put a hand out to balance himself. He should be angry, he thought; but he only felt out of his depth. There was a gap between himself and his emotions too wide for any spark to cross. But because he believed he should react in some way, because not to react smacked of inadequacy, he pointed the pistol at Nicolai's chest.

"Give it a try," said Nicolai, he held both arms straight out from his sides, turning himself into a blond, expensively tailored Jesus on the Cross. "It worked the first time. I'm interested in what'll happen myself." He rested his head on his shoulder. "Wonder what Yuri will have to say?"

After pondering his options Chemayev decided it would be best to hurry past this part of things. "Where's Yuri now?"

As if in response the air between them began to ripple, a sluggish disturbance that spread throughout the room, infecting floor and ceiling and walls, and as it spread the dimensions of the room underwent a slow, undulant elongation, an evolution that seemed organic, like the stretching of a python's gullet when it prepares to swallow an exceptionally large object. Once the rippling ceased Chemayev found that he was standing at a remove of some forty feet from Nicolai.

"Haven't you heard a thing I've been telling you?" Nicolai's voice carried a slight echo. "In this place you can't get away from Yuri."

Before Chemayev could react, the rippling started up once again, accompanied by a dimming of the lights. Moved by an old reflex of mutual reliance he sprinted toward Nicolai, but the process of elongation was on this occasion so rapid, like the reduction in view achieved by narrowing the aperture of a telescopic lens, by the time he had gone only a couple of steps, Nicolai had dwindled to a tiny black figure at the far end of a long corridor. A foul-smelling corridor with stained, pitted concrete walls, littered with trash, ranged by warped wooden doors and buckets of sand. Hills of cans and bottles, stratified canyons of paper and plastic waste, dried-up riverbeds of urine and spilled vodka, altogether effecting a post-apocalyptic terrain laid out beneath a dirty white sky in which hung a jaundiced light bulb sun. It was the same corridor he and Nataliya had walked down earlier that evening.

The elevator door, battered, defaced by graffiti, stood about twenty feet away. Chemayev had the impulse to run to it, to seek shelter in the relative sanity of the night club. But he was fed up with being given the runaround, he'd entered into a straightforward business arrangement and he intended to see it through to a contract, no matter what games Yuri wanted to play. As for Larissa, if she'd lied...he could handle it. Their problems were every one associated with this psychotic country populated entirely by lunatics and their victims. By tomorrow night they'd be clear of all that.

He turned back, intending to frame a few last words that would convey to Nicolai both a more rational, more dignified portion of apology, and his acknowledgment of how things stood between them; but his former friend was nowhere to be seen. Looking at Chemayev from an arm's-length away was the swarthy old derelict who had been sweeping up the corridor. He had barely noticed him on first meeting, but now he marveled at the man's ugliness. With his stubby arms and legs, his swollen belly and narrow sloping shoulders, his smallish head, he might have been a toad that had undergone a transformation, only partially successful, into the human. He had about him a bitter reek reminiscent of the smell of the vegetation in the garden. The chest of his grimy T-shirt was mapped by a large, vaguely rectangular brown stain like the image of a spectacularly undistinguished continent whose most prominent features were bits of dried food stuck to the fabric along the south coast and central plain. His wool trousers were shapeless as those of a clown, supported by frayed suspenders. Filthy twists of gray hair hung from his mottled scalp, half-curtaining his eyes, and his face, sagging, pouchy, cheeks and nose sporting graffiti of broken capillaries, thick-lipped and dull.... It reminded Chemayev of dilapidated hovels in the villages of his childhood, habitations humbled by weather and hard times into something lumpish, barely distinguishable from a mound of earth, a played-out vegetable plot in the back, rusted garden tools leaning against bowed steps, its thatched roof molting, sided with unpainted boards worn to a shit brown, and something ancient, howlingly mad with age and failure, peering out through two dark windows with cracked panes. It was fascinating in its lack of human vitality. More than fascinating. Compelling. It seemed to hold Chemayev's eyes, to exert a pull that intensified with every passing second, as if the mad absence within had the virtue of a collapsed star, a generating fire grown so cold and inert it had become fire's opposite, a negative engine wherein chaos became comprehensible and physical laws were reworked according to some implausible design. He could not look away from it, and when at last he did, not due to his own efforts, but because the old man moved, extending a hand to him, palm upward like a beggar, thus shattering the connection, he felt lightheaded and confused and frail, as if he had been winnowing away, unraveling in the depths of that bleak stare.

In his frail lightheaded confusion there were a few things Chemayev thought he understood. This liver-spotted troll, this mud man with a black hole inside him, was Yuri -- he was fairly certain of that. He was also fairly certain that the old bastard had his hand out for money. For the gold certificates contained inside his, Chemayev's, money belt. What was he supposed to do? Just fork it all over? Fuck that! Where were the papers to sign. What guarantees did he have -- could he have -- with a creature like this. He wanted to establish some sort of security for himself and Larissa, but couldn't summon the words, and he realized with complete surety that fear had nothing to do with his inability to speak, words simply weren't part of Yuri's program -- no more talk was needed, everything had been said, and now it was Chemayev's choice to give over the money and see what that bought him...or to exercise caution for the time being.

That he accepted this proscription, that he believed Yuri had so much control over the situation, implied that he accepted Nicolai's assessment of the man. He would have liked to deny this, but it seemed undeniable. He should tell someone, he thought. Before leaving Moscow he should tip the media, get a TV truck out to Eternity, expose the fact that the great Yuri Lebedev was running more than a night club, the old geezer had become a minor fucking deity in charge of a franchise in the afterlife catering to murderers, hookers, and various relics of the Cold War.... This trickle of whimsy, edged with more than a little hysteria, dried up when Chemayev noticed that the walls and ceiling and floor of the corridor around and behind Yuri were billowing in and out with same rhythm as the rise and fall of his chest, as if the old man were the central image of a painting, a portrait of squalor floating on the surface of some gelatinous substance in a state of mild perturbation. He backed farther away, but the distance between himself and Yuri did not lengthen, and he saw that his body, too, was billowing, rippling, ruled by the tidal flux of Yuri's sluggish breath -- it appeared they were both elements of the same semi-liquid medium. Horrified, he flailed and kicked, trying to swim away, but none of his exertions had the least effect...unless they played a role in the steady expansion of Yuri's face. It was widening, distending, losing its cohesion like a shape made of colored oil, spreading to cover more and more of the fluid atop which it was suspended, resembling a face distorted by a funhouse mirror, and Chemayev felt that his own body was suffering a similar distortion, his legs elongating, his torso becoming bulbous, his head lopsided and pumpkin-sized, and that he and Yuri were flowing together.

Yuri's mouth stretched wider and wider, becoming a dark, gaping concavity that reduced his other features to tiny irrelevancies, like the glowing lures above the enormous mouth of an angler fish. It was curving to surround Chemayev, preparing less to swallow him than to incorporate him into its emptiness, and he thought briefly of the garden, the dark oval through which he had passed to reach it. If he could have screamed he would have made a cry that reached to heaven, but he was as voiceless as a strand of seaweed floating on an off-shore billow, going out on the tide toward the great hollow places of the sea, and as he passed into the darkness, Yuri's darkness, as it closed over him, his fear -- like his voice -- was subsumed by the myriad impressions that came to him from the place into which he was being absorbed.

He had a sense of the man Yuri had been, a quick mental rumor that left flavors of crudity, brutality, lustfulness, intelligence...an intellect that had aspired too high, that had sought a godlike invulnerability and created the means necessary to achieve it, hut had lost everything of consequence in gaining it, for Yuri's character was merely a component of the thing, the place, he had become. Through a mingling of magic and science and will he had triggered a sort of spiritual fission, all the particulars of his flesh and mind exploding into an immense, radiant cloud that did not dissipate in the way of a mushroom cloud, but maintained its integrity at the moment of peak fury, sustained by a surface tension that might have been the residue of the spell he had caused to be pronounced. Not a god so much as an embryonic entity of unguessable nature, striving to reach its maturity, extending its influence through various human (and perhaps inhuman -- who could say?) agencies, populating its vacancy with dead souls, partly just for company, to ease its aching emptiness, but also utilizing their knowledge to engineer plots designed to increase its power, always feeding, growing, becoming.... This was among the last thoughts Chemayev recalled before he was utterly subsumed, drowned in Yuri's black essence -- that all Yuri's energies were being desperately directed toward the process of growth, of fulfilling whatever evolutionary destiny was now his -- though perhaps he had no real destiny. That had come to be Yuri's torment, the one feeling of which he was capable: the fear that he had trapped himself inside the prison of his own power, that he could only grow larger, that no matter how much power he gained, the dissolution and chaos of his new condition would never change, and he could impose no order, no equilibrium that would satisfy his original wish to be both man and god, he could merely unify his environment -- whether this consisted of a night club, Moscow, Russia, or entire planet -- under the disordered banner of Eternity. His circumstance posed an intriguing intellectual and philosophical puzzle. Through his machinations, his alliances with generals and politicians and the mafiyas, might not Yuri be responsible for the chaos overwhelming the old Soviet states, or were the two forces feeding into one another? And if Yuri came to dominate the world or a substantial portion thereof, if he could avoid being absorbed by a creature like himself, but vaster and more cruel, would anyone notice? Was not the current chaos of the world all-pervasive, were not genocides and serial killings and natural disasters and the unending disregard of one soul for another sufficient evidence of this." And that being so, could it be possible that this chaos had always been the product of sad invisible monsters such as Yuri, a ruling class gone unnoticed by everyone except for saints and madmen...? Chemayev was amused by the formulation of these questions. He thought if he could sustain his awareness a while longer he might learn the answers, and they in turn would lead to subtler questions, the ones Yuri himself had asked, and if he could learn those answers, benefiting from Yuri's experience, he might be able to avoid Yuri's mistakes. But at the moment it didn't seem worth the effort. Blind now, all his senses occluded, uncertain of his location, even as to which plane of existence he occupied, by all rights he should have been more afraid; but having practiced death once before, and having since witnessed a condition worse than death, he felt prepared for anything.

ON REGAINING consciousness Chemayev realized he was back in the garden. Considering the cautionary flavor of his previous experience and the circular pattern governing the evening, he had little doubt that March would soon put in an appearance, but nevertheless he found the bitter smell of Yuri's vegetation and the sound of water spurting from the broken fountain and the silver bar of light floating overhead solid and comforting by contrast to the emptiness through which he had passed. Surprised to find that he was still holding the nine-millimeter pistol, he tucked it into his waist and headed for the fountain, pushing aside black branches clustered with white leaves bearing scatters of inky characters --- he wondered now if these might not be fragments of the formula that had made Yuri's transformation possible.

Once he reached the edge of the cobblestone circle he stationed himself behind some bushes, a position from which he had a clear view of the fountain. The abstracted calm that had eased his passage from the corridor to the garden remained strong in him, and waiting went easily at first. With its black serene sky, the silver bar in place of a sun, the ruined fountain and eccentric forest, the place had a Mexican Twilight Zone ambience -- like an old B-movie set awaiting its Dramatis Personae -- that appealed to him. But as the minutes wore on his anxiety resurfaced. He chastised himself for not having given Yuri the money. The moment had been brief, the circumstances problematic. But everything he'd worked for had been on the line. He should have been up to it. Of course paying the money might have been a fruitless gesture. God only knew what was going on. It was apparent that he was being manipulated. Equally apparent that Polutin had a hand in things -- hadn't he implied that he'd done business with Yuri? Perhaps he'd managed to sour the deal Chemayev had negotiated. One way or another, he'd just have to find another way to get the money to Yuri.

He became so enmeshed in worry he nearly failed to notice March on the opposite side of the circle, half-hidden in the bushes. Not shiftless as before. Wearing his leather trenchcoat. Chemayev aimed his pistol at him, but let the barrel drop. Killing him seemed the safest course, but he had no clue what the repercussions might be. It might be wise to feel things out. Risky, perhaps. But the pistol boosted his confidence. He tucked it back into the waist of his trousers, concealing it beneath his jacket, and stepped out onto the cobblestones.

"March!" he called.

March's head snapped toward him. "Viktor! Christ, what're you doing here?" "What am I doing here? Just taking a stroll. What are you doing here?" As he spoke Chemayev recognized that their dialogue was roughly the mirror image of what they had said to one another on his previous adventure in the garden. He didn't know whether to take this for a good or a bad omen.

"I'm not sure how to answer that." March edged forward. "Frankly, I've been having myself one hell of a time. A fucking asylum would feel like a rest home after this place."

It hadn't occurred to Chemayev that anyone else might have been having experiences similar to his own; but judging by March's behavior he thought now this might be the case. The Irishman kept casting furtive looks to the side, as if expecting some menace to emerge from the bushes.

"This Yuri character..." March's right hand fluttered up; he rubbed the back of his head fitfully. "Did you keep your appointment with him?"

"Not yet," said Chemayev.

"If I were you I might give it a pass."

"You've seen him, then?"

March shook his head in the affirmative, then said, "I don't know. Maybe." He moved another step toward Chemayev. "I was talking to this old geezer. The guy looked like he'd spent the night in the boneyard kissing corpses. Filthy bugger! About seventy years old going on terminal. He claimed to be Yuri."

"You talked with him?"

"Naw, we stared into one another's eyes! Of course we talked."

"What did you talk about?"

An angry tightness in his voice, March said, "Oh, this and that. The rugby final, the roots of British oppression. Chatty bits." He had another quick glance behind him. "Do you know of a way out of here?"

March's agitation lifted Chemayev's spirits. "How about the way you came in?"

"Are you fucking with me, Viktor?" March walked purposefully toward him, stopping close to the fountain, about twenty feet away. "I need an ally. If you're not an ally, I may have to take a bite out of you." He had regained some of his self-assurance, as if the show of menace had been restorative. "I've had a number of unsettling experiences. A premonition of violence as well. Perhaps it's all in my head. I'm not a'tall sure someone didn't put something in my drink. But no matter that, I'm sensing a hostile vibe between us. Why would that be?"

Chemayev considered showing March the pistol, but decided against it. Confrontation had not served him well the last time. "Work it out for yourself. I've got my own problems." He started to walk away, but March said, "Hang on, Viktor." He was holding a chrome-plated automatic with a taped grip.

Chemayev gawked at it. "Where did you get the gun?"

"Picked it up during my travels. I was feeling a touch inadequate after checking my own weapon. But now" -- he hefted the gun, as if appreciating its weight -- "now I'm feeling twice the man I ever was."

He urged Chemayev toward the fountain, had him sit on carved fragments at its base. Chemayev arranged himself carefully, adjusting his left hip so the pistol came loose in his waistband. In his thoughts he remarked again on the role reversal taking place. During their previous encounter he had been the anxious one, the one to ask about Yuri, the one to decide for confrontation. Perhaps all this pointed to a happier conclusion. But did March suspect what he suspected? He'd mentioned a premonition of violence. Chemayev was forced to assume that this premonition had involved the two of them.

"Do you fancy Irish music, Viktor?" March asked out of the blue; he sat down cross-legged about fifteen feet away. "Bands, you know. Rock 'n'roll."

"U-2," said Chemayev absently. "I like U-2."

"Jesus! U-2!" March launched into a simpering parody of "In The Name of Love," and then made a flatulent sound with his lips. "Bono Vox, my ass! That ball-less little prat! I'm talking about real Irish music. Like Van Morrison. Van the Man! Not some gobshite got up in a gold jockstrap."

"He's okay," Chemayev said.

"What the fuck do you mean,'okay'? That's soul music, man! Ahh!" He made a dismissive gesture with the automatic. "That's what I get for trying to talk rock 'n'roll with a Russian. Your idea of music is some fat asshole playing folk songs on the lute."

Chemayev leaned back against the base of the fountain. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the arc of water spurting from the broken pipe; overhead, a great crossbeam broadcast a benign silvery radiance. Black trees with leafy prayer flags stretched toward the light, and the round gray stones beneath him seemed to be eddying in their concentric circles. He allowed the fingers of his right hand to brush the pistol grip beneath his jacket. His chances were fifty-fifty, he figured. About the same as ever.

"You look almost happy," March said. "Did you have the good thought?"

"Happy's not the word for it," said Chemayev.

"What am I missing, Viktor? You seem so at ease. It's not like you. Do you know something I should know, or is it the drugs have just kicked in?"

"I don't know shit," said Chemayev. "I've been having a bad night, too. Someone's been playing games with me."

"Games," said March. "Yeah, that's my feeling." He cracked the knuckles of his free hand by making a fist. "Do you recall me mentioning the dealings I had with your Mister Polutin over in London? A terrible business. Couple of his boys got taken out. Well, not long after I was passing the evening with this Rastafarian bunch in a squat in Chelsea. I won't go into the whys and wherefores -- suffice it to say, it was part of a complex proceeding. At any rate, I was feeling comfortable with things when I made the mistake of smoking a joint one of those savages handed me. I'm not sure what was in it, but from the extreme paranoia that resulted, I'm guessing it was angel dust. The idea was, I gather, to fuck me up sufficient so the Rastas could carve me. I had the suspicion it was Polutin's idea...though considering the relationship we've had since, I may be mistaken. But the drug, whatever it was, didn't have the desired effect." The barrel of the automatic drooped toward his knee. "Not that I wasn't sick as a fish. Fucking hell! I was feverish. My thoughts buzzing like flies. Patches of color swimming around me. My bones ached. I thought my heart was going to burst out its bottom like a soggy sack full of red milk. But the paranoia...it organized me somehow. I became a calm at the center of the storm of my symptoms. I could see everything in the room with wonderful clarity.

"There was eight of 'em. All licorice-skinned and snake-headed. Eyes agleam. Lounging in the doorways, sitting on sprung sofas. Trying to orchestrate my paranoia with their whispered talk. Streetlight washed through the busted-out windows, painting a shine on their faces and exposing the shit spray-painted on the walls. Designs, mostly. A variety of strange devices that had to do with that mongrel religion of theirs, but which spoke to me in a way unintended by the artist. I could read the future in those mazes of squiggly lines."

A slackness came into March's face, as if he'd been brought hard against the memory of a transcendent moment. Chemayev inched his hand beneath the flap of his jacket, touched the pistol grip with his fingertips.

"Have you ever been close to death, Viktor?" asked March. "I don't mean nearly dead. I'm talking about the way you're close to a woman when you're lying with her in the act of love and there's not an inch of air between you that isn't humming with sweet vibration. That's how it was that night. I was in death's arms, fucking her slow and easy, and she was fusing her power with mine. I could actually see the bitch. She had a sleek silver face with a catlike Asian cast. The mask of a demoness. The silver moved as supplely as flesh to make her wicked smiles. Her hair was white, long and fine, and her breasts were corpse-pale, the nipples purplish. Like poison berries. When she opened her mouth I saw a silver word embossed on her black tongue. A character in the language I spoke before I was born, telling me it was time to act. That if I took action at that precise second, I'd come through the ordeal."

In his distraction March's pale face had an aspect of long-preserved youth, like that of a revivified mummy; the licks of black hair falling over his brow looked like absences in his flesh.

"When I drew my gun," he went on, "I was inside death. Hot and slick with her. Her legs locked about my waist, fingernails stabbing my back. Both of us screaming with release. I had six bullets, and every one went true. Six head shots. Their dreadlocks hissed and snapped, their eyes rolled up like horses' eyes. One of the survivors came at me with a machete, and I killed him with my hands. The last one fled." He ran the barrel of the automatic idly along his thigh. "That was strange enough, but what happened next was stranger yet. I was standing there, reviewing my work. Stoned as a fucking goose, I was. Reading the bloody sentences newly written on the walls. Obituaries of the recently deceased. Tributes to my marksmanship. When I turned my head, following the red script of those shattered lives, I found death was still with me. I'd assumed she was an ordinary hallucination, that she'd served her purpose and moved on. But there she stood, posed like Hell's calendar girl with hands on hips and one leg cocked, smiling at me. I'd only seen her close up before. Only been witness to half her beauty. The silvery stuff of her face flowed in sinuous curves to embellish her arms and legs. Silver flourishes coiled down her hips and framed her secret hair, which was trimmed to the shape of seven snakes standing on their tails. She beckoned to me, and I couldn't resist. I lay with her once again."

Chemayev had succeeded in securing a firm grasp on the pistol; but recalling March's quickness, he didn't trust the steadiness of his hand.

"It was a fool's act," March said, "to be coupling with what half my mind believed to be a product of madness. Especially with the dead lying around us, souls still tangled in their flesh. But I was in thrall. Her musk coated my tongue, her sweat formed a silvery sheen on my skin. My eyes went black with staring through the slits of her eyes into the thoughtless place beyond. She whispered to me. Not words of love, but a sibilant breath that entered through my ear and slithered into all my hollows, making an icy shape inside me. She stayed with me until the sky paled and flies began to gather like early fishermen at the edges of the spills of blood. But she never truly left me. I've seen her time and again since that night. Whenever trouble's near she comes to guide my arm." He gave Chemayev a sideways look. "I've seen her tonight."

"Maybe you're mistaken. It could have been one of Yuri's girls. They like to dress up." Chemayev thought if it weren't for the plash of water behind him, he would be able to hear the beating of his heart.

"I've seen her tonight," March repeated. "But I'm not so sure she's with me this time." He paused. "What do you think of my story, Viktor?"

"You mean apart from the obvious pathology?"

"Always ready to spit in the devil's eye." March lowered his head and chuckled. "You remind me of myself as a lad."

Chemayev's hand tightened on the pistol, but he failed to seize the opportunity.

"You probably think I'm having you on," said March, and was about to say more, when Chemayev, his patience for this game exhausted, broke in: "I don't know what you've got in mind, but I doubt you understand the implications of your story."

"And I suppose you're bursting to enlighten me?"

"Sure. Why not?" said Chemayev. "The idea that a man who's accustomed to violence, who thrives on it, has come to rely on a fictive alliance with death...with a comic book image of death..."

"All alliances are fictive," said March. "Haven't you figured that one out?"

Chemayev ignored the interruption. "The fact you've created an imaginary playmate to help enable your violence -- even if just in a story -- that implies slippage. Weakness."

March's face emptied. "Weakness is it?"

"What else? Maybe it's a touch of guilt. Some old flutter of religion. Something that demands you create a quasi-mystical justification for actions you previously considered utilitarian."

"Quasi-mystical." March blew air through his lips like a horse. "That cuts deep, Viktor. It's a brand I'm not sure I can bear. Especially coming from a featherless little chirper like yourself."

It seemed to Chemayev that March was fast approaching a moment of decision, a moment when he'd be preoccupied, all his attention focused on the possible consequences arising from the exercise of his anger, and as a result, for a fraction of a second he'd be slow to react.

"It may be a product of age," Chemayev said. "Your increasing awareness of mortality."

"Let it rest," said March. "Seriously."

"The brain could be in the early stages of decomposition. Logic decaying into fantasy, gasses collecting in the skull."

"Do you hear what I'm telling you, boy?"

"It must look like a fucking swamp in there." Chemayev tapped the side of his head. "Methane seeping from rotten stumps, gray scraps of tissue hanging down like moss. The brain a huge pale cheese wreathed in mist, rising from the black water. The creatures of your imagination peeping from its fissures. Most of them bullshit versions of yourself."

"You bloody little piss merchant! Shut the fuck up!"

"Bruce Lee March, Dylan Thomas March, Charlie Manson March. Niall the Catholic Fishboy, old Father McConnell's favorite sweet. And let's not forget your masterpiece: Death. Based, I imagine, on some pimply little squinch who wouldn't let you have a bite of her muffin back in trade school. When the mists get really thick, they all pick up banjos and sing 'Toora Loora Loora.'"

"That's enough!" said March.

"You know, there's every chance you've developed a tumor. Brain cancer's known to cause delusions. Or maybe it's early Alzheimer's. You might want to get yourself checked out."

March's nearly colorless eyes appeared to lighten further, as if the black shadow of his soul had shrunk to a more compact shape, pulling back from his skin, and Chemayev, feeling certain the moment had arrived, slid the pistol from beneath his jacket and shot him twice in the chest.

The bullets twisted March, flipped him fishlike onto his side; the detonations blended with and seemed to enlarge his outcry. His feet kicked in sequence as if he were trying to walk away from the pain. He was still clutching the automatic; he fumbled with the trigger guard, the barrel wobbled down, the muzzle lodging between two cobblestones. He strained to lift it, his eyebrows arching with effort. The heightened pallor of his skin and the bright blood filming his lips gave him the look of an actor in a Kabuki drama. Chemayev finished him with a bullet to the temple.

He dropped the pistol onto the cobblestones. He had no remorse -- March had intended to kill him, hadn't he? -- but he was tired, desperately tired, and he felt an odd internal instability, as if the spiritual vacuum created by the death, the instantaneous decompression, had sheared off part of his soul and the remaining portion, now too small for the body it inhabited, was tipping this way and that like the air bubble in a carpenter's level. He sat down awkwardly, one leg sticking out, the other folded beneath him. Streams of March's blood fingered among the stones -- Chemayev imagined them to be a cluster of gray environmental domes in a crimson flood, a mining colony amid the lava flows of Venus. The sound of the splashing water grew louder, troubling his head. He pressed his fingers to his brow, closed his eyes. Fuck. What next? Where did he stand with Larissa? With Yuri and Polutin? He had the suspicion none of it mattered anymore. The victor in this contrived war between himself and March would be trapped forever with an undecaying corpse on the stage set of a magical western, condemned to a limbo in which he would feed on deathly beetles and drink bitter water from a fountain whose splashing kept growing louder and louder. Becoming incredibly, irrationally loud. It was beginning to sound almost like applause.... He opened his eyes. Blinked rapidly due to the unaccustomed brightness. Then scrambled to his feet. The body was gone, the fountain was gone, the stones, the trees, it was all gone, and he was standing on the stage of Eternity's theater, tiers of white leather booths rising on every side into swirling fog, the elegantly attired men and women looking down at him, clapping and cheering. Stricken, overwhelmed by this latest transition, he turned in a circle, hoping to find a point of orientation, something that would explain, that would clarify. He caught sight of Polutin. The big man was standing in the aisle, his head tipped back, belly thrust out, applauding with such ponderous sincerity that Chemayev half-expected to see a ringmaster urging him on with a whip in one hand, a piece of raw fish in the other. On unsteady legs, giddy with the aftershocks of violence, stunned by all he saw, he made his way up from the stage and along the aisle and let Polutin guide him into the booth.

"Why did you take so long? What's wrong with you?" Polutin frowned at him, exasperated; but then he patted Chemayev's knee, the brisk gesture of someone ready to put the past behind them. "You did well," he said. "You may not think so now, but you'll see it eventually." In his sloppy, drink-reddened face was a bearish measure of self-satisfaction that seemed to answer all questions concerning his involvement in the evening's events; but Chemayev was unable to process the information. There was too much to think about. Just the idea that he and March had been part of the entertainment suggested a labyrinthine complexity of physical and metaphysical relationships sufficient on its own to confound him. And the odd certitude he had felt immediately prior to shooting March, the correspondences between that feeling and March's story about Death -- what could be made of that? For the life of him, he could not even recall how he had come to this moment. The road that led from a village along the Dvina was easy to follow up to the point he and Nicolai arrived in Moscow, but thereafter it was broken, gapped, and once it entered the darkness of Eternity, everything that had previously been easy to follow came, in retrospect, to seem unfathomable. Polutin began prattling on about a meeting scheduled for the next day with his Italian associates, and the talk of business calmed Chemayev. He tried to achieve a perspective, to reorder the universe according to Chemayevian principles, but the image of March intruded. Another ghost to join that of Nicolai. Not so much guilty baggage attached to this one. Though for a vicious killer, March hadn't been such a bad guy. A slant of wild hilarity broke through his mental overcast. Someday they'd say the same about him.

The background music changed -- a saccharine swell of violins flowing into a romantic brocade of darker strings, French horns, trumpets. "Aha!" Polutin said. "The auction!" Disinterested, Chemayev glanced toward the stage. And sat bolt upright. Emerging from the center of the stage, borne upward on a circular platform, was Larissa. Naked. Carrying a silver tray on which lay a single long-stemmed rose. Their eyes met and she looked hurriedly away. Waiting for her on the stage, his thinning hair slicked down, natty in a white suit, holding a microphone, was one of Yuri's portly doubles. "LADLES AND GENTLEMEN!" he said, and with a florid gesture directed the general attention to Larissa. "THE ROSE!"

As Larissa walked up the aisle, serene in her nakedness, several men shouted bids, which were duly noted by Yuri's double, who plodded along behind her. When she reached Polutin's booth she stopped and trained her eyes on a point above Chemayev's head. Her expression was unreadable.

Chemayev said weakly, "Larissa?"

She betrayed no sign of having heard; he saw nothing but reflected dazzles in the darks of her eyes.

Polutin's arm dropped onto his shoulder. "So, Viktor. How much are you bidding?"

Uncomprehending, Chemayev looked at him, then at Larissa. The stoniness of her face in contrast with the soft vulnerability of her breasts and the gentle swell of her belly seemed to restate the conflict between what he hoped and what he feared. He had the impulse to take off his coat and cover her, but he didn't move a muscle. "I don't have any money," he said to Polutin. "Not for this. I have some, but...I...." He looked again to Larissa. "Why aren't you at the bar?" He reached for her hand but she pulled away.

"Don't." Her chin trembled. "Don't touch me. Just do what you have to and let me go."

"What's happened? Larissa, please!" Chemayev made as though to slide out of the booth but Polutin caught his arm.

"Be very careful," he said. "I can't save you from this."

Chemayev shook him off, leaned across the table to Larissa. "For God's sake! I still have the money. All of it. What's wrong?"

Yuri's double moved between them, stared at him dispassionately, his thick lips pursed. "You refused to pay," he said. "You broke the contract. Now" -- he shrugged -- "you can either bid or you can remain here until your debt is paid."

"My debt? I don't owe you...."

"The price of the woman," said the double. "You broke the contract, you forfeit her price."

A tiny nebula of platinum and emeralds glinted among the tangles of Larissa's dark hair. Someone must have given her new earrings. In the silvery light her nipples showed candy pink, her skin milky. A mole the size of a .22 caliber bullet hole on the small of her back above the high, horsey ride of her buttocks. Chemayev realized he was cataloguing these details, filing them away, as if he'd have to remember them for a long time.

"What can I do?" he asked her. "Isn't there anything...?"

"Leave me alone," she said.

His desperation and confusion knitted into a third emotion, something akin to anger but imbued with the sort of hopeless frustration an insect might feel when, after an enduring struggle, it has freed itself from a spiderweb only to fall into an empty jelly glass, where it is peered at by the incurious eyes of an enormous child. Chemayev's hand dropped to the money belt but he did not remove it.

"Make up your mind," said the double. "There are others who may wish to bid."

Chemayev had difficulty unbuttoning his shirt. His fingers felt thick and bloodless, and the inside of his head compacted, as if stuffed with gray rags. Stripping off the belt took an inordinately long time -- it seemed to cling to his waist. Finally he managed it. The double grabbed the belt and gave it a shake. "There can't be much here," he said.

"Four million," said Chemayev emptily.

"Four million rubles?" The double scoffed at the figure. "The bid's already much higher than that."

"Dollars," Chemayev said. "It's in gold certificates."

Polutin was aghast. "Four million dollars? Where did you get such a sum?"

"I didn't steal from you. I played the German market. The Dax."

Polutin lifted his glass in salute. "And I thought I was familiar with all your talents."

"FOUR MILLION!" The double roared into his microphone. "VIKTOR CHEMAYEV BIDS FOUR MILLION DOLLARS!"

The assemblage began to cheer wildly, shouts of "Bravo!", fists pounding the tables, women shrieking. Chemayev put his elbows on the table, rested his head in his hands.

"Here," said Larissa, her voice like ashes. She thrust out the rose to him, the bloom nodding stupidly in his face, a knurl of convulsed crimson. He was unable to make sense of the thing. He tried to connect with her again, and when she looked away this time, his eyes ranged over her body like a metal detector over a snowy field, registering the fullness of her thighs, the razor-cut strip of pubic hair, the swollen underside of a breast. The least of her human details -- she had withdrawn all else. She dropped the rose onto the block of ice. The bloom nestled against an empty bottle of Ketel One. Melting ice dripped onto the petals. Yuri's double took Larissa by the arm and escorted her toward the stage.

"It might be best for you to leave, Viktor," Polutin said. "Take the morning off. Come see me in my office around three. And be prepared for a difficult negotiation. These Italians will screw us good if they can."

Chemayev laboriously pushed himself up from the booth. People were continuing to cheer, to talk excitedly about the size of the bid. On stage Yuri sailed one of the gold certificates into the air where it burst into flames; the fire assumed the shape of a pair of flickering wings and then flew apart into a flurry of small orange birds. With gasps and delighted cries, the crowd marveled at what they assumed was a trick, but might well have been something more extraordinary. Yuri bowed, then sailed another of the certificates high -- it floated above the heads of the crowd, expanding into a sunburst, becoming a stylized golden mask like the representation of the benign east wind on a medieval map. Golden coins sprayed from its mouth. One of the coins was plucked out of mid-air by a pale dark-haired man wearing a leather trenchcoat. Chemayev had only the briefest glimpse of him before he vanished in the swarm of people scrambling for the coins, but he could have sworn it was March. Niall your fucking Welcome Wagon March, the rage of Kilmorgan, the pale Gombeen Man. Chemayev could not sustain interest in the implications fostered by March's possible presence, but he wondered about the man. Who the hell had March been, anyway? What he said he was, who he variously seemed, or a surprise waiting behind the game show's mystery door?

"Come a little before three," said Polutin. "That way we'll be sure to have time to talk."

As Chemayev turned to leave he noticed the rose. Contact with the cold had darkened the edges of several petals, but it remained an alluring complexity, vividly alive against the backdrop of ice and white linen. After a moment's hesitation he picked it up. Chances were he would only throw it away, but considering the cost, he wanted no one else to claim it.

OUTSIDE, THE SNOW was no longer falling. Long thin curves of windblown powder lay across the asphalt like the ghosts of immense talons; white crusts shrouded the windshields of the surrounding cars. Chemayev sat at the wheel of his Lada, the engine idling, wipers clearing a view of the bunkerlike entrance to Eternity. In the morning, he thought. In the morning when Larissa went to school he'd meet her at the door and ask why she had treated him so coldly. Was it simply because he'd failed her? Maybe they'd threatened her, lied to her. Whatever the reason, he'd be honest. Yes, he'd say, I fucked up. But it's this place that's mostly to blame, this broken down ex-country. Nothing good can happen here. I'm going to set things right and once we get away I'll be the man you believed in, the one who loves you.... Even as he rehearsed this speech he recognized its futility, but the plug of nothingness that had stoppered his emotions during the auction had worked itself loose, the speedball of failure and rejection had worn off, and all the usual passions and compulsions were sparking in him again.

A gaunt, gray-haired man in a tattered overcoat stumbled into his field of vision. One of the krushova dwellers, holding a nearly empty bottle of vodka. He lurched against the hood of a Jaguar parked in the row across from Chemayev, slumped onto the fender, then righted himself and took a pull from the bottle. He wiped his mouth, stared blearily at the Lada, and flung out his arm as if shooing away a dog or an annoying child. "Fuck off," said Chemayev, mostly to himself. The man repeated the gesture, and Chemayev thought that perhaps he had not been gesturing at him, perhaps he'd been summoning reinforcements. Dozens...no, hundreds of similarly disheveled figures were shambling toward him among the ranks of gleaming cars. Bulky women with moth-eaten sweaters buttoned wrong; men in duct-tape-patched hooded parkas, ruined faces peering grimly through portholes lined with synthetic fur; others in ill-fitting uniform jackets of various types; one in rubber boots and long johns. Shadowy drabs and drudges coming from every comer of the lot, as if they were phantoms conjured from the asphalt, as if the asphalt were the black meniscus of Yuri's brimful kingdom. Clinging to one another for support on the icy ground like the remnants of a routed army. Drunk on defeat. They stationed themselves along the row, all glaring at Chemayev, each with a charcoal mouth and inkdrop eyes, faces with the ridged, barren asymmetry of terrain maps, the background figures in an apocalypse by Goya come to life, each beaming at him a black fraction of state-approved, party-sponsored enmity. Yuri's state. Yuri's party.

Less frightened than repelled, Chemayev drew a pistol from his shoulder holster, rolled down the window, and fired into the air. Instead of fleeing they edged forward, clumsy and tentative as zombies, confused by the brightness of life but full of stuporous menace. What did they intend to do? he wondered. Curse him? Puke on him? He poked his head out the window and aimed the pistol at the closest of them, a balding man whose seventy-inch-waist trousers appeared to support his upper half like a dessert cup filled with two scoops of yellowish cream pudding, the smaller topped by sparse hanks of white hair like shredded coconut, his sweatshirt proclaiming allegiance to the Central Soviet hockey team. He displayed no fear. And why should he? Who'd be fool enough to kill one of Yuri's people? Perhaps he was dead already. Chemayev ducked back into the car. Set the pistol on the dash. He had surrendered so much, he stubbornly refused to admit this last formal measure of defeat. But then the army of the krushovas came shuffling forward again and he understood that he had neither the confidence nor the force of arms to stand against them. He shifted the Lada into gear and pulled out along the row, going slowly to avoid hitting the shabby creatures who stood everywhere throughout the lot. They pressed close as he passed, like animals in a preserve, peeking in through the windows, and he had a surge of panic...not true fright, but a less disabling emotion fueled by a shameful recognition of his relationship to these lusterless clots of anti-life, these exhibits in the existential sideshow. Sons and Daughters of the Soil. Old ragged male monsters with the hammer-and-sickle stamped on every cell of their bodies. Boring meat-eaters, ferocious farters, grunters, toilers, industrial oxen, blank-eyed suet-brained party trolls. Old lion-faced women with gray hair sprouting from every pore, ugly with the crap they'd eaten all their lives, their filth-encrusted nails as strong as silicon, breeding warmonger babies in their factory wombs, dead now like empty hangars, cobwebbed, with wheelmarks in the dust.... You couldn't hate them, that'd be the same as hating yourself, you could only say goodbye to all their grim Russian soul shit. You had to cut it out of yourself somehow, you had to sit down and pinch a roll of fat and slide a knife in, probe for that special Russian organ that made you such a bear for suffering, that prompted you to sit up with your mouth open when God came round with his funnel and his tube of black bile to forcefeed all the Russian as-yet-unborns he was fattening for some conflagration on the far side of infinity. You had to put some distance between yourself and this dirt with its own soul that reached up through the bottoms of your feet and moved you like a finger puppet. You had to find some way not to be like these relics, even if that meant killing the most vital part of your spirit. You had to run to America, you had to drown in its trivialities, bathe in its chrome wavelengths until all the scum of Mother Russia was washed off your skin, until your pores were so open the black oily essence of your birthright came seeping out like juice from a cracked bug. That's what you had to do. That was the only thing that could save you. But it was probably not possible.

Once clear of the krushovas Chemayev accelerated along the access road leading to the Garden Ring. Headlights penetrated the Lada, revealing patched brown plaid seat covers, a littered dash, bent ashtray stuffed with candy wrappers. The radio dial flickered, the heater whined and yielded up a smell of burning rubber. The crummy familiarity of the car consoled him, molding itself to him like a friendly old chair. He wanted a cigarette, but Larissa had made him quit. Shit. He rapped the top of the steering wheel with the heel of his hand. Not angrily. A call-to-order rap, a wake-up notice. He banished the feeling of unsoundness that had plagued him most of the night, took stock of his reserves. He pictured them straggled across a parade ground, the survivors of a force that had once numbered four million. He'd have to start over. He'd have to put tonight behind him. Approach tomorrow as if everything were normal. He'd permit himself to make no goals, not even where Larissa was concerned. He'd simply do his job and see what developed. He sped out onto the Garden Ring, merging with the stream of traffic headed for the city center. There was an ache in his chest that seemed part bruise, part constriction, and he knew it would worsen during the weeks ahead. Whenever he stopped for a solitary drink or tried to sleep it would send out fresh tendrils of pain, seeding despair and distraction; but he'd overcome those enemies before, and he could do it again, he would rise to the challenge. That was half of life, the way you dealt with challenges. Maybe more than half. It occurred to him, and not for the first time, that his obsession with Larissa was partially fueled by the challenge she presented, but as always he refused to diminish the purity he accorded the relationship by defining it as a logical consequence of his compulsiveness. He brushed the idea aside, concentrated on the road, and soon his mind began to tick along with its customary efficiency, plotting the day ahead. Call Larissa. See where things stood with her. Then business. What had Polutin said? The Italians. His office. Chemayev decided to set his alarm for eleven o'clock. That should give him plenty of time. No, he thought. Better play it safe. He'd set the alarm for ten. It would not do to be late.