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jacket and the other had several boxes of chocolate candy.
    The two Russians and the Japanese had been in Moscow alone, no family, no traveling companions.
    Aubrey’s room revealed little more. There was, however, a notebook in the pocket of Aubrey’s jacket with names and comments. It took Rostnikov a few minutes sitting on the bed to decipher Aubrey’s scrawl and to discover that in the past two days he had interviewed various people connected with the film festival. The list included James Willery, whose name sounded English or American, possibly Canadian; Wolfgang Bintz, clearly a German; and Monique Freneau, almost certainly French. Rostnikov recognized none of the names, but the notebook gave him an idea. He made a thorough but fruitless search for Aubrey’s notes or tape recordings of the interviews. Then he made a note to ask Mrs. Aubrey how her husband took his notes.
    The chief inspector placed himself so that he could watch the hotel desk and the people crossing the vast carpeted lobby while he listened to Karpo’s report. He did not expect to witness anything directly related to the case, but he was beginning to feel that if he was going to solve this case, he would have to cultivate a more specific understanding of foreigners. As he sat listening and watching, Rostnikov decided that East Germans looked the most like Americans. Several registered and let their accents give them away even across the expanse of the lobby.
    He learned in the course of the next twenty minutes that the four dead men had indeed shared a bottle of vodka in the Metropole restaurant the previous night. In fact, they had shared two bottles of pepper vodka, a number of dark beers, a very large order of smoked salmon, and some caviar. The empty bottles and remains of the food were nowhere to be found.
    Apparently Warren Aubrey had absented himself from the party for about an hour. A waiter had heard him say something about finding a woman. Under pressure from Karpo, the waiter had explained that it was his impression that the American was going to seek a prostitute.
    â€œAnd next?” asked Karpo, closing his notebook which, after he copied his comments for official use, would go into the extensive library of black notebooks in his small apartment, notebooks containing every detail of every investigation he had been involved in for the past twenty years. He would index and cross-categorize the notes, and he would later return to the notebooks if more information turned up.
    â€œNext,” sighed Rostnikov, “we get something to eat. Then you make yourself ominous at the police laboratory until they give you a report on what killed those men.”
    Rostnikov also gave him the task of tracking down the prostitute Aubrey might have been with, then added, “Oh, yes. I have some names from a notebook, people who must be interviewed. Foreigners who are here for the film festival. Do you speak German?”
    â€œNo.” Karpo shook his head.
    â€œThen I’ll talk to the German one,” Rostnikov said, leading the way to the Metropole dining room. He would personally interrogate the kitchen staff.
    â€œDo we have anyone who speaks French?” he asked.
    â€œTkach,” answered Karpo, staring down a hotel guest who gave them an angry look when the two detectives pushed past him into the dining room.
    â€œGood. Tkach gets the Frenchwoman. I’ll find him after we investigate the kitchen.”

THREE
    T HE BEATINGS HAD BEEN PARTICULARLY BRUTAL but none of the seven victims had died. Sasha Tkach, though only twenty-eight years old, had seen a great deal in his three years as a police detective. He had seen decayed corpses, old men so frightened that they had messed their pants while being robbed, and even the body of a very young boy whom Tkach had been forced to shoot. But these rape victims were the worst he’d ever seen—their faces swollen, bones broken, teeth punched out, hearing