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office, the sound of it hitting the street lost in the echoes of the explosion which rolled away into silence as the screams began.
    There were two Serebins at that moment. One sat down. The other, the real one, ran as far as the foot of the stairs, where he was forced back by the crowd. He saw the girl, she had blood on her and her eyes were vacant, but she was there, stumbling down the stairs between a man and a woman. The woman had one hand pressed over her eyes while the other gripped the shoulder of the girl’s blouse. She was either pulling the girl away from what had happened in the office or holding on to her because she couldn’t see. Or, perhaps, both. To Serebin, it wasn’t clear.
    He waited, it seemed to take a long time, people were coughing, their faces stained with black soot. Eventually, the stairway cleared and Serebin climbed up to the office. The air was thick with smoke and dust—it was dark as night and hard to breathe—but the building wasn’t on fire. He didn’t think it was. There were three or four people walking around in what had been the office, one of them knelt by a shape beneath a table. Serebin stepped on a shoe, heard a siren in the distance. Goldbark always wore a silver tie, and so did what he saw on the floor by a cast-iron radiator, now bent in a vee aimed at the ceiling.
    “She’s alive, I think.” A voice in the darkness.
    “Don’t move her.”
    “What did she say?”
    “I couldn’t hear.”
    He went up to Besiktas, to the yellow house on the Bosphorus. Tamara wore a heavy coat and a sweater, and, knotted under her chin, one of those head scarves that all Ukrainian women had, red roses on a black background. She’d bundled up so they could sit on the terrace, where the wind made the lantern flicker on the garden table, because she knew he was one of those people who don’t like to be indoors.
    “It’s too cold for you,” he said.
    “No. I’ll be fine.”
    “I’m going in.”
    “Go ahead. I’ll be right here.”
    Stubborn.
Like all of them. The word Ukraine meant borderland.
    One of the sisters appeared with a pot of steaming tea—Tamara had asked for that because she thought it might settle him—and a bottle of vodka, which would.
    When he told her the story she was silent for a long time, then shook her head slowly. She’d seen such things, been told such things, too often. Finally she said, “Was it Russians, Ilya? Special services?”
    “Maybe.”
    “Why would they do this?”
    He shrugged. “Espionage, of some sort, maybe somebody running a network out of the IRU office. It’s a convenient setting, if you think about it. And nothing new—every spy service in the world tries to recruit émigrés, and every counterintelligence office tries to stop it. So, what happens next, is the local people see something they don’t like, and then...”
    “But they spared you.”
    Serebin nodded.
    “That didn’t just, happen.”
    “No.”
    She poured two cups of tea, took one for herself, held the vodka bottle over the other. “You want?”
    “A little.”
    He moved his chair back from the table and lit a cigarette.
    “You have family in it, no?”
    “My mother’s sister.” She had never been an
aunt
.
    Tamara thought it over for a moment, then said, “Ah, the Mikhelson girls.” She smiled—it was strange to remember a time when the world just went along, one day to the next.
    A well-known story in Odessa, the life and courtship of the Mikhelson girls. Frieda and Malya. Zaftig, smart, they smoked cigarettes, wore black, read French novels, went to Polish spas. Frieda got Serebin’s father, a son of the nobility—the real thing: handsome, brilliant, certainly a little crazy but who cared. So, now Frieda had a husband, Malya had to have one too, but it didn’t last a year. She wore him out, going off to screw her lovers whenever the mood took her. A dancer, a baron, a colonel. The husband shot himself in the front parlor and they couldn’t find the