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and watched the policeman move down the walk with the crowd. A shudder ran down the old man’s back, and he prayed to the unknown god that one was no longer supposed to believe in that the wounded bat of a policeman never returned to blot out the sun again. He started to take a bit of his sandwich, changed his mind, threw the remains in his bag, packed up his dominoes, and hurried to a state store where he still might be able to buy a bottle of kvass before his lunch break was over.
    While Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov was beginning to consider the facts in the case of the murder of the old Jew in a bathtub and Emil Karpo was questioning the hotel porter, Sasha Tkach was engaged in the investigation of a crime of far less moment than murder. Sasha had been selected for this investigation by the new assistant procurator because Sasha did not look like a policeman. At twenty-eight, he looked like a tall, young student. With the new clothes that had been provided for him, he looked like a prosperous young university student. His looks belied his feelings.
    Sasha’s wife, Maya, was about to have a baby, and they feared the consequences of living in those two rooms with a child and Sasha’s mother, Lydia, who was becoming more and more difficult with each day. He could not afford to pay enough nalevo, money on the side, to get a new apartment. Now he stood in front of an old building that looked as if it had once been a barn, on a small street just off of Volgograd Prospekt. He had taken the Zhadanovsko-Krasnopresnenskaya line of the metro to the Tekstilshchiki station and walked the five blocks, pausing to check off the name of the shop in his notebook even before he arrived.
    His task was simple and boring, to visit every known automobile repair shop in the Moscow area, both the officially listed ones and those operated unofficially. For a city the size of Moscow, the list was quite small. For an individual taking the metro in the August heat, the list was monumental.
    For almost four months, a well-organized team of automobile thieves had been focusing on the cars of the very rich, the very powerful. Normally, car theft in Moscow was routine; no part of a car was even safe overnight. Drivers routinely unscrewed outside mirrors and lamps and removed windshield wipers. Complaints were frequent, but the police had more important things to do, at least until this new gang had boldly gone into operation. They had begun by stealing two black Volgas belonging to politicians of more than moderate influence. A few months later, a black Chaika had been stolen from in front of the dacha of a member of the KGB not far from the Outer Ring Road. The Chaika had belonged to an admiral. So rare are these cars that the center VIP lane of major thoroughfares, reserved for government use, are known as “Chaika Lanes.” The final blow, however, came when a black Zil limousine, the hand-tooled car that no more than two dozen members of the Politburo and a few national secretaries of the Communist Party owned, disappeared from in front of the apartment building where the then-acting head of the KGB resided. It was forcefully and officially denied to an English journalist who heard about the theft that the auto belonged to the distinguished old gentleman, but whoever it belonged to, the Zil, complete with armchair seats, air conditioning, telephones, and a bar, was gone.
    The question of who might be buying these automobiles—the Zil alone would bring about $125,000 if someone dared purchase it—remained unanswered. The procurator general, however, had moved the investigation to high priority, higher than at least forty outstanding murders and a major drug ring. The highest priority, however, was given to keeping anyone from finding out about these bold and embarrassing thefts. So, boring though it might be, Tkach’s task was deemed an important one. His charge had been simple and probably impossible.
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