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once seen under a microscope in school, as his teacher explained the phenomenon of Brownian motion.
    Suddenly, Kirov paused and raised his head, distracted by a noise from the street below – a jangling of metal against stone.
    Kirov smiled. Setting aside his pen, he got up and opened the window. The frigid air snatched his breath away. Just beneath him, hanging from the gutter, icicles as long as his arm glowed like molten copper in the sunlight. Kirov leaned out, five storeys above the street, and craned his neck to get a better view.
    Then he saw it – a black Mercedes sedan making its way along the cobbled road. It was in poor repair, with rust-patched cowlings, a cracked headlight and a rear windshield fogged as if by cataracts. The jangling noise emanated from its muffler, which had lost a retaining bracket and clanked against the cobbles, sending out a spray of sparks at every dip in the road.
    In the centre of the street lay a huge pothole. Some months ago, a construction crew‚ whose purpose remained a mystery‚ had removed some of the cobblestones. The workers never returned, but the pothole remained. There were many such craters in the streets of Moscow. People grumbled about getting them fixed, but the possibility of this actually happening, the mountains of paperwork that would be required to set into motion the appropriate branches of government, stood as a greater obstacle than any of the potholes themselves.
    Most people just learned to live with them, but not Colonel Piotr Kubanka of the Ministry of Armaments. He had appealed, to every office he could think of, for the roads to be repaired. Nothing had been done, and his increasingly angry letters were filed away in rooms which served no other purpose than to house such impotently raging documents. Finally, in desperation, Kubanka had decided to take matters into his own hands.
    Across the road from Kirov’s office stood a tall, peach-coloured building which was the home of the Minister for Public Works, Antonin Tuzinkewitz, a thick-necked man as jowly as a walrus and responsible for‚ among other things‚ the filling in of Moscow’s potholes. This minister was best known not for his public works but for the facts that he rarely got out of bed before noon and that the primordial roar of his laughter, as he returned in the early hours of the morning from the Bar Radzikov, could be heard more than a block away.
    Colonel Kubanka’s daily commute to the Ministry of Armaments should not have taken him past Tuzinkewitz’s home, but Kubanka made a wide detour to ensure that it did.
    The noise, as the front and rear wheels of Kubanka’s Mercedes collided with the pothole, was like a double blast of cannon fire. It actually shook the loose panes of glass in Kirov’s window. No one could sleep through that, especially not a man like Tuzinkewitz, who still suffered from flashbacks of the war, in which he had been repeatedly shelled by Austrian artillery in the Carpathian Mountains. Tuzinkewitz, rudely jolted from his dreams, would rush to the window, fling back the curtains and glare down into the street, hoping to spot the source of this noise. By then, Kubanka’s car had already turned the corner and disappeared and Tuzinkewitz found himself staring down helplessly at the pothole, which returned his stare with a cruel, unblinking gaze.
    It was driving Tuzinkewitz mad, slowly but with gathering speed, exactly as Kubanka intended. Kirov saw the proof of this each day in the strain on Tuzinkewitz’s meaty face as it loomed into view out of the stuffy darkness of his bedroom.
    When this daily ritual had been completed‚ Kirov turned and smiled towards Pekkala’s desk, but the smile froze on his face when he saw the empty seat. He kept forgetting that Pekkala was gone. Even stranger than this, he sometimes swore he could feel the presence of the Inspector in the room.
    Although Major Kirov had been raised in a world in which ghosts were not allowed to exist,