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stop and brush the wipers clear, but he decided that as long as he followed taillights he was on the right side of the road and headed into Three Stations, as everyone called Komsomol Square for the railroad stations gathered there. Traffic lights swung, lenses packed with red and green snow. Leningrad Station’s Italian pomp, Yaroslavsky Station’s golden crown, Kazan Station’s oriental gate: the windshield wipers smeared them together.
    Arkady left his car in a snow drift in front of Kazan Station. A few passengers had already come out to search for taxis. Most arrivals streamed next door toward the Metro: oilmen from the Urals, businessmen from Kazan, a ballet troupe returning home, day trippers with caviar to trade, families with small children and huge suitcases, commuters and budget tourists following a dim path of half-smothered streetlamps. They hurried in the steam of their breath, hats pulled low, bags and packages tightly clutched, perhaps more eager to leave than arrive someplace else. Snow had driven away the usual pimps and Gypsies and wholesome country women who sold their poisonous homemade brew and drunks who gathered empty vodka bottles to pay for new. A hazardous undertaking. The year before, five bottle scavengers had their throats slit in and around Three Stations. For bottles. Until the Metro doors opened, people would be pressed against a dead end in the dark. There were militia officers assigned to outdoor posts; they were inside the train station checking tickets and fighting Chechen terrorism where it was warm.
    Part of Arkady was back in the Kuznetsovs’ bloody apartment, where he and Isakov seemed to have exercised a gentlemen’s agreement not to mention Eva. No, neither of them took things personally.
    Arkady searched between shuttered kiosks and flushed out a pair of drunks so unsteady they couldn’t stand except against a wall.
    “Stay together!” he told people. Present a solid front, even yaks knew that much, he thought.
    But it was each for his own. People closest to the Metro doors clung to their position; those behind pressed harder to the fore, while the crowd further back began to scatter. It was like watching wolves cull a herd as boys flowed out of the dark in packs of five or six, wearing black garbage bags and balaclavas that made them virtually invisible. Old people they plucked where they stood. Bigger game they swarmed; a monk was pulled down on the ice by his cassock and stripped of his gilded cross. One moment he had two boys in his grasp, and then nothing but trash bags.
    Arkady was circled by boys. The leader wasn’t more than fifteen, not afraid to show his moon face and wispy mustache. He pulled up his bag to produce a slim revolver he aimed at Arkady. Arkady was not amazed that a kid could get a firearm. Railroad police, the lowest level of law enforcement, were still issued hundred-year-old revolvers. Had Georgy come upon a drunken guard sleeping in a boxcar and stripped him of his gun? At Three Stations stranger things had happened.
    “Bang,” the boy said.
    Melting snow coursed down Arkady’s back.
    “Hello, Georgy,” Arkady said.
    “How would you like a hole in the head?” Georgy asked.
    “Not especially. Where did you find that?”
    “It’s mine.”
    “It’s a real antique. It outlasted the Soviet Union.”
    “It still works.”
    “Where’s Zhenya?”
    “I could blow your brains out.”
    “He could,” said the smallest boy in the circle. “He practices on rats.”
    “Isn’t that what you are?” Georgy asked Arkady. “Aren’t you a rat?”
    After two days without sleep anything was possible. The pistol was a Nagant, a double-action, and the hammer was cocked. On the other hand, the trigger demanded a serious squeeze; Georgy wouldn’t fire accidentally. Arkady couldn’t see how many rounds were in the cylinder, but you can’t have everything.
    He rolled back the cap of the smaller boy. “Fedya, you’re up early today.”
    Georgy