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knotty hands clasped behind his back, gazing up at the painting. It had been five months since their last meeting, and Yevgeny Primakov was exactly as he remembered him. Thin white hair; fragile frame; thick eyebrows and a tendency to swipe at his cheek with the fore-finger of his left hand. The same exorbitant suits, which he imagined were de rigueur at all his United Nations functions. Milo, who was taller with dark features but the same heavy eyes, could never imagine aging to look like this.
    That previous meeting had been like this one—an unconscionable risk. Milo had been out of jail less than a week when, late one night, frustrated and drunk, he climbed out of his Newark apartment’s window, crawled down the fire escape, and snuck into the opposite building where his twenty-four-hour shadow had been holing up. He knew the face—the young surveillance operative hadbeen on him since the bus from prison—and knew who he was working for. He unlocked the man’s door with a screwdriver and a homemade pick and found him dozing on a cot beneath the open window, beside a video camera with a stack of tapes and a telescopic microphone. Fast-food wrappers and cups were scattered across the floor. He woke the kid with the screwdriver to his neck and said, very quietly, “You’ll tell that Russian bastard to meet with me within forty-eight hours.”
    “Er . . . Russian?” the kid managed.
    “The one who pulls your strings. The one even the UN doesn’t know is doing its sneaky work. You call him and tell him to bring everything on the senator.”
    “What senator?”
    “The one that cost me my family.”
    Thirty-five hours later, Primakov had met him in that same dirty room, overdressed as usual, and criticized his description of the man in question. “No,” Yevgeny told him in Russian. “You cost yourself your own family, by being a liar.” He’d brought along the file on Senator Nathan Irwin anyway.
    Not that it told Milo much that he didn’t already know, because someone like Irwin made sure the crucial details of his otherwise public life remained private. The senator had been behind last year’s Sudanese debacle—the murder of a Muslim cleric, which had led to riots that had claimed more than eighty lives—and his desperation to cover it up had led to more deaths, among them two of Milo’s close friends, and prison time for Milo. “This man may be at the top of your grievances list,” Yevgeny had said, “but that doesn’t mean he’s responsible for all your life’s disappointments.”
    Now, five months later, the old man stared up at the painting that had caught his fancy and spoke to the figures, again in Russian. “I’ve been looking into this. It might be retribution against the uncle. The baker. You didn’t check on him, did you?”
    “He’s had some trouble with the law. I watched him. He’s clean enough.”
    “Well, I did more than watch. Mihai Stanescu’s involved in immigrant affairs. He works with incoming easterners and sets themup with jobs. That’s how the girl’s family got here. Sometimes he sneaks them in. He’s got connections with the Russian mafia in Transnistria—which is another way of saying he’s got government connections. I’m guessing he’s using those immigrants to transport heroin into Germany.”
    Milo didn’t quite believe it. “So? Why kill his niece?”
    “Maybe he’s been warned. Maybe the kid’s involved.”
    “She’s not.”
    “So you keep saying.”
    “I’m right, Yevgeny.”
    His father didn’t answer immediately, because three Bavarians materialized close behind them and whispered in awed tones, gesturing up at the painting, one waving his camera around. Once they’d moved on, he said, “You know as well as I do that it would take a lot longer than a week to find out why your people want some girl dead. Just because New York won’t tell you doesn’t mean there isn’t a reason.”
    Milo didn’t bother answering, because the subject