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into his coat pocket.
    The corridors were empty but littered with spare pens and flakes from spiral notebooks. Just past the office, he took a left and began walking slowly past doors, each with a tall, narrow window. He paused at one where an old woman helped a black teenager with his writing, then at another where three students sat on a table, looking at notes a fourth was marking on the chalkboard. Whatever he’d written had upset a girl, who was shouting at him.
    Gavra followed the corridor to the end, where it turned right, past a woman running a vacuum cleaner, and then up another right until he was back at the corridor where he’d begun. In the center of the floor was a large glassed-in library where a librarian was directing her student-workers as they shelved returned books. On the opposite side of the building, he followed another U-shaped corridor past more empty rooms until, on the last leg, he stopped at room 161.
    Looking through the narrow window at an angle, he saw Lubov Shevchenko, a little fatter and older than his picture, with spectacles, seated at a desk, reading a disorderly stack of papers. He’d mark one, then go to the next, read, and write something else. He was grading students’work.
    Gavra stepped to the other side and saw from that angle seven students at desks, serving their time. Some were working as well, hunched and scribbling, while the pretty girl he’d seen earlier— Jennifer—was passing a slip of paper to the balding redhead and glancing warily in Shevchenko’s direction.
    The scene brought on a pang of empathy. As a boy, Gavra had considered it his patriotic duty to make trouble. He’d succeeded often enough to be very familiar with the experience of staying after school.
    His smile disappeared—Jennifer was looking directly at him. She touched her boyfriend’s hand, and then he, too, was staring at Gavra. Jennifer smiled, and Gavra brought a finger to his lips for silence.
    But Jennifer, like the young Gavra, was deaf to the pleas of adults. Through the door he could hear what she said: “Mr. Shevchenko, your cousin’s here.”
    Gavra stepped back out of view. He almost fled as Lubov Shevchenko’s accented voice said,
“Cousin?”
    “See for yourself if you think I’m a liar,” said Jennifer.
    Gavra only wanted to follow Shevchenko. Confronting him in the middle of a schoolhouse was not what he’d had in mind.
    The door opened, and Lubov Shevchenko’s spectacled face peered out. He cocked his head and spoke in their shared accent. “Can I help you?”
    All reasonable plans were now figments of Gavra’s imagination. He answered in our language. “Please close the door. I’d like to speak with you a moment.”
    Shevchenko’s expression, at first confused, shifted. It was in the edges of his nose and the way his heavy eyes seemed to stretch just slightly. Fear, or repugnance. “How did you find me?”
    “I’m not here to bother you.”
    “You are.”
    “No.”
    “Then why are you here?”
    “To talk. Please come out and close the door.”
    Shevchenko looked back into the classroom and said in English, “I’ll be right back. Everyone, quiet.” Then he stepped into the corridor and shut the door. Something occurred to him, and he raised a finger. “Tell them you can’t find me. Tell them I died.”
    “Tell who?”
    Shevchenko said nothing at first. Then: “What do you want to talk about?”
    That was the question for which Gavra had no real answer. So he said, “These kids are in trouble?”
    Shevchenko frowned; he nodded.
    “American kids, are they any worse than we were?”
    “Much, much worse. But you didn’t cross the Atlantic to ask me that.” Behind his glasses, a dew of sweat formed in Shevchenko’s thick eyebrow and rolled down his cheek. “You’re going to kill me, aren’t you.”
    “I’m not going to kill you. I just want to talk.”
    “You’re a liar.”
    “Come on,” said Gavra. “We’re going.”
    “I have a job