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tape was silent, Arkady read Ivanov’s lips: Puppies? he asked the owner. When the dogs had passed, Ivanov clutched the attaché to his chest and went into the building. Arkady switched to the lobby tape.
    The marble lobby was so brightly lit that everyone wore halos. The doorman and receptionist wore jackets with braid over not too obvious holsters. Once the doorman activated the call button with a key, he stayed at Ivanov’s side while Ivanov used a handkerchief, and when the elevator doors opened, Arkady went to the elevator tape. He had already interviewed the operator, a former Kremlin guard, white-haired but hard as a sandbag.
    Arkady asked whether he and Ivanov had talked. The operator said, “I trained on the Kremlin staircase. Big men don’t make small talk.”
    On the tape, Ivanov punched a code into the keypad and, as the doors opened, turned to the elevator camera. The camera’s fish-bowl lens made his face disproportionately huge, eyes drowning in shadow above the handkerchief he held against his nose. Maybe he had Timofeyev’s summer cold. Ivanov finally moved through the open doors, and Arkady was reminded of an actor rushing to the stage, now hesitating, now rushing again. The time on the tape was 2133.
    Arkady switched tapes, back to the street camera, and forwarded to 2147. The pavement was clear, the two cars were still at the curb, the lights of traffic filtering by. At 2148 a blur from above slapped the pavement. The doors of the chase car flew open, and the guards poured out to form a defensive circle on the pavement around what could have been a heap of rags with legs. One man raced into the building, another knelt to feel Ivanov’s neck, while the driver of the sedan ran around it to open a rear door. The man taking Ivanov’s pulse, or lack of it, shook his head while the doorman moved into view, arms wide in disbelief. That was it, the Pasha Ivanov movie, a story with a beginning and an end but no middle.
    Arkady rewound and watched frame by frame.
    Ivanov’s upper body dropped from the top of the screen, shoulder hitched to take the brunt of the fall.
    His head folded from the force of the impact even as his legs entered the frame.
    Upper and lower body collapsed into a ring of dust that exploded from the pavement.
    Pasha Ivanov settled as the doors of the chase car swung open and, in slow motion, the guards swam around his body.
    Arkady watched to see whether any of the security team, while they were in the car and before Ivanov came out of the sky, glanced up; then he watched for anything like the saltshaker dropping with Ivanov or shaken loose by the force of the fall. Nothing. And then he watched to see whether any of the guards picked up anything afterward. No one did. They stood on the pavement, as useful as potted plants.
     
    The doorman on duty kept looking up. He said, “I was in Special Forces, so I’ve seen parachutes that didn’t deploy and bodies you scraped off the ground, but someone coming out of the sky here? And Ivanov, of all people. A good guy, I have to say, a generous guy. But what if he’d hit the doorman, did he think about that? Now a pigeon goes overhead and I duck.”
    “Your name?” Arkady asked.
    “Kuznetsov, Grisha.” Grisha still had the army stamp on him. Wary around officers.
    “You were on duty two days ago?”
    “The day shift. I wasn’t here at night, when it happened, so I don’t know what I can tell you.”
    “Just walk me around, if you would.”
    “Around what?”
    “The building, front to back.”
    “For a suicide? Why?”
    “Details.”
    “Details,” Grisha muttered as the traffic went by. He shrugged. “Okay.”
    The building was short-staffed on weekends, Grisha said, only him, the receptionist and the passenger elevator man. Weekdays, there were two other men for repairs, working the service door and service elevator, picking up trash. Housecleaners on weekdays, too, if residents requested. Ivanov didn’t. Everyone had been