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On the street outside the institute, where there was decent mobile phone reception, Paul called the number for Ludmilla Zaitseva using the FBI’s iPhone. If she wasn’t there, he wouldn’t bother with the long journey to her apartment. But if she answered . . .

A brusque “ Allo? ”

“Ludmilla Sergeyevna?”

“Da? Kto eto?”

He switched to English, hoping she spoke it, too. “I am a friend of Arkady Galkin’s,” he said.

A long pause. “Yes?”

“I need to talk with you.”

Another long pause. Paul thought she’d hung up. Then: “Who is this?”

“My name is Robert Langfitt.”

“Yes?”

“Will you be there in an hour? Something I’d like to speak with you about.”

Before she could demur, he hit End.

It was a long Metro ride to the Chertanovo District, on the outskirts of the city. The Metro station there was plain and unadorned, probably built recently. When he emerged from it, he saw that he was in a very bad part of town. No tourists here. An apparently homeless man slept on a park bench. Garbage was strewn across the ground. The asphalt was full of potholes. Paul passed a monument honoring the Soviet space program and quickly found Ludmilla Zaitseva’s address, a decrepit-looking high-rise. The main doors to the building were unlocked, and the entryway was littered with vodka bottles and discarded hypodermic needles. In the lobby, he found a row of intercom buttons labeled with surnames; he pressed the one that read, “Zaitseva, 6F.”

He waited for the inner door to be buzzed open. And waited. He rang again. Still no answer. Maybe she was out. Maybe she was at work, if she still worked.

A woman entered the lobby from outside and keyed open the inner door. Paul followed her inside.

The elevator bore a sign in Russian that said it was under repair. Apartment 6F was probably on the sixth floor. Paul climbed six flights, passing more scattered hypodermic needles, a spill of food garbage on the third floor—orange peels, melon rinds, chicken bones, coffee grounds—and a discarded and evidently used condom. By the time he got to the sixth floor, he was a little winded. You need to exercise more , he chided himself.

He knocked on the door to 6F. There was no bell to ring.

Nothing. He waited a minute, knocked again.

From deep inside, he heard a woman’s voice, high-pitched and harsh and scolding. The voice moved closer to the door. “ Shto, shto, shto? ” it said. “What, what, what? Who is it? What do you want?”

The voice continued babbling stridently as the door opened a few inches, and Paul found himself looking at a short, broad-faced, portly woman whose eyes looked peculiar, cloudy and opaque.

“Ludmilla Sergeyevna? I called you.”

“Yes, yes. Mr. . . . Langford.”

“Langfitt.” Then he made a decision and said, “I got your name from Galina Borisovna.” He added her surname for good measure: “Belkina.” Galina had indicated that the two women had detested each other, but some personal connection would still be better than none.

The apartment smelled of fried onions, which wasn’t unpleasant. But also of something putrid. He looked around. The place was squalid, the dwelling of a pathological pack rat. Piles of magazines and newspapers everywhere, drifts of dust, food-encrusted dishes.

“Oh,” the woman chastised him, referring to Galina: “ Kakaya skuchnaya lichnost .” “What a bore.” Then, still in Russian, “What an idiot. She gives you my address? This Galina, she gives you my address?”

“Just your name,” Paul said, not wanting to detail how he’d located her. “I’ll tell you why I’m here,” he said in English. “I just started working for Arkady Galkin, and I have some concerns.”

She looked in his general direction, her eyes unfocused. She seemed to be blind. Maybe she didn’t understand English. So he repeated the words in simple and, he hoped, correct Russian. Then: “May I come in?” in both English and Russian.

With a deeper scowl, she pulled the door open just enough for him to enter. “You are American?” she said.

“Yes.”

“You work for the great man?” Her sarcasm was sharp and obvious.

“Yes.” He entered the apartment.

The woman backed into a chair, and Paul sat on the piano bench facing it. The lights were all off in this malodorous apartment, and the room was dark.

“Why? You can’t get other jobs in America?”

Paul realized he’d misunderstood Galina’s words about this woman. Ludmilla Sergeyevna may have urged Arkady not to marry his first wife, but she was no friend of Arkady’s. She also spoke excellent English.

He gave an uncomfortable smile.

“I know this man well,” she said. “You see, Arkady was a small, unimpressive man. Not very good looking, but very ambitious. And very very smart. None of the women in his class were interested in him. You think he is now rich and powerful oligarch married to what you call bimbo? Back then, bimbos didn’t even look at him . . . until he started to become rich, and then they flocked like, like . . .” She said it in Russian: “Like moths to the light. I warned him that the gold diggers will come. But men are ruled by their . . . sexual organ , even smart, ambitious ones like Arkady Galkin. Maybe especially that type of man. So he marries this shrew.”

“Galina.”

“Yes, of course.” Her eyes looked just past his.

She was definitely blind, Paul decided. She was also quite elderly looking, like a woman in her nineties. Russia must age people , he thought. Maybe it’s the poverty . He changed tack: “You were one of his professors.”

“I taught economics at the institute and also was on Kremlin advisory committee. This when Russia was changing from communism to capitalism. Back then, I just had bad vision. I didn’t know I had retinitis pigmentosa and was steadily going blind.”

“And he was your student.”

“I discovered him. I was a talent scout. I mentioned him at my weekly committee meeting in the Kremlin. They investigated him, liked his story. . . . He was agreeable. Back then, you know, we were all on one side. We all knew that someone young and energetic and ambitious could be immensely valuable.”

“Valuable how?”

“We needed some of our biggest state-owned companies to go private, and so we needed smart capitalist types. Galkin was a student by day, a black market hustler by night. He’d sell jeans and then cars. Made a lot of money. That attracted our attention. He was a brilliant young man.”

“I don’t understand. You made him rich?”

“I did what I thought was best for everyone.”

“How? What did you do for him?”

“No, no. We let him make his fortune. Let him take over distressed assets. Cut through the miles of red tape. Gave him the chance to get rich. He was smart enough to amass his own fortune. As long as the Russian bureaucracy stayed out of his way.”

“So now . . .” Paul faltered. “Not sure I get this. Is he independent? Or is he controlled by the Kremlin?”

“All these oligarchs, they’re marionettes. Marionettes with their own bank accounts.”

“And the Kremlin’s pulling the strings.” Paul thought of what Galkin had said at dinner at the Aragvi: A puppet thinks he is free if he loves his strings .

“As for who pulling strings,” Ludmilla continued, “that’s where things get complicated.”

Paul paused. “Does that mean you’re still connected to the Kremlin?”

She shrugged. “Look at me. You think I am still part of government now?”

He nodded that he got it, didn’t reply.

“We were all squeezed out years ago. And I? I am thrown away like so much garbage. Look how I live.”

“But who threw you away?”

She shrugged again.

Paul shook his head. “Galkin must know you’re in desperate straits, but he doesn’t support you?”

Her eyes flashed. “He wants nothing to do with me.”

“Why not?”

Another shrug. “Maybe he wants everybody to think he became a rich man because of his genius. He doesn’t want anybody to know he got help.”

“Or that he’s two-faced.”

“ Two -faced? Count again!”

“Huh?”

“For a thousand years Russia has had an imperial court in one form or another. And everyone interested in power in this court develops at least three faces.” She held up one finger after another as she said, “The face you turn to the empress. The face you show your peers. And the face that confronts you in the mirror.”

“Ah,” he nodded.

Wagging a crooked forefinger, Ludmilla said quietly, “The moment you think you have it all figured out is when you learn how dead wrong you are.”

Paul nodded, and said, “Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery, or whatever the Churchill quote is.” One of his Russian teachers at Reed liked to quote that.

She shook her head. “No riddle. You Americans, you believe in brute force. We believe in innuendo and disinformation and a slick of poison on the doorknob. And now you have a new prime minister in England named Boris!”

Her phone rang. It was an old-fashioned black rotary dial phone like you’d see in the United States in the last century. She reached for it and after just a second or two of fumbling was able to grasp the receiver in her hand.

“ Allo! ” She listened. Spoke in rapid Russian, then hung up.

“You were followed here?” she said with alarm.

Paul’s stomach dropped. “I don’t know. I can’t be certain, but I didn’t think so. Why do you—?”

“The FSB is coming. Not regular police. I have friend in FSB.”

“What do you mean they’re coming? For what? Meeting you isn’t breaking any law.”

“You are in Russia, my friend. Knowing the law won’t help you. It’s no defense. If they wish to arrest you, they will. They will make up a pretext.”

“Why FSB?”

“I have spoken critically of government, so they put watch on me. They listen to my telephone. Is easy to do now. Is automated. Someone calls me, a light goes on, maybe a bell rings somewhere. I don’t know how. They want to know who I am meeting with. American, they know this. Now, go . Now .”

“How close are they?

“Please! Move! ”