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Tamsin’s eyes narrowed. “Which guy?”

“The birdwatcher. With the long lens.” He looked at me, then at her, and lowered his voice. “He’s across the street again. In the dark, by the bakery. Same coat. He’s been there since before your friend showed up.”

The room grew still.

“Birdwatcher,” I said.

“That’s what he told the cop who moved him along on Monday,” said Marcus. “Said he was doing a winter survey. In February. Hell of a hobby.”

“Is he there now?”

“Gone when I looked again. But I got a photo of the plate.” He held up a phone. “I wanted to show you before I ran it.”

I looked at the plate number. Nothing meant anything to me. But there was a bad, cold feeling at the back of my neck that I had not felt in some time. It is the feeling of a hand on the shoulder in the dark. It is the feeling from the Karpov brothers’ funeral, and from the winter in Prague, and from a night in 1943 that I will not discuss.

“Run it,” I said. “Tell me what you find. And if he returns, do not approach. Call me.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Maksim,” said Tamsin, sharply.

“It is probably nothing.”

“It’s not nothing. Four days of a man with a camera, and your boy comes tearing in on a motorcycle, and you look like that. “ She stood, and took my chin in her hand, and made me look at her. “Somebody’s watching your world. And now there’s a human in the middle of it who knows what he saw. What are you going to do?”

The truth is that I did not know.

I said, “I am going to go home and speak to him.”

“Tell him the truth.”

“I do not know yet.”

“Maksim.”

“I promise nothing,” I said, and heard how much like myself I sounded, and how tired.

The guest house was dark when I pulled into the lot, except for one window on the second floor.

214. The little lamp was off. But behind the curtain there was a blue flicker that came and went, the glow of a laptop screen, and above it the outline of a head bent close, hair standing up in all directions.

He was awake. Of course he was.

I sat in the car with the engine off and the snow ticking on the roof, listening. I could not hear his heart from that distance, but I did not need to, because I knew what it would be doing. I have known what it would be doing since the first time I smelled him.

I had a plan, or the ghost of one. I would go up. I would be calm. I would let him ask, and answer as little as I could, and I would be cold and ordinary and very much the man he had believed me to be for two days. That man was easy. I had been him for a thousand years.

I put my hand on the door.

Sabine had said, do not touch him. Tamsin had said, tell him the truth. Yelena had said, when I was very young and very new, you will know, and it will frighten you, and it will be the best thing that ever happens to you. Three women, three warnings, and every one of them was right.

I pressed my forehead to the steering wheel and said, in Russian, to no one, “Give me one night. Let me have one night more of being nothing to him.”

Nobody answered, and the snow came down, and in the window the blue light flickered and went out.

Then I got out of the car and climbed the stairs.

Chapter 6