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correct, of course, but the FSB agents had already tagged him for what he was and were quite happy.
    ¯
    THE weirdly named Enthusiasts’ Boulevard is probably the most decrepit, shabbiest, and meanest quarter in the city of Moscow. In a triumph of Communist planning it was situated downwind of the chemical warfare research establishment, which had filters like tennis nets. The only enthusiasm ever noted among its inhabitants was possessed by those slated to move out.
    According to the records Leonid Zaitsev lived with his daughter, her truck-driver husband, and their child in a flat just off the main street. It was half-past twelve and still a warm summer’s night when the sleek black Chaika, its driver’s head stuck out of the window to read the grimy street names, pulled up outside.
    The son-in-law’s name was different of course, and they had to check with a roused and drowsy neighbor on the ground floor to establish that the family lived on the fourth. There was no elevator. The four men clumped up the stairs and hammered on the peeling door.
    The woman who answered, sleepy and bleary-eyed, must have been in her mid-thirties but looked a decade older. Grishin was polite but insistent. His men pushed past and fanned out to search the flat. There was not much to search; it was tiny. Two rooms in fact, with a fetid lavatory and a curtained cooking alcove.
    The woman had been sleeping with her six-year-old in the one family-sized bed in one of the rooms. The child now woke and began to whimper, the whine rising to a cry when the bed was turned over to see if anyone hid beneath it. The two miserable plywood cupboards were opened and ransacked.
    In the other room Zaitsev’s daughter pointed helplessly at the cot along one wall where her father slept, and explained that her husband was miles away on a trip to Minsk and had been for two days. By now weeping helplessly, a cue taken up by the child, she swore her father had not returned the previous morning. She was worried but had taken no steps to report him missing. He must have fallen asleep on a park bench, she thought.
    In ten minutes the Black Guards had established that no one was hidden in the flat, and Grishin was convinced the woman was too terrified and ignorant to lie. Within thirty minutes they were gone.
    Grishin directed the Chaika not back into central Moscow but to the camp forty miles away where Akopov was being held. For the rest of the night he questioned the hapless secretary himself. Before dawn the sobbing man admitted that he must have left the vital document consigned to his care lying on his desk. He had never done such a thing before. He could not understand how he had forgotten to lock it up. He begged for forgiveness. Grishin nodded and patted him on the back.
    Outside the barracks block he summoned one of his inner-core deputies.
    “It is going to be a stinking hot day. Our friend in there is distressed. I think a predawn swim is in order.”
    Then he drove back to the city. If the vital file had been left lying on Akopov’s desk, he reasoned, it had either been wrongly thrown out, or the cleaner had taken it. The former theory did not work. Trash from party headquarters was always retained for several days, then incinerated under supervision. The paper trash of the previous night had been sifted sheet by sheet. Nothing. So, the cleaner. Why a semiliterate old man should want to do such a thing, or what he had done with it, Grishin could not fathom. Only the old man could explain. And explain he would.
    Before the normal hour of breakfast he had put two thousand of his own men, all in civilian clothes, onto the streets of Moscow to search for an old man in a threadbare ex-army greatcoat. He had no photograph, but the description was precise, even down to the three steel teeth at the front of the mouth.
    However, the job was not that easy, even with two thousand searchers. There were ten times that number of derelicts crowding the back alleys and