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bodies had lain. They were catching up to them.
    The black man sank to his knees and ran his fingers through the pale ashes. He sifted out the coals and put them in his pocket.
    They followed the tracks. Perhaps they would find them before nightfall. So badly did they want to join up with them, they forgot how weak their position in the group was.
    Later on, it rained. The tall, yellow tufts of grass seemed to give off a gentle light beneath the rolling grey clouds. The black man stuck out his tongue as he walked to catch some rain. He seemed refreshed and cheerful. Sometimes he spoke to the other man. The tall man shrugged, and the negro repeated his words more loudly this time, his yellow eyes fixed on him.
    The tall man shook his head sadly. It was useless — they would never understand each other.
    The black man had tried to tell him something about the journey, he thought, something about the weather or the can of food they’d devoured together. How could it be anything else? Who thought about anything else? The journey left no room for other thoughts. They had become people without a history, living only in an immediate present.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
    Whoosh
    Beg had gone to his dacha, seventy kilometres outside town, to ready the cottage for the winter; he spread a few last barrows of manure over the garden plots, covered the well, and screwed the shutters over the windows. He enjoyed gardening. Sometimes he thought of himself as a landless farmer. As soon as he could, he left town to prune the roses and bind up the grapevines along the side of the house.
    Now he was driving home in the dark. It would be spring before he went back again. A crate of bell peppers was on the back seat. On top of old newspapers lay the last of the pumpkins, muddy and overgrown.
    Approaching an intersection, he slowed. The places they lay in wait were predictable enough — and indeed, on the far side of the road was a police cruiser, hidden behind the low stand of trees. Beg crossed the road and pulled up beside it.
    The patrolman climbed out, and Beg rolled down his window.
    â€˜Commissioner,’ the man said. He dropped his cigarette.
    â€˜Everything in order?’
    â€˜Certainly, certainly. Quiet. A quiet evening.’ A final plume of smoke escaped his lips.
    â€˜Nothing special?’
    â€˜No … nothing really. Quiet.’
    More than anything else, his subordinates liked to hand out fines along the road. It was how they collected their take; it was their easiest source of income. Since the arrival of laser guns they were able to justify their extra earnings with technological precision. No one could claim any longer that they were making things up. It was there for everyone to see — digits told no lies.
    â€˜Playing the lonesome whore’ was what they called this aspect of their profession, for that’s how it looked as they stood beneath a streetlight, monitoring traffic.
    Beg had stopped doing that when he became police inspector, long ago. With a rank like his, it was unseemly, standing there in that dome of artificial light carved out in the endless spaces of the steppes.
    A policeman had been gunned down once during a speed check. They found him along the side of the road, more dead than alive. His colleagues visited him at the clinic. He was deaf and blind, he reacted to nothing. Their eyes were constantly drawn to the hole where his nose had been.
    He haunted their thoughts whenever they stood along a darkened road.
    Beg had prohibited his men from setting up speed traps on their own — a rule everyone ignored. You collected more when you were alone.
    Whenever one of the colleagues had a birthday, a standard joke made the rounds.
    â€˜What are we going to give him?’ one of them would ask.
    â€˜A microwave,’ the others would say.
    â€˜He’s already got that.’
    â€˜So a flatscreen.’
    â€˜Has one.’
    â€˜A new cell phone?’
    â€˜Got