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them). His feet were beginning to feel numb again; if the cold snap kept up he would have to start wearing his wool-lined slippers inside his galoshes, as he did at the height of winter. He paused before the glistening white marble bust of Stalin's beautiful young wife. She had stormed out of a Kremlin dinner party one night in I932, gone home, put a pistol to her head and, as Piotr Borisovich once quipped, introduced a foreign object into her brain. Another suicide!
    More violence! "To Nadezhda Alliluyeva," the inscription on the bust read, "from a member of the Communist Party, J. Stalin."
    "Pssssssst!"
    The Potter turned to see a little man with shirred skin squinting at him from several meters away. He must have stepped from behind a tombstone, because he hadn't been there a moment before. The man beckoned with an emaciated finger. The Potter approached. The man removed his hat, an unexpected sign of deference considering who they were and what they were up to. "I have confirmed," he announced, nodding a very bald head,
    "that you are alone. Down that path, through that gate, you will discover another taxi waiting for you."
    "Where will it take me?" the Potter asked, knowing the question would never be answered.
    "Anywhere!" replied the little bald man with a mischievous wink, and planting his hat squarely on his head, he darted with unexpected sprightliness between two tombstones and disappeared.
    Atop the great baroque belfry in the center of the monastery grounds, two men dressed in ankle-length mink coats and mink hats stood with their backs to the wind. Because they were vaguely related (one's mother's brother had been the other's uncle by marriage}, because they directed Department 13 of the First Chief. Directorate, the sabotage and assassination unit of the Komitet Gosudarsrvennoy Bezopasnosti, better known by its initials KGB. their subordinates referred to them as the Cousins- The younger of the two, in his early forties, stared down at the cemetery through binoculars. The other, who was blind, the result of being tortured by the Gestapo during the Great Patriotic War, asked, "Is the bald man one of ours or theirs?"
    "Theirs. Oskar must have pulled him out of a hat for this operation,"
    the younger man answered.
    "We should remember to log him," the blind man said.
    "Small fish, big pond," the man with the binoculars replied. "Oskar will make us a present of him if we ask. In any case, we must be careful not to frighten any of them off before this whole thing becomes history."
    The man with the binoculars watched the Potter enter the second taxi. "I will tell you the truth," he admitted. "I didn't think he would go for it."
    "Did you know him personally?" inquired the blind man. He used the past tense, as if he were speaking about someone dead and buried.
    "I met him years ago just after he came back from New York," the younger man replied. "He was a great hero to us all then." He fitted his binoculars back into their leather case. "He had served Mother Russia well. We looked up to him."
    Below, the driver gunned his motor and the taxi lurched away from the curb. The blind man bent an ear toward the sound, then tapped his long, thin white baton several times on the ground in satisfaction. "He is still serving Mother Russia," he said thoughtfully, and he pressed his lips into what, on his scarred features, passed for a smile.
    The yafka (Russian for "safe house") turned out to be on Volodarskaya Street, down the block from the Church of the Dormition of the Potters.
    When he discovered Feliks' hobby was throwing pots, Piotr Borisovich, sporting an ancient fedora that had seen one too many rainstorms, had hauled him off, one sparkling Sunday before he graduated to the "field,"
    to see the mosaics and decorative brickwork of the church. What do you think? Piotr Borisovich had demanded, delighted to have come up with something in Moscow that the novator didn't know about. What I think, the Potter had responded, is