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permitted himself a gesture of impatience. The Potter politely retracted the question. Oskar said, "That brings us to the part of the conversation where you suggest what, specifically, you can otter to us to justify our efforts, not to speak of our risks."
    The Potter suppressed a faint smile. " 'Justify' in the sense of provide financial profit?"
    Oskar knew he had to choose his words carefully. "If we decide to get you out, we will want to be rewarded for our efforts. It is a fact of life that there are organizations in the West that will pay generously for your information. But you misjudge us if you think the money is for us. It will fund projects designed to undermine a regime, a system, a philosophy that we consider odious." Lowering his voice to a whisper, Oskar intoned Dostoevsky's famous phrase, "Where there is sorrow and pain, the soil is sacred, yes?"
    "Yes," the Potter remarked dryly. Somehow he believed Oskar. He had the look of an idealist, which is to say the look of someone with a short life expectancy. "My having been a novator-doesn't that, in itself, justify your efforts, your risks?"
    Oskar shrugged.
    "There were circuits in New York," the Potter said softly. He had been trained to keep secrets; giving them away didn't come naturally. "There was an entire rezidentura. There was an istochnik-a source of information-in the United Nations Secretariat."
    "So: that was all some time ago," Oskar noted. "And you have been out of circulation for six months now."
    "Try it out on your principals," the Potter insisted. "In any case, it is all I have to offer."
    "Of course I will try it out," Oskar said. "But I suspect that your rezidentura, your istochnik, are what the Americans call"-here he switched to English-"old hats." Speaking again in Russian, he added,
    "You are familiar with the expression, yes?"
    "Yes," repeated the Potter, remembering Piotr Borisovich's ancient fedora, wondering what he had gotten himself into; wondering if in the end they would get out of him the thing he valued more than the pupil of his eye. "I am painfully familiar with old hats."
    Oskar inserted a key and let himself in the service door. It was a little-used back entrance to a stuffy transit hotel on Sushchevsky Bank Street, behind the Riga Station. The narrow service stairs hadn't been swept in years, but then the few people who used it generally had other things on their minds besides cleanliness. The doors on all the floors except the fourth were bolted shut. Upstairs, Oskar felt his way along the pitch-dark corridor, one hand on the wall, the other raised protectively before his eyes. It occurred to him that the people who frequented the fourth floor could easily afford to supply light bulbs, but probably felt more comfortable in the dark. At the third door along the corridor wall, Oskar knocked and then entered without waiting for an invitation. He stuffed his scarf into the sleeve of his raincoat, and hung it on the clothes tree alongside the two mink coats. So: if the Cousins were wearing their mink coats now, when it was not even freezing out, God knows what they would do in January when the temperature could drop to minus thirty. Well, everyone had his threshold of pain, or cold, or corruptibility, yes? It remained to be seen what the Potter's was.
    The blind man recognized Oskar's footfall. "You're early," he called,
    "which means things went badly."
    "Things went quickly," Oskar corrected him. "It would have been very curious-suspicious even, yes?-if he had offered us precisely what we wanted the first time around."
    "He needs to marinate," agreed the other man in the room.
    The blind man tapped his baton against his shoe impatiently. "He should be pushed," he insisted. "You could play the tape recording of the meeting back to him. He has already done enough to merit a firing squad."
    "With all respect," the younger Cousin said-he was, after all, dealing with someone who, on paper at least, was his superior-"he needs to be