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space between them and punched Khosov in the heart, a downward motion, as though his balled fist were a hammer. It blew the breath from Khosov’s mouth and made him sit down and wrap his arms around his chest. Anti-pin leaned over and took the revolver from the holster and smashed it to pieces on a rock. Khosov groaned, then hunched over, struggling to breathe. Antipin reached down and put two fingers inside his nostrils and jerked his head upright. Khosov gave a shrill little cry like a hurt animal.
    “Now you go up there and tell them what I said. That they shall eat the dirt.”
    Antipin let him go and he managed to stand up, still gasping for air. Blood ran freely from his nose and he tried to stop it with his hand. He gave Antipin one terrified glance—this is a thing that makes pain, stay away from it always—then turned and scrabbled up the hill, holding his nose, head turtled down between his shoulders like a child running away from a beating.
    Khristo watched him go, then turned to look at the men around him, illuminated by the light of the burning house. They coughed and spit, trying to get the smoke out of themselves. Someone had dragged the man from the windowsill where he had fallen and laid his smoking body on the ground. He had been burned black in the fire, but those who had heard the sound of the iron bar knew he had been beyond feeling anything at all. Up on the road, the group of silhouettes shifted nervously as Khosov the Policeman scurried toward them.
    Khristo sensed clearly that this was not the end of it, that it would go on, that each act would become a debt to be repaid with interest. Nikko’s death had seemed to him, to his family, a tragedy of bad fate—like a drowning, or a mother taken at childbirth. You had to live with death, God gave you no choice. Today it was your turn, tomorrow it would touch your neighbor; thus people gathered around you, held you up with their spirit, tried to fill the empty place. He now understood that Nikko’s death was a tragedy of a different kind. It was part of something else; there was a connection, a design, at first faint, now much clearer. The unknown intelligencethat conceived a method of blocking doors could also see a purpose in the murder of a fifteen-year-old for laughing at a parade.
    As Khosov climbed toward the road, a man near Khristo said, “We had better stand together here.”
    The old fisherman took a step back. “I am no part of this.”
    “Go home then,” someone said. “They know where you live.”
    “I do not oppose them. I will tell them that.”
    “Then there will be no problem,” the man said, a sour irony in his voice.
    On the road, Khosov and the others climbed onto the back of the truck, which stuttered to life and bounced away down the dirt road.
    Khristo found Antipin at his shoulder. “Come with me,” the Russian said. “Let us take a little walk together.”
    They walked down to the river, past the sagging pole docks, to the sand beach below the walls of the old fort, called Baba Vida—Grandma Vida—built by the Turks three hundred years earlier, though some of the inner walls had blocks set by Greek and Roman hands.
    It was well after midnight, a stiff breeze blew off the river, they could just make out the dark bulk of the Romanian shore on the other side. Antipin rolled two cigarettes and gave one to Khristo, lit a wooden match with his thumbnail. They bent toward each other to protect the flame from the wind. Their cigarettes glowed in the darkness as they walked along the beach.
    “You understand, do you not,” Antipin said, “that they meant for me to kill him.”
    “Who?”
    “The policeman.”
    “Khosov?”
    “If that’s his name.”
    “Why?”
    “Why. To create an incident, to make politics, to give their newspapers something to say: bloody-fanged Bolshevik murders local policeman. Yes?”
    Khristo thought about it for a time. He understood it, but it seemed very strange. Events occurred,