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clerks and technicians earned four hundred rubles per month, pensions were half that.
    “Until we find somewhere more permanent,” said Alice. “Or the IMF runs out of money, whichever is the sooner.”
    Quarrie laughed much louder and much longer than the joke was worth.
    Armed guards stamping their feet to keep warm slid from view as the taxi eased out of the airport. Quarrie peered through the rear windshield and then sneaked a surreptitious look at Alice when he thought she wasn’t looking. She hardly noticed, it happened so often, even with her auburn hair cropped short enough to bristle up the back of her neck. She loved it; from one angle it made her look bold, and from another vulnerable. Lewis hated it. He called the cut a duck’s ass and said it made her look like a dyke.
    “It’s quite a ride into town, so please take your coats off if you want to,” Quarrie said, playing the old Moscow stager. “Are you warm enough?”
    “Fine,” said Alice. The heat was on full blast.
    “You’ll be used to the weather, anyway. Moscow winters aren’t much worse than Boston ones.” He smiled. “Your accent gives you away.”
    “My husband’s from New Orleans,” she said, realizing that Lewis hadn’t exchanged a single word with Quarrie.
    “New Orleans?” Quarrie laughed. “You guys don’t even have winter there, right?”
    They passed the antitank hedgehogs that marked the place where the Red Army had halted the Wehrmacht’s advance half a century before. Alice stared rapt as Moscow flashed changes at the window, rolling out for her delectation every cliché about Soviet cities, and then some: massive buildings of uniform gray with crumbling facades, roads with potholes large enough to be bomb craters. There were pockets of beauty—a Byzantine church here, a prerevolutionary house there—but they only served to accentuate the gloom.
    The taxi swayed left and right as the driver glided between the hollows.
    The ugliness and dereliction didn’t bother Alice. For her, the first glimpse of a new country was always exciting, vista on a world pregnant with promises of adventure and challenge. She glanced across at Lewis, knowing that he didn’t share her animation. Lewis was still ambivalent about coming to Moscow. He was looking at exactly the same city as Alice, but she knew that for him it spelled discomfort and difficulty, an experience to be endured rather than enjoyed. After two years living on different continents—the IMF job had started out as a temporary assignment in Warsaw, which then led to another in Budapest and then another andanother—Lewis, having failed to talk her out of accepting the Moscow posting, had decided to join her. As soon as her work was done there, they would head back to Boston to settle down and have kids while he was still young enough not to be taken for their grandfather.
    Alice reached for Lewis’s cheek and ran her hand down it, past the silvering hairs at his temples. He gave her a weak grin.
    Quarrie leaned toward Lewis. “You’re taking up a post at the Sklifosovsky, I understand.” Lewis nodded, a blip in Quarrie’s monologue. “Finest emergency department in Moscow; they say it’s far better than the Kremlinovka, or whatever they call it now—the Central Clinical Hospital, something like that. Even an old Russia hand like me finds it hard to keep up with all the name changes. No more Leningrad, no more Sverdlovsk; streets and metro stations switch from one day to the next. In Moscow, only the weather’s still the same.”
    The driver cut across three lanes without indicating; Quarrie, unconcerned, pointed out the window. In the gathering darkness, the most radiant objects in the skyline were the ruby-red stars shining above the Kremlin towers. “Five points, for the proletariats of five continents,” he said. “Fat lot of good it did them.”
    The Kremlin itself, so familiar from photographs and television footage, looked slightly out of kilter. It took