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a Polack. You know, my brother married a Polack. That's why I have to go there."
    Riesling dealt. With a grunt, Saarinen put his feet up on the table and rested his head on the sink behind him. "Rising from the dead," he muttered. "Speaking English. Playing chess. Must have been drunk out of his mind."
    "What's that?" Riesling asked sharply.
    Saarinen raised by twenty. "Drunk. Drunk, I said."
    "You said chess." Suddenly Riesling was shivering.
    Saarinen smacked his lips sleepily and grinned. "Who knows? Maybe in Poland, Jesus Christ is an English-speaking vampire chess player. If you've got your own pope, you can do anything."
    Riesling tried to steady his hands. "Saarinen, I want that medallion," he said. With a start, the captain brought himself out of his doze. "I'll give you two hundred dollars for it."
    Saarinen took his time answering. He appraised the American slowly, his smiling eyes taking in the clenched jaw and sudden outpouring of sweat. "Sentimental reasons?" he asked.
    Riesling worked to keep his face a blank. "The dead man had relatives," he said. "They'd like to have it."
    "Ah, yes, for the relatives." The captain stroked the sooty growth on his chin. "Quite a large sum, my friend. The necklace must be a valuable object. To you, at least, eh?"
    His smile faded. Riesling's Hammerli pistol was pointed directly at his face."Two hundred dollars," Riesling said.
    Saarinen spread out his hands in a gesture of helplessness. "My friend," he said soothingly. His satyr's smile returned. "Make it three."

Chapter Two
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    A ndrew Starcher ran his hands over his face , vaguely hoping that the gesture would somehow stop the headache pounding in his brain. He read the coded message from the American consulate in Leningrad in front of him for the second time, then reached in his desk drawer for the vial of Aldril.
    "Tranquilizers?" Corfus asked, an amused smile softening his blunt Tartar features.
    "Blood pressure pills. I'm a rare spy. I'm going to die of old age, I guess." Starcher shook out two of the tablets and washed them down with cold coffee.
    At sixty-six, Andrew Starcher was a recruiting poster for the American diplomat—genteel, distinguished, his snow white hair and hawklike nose bespeaking generations of good breeding. Grimacing, he pushed the telex cable toward his assistant.
    Outside, the first snowfall was accumulating in the cobalt twilight of the Arbat district of Moscow, its graceful old homes twinkling with warm light. In that snow, Starcher knew, someone was watching.
    Someone was always watching. Any number of KGB pavement artists with their cigarette-lighter cameras and miniature radio transceivers invariably lurked around the American embassy at any given time, and the office of the cultural attaché was particularly fascinating to them.
    Starcher had known about diplomatic espionage since his first days with the CIA, but it had always seemed like a joke. Even newspapers weren't particularly interested in stories about diplomatic personnel who were chased out of a country for spying.
    Now, here he was, after twenty-five years in the field, arranging square-dancing exhibitions and tours of Moscow for American movie stars. He was vaguely embarrassed about it, even though it was only the cover for his true job as the top CIA man in the city.
    Mike Corfus bent over the rumpled cablegram, squinting as he followed Starcher's decoding markings. His bulky appearance belied Corfus's sharp intelligence. The son of Russian immigrants who'd settled on New York's seamy Lower East Side, he had worked his way through Yale and had graduated summa cum laude right into the CIA, without any of the usual family connections.
    He had been in Moscow only a month, serving as Starcher's eyes and legs. Where Starcher, locked up by his visibility, could only conjecture about what the Soviets were doing, Corfus could go out on the street and find out. He was Starcher's deputy in dealing with field agents like