Declare

women bundled up in coats and scarves, shuffling along the sidewalks in heavy felt boots, sweeping the snow into the gutters with crude brooms. Elena envied them their secure identities.
    She had walked past the northernmost towers of the Kremlin. The buildings she passed were pillared palaces now, and she knew one of them was the Bolshoi Theatre—but she hurried past without looking up at the Corinthian columns, and tried to step along in a businesslike way as she made straight for the shadows of a cobbled pedestrian underpass.
    When she came up into the gray daylight again on the far side, she heard music—a song that Marcel Gruey had sometimes sung, an American song called “The Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe”—echoing out across the snowy sidewalk from a hotel whose name she was able to figure out phonetically: Metropol. The clarity and imprecision let her know that the music was being produced by a live band rather than a radio speaker, and she hurried across the street and up the hotel steps. If she could meet some man, and get him to take her home, she could at least establish a temporary shelter from which to reconnoiter.
    A moustached old man at the door mumbled something to her, and when she cocked her head inquiringly, he said, in English, “Thirty cents.” Uneasy that he had so instantly identified her as a foreigner, Elena gave him a ruble coin and hurried past him—into a corridor that opened on an ornate nineteenth-century ballroom, with a fountain and a marble pool out in the middle of the polished wood floor.
    At the checkroom she handed her overcoat across the counter. Three girls in lumpy ski pants arrived right behind her, chattering in Russian, and they began hopping on one foot and the other to pull the pants off, afterward smoothing the dresses that they had worn crumpled up under the pants. Elena’s face went cold and expressionless to see two men in Red Army uniforms stepping up the hall now—but they were laughing as they took off their overcoats. Clearly they too had come simply to dance.
    Elena shuffled nervously into the ballroom, eyeing the young men who seemed to be without partners. Everybody in Russia seemed to have come to the Metropol—men in coveralls were dancing with young women in wrinkled gowns, helmets rocked on the belts of gyrating soldiers, and even the aproned waiters were tap-dancing as they carried drinks on trays; Elena even heard English sentences, and after peering around spied a table of obvious Britishers drinking watery Zhigulovsky beer. Her first thought, instantly scorned, was to try to give them a message to take to Marcel Gruey, to poor gallant Lot—but she didn’t even know his real name, and in any case he was a sadly deficient Communist.
    Elena had just steeled herself to approach a studious-looking young man whose dance partner had been deflected away by one of the Red Army soldiers, when she found herself in the arms of a lean-faced man who smiled at her with steel teeth. “Bless me,” the man said.
    She nodded, recognizing the old Paris Razvedupr code: Things are not what they seem—trust me.
    “You’ll have to tell us,” the man remarked quietly in her ear in French, “how you knew to avoid his office this morning. You were right—he’s gone, and so would you have been. We might or might not have been able to get you away from them. But why didn’t you simply follow her, when she approached you in her ring yesterday?”
    Elena knew who it was that he must be referring to. “Her ring? The Sadovaya?”
    “With her… earring stones? anchor stones?… installed around the periphery, at Patriarch’s Pond and Gorky Park and the Kursk Station, to keep her from becoming… disoriented?” The French word was désoriente , and he laughed as though he had made a joke.
    He had whirled her to an arch on the other side of the high-ceilinged room, and he stepped back and let her last dance step link her arm through his, so that now they were walking down the corridor beyond without having paused.
    Another man was holding open an outside door, and Elena found that she had been escorted down a set of cement steps and into the back seat of a black Ford sedan before she could catch her breath. She wondered if she would ever see her overcoat again.
    The man who had met her on the dance floor glanced at his wrist-watch as the car accelerated away from the curb, driving in a counter-clockwise loop around the block and then speeding north up the