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By Root 866 0

though its 7.62-mm heads went through Sheetrock as if it were paper. Peter walked along the wall, sawing waist-high, reloading as he went. A couple of rounds sparked off studs and nails. Shouts of outrage and confusion answered from the hall. Peter sprayed the second clip at knee level. Someone in the hall finally understood what was happening and fired back. A saucer-sized chunk of the wall exploded into the room. Peter used the shining hole as a target. He turned his back to the wall, disengaged the empty clip and inserted the last. An arc of holes answered through the walls. Peter walked to the high point of the arc, aimed low and fired, standing as close as a carpenter to the wall, surrounded by shafts of light. He moved to the side when a single shot responded, took his stance again, put the barrel in the hole and widened it with four more shots. He set the rate to manual and listened for moans, then placed a shot straight through the wall at his feet. Reset to automatic and finished the clip in a spray. In ten seconds Peter had put eighty rounds through the wall. On his way to the door, he let the Skorpion fall and reached around to the holster at the back of his belt for his own gun in case he needed it.

He didn’t. Four Chechens lined the hall. Covered in blood and lime, they seemed to have suffered an industrial accident. Peter sorted through them, holding a cautionary gun to each head with one hand while he checked the carotid pulse with the other. A couple of the dead men held Skorpions of their own, for all the good it did them. Arkady recognized Ali’s friend from the Wall café staring up through a layer of dust. He didn’t see Beno.

“They were parked outside when I got here,” Peter said. “Two in each car.”

“Thank you,” Arkady said.

“Bitte.” Peter relished the word, like a mouthful of satisfaction.

People are Confused when they wake to the sound of automatic fire. In an area of the city with so much construction, the first reaction is bourgeois outrage that anyone would break the law and drive a nail before dawn.

On the street, Arkady saw blue police lights floating far off down Friedrichstrasse, approaching without sirens since it was the middle of the night. He and Irina followed Peter around a corner to his car. As he started to drive, Peter monitored the police radio.

The responding officers had to locate the right address, then search four floors to find the bodies. There were no witnesses in the building. Arkady knew that possibly someone in an apartment across the street had noticed them leaving the building, but what was there to describe except two men and a woman seen from hundreds of feet away at an angle in the dark?

Peter said, “There’s nothing we can do about your finger- and footprints, they’re all over the apartment, but they won’t be easy to match. Your friend says she has no criminal record in Germany and there are no prints on you at all.”

“What about you?”

“I wiped the pistol and the clips, and I didn’t use my own gun.”

“That’s not what I meant. What about you?”

Peter drove for a while before he said, “There’s an official review every time you use a firearm. I don’t want to explain why I shot four men that I didn’t formally identify and warn. Through a wall? They could have been four visitors asking directions, collecting for Greenpeace or Mother Teresa.”

There was dust on Peter’s fingers. He wiped them on his shirt. “I don’t necessarily want to explain how I was helping my grandfather. This is a Russian gang war, I’m not going to let it turn into a public scandal about him.”

“If they do trace this to me, Federov knows your name,” Arkady said.

“With the coup, I think the consulate in Munich has more on its mind than me or you.”

On the police band, a dispatcher ordered ambulances to Friedrichstrasse. The urgency of the voice contrasted with the calm of the Tiergarten, the park’s rounded massing of shadow under morning stars.

Peter said, “You’ve lied to me from the start, but I have to admit that I’ve found out more from your lies than the lies I heard before. What is it about