"Wait." Vasiliev reached for the pack before it slid out of sight. "Wait." The thief 
placed the cigarettes back on the table, and Vasiliev covered them with one proprietorial 
hand. He looked up at his interrogator as he spoke.
    "The last time I heard, he was north of here. Up by Muranowski Square. You know it?" 
The thief nodded. It was not a region he relished visiting, but he knew it. "And how do I 
find him, once I get there?" he asked.
    The Russian looked perplexed by the question.
    "I don't even know what he looks like," the thief said, trying to make Vasiliev 
understand.
    "You won't need to find him," Vasiliev replied, understanding all too well. "If he 
wants you to play, he'll find you."
    
    3
    The next night, the first of many such nights, the thief had gone looking for the 
card-player. Though it was by now April, the weather was still bitter that year. He'd 
come back to his room in the partially demolished hotel he occupied numb with cold, 
frustration and-though he scarcely admitted it even to himself-fear. The region around 
Muranowski Square was a hell within a hell. Many of the bomb craters here let on to the 
sewers; the stench out of them was unmistakable. Others, used as fire pits to cremate 
executed citizens, still flared intermittently when a flame found a belly swollen with 
gas, or a pool of human fat. Every step taken in this new-found land was an adventure, 
even to the thief. Death, its forms multitudinous, waited everywhere. Sitting on the edge 
of a crater, warming its feet in the flames; standing, lunatic, amongst the refuse; at 
laughing play in a garden of bone and shrapnel.
    Fear notwithstanding, he'd returned to the district on several occasions; but the 
card-player eluded him. And with every failed attempt, with every journey that ended in 
defeat, the thief became more preoccupied with the pursuit. In his mind this faceless 
gambler began to take on something of the force of legend. Just to see the man in the 
flesh, to verify his physical existence in the same world that he, the thief, occupied, 
became an article of faith. A means, God help him, by which he could ratify his own 
existence After a week and a half of fruitless searching, he went back to find Vasiliev. 
The Russian was dead. His body, throat slit from ear to ear, had been found the previous 
day, floating facedown in one of the sewers the Army was clearing in Wola. He was not 
alone. There had been three other bodies with him, all slaughtered in a similar fashion, 
all set alight and burning like fire ships as they drifted down the tunnel on a river of 
excrement. One of the soldiers who had been in the sewer when the flotilla appeared told 
the thief that the bodies had seemed to float in the darkness. For a breathless moment it 
had been like the steady approach of angels.
    Then, of course, the horror. Extinguishing the burning corpses, their hair, their 
backs; then turning them over, and the face of Vasiliev, caught in the beam of a 
flashlight, carrying a look of wonder, like a child in awe of some lethal conjuror.
    His transfer papers had arrived that same afternoon.
    In fact the papers seemed to have been the cause of an administrative error that had 
closed Vasiliev's tragedy on a comic note. The bodies, once identified, had been buried 
in Warsaw, except for Second Lieutenant Vasiliev, whose war record demanded less cursory 
treatment. Plans were afoot to transport the body back to Mother Russia, where he would 
be buried with state honors in his hometown. But somebody, alighting upon the transfer 
papers, had taken them to apply to Vasiliev dead, not Vasiliev living. Mysteriously, the 
body disappeared. Nobody would admit responsibility: the corpse had simply been shipped 
out to some new posting.
    Vasiliev's death merely served to intensify the thief's curiosity. Mamoulian's 
arrogance fascinated him. Here was a scavenger, a man who made a living off the weakness 
of others, who had yet grown so insolent with success that he dared to murder-or have 
murdered on his behalf-those who crossed him. The thief became jittery with anticipation. 
In his dreams, when he was able to sleep, he wandered in Muranowski Square. It was filled 
with a fog like a living thing, which promised at any moment to divide and reveal the 
card-player. He was like a man in love.
    
    4
    Tonight, the ceiling of squalid cloud above Europe had broken: blue, albeit pale, had 
spread over his head, wider and wider. Now, toward evening, the sky was absolutely clear 
above him. In the southwest vast cumulus, their cauliflower heads tinted ocher and gold, 
were fattening with thunder, but the thought of their anger only excited him. Tonight, 
the air was electric, and he would find the card-player, he was sure. He had been sure 
since he woke that morning.
    As evening began to fall he went north toward the square, scarcely thinking of where 
he was going, the route was so familiar to him. He walked through two checkpoints without 
being challenged, the confidence in his step password enough. Tonight he was inevitable. 
His place here, breathing the scented, lilac air, stars glimmering at his zenith, was 
unassailable. He felt static run in the hairs on the back of his hand, and smiled. He saw 
a man, something unrecognizable in his arms, screaming at a window, and smiled. Not far 
away, the Vistula, gross with rain and melt-water, roared toward the sea. He was no less 
irresistible.
    The gold went out of the cumulus; the lucid blue darkened toward night.
    As he was about to come into Muranowski Square something flickered in front of him, a 
twist of wind scooted past him, and the air was suddenly full of white confetti. 
Impossible, surely, that there was a wedding taking place here? One of the whirling 
fragments lodged on his eyelash, and he plucked it off. It wasn't confetti at all: it was 
a petal. He pressed it between thumb and forefinger. Its scented oil spilled from the 
fractured tissue.
    In search of the source, he walked on a little way, and rounding the corner into the 
square itself discovered the ghost of a tree, prodigious with blossom, hanging in the 
air. It seemed unrooted, its snow-head lit by starlight, its trunk shadowy. He held his 
breath, shocked by this beauty, and walked toward it as he might have approached a wild 
animal, cautious in case it took fright. Something turned his stomach over. It wasn't awe 
of the blossom, or even the remnants of the joy he'd felt walking here. That was slipping 
away. A different sensation gripped him here in the square.
    He was a man so used to atrocities that he had long counted himself unblanchable. So 
why did he stand now a few feet away from the tree, his fingernails, meticulously kept, 
pressed into his palms with anxiety, defying the umbrella of flowers to unveil its worst? 
There was nothing to fear here. Just petals in the air, shadow on the ground. And still 
he breathed shallowly, hoping against hope that his fright was baseless.
    Come on, he thought, if you've got something to show me, I'm waiting.
    At his silent invitation two things happened. Behind him a guttural voice asked: "Who 
are you?" in Polish. Distracted for the merest heartbeat by surprise, his eyes lost focus 
on the tree, and in that instant a figure dislodged itself from beneath the 
blossom-weighed branches and slouched, momentarily, into the starlight. In the cheating 
murk the thief wasn't certain what he saw: a discarded face looking blankly in his 
direction perhaps, hair seared off. A scabby carcass, wide as a bull's. Vasiliev's vast 
hands.