Yon Mandelstem was just past Building One of the four 14-floor concrete high-rise apartment buildings known to their older tenants as the Friedrich Engels Quartet when the rain abruptly stopped. It had lasted no more than a minute or two, and the sky was already clearing. A huge plane that had just taken off from the Sheremetyevo International Airport boomed overhead.

Yon Mandelstem continued, feet splashing in puddles, toward his goal, Building Two.

A few people emerged from the buildings and looked up at the clouds, which thundered a farewell and moved west, away from Moscow.

Opening the door was awkward. He could not put his case down on the wet ground, but it was difficult to open the heavy door with only one hand. Fortunately, someone came to his rescue and pushed it open.

"It stopped raining?" asked the woman who had opened the door as she stepped back to let Yon enter.

"Yes," Yon answered, removing his glasses, panting slightly.

In the dim light of the narrow hallway, Yon now recognized the woman. She was in her late thirties, possibly even forty, dark, made up, and wearing a blue dress with white flowers.

"I don't want to get my hair, my dress, wet," she said. "It's so… You just moved on ten? I've seen you."

"Yes," he said. There were no elevators in the Engels Quartet. In fact, there was not much to recommend the buildings or the series of slightly lower apartment buildings constructed in the 1950s and 1960s in the area. The service was terrible, worse since the reforms, for not even political pressure could get the repairmen to work. The airport was too close, and the flight patterns went directly over this section. Still, one was lucky to get an apartment, and Yon knew he would not have gotten his if he did not have special connections.