In 1936 Gorky died. “No one will protect me now,” Babel told his wife. Three years later, he was arrested, interrogated, tortured, and shot. He was forty years old.

I still remember—how well I remember—looking out the window of that train. We were blazing down the final stretch of rail before Baltimore, toward the roads and multitudinous lacrosse fields and the late-night ice cream shop of my youth; Ali was going to meet me at the train station in exchange for a six-pack of beer. No one would ever arrest me at my house, take me to the basement of Lubyanka, and shoot me in the back of the head. Nonetheless I knew what Morris’s book was telling me, what the book he never finished was telling me. In that train, on those rails, some premonition of the truth brushed against my side.