The Brothers

Map: The Failed Escape

Four COMING TO AMERICA

Many media accounts of the Tsarnaev story have hinted or simply stated that they lied to get into the United States, that they never should have been granted asylum—indeed, that had the asylum process worked as it should, weeding the worthy victims from the dangerous ones, a tragedy could have been averted. In fact, the Tsarnaevs typified asylum seekers in America, and the process in their case worked as well, or as poorly, as it does the vast majority of the time. Future asylum seekers usually come to the United States on visitors’ visas and then, relying on a network of family and friends, try to make ends meet, not quite legally, while they apply for asylum. And yes, they usually lie, or at least embellish.

Making your case to the immigration authorities is different from making a case in court: rather than tell a coherent story, you, the asylum seeker, tell of everything that has gone wrong in your life—at least the things that went wrong that the asylum officer might find worthy of notice. You exaggerate, you mold your story to fit the requirements. It probably would not work to tell the officer that you were born in a country where you could never be a full citizen, a country that then broke apart into several others, which you crisscrossed trying to find a home and could not, and so you came to America. Instead, you have to say that you have been subjected to persecution based on your ethnic origin and you are fleeing a war. The Tsarnaevs did just that: they relied on the war in Chechnya and the ethnic discrimination in Kyrgyzstan to establish their credentials. Anzor appears to have claimed that he was briefly jailed and tortured in Kyrgyzstan as part of a broad anti-Chechen crackdown. He may indeed have been detained in Kyrgyzstan toward the end of his time there, though this was most likely to have been connected to his work for Jamal’s business. It would have been much too complicated to try to explain to an asylum officer that the Chechens’ very existence on the permanent wrong side of the law in Kyrgyzstan and elsewhere was a function of generations of disenfranchisement. Anzor could be said to have used shorthand.

THE TWO CHECHEN WARS, the one in the mid-1990s and the one that began in 1999, displaced hundreds of thousands of people. Many of them stayed in the former Soviet Union, joining relatives in Central Asia or Russia. Tens of thousands sought refuge in countries of the European Union, where they often spent years in refugee camps. Very few made it all the way to the United States. The people who came were not always the ones who most needed to escape: they were the ones most capable of escaping. “With any country early on in a conflict, the people who claim asylum first are usually the elites or people who don’t actually live there,” says Almut Rochowanski, a Columbia University legal scholar who in the early 2000s started an organization that helped new Chechen refugees find legal representation, although she herself was born in Austria and had no personal connection to Chechnya until research and human rights work took her there. The first Chechen refugees to arrive in the United States were members of the Dudaev pro-independence government and Chechens from Central Asia. Later came the people whose family members had been disappeared by the Russian authorities or the Chechen fighters. In refugee camps and in tiny Chechen communities that formed abroad, they often mixed with people who had actually been fighters—making for messy alliances at best and open conflict at worst.

The Chechen community in and around Boston numbers only a handful of families. This was the community that Anzor and Zubeidat joined when they came. It also happens to come close to representing the entire range of the Chechen immigrant experience in the United States. Makhmud Mazaev was probably the first to arrive—in 1994, just as the war was about to break out. He had been a urologist in Grozny, but learned upon arrival in the United States that he was too old to requalify as a doctor. He got a nursing certificate and worked as a visiting nurse. Later he created a thriving business, a day center for elderly Russian speakers. It is called Zdorovye, the Russian word for “health.” In the morning a half-dozen Zdorovye vans make the rounds of several Boston neighborhoods, collecting elderly people who are well enough to live on their own but not to care for themselves during the day. Zdorovye attends to their meals, tracks their medical appointments, and celebrates their birthdays with them. Mazaev is the classic—and rare—example of a successfully assimilated Chechen refugee. He goes by the name Max; his American-born son, Baudy, who is about Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s age, is a student at competitive Boston University; and he has friends in Boston’s large community of Russian-speaking Jews, from which he draws most of his clientele. One friend is a younger Russian Jewish doctor who often joins Mazaev on trips to New Hampshire, just an hour’s drive north, where Mazaev likes to go for target practice: even an assimilated Chechen man wants to get his shooting done, and the range in New Hampshire is the only open-air one in the area.

Not far from the shooting range, in a ground-floor apartment in a complex in Manchester, New Hampshire, lives Mazaev’s cousin Musa Khadzhimuratov, an entirely different kind of Chechen refugee. Khadzhimuratov joined the war effort in Chechnya as a teenager and in a few years became the head of security for Akhmed Zakayev, a former actor who served as foreign minister in the separatist government. At the beginning of the second war, a wounded Zakayev fled Chechnya—he would later be granted political asylum in the United Kingdom—and Khadzhimuratov went into hiding. Russian troops found him, shot him, and left him for dead. He survived. His family moved him to Azerbaijan, where he underwent a series of operations. He is paralyzed from the waist down, he lacks sensation in eighty percent of his body, he has frequent petit mal seizures, and he requires around-the-clock care, but he is alive. Khadzhimuratov, his wife, Madina, and their two small children were brought to the United States by a refugee foundation, on a plane with one other family from Chechnya and a score of families fleeing Afghanistan. The Khadzhimuratovs landed in New Hampshire by accident—they had been told they were going to the Boston suburb of Chelsea, where one Chechen family already lived, but were rerouted at the last minute to what they thought was Manhattan but turned out to be Manchester. They were placed in a second-floor apartment that had a hallway with a step in it, which meant that Khadzhimuratov could not make it from the bedroom to the bathroom. The entire family stayed in the living room, with Khadzhimuratov and his son sleeping on a mattress on the floor and Madina and their daughter sleeping in armchairs. By the time they found a ground-floor, wheelchair-accessible apartment a few weeks later, they did not want to think of changing cities. The Khadzhimuratovs live on public assistance, but perhaps because the relative isolation of New Hampshire requires this, they have also assimilated to a significant extent. Their spotless two-bedroom apartment is as open as any traditional Chechen home: the kids of the Sudanese family from upstairs come here after school with the Khadzhimuratov children and never leave; a retired American named Jim, who lost all ties to his family after a bitter divorce, has adopted the Khadzhimuratovs, or has been adopted by them—he is here every afternoon. Madina, on whom Khadzhimuratov is dependent for constant care, shows none of the deference traditional for a Chechen woman. She sits at the table with everyone else and interrupts with laughter and even with the occasional correction.

That other family from the Khadzhimuratovs’ plane made it to Chelsea, making a total of two Chechen families in that suburb. They were a middle-aged woman, her son, his wife, and their toddler daughter: the woman’s husband and her other son had been taken away by Russian security services and never returned. The other Chelsea family was that of Hamzat Umarov, his wife, Raisa, and their seven small children, who had come by way of a refugee camp in Turkey—and before that, they had crossed the border from Chechnya on foot, at the height of the fighting. An equally dramatic escape story belongs to the Boston Chechen community’s celebrity, Khassan Baiev. Before the first war, Baiev was an up-and-coming plastic surgeon with a profitable practice in Grozny and a side business not unlike Jamal Tsarnaev’s. During the war he ran a field hospital where, he says, he treated the wounded from all sides. At the start of the second war he was targeted, ostensibly for having aided the rebels. A human rights organization virtually smuggled him out of Russia and helped him apply for asylum in the United States; eventually he was able to bring his wife and three children over. Like Mazaev, Baiev concluded he would be unable to be recertified as a doctor in the United States. He tried to volunteer at a hospital. He wrote a memoir with the help of a Boston journalism professor who had once been posted to Moscow. Eventually, after the war ended, he drifted back to Russia, where he now once again has a lucrative plastic surgery practice, which keeps him in ostentatiously expensive clothes and his family living in the middle-class Boston suburb of Needham, in a cul-de-sac with a playground in the middle.

When the Tsarnaevs arrived in Boston, the two doctors’ families—the Mazaevs and the Baievs—were already there, as was Hamzat Umarov’s large family in Chelsea. The others had not yet arrived. The Tsarnaevs’ timing was as bad as it had ever been: they landed in America precisely at the moment when they and their kind were seen as most suspect.

AMERICAN SOCIETY, perhaps more than some others, goes through distinct cycles, separated by shifts in the national psyche. But to a new immigrant, nothing was here before—and there is no inkling that things will be different after. There is only the mood of the present moment, and this mood becomes what America feels like. The Tsarnaevs arrived a few months after the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington had united Americans in fear.

The family had plenty of experience with the power of tragedy to bring a nation together. They had seen this most recently in Russia, in August and September 1999. On three nights bombs had gone off in apartment buildings, burying people under the rubble in their sleep. More than three hundred people died, and Russia, gripped by terror, quickly turned against the Chechens, who were blamed for the attacks. Chechen men throughout Russia were rounded up, Chechen children were hounded out of school, Chechen families were chased out of their homes. The war in Dagestan started. What was now happening in the United States did not look very different: there were the witch hunts, and there was the punitive war in a faraway abstraction of a land. It was called, tellingly and absurdly, the War on Terror, an emotion all nations would like to declare war against if only that were possible. Instead, they waged war on the Muslims. It was always the Muslims.

The Tsarnaevs came to this land, terrorized by the specter of terrorism, from a land and a moment where terrorism looked markedly different. For Americans, terrorism seemed to come from nowhere and to attack them for no reason. In Russia, the first terrorist act that shook the country in the 1990s had been a direct consequence of the war in Chechnya. In June 1995 rebel field commander Shamil Basayev led his troops across the Chechen border into the predominantly ethnic-Russian Stavropol region and seized over six hundred hostages in a civilian hospital and in the surrounding area. This hostage-taking is almost certainly unique in modern terrorist history: first, because most of the hostages survived but were not freed by force; second, and most incredible, because this act of terrorism accomplished its avowed goal.

Russian prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin negotiated with Basayev over the phone, and some of the negotiations were caught on tape by Russian television reporters. Chernomyrdin sounded desperate. In the end he negotiated the release of most of the hostages—except for a busload of volunteers, most of them journalists and human rights activists, whom Basayev would take to Chechnya. They were to be released once Russia pulled back its troops and sat down to negotiate with the rebels. This happened.

The second major act of terrorism that originated in Chechnya (not counting the apartment bombings in 1999 that had almost certainly been falsely blamed on the Chechens) occurred less than a year after the Tsarnaevs arrived in Boston. On October 23, 2002, a group of men and women led by a twenty-three-year-old Chechen commander named Movsar Barayev seized a large Moscow theater during a musical performance, taking about eight hundred hostages. The standoff lasted three days. On Day Two, Khassan Baiev, the plastic surgeon now living in Boston, was called upon to negotiate with the hostage-takers over the phone, to try to secure the release of some of the hostages. He tried and failed. Earlier, a number of other people, including several journalists, had also talked with the hostage-takers, and some even managed to enter the theater; young children and non-Russian citizens had been released as a result.

The standoff ended on Day Three with a military operation that was as well conceived as it was spectacularly botched in execution. First, sleeping gas was pumped into the building through its plumbing system, knocking out everyone inside. Russian armed personnel rushed in. They shot dead all the sleeping hostage-takers, making a subsequent investigation impossible. Then they carried the unconscious hostages out and laid them on the porch of the theater, where none of them received prompt medical help. One hundred twenty-nine people died, most of them choking on their own vomit or asphyxiating because they were placed in a way that blocked their breathing.

The tragedy, so clearly created through negligence and, on a more basic level, so clearly a result of the continuing war in Chechnya, drew comparatively little media coverage and virtually no political attention in the United States. After September 11, America had stopped criticizing Russia for waging war in Chechnya. In the post-9/11 era, Russia got to reframe Chechnya, and the continuing bloodshed in Dagestan, as part of a war it was now fighting alongside the United States—the war against radical Islamist terrorists. The United States and Russia agreed to share information on the Islamist threat. Tokmok appeared on the map of the world, and of American–Russian relations: for eight years starting in December 2001, United States military planes would be taking off from Manas Air Base just outside Tokmok—by agreement with Kyrgyzstan and with Moscow’s acquiescence.

In this new era, when the United States stopped viewing Chechen rebels as freedom fighters and started seeing them through Russian optics, as likely Islamic terrorists, a new regulation blocked anyone who had provided “material support” to any of the extralegal fighters from receiving refugee status and a green card.

Musa Khadzhimuratov, though he came over as a refugee, would never be issued his green card. Had this regulation been in effect earlier, it could also have applied to Ruslan Tsarnaev, who at one point after moving to the United States started a group of Chechen exiles who may or may not have had ties to the pro-independence forces. Fortunately for Ruslan, by the time the new regulation went into effect, he was a full United States citizen.

RUSLAN’S AMERICANNESS had cost him a great deal. When he first moved to the United States with his wife, they lived in her parents’ house in Washington state. Graham Fuller, a former high-level CIA official, was a onetime Russia scholar, an expert on Islam, and a charming, enthusiastic talker. He and Ruslan spoke Russian with each other. But other than talking with his father-in-law while Samantha worked on her business-school applications, Ruslan did one of two things: he tried to master English by memorizing his way through a Russian–English dictionary, ignoring Graham Fuller’s counsel that this was no way to learn a language, and he sat on a couch in the basement, watching, over and over again, the same videotape of a Chechen celebration with Lezghinka, which they used to dance every night back in Bishkek. Eventually he began making contact with other Chechens in America, and he even registered his new organization at Fuller’s address. This activity brought him back to life, but by this time his marriage had collapsed.

His sister Maret’s marriage also ended, though once she arrived in Canada it began to appear that she had planned this all along, that her husband had been merely a means of transporting her across the Atlantic. All is fair in immigration. Except one thing: You never talk about the pain of dislocation. You do not describe the way color drains out of everyday life when nothing is familiar, how the texture of living seems to disappear. You breathe not a word of no longer knowing who you are, where you are going, with whom, and why—and the unique existential dread of that condition. Most important, you never question your decision: from the moment you cross the border, there is only ever the future.

Most immigrants eventually come out the other side, as Ruslan did. He completed his studies at Duke, married a Chechen woman he met in the United States, and eventually took a job in Kazakhstan, as an American, intending to return to the United States. He was now in a position to help his siblings. When his elder sister, Malkan, divorced as well, he took in her children, and he also offered to temporarily take Anzor and Zubeidat’s children while they engineered their move to America. Going to the United States, Ruslan was more certain than ever, was what they should do—if they wanted their children to have a future.

Tamerlan and the girls, Bella and Ailina, went to Kazakhstan to stay with Ruslan. In the Chechen tradition, it is the older brother who is the boss and caretaker of the family, but a big part of becoming a successful immigrant is knowing when to choose pragmatism over tradition: both Anzor and Ruslan would have to accept the reversal of family roles. Anzor, Zubeidat, and eight-year-old Dzhokhar traveled to the United States on tourist visas. They chose Boston because Maret and Alvi were both there at the moment. Neither had a stable living arrangement, however, so at first the newcomers stayed with Khassan Baiev, with whom Maret had become very close when he first came to the United States.

Dzhokhar started attending second grade at the public school where two of the Baiev children, Islam and Maryam, went. Max Mazaev helped Anzor get a few odd jobs. The family applied for asylum—once it was granted, it would extend to their other children, who would then be able to move to the United States. In April 2002, Anzor and Zubeidat found an inexpensive apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Over the next ten years, it would witness the slow and catastrophic demise of a whole set of immigrant dreams.

Five A DECADE OF BROKEN DREAMS

For a new immigrant, the simplest and smallest of life’s obstacles can be insurmountable. Take, for example, this scenario: You are an asylum seeker looking to rent an apartment over the months it takes to assemble your case. You are in the United States on a visitor’s visa. You have no credit history, no pay stubs, no tax returns to show to a potential landlord. You also have no way to tell the good from the bad, the normal from the crooked. You get swindled by brokers, pay out a fortune in application fees, get your hopes up, get your hopes dashed, lower your standards, and ultimately understand you just have to hope for a miracle.

Joanna Herlihy was the Tsarnaevs’ miracle. She was sixty-eight when they met—the youngest of her four children was roughly the same age as Anzor and Zubeidat—and for most of her adult life she had been trying to save the world. With a first marriage behind her, and once her children did not need her at home, she had joined the Peace Corps. She was a fixture of city politics in Cambridge, where she now lived. At the time Anzor and Zubeidat met her, she was taking care of one aging ex-husband (her second), and her grown children continued to drift in and out of her house.

She had bought the house in 1994 for the very low price of $45,000, at a foreclosure auction. It was what Bostonians call a three-family, a wooden three-story house with one long apartment on each floor. Three-families are common to the working-class neighborhoods—Dorchester, Jamaica Plain, Somerville. With postage-stamp-sized yards and on-street parking only, they used to represent cheap and unambitious city living. The house sat right on the Cambridge–Somerville city line, on the Cambridge side. It was modest even by three-family standards: it was built in the back of a shared lot and lacked the porches and small balconies typical of such buildings. When Joanna bought it, it was uninhabitable: it had not been heated, and the pipes had burst all over the house, causing extensive water damage. But it was also a three-apartment building in a city where property values were about to skyrocket: Cambridge would soon make every list of America’s overpriced cities. Over the next few years, Norfolk Street, which was an orphaned corner of Cambridge when Joanna bought the building, would shed its many junkyards and acquire more condominium complexes than a street so small could be expected to fit. She gradually replaced the plumbing and rectified the worst of the damage. She lived on the first floor, and eventually rented out the top two floors at below-market prices, ensuring that at least two units of Cambridge housing remained affordable.

Maret heard about the apartment from Khassan Baiev, who had probably heard about it from the journalist with whom he had written his memoir, a member of Cambridge’s loose network of Russophile intellectuals. Joanna had studied Russian at the University of Chicago, where she had earned her bachelor’s degree while still in her teens, like another precocious coed there, Susan Sontag. Joanna’s first husband was Alexander Lipson, a brilliant linguist and an inventive teacher of Russian who had taught out of their Cambridge home and taken his students, and his wife, by Volkswagen bus on tours of the entire Soviet Union, including Central Asia.

The third-floor apartment was not, strictly speaking, available for rent: the walls, which Joanna had repositioned, were unfinished. Maret, who was in charge of the negotiations, said the Tsarnaevs would happily finish the improvements themselves—they were just desperate for a place to live, now. They could have the apartment for eight hundred dollars, easily a third below the market rate. There were three bedrooms, all of them small, but Anzor and Zubeidat could move right in along with Maret and Alvi, even though they were likely soon to be joined by their children. Indeed, from the moment Joanna met the Tsarnaevs, she passionately wanted them to live in her home. She seemed—as they surely sensed—uniquely positioned to help them. She got them: she spoke Russian, she had seen where they came from, she had even studied Sufism. And she was primed to see the Tsarnaevs exactly as they wanted to be seen.

They presented themselves as having studied law. Anzor said he had worked in the prosecutor’s office. They were fleeing ethnic strife. They were clearly modern people, Zubeidat with her low-cut dresses and elaborate makeup, Anzor with his clean-shaven face and athlete’s body. That they were separated from their children—even Dzhokhar, whom they left at the Baievs’ for the moment, so as not to interrupt his schooling midyear—was a measure of the gravity of their situation. And they manifested an anger about the injustices of the world that was not unlike Joanna’s own. They were, as she was, at once profoundly disappointed by the world and stubbornly looking for a way to live on their own terms. Anzor and Zubeidat also saw a kindred spirit: a beautiful, odd bird. Joanna had the body and the physical energy of a woman half her age. She wore skirts and leather sandals, and her long hair was undyed—it still had some natural blond streaks in it. To the Tsarnaevs, who were always finely attuned to the aesthetics of their situation, to encounter in Joanna’s manner and appearance some of their own distinctiveness seemed fateful.

FOR ALL of Joanna’s commitment to community, when the Tsarnaevs arrived, the house was a collection of single, separate people. Two or three unmarried men from Tanzania lived on the second floor. Friends and acquaintances of Joanna and her children set up camp, often semipermanently, in this building and in another property she owned. Joanna kept power tools in the kitchen. Taking in all of that, and the coming and going of Joanna’s children, Zubeidat saw a woman who had a clan, much as the Chechens had clans, but who lacked the skills to manage it. Zubeidat started inviting the landlady up for tea. Gradually they started having communal meals. Zubeidat and Anzor told their stories. Joanna reacted with compassion and appropriate outrage and, often, proposed solutions.

Reinventing your own story is one of the benefits and requirements of immigration. It was natural and even right that Anzor and Zubeidat would skew and embellish their narrative to make it more intelligible and compelling to an American, and to gain a foothold at a higher station in their new life. Zubeidat said that she might apply to Harvard Law School. Joanna took her, along with Max Mazaev’s wife, Anna, to an Amnesty International event at which the Russian human-rights group Memorial presented its findings on Chechnya. Afterward, Zubeidat volunteered to translate some of the documents—a gesture that got her a Harvard Law School ID, though no pay. This affiliation did not last long: Zubeidat’s remarkable aptitude for languages made her an able interpreter, but she lacked the formal education that would have been required to translate human-rights documentation accurately. Joanna suggested a Harvard Extension School course on negotiation, and most likely paid for it. Zubeidat dropped the course after the unit on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

For Anzor, Zubeidat, Maret, and Alvi, it was a strange period of living as a family of adults, with all their children farmed out. Maret ran the household, taking charge even of her brothers’ work negotiations: she was a woman, yes, but she was the eldest—and then, this was not Chechnya. Dzhokhar was still staying at the Baievs’ and spent only the weekends at Norfolk Street, and the rest of Anzor and Zubeidat’s children, along with Alvi’s, were in Central Asia, waiting to be brought over. Most of Joanna’s conversations with the family focused on the mechanics of getting everyone to the United States. She tried to help Alvi’s wife, Zhanar, and their two children, Aindy and Luiza, get visas. The attempt failed, and soon after, Alvi divorced Zhanar and moved out of the house, starting a journey around the United States in search of a place where he would want to live; he eventually settled in Maryland. Back in Almaty, Ruslan, who was still taking care of Anzor and Zubeidat’s three older children, adopted Aindy. Ruslan’s own children were in Brighton, a Boston neighborhood, with their mother, who was about to give birth to a third child. Maret went to stay across the Charles River with them.

When the school year was over, Dzhokhar came to live with his parents on Norfolk Street. He was already a different kid. The Baievs were strict about speaking only Chechen in the house, and Dzhokhar had barely understood a word. The Baiev children—Maryam, who was Dzhokhar’s age, and Islam, who was a year younger—understood Dzhokhar when he spoke Russian but tended to switch into English whenever their parents were out of earshot. Before he left the Baiev house, Dzhokhar was already speaking English with the other kids—an extraordinarily fast accomplishment, even for an eight-year-old. He had also already become part of the community of Chechen seven-to-nine-year-olds in Boston: the Baiev kids, the Umarov kids, and the Mazaev kids, with whom he spent much of the summer of 2002, before entering third grade at a Cambridge public school. He would be bumped up to fourth grade before the school year was over.

For roughly the first year in the United States, an asylum applicant has no right to seek employment or to ask for public assistance. Anzor and Zubeidat were probably making rent with Ruslan’s help. Little by little, Anzor started getting under-the-table work fixing cars. He charged ten dollars an hour, and part of that went to one or another of the neighborhood garages in return for temporary work space. Zubeidat focused on her English: she made fast progress, unlike her husband, who would never really learn to speak this new language. Once she received her work authorization, in 2003, she followed Max Mazaev’s recommendation to look for work as a personal-care attendant. He connected her with the people who would become her first clients, and she would work for some of them for many years. It was unattractive but honorable work, the work Max Mazaev himself did for years before launching his adult-care center.

By mid-2003, the Tsarnaevs were granted asylum in the United States. Bella, Ailina, and Tamerlan were now entitled to visas. Maret traveled to Kazakhstan to collect the children and travel with them to Istanbul, where they stayed with friends while their U.S. papers were processed. She then brought them to Boston and left for Toronto, where she would finalize her divorce and embark on a career as an immigration lawyer.

A YEAR AND A HALF after Zubeidat and Anzor arrived in the United States with Dzhokhar, the family was reunited and looked, finally, like it was on solid ground. The Tsarnaevs’ housing was guaranteed, thanks to their landlady and the federal government. Official asylee status meant that they could apply for public assistance, and they qualified for Section 8, a federal housing subsidy program for low-income families. Anzor and Zubeidat were both working—hard, low-paying, typical recent-immigrant work. The additional adults were gone from the house, and the kids were all in one place—Dzhokhar, who was now practically an American child, and the three disoriented newly arrived Chechen teenagers from Almaty.

Immigrant families often suffer from a sort of inversion: kids stop being kids, because the adults have lost their bearings. The kids do not turn into competent adults overnight; they go through a period of intense suffering and dislocation made all the more painful for being forced and unexpected. But at the other end of the pain, they locate their roles and settle into them, claiming their places in the new world.

Dzhokhar’s role was that of the sweet kid, the kid everyone loves. All the descriptions of him that have emerged from conversations with people who knew him, including people who cared for him deeply, are spectacular in their flatness. Those who watched him from a distance describe him as a social superstar. To those who thought they got closer, he was charming. Indeed, charm appears to be his sole distinguishing personality trait. Teachers thought he was bright but uninterested in thinking for himself. Dzhokhar was the kid who said the things that made others like him. Many of the articles that have been published since the Boston Marathon bombing have noted that Anzor and Zubeidat did not attend Dzhokhar’s wrestling matches, or his graduation from middle school—as though those absences signified notably grievous parental neglect. But Dzhokhar did not need his parents there and he probably did not want them there. Anzor and Zubeidat’s presence had a lot of weight and texture, entirely unsuitable for a boy making his way in the world as a sweet, weightless cloud. Joanna—American, sociable, quintessentially Cambridge—attended Dzhokhar’s graduation from middle school.

In 2003, Dzhokhar entered fifth grade, which was appropriate for his age. Ailina, at thirteen, and Bella, at fifteen, were older than most of their new seventh- and ninth-grade classmates. Tamerlan, entering tenth grade as he neared his seventeenth birthday, was a giant among sophomores—but this was his chance to prepare for college. Tamerlan and Bella started at the city’s only public high school, Cambridge Rindge and Latin. The school has an odd hybrid identity: it is a large urban high school with a pervading hippie ethos—the legacy of the many progressive teachers who have shaped it over the years. It maintains a distinct cult of itself. Its students seem, with a few exceptions, to hew to a powerful collective identity as residents of the special brilliant society of Cambridge and as students of an outstandingly diverse school. At the same time, Harvard and MIT professors, on whose presence so much of Cambridge pride is predicated, send their children to private schools. Cambridge Rindge and Latin’s genuine diversity comes courtesy of immigrant and poor populations: a third of the students come from low-income families, a third speak English as their second language, and only a third are white. For test scores, the school ranks at 213 out of the state’s 347 public high schools.

Joanna took the family to performances and movies and loaned them DVDs. Zubeidat suggested that The Chronicles of Narnia was an allegory about Chechnya. The landlady tutored all three teenagers in English; Ailina picked up the language as fast as she learned the habit of riding her bicycle to school, but Bella and Tamerlan, who would never shed their accents, were placed in English-as-a-second-language classes at Rindge. Tamerlan was also trying to teach himself English by reading Sherlock Holmes stories, which had been popularized in the former Soviet Union by excellent translations and a series of inspired short films. It may not have been as masochistic as Uncle Ruslan’s dictionary-based approach, but it was just as transparently self-defeating. Consider this single sentence from “The Adventure of the Speckled Band,” arguably the most famous of Conan Doyle’s stories among Russians: “‘Alas!’ replied our visitor, ‘the very horror of my situation lies in the fact that my fears are so vague, and my suspicions depend so entirely upon small points, which might seem trivial to another, that even he to whom of all others I have a right to look for help and advice looks upon all that I tell him about it as the fancies of a nervous woman.’”

THE BIG QUESTION facing the family was how to make Tamerlan succeed. One look at him and you knew he was destined for greatness—an impression confirmed by people outside the family. The physical grace of his large body, and his sharp features and large dark eyes, turned heads and messed with them. But he had lived in seven cities and attended an even greater number of schools. True, he could play keyboard and aspired to good grades, but with his late start in America, how was he to assert his potential? Anzor and Zubeidat did what immigrants do: they asked others for advice. They were lectured on the relative merits of different colleges, and learned that even the public ones carried a frightening price tag. They sorted through lists of possible professions. Would their golden boy be an engineer, a performer, an entrepreneur?

Khassan Baiev suggested martial arts. It was a terrible suggestion. If Almut Rochowanski, the legal scholar who founded the group for Chechen refugees, were to classify immigrants from the Caucasus, she just might divide them into two groups: those who push their male children into martial arts and those who do not. It is the second group that will succeed; the first group’s assumptions come from the old country. Back in the Caucasus, if you took at least one national title in wrestling, boxing, or any other fighting sport, you were set for life. In return for the honor you brought your region, you would get a gym of your own to run and, more often than not, a seat on one of the so-called legislative bodies. In the United States, a martial-arts career was generally a dead end, one that would leave a man cocky, injured, unemployed, and unassimilated by his late twenties.

Khassan Baiev’s own experience was exceptional, but neither he nor Anzor and Zubeidat knew this. He had been a man with a career in Russia, then a man with money, then, in Chechnya, a man with a mission. In the United States, he was a man with a tragic and glorious past and too much time on his hands. He tried volunteering at a Boston-area hospital and quickly despaired of ever building a medical career in the United States; he also grew profoundly disillusioned with the American medical system. Then a friend suggested he try competing in sambo again—the sport had once helped him overcome discriminatory Soviet university admissions policies and set him on his way to becoming a doctor. Again it worked a miracle. Baiev became a champion in his early forties. It did not exactly lead to making a good life in the United States—he ended up starting a practice in Russia and supporting his family’s neat middle-class Boston life from there—but for him martial arts were a proven magic bullet. What is more, this was the one thing Anzor could do for his son in the new country: he started training Tamerlan in boxing.

Tamerlan was a naturally gifted fighter, if an unconventional one—though it is impossible to tell whether his unusual stance came naturally or was the result of Anzor’s training. Rather than defend his body and face while he boxed, he let his long arms hang down. He could look overconfident if he was winning, which he often was, or vulnerable, literally unguarded, if he was beaten, which happened rarely. After training with Anzor at home, he worked his way through a series of Boston-area gyms to the Wai Kru Mixed Martial Arts center in the neighborhood of Allston, just across the river from Cambridge. When he first showed up, he had no mouthpiece, helmet, or other standard protective gear and insisted that he did not need them. This suggested to the owner that Tamerlan was either a buffoon or a boxing genius; with time, it seems, he concluded that the boy was a bit of each.

One of the few documents of Tamerlan’s life to have become public before his crime and his death is a photo essay shot by a young man named Johannes Hirn in 2009 and published in a Boston University graduate student magazine the next year. Titled “Will Box for Passport,” it offers a tellingly inaccurate narrative: Tamerlan says his goal is to make the U.S. Olympic team and become a naturalized citizen that way—though as an asylee, he should have qualified for citizenship anyway. He also says, “I don’t have a single American friend. I don’t understand them,” though his best friend at the time, former classmate Brendan Mess, was an American. He also claims to be from Chechnya and to have fled it with his family in the early nineties, when the fighting broke out. None of this is gravely untrue, but all of it is a sort of shorthand for a story he had come to tell about himself, one in which he was a stranger in a strange land and boxing his only hope. The photographer seems to have had an inkling that Tamerlan’s self-presentation was not entirely accurate. One large black-and-white picture in the spread shows him wearing high-tops, chinos, and no shirt, smiling while sparring with a young woman. The caption reads: “Tsarnaev says he doesn’t usually remove his shirt when among women at the gym.”

The strange thing about Anzor and Tamerlan’s outsize ambition for Tamerlan’s boxing career—the plans for stardom and for a spot on the Olympic team, if not the expectation of Hollywood-style prosperity to follow—was that it was not entirely unreasonable. With his ability, training, and drive, Tamerlan could have had an Olympic career. But he did not.

His first victory came in January 2004, just six months after coming to the United States: he won in the 178-pound novice class in the Golden Gloves amateur competition in Lowell, Massachusetts. He got a trophy and gave an interview to the Lowell Sun. “I like the USA,” he said. “You have a chance to make a lot of money here if you are willing to work.” He had not yet seen anyone who had actually made money in the United States, but this was what he had been told. He started climbing quickly but dropped boxing abruptly during his senior year of high school—he needed to concentrate on academics in order to graduate.

In 2006 he started at Bunker Hill Community College, a lonely sixties building perched at the intersection of two highways in Charlestown, near the boundary with Cambridge. This two-year college, which he attended part-time, was not what anyone had imagined in Tamerlan’s brilliant future. He did not return to competing until 2008—but when he did, his boxing prospects again began to shine. In 2009 he made it to the national amateur boxing competition in Salt Lake City. The next year, he got the Rocky Marciano Trophy for winning the New England Golden Gloves competition. He did not, however, go on to the nationals that year: the federation had changed its rules, and noncitizens were now excluded. After that, he let his amateur boxing registration lapse.

There is a footnote to Tamerlan’s boxing career. More than a year after it was over, he called Musa Khadzhimuratov, the paraplegic former bodyguard living in New Hampshire, and said he was traveling to a competition, flying out of Manchester, New Hampshire, and wanted to leave his car with Khadzhimuratov. “He had a cold,” Khadzhimuratov told me later. “I noticed on the way to the airport how bad it was. I said, ‘They are not going to let you compete in that condition, there is no point in getting on the airplane.’” They stopped at a drugstore and loaded up on antihistamines and decongestants. When Tamerlan returned a few days later, he said he had come very close to beating his first opponent but then the judge had noticed he was ill and disqualified him.

TAMERLAN had long since dropped out of Bunker Hill. He still planned to be a star, though. He played keyboard. He talked of becoming a performer, a musician and dancer. He often, though not always, dressed ostentatiously: flowing shirts unbuttoned all the way down to his navel, huge scarves, and pointy shiny shoes that accentuated his swagger. He looked like an Italian gigolo, and he told the graduate student photographer that he dressed “European style.” He had two girlfriends, a pretty, white American-born woman named Katherine Russell and an aspiring model named Nadine Ascencao. Tamerlan had gone to Rindge and Latin with Nadine, except there she had been one of the least popular girls in the ESL crowd. Sometime after graduation, she transformed herself: she got the clothes, the hair, and the makeup that she had lacked in high school, and she dropped her Cape Verdean identity, claiming instead to be Italian. She also started dating Tamerlan, who had been the object of desire of so many Rindge girls—while he claimed that boxing was his only “babe.” At some point in 2009, both Nadine and Katherine may have been living at 410 Norfolk Street.

By this time, taking multiple wives had become if not common then at least accepted back in Chechnya, which was in the process of inventing its own form of fundamentalist religious rule. So his parents might not have objected to such an arrangement. Anzor did object strenuously to Tamerlan’s plan to marry Katherine. Boston Chechens gossiped that Anzor told his son, “Look how marrying a non-Chechen woman got me nothing but trouble. Don’t make the same mistake.” The fact that Katherine, who had grown up in Rhode Island, the daughter of a surgeon and a nurse, converted to Islam in order to marry Tamerlan did not convince Anzor. If anything, it irritated him—his wife and son had slowly, in spurts, begun exploring religion, but in Anzor’s mind Islam had nothing to do with being Chechen; it merely obscured the real issue, which was that Katherine was not and could not be one of them.

Like Zubeidat before her, Katherine, who after converting called herself Karima, had to leave the family’s home to have her baby; unlike his father before him, Tamerlan did not accompany her. Karima was staying with her own parents in Rhode Island when she gave birth to a daughter, Zahira, in October 2010. About four months later, Tamerlan moved them to Norfolk Street. Zahira did what babies do: she created family. Soon Zubeidat was spending all her free time with her, and both Anzor and Dzhokhar appeared smitten with the baby and her mother.

By 2011, Tamerlan was neither a boxing champion nor a music star nor even a college student, but a twenty-four-year-old father living with his parents, his siblings, and his own family in a three-bedroom apartment. What was he doing for work? Since his first year at Bunker Hill, he had made some change delivering pizza. He had done some van driving for Max Mazaev, who had started his senior-care center and was rapidly expanding it. In 2009, Tamerlan got an arrest record when Nadine called the police to Norfolk Street after he slapped her. Though she eventually dropped the charges, this may be why he did not have his U.S. citizenship, for which he should have been able to apply in 2009 or 2010—and this helps explain both the unexpected discovery, on the part of the Golden Gloves association, that he was not a citizen, and the almost magical thinking evident in what he told the photographer about “boxing for a passport.” At some point, Tamerlan had also started dealing pot. He was small-time, a runner—an occupation that often goes hand in hand with delivering pizza, so it is not clear which came first.

Pot was the scourge of Cambridge Rindge and Latin. Some kids would just start fading out, and by the time they graduated they seemed to have no presence. Brendan Mess, Tamerlan’s best friend, had been like that. His grades had tanked and his college ambitions had evaporated. But a few years later, he seemed to get his act together. He had been accepted to college, he was boxing—his friend Tamerlan had been taking him to the gym—and he looked more pulled together than he had since junior year in high school. Then he was dead: on September 12, 2011, Mess, thirty-one-year-old Erik Weissman, also a Rindge graduate, and thirty-seven-year-old Raphael Teken were found in Mess’s apartment in Waltham, a western suburb of Boston. Their throats had been slit. Their bodies were strewn with loose cash and loose marijuana—thousands of dollars’ worth. When Mess and Weissman were buried in a joint ceremony, Tamerlan did not show up. A whisper kept shuffling through the crowd: “Where is Tam?” or “Where is Timmy?” depending on who was asking.

Tamerlan might in fact have been at his mysterious boxing tournament—the one from which he claimed to have been disqualified because of a cold—or, with his registration as a fighter expired for more than a year, the entire exercise might have been a ruse invented for the purpose of getting himself and his car out of town for a few days. After the murders, he stopped going to the gym where he had been training with Mess.

The murders were never solved or, really, investigated. The police appeared to write them off as just more drug-related crime, even though Boston’s drug dealers had not been known to settle scores in ways so gruesome and so bizarre. It was in the course of talking to people who had known Tamerlan or Mess, however, that I discovered that Tamerlan had also been dealing.

How was it possible for the adults not to notice that Tamerlan was not so much delivering pizzas or senior citizens as making money selling marijuana, which is what kept him in his flashy clothes? The answer is, there was no one around to notice. The household’s relationship with money had created a mess of debts.The family’s federal benefits were revoked and reinstated at irregular intervals. Unanticipated, sometimes catastrophic medical expenses became a regular occurrence, creating more debts covered by impossible promises. No one was thinking straight about money—or about anything else. Each member of the Tsarnaev family was descending into a separate personal hell.

AILINA’S TROUBLES started out small. In eighth grade she began getting into fights, especially with one girl. The school required counseling, and the Tsarnaevs complied. Joanna suggested that instead of going on to Cambridge Rindge and Latin, where the social dynamics might follow her, Ailina apply to a newly formed charter school. She did, as did Dzhokhar, and both were admitted. (Dzhokhar was two grades behind Ailina, but there was no division between middle and high school levels at this school; after he finished middle school, though, he enrolled at Rindge and Latin.) The girl with whom Ailina had been fighting also entered the school, but, much to the relief of everyone at 410 Norfolk Street, she was expelled within a month.

The summer before ninth grade, Ailina joined Bella on a trip to Washington state to stay with Uncle Ruslan, who had returned from Almaty, and his family. Ruslan’s wife had a younger brother, Elmirza Khozhugov, who was studying at a nearby college. It seemed like a good idea for him to marry one of the Tsarnaev girls. Bella would not hear of it, so this left Ailina. To most Americans, the looming arrangement would have looked disturbing. Ailina was a rising high school freshman, a slight girl with typical American teenage speech and a gaggle of friends from her hip-hop class; she liked to lead people to believe she was Latin American. Joanna probably saw more of the nuance: Ailina was slightly older than her classmates, and by the time of the wedding, she would be around the age her own mother had been when she married Anzor. And unlike their own mother, Ailina and Bella did not have parents trying to force marriage matches on them. Anzor, for example, accepted Bella’s refusal to marry Elmirza—as long as she accepted the fact that she would be allowed to marry only another Chechen.

As soon as Ailina finished ninth grade, she and Bella traveled to Almaty. Ailina and Elmirza had a big wedding. It is not customary for the bride’s parents to be present at a Chechen wedding, so there was nothing conspicuous in Anzor and Zubeidat’s absence.

Elmirza and Ailina returned to Washington state at the end of the summer, in time for him to resume college and for her to enroll in a high school program for pregnant teenagers, which by that point she was. In the spring of what would have been her sophomore year of high school, Ailina moved back to Cambridge to give birth to a little boy, Ziaudy; then she returned to Washington. It is not clear when everyone at Norfolk Street became aware that Elmirza was beating Ailina, but by 2008—less than two years after the wedding and barely a year after Ziaudy’s birth—Elmirza was taken into custody after repeated reports of domestic violence, and Ailina and the baby were back in Cambridge. Tamerlan was dispatched to Washington with bail money so Elmirza could leave the country before he had to face trial—and prison time. Ailina destroyed her green card and other documents in fear that Anzor would try to force her to follow her husband.

In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, Ruslan would publicly condemn his nephews and reveal that he had not communicated with Anzor’s family in several years. The media generally assumed the estrangement had resulted from a difference of views on Islam and on what it meant to be Muslim and Chechen in America. Far more likely, the rift was caused by Ailina’s split with Elmirza. Chechen men beat their wives. When they do not, other men often suspect them of weakness and subservience to their women. When they do, the wife’s family usually tries to mitigate the effects without interfering—sheltering the wife in times of crisis and sending her back after a few weeks. No one ever calls the police. No one lets the men be jailed, disgraced, and effectively deported. Ailina ruined Elmirza’s American dream and broke Chechen tradition by keeping Ziaudy, who rightfully belonged to his father’s family. However Americanized Ruslan had become, he would have had a very difficult time justifying the situation to his wife’s family back home.

BELLA’S TROUBLES began in 2006. Anzor took her out of school after learning that she had been seen holding hands with a boy, and a non-Muslim boy to boot. Back home—and by now Anzor imagined that place to be the Caucasus, where he had spent all of a couple of years—Bella’s behavior would have warranted an honor killing; all Anzor did was deny her the opportunity to complete eleventh grade. Tamerlan sought out the boy and knocked him out with a well-placed punch. It is not clear that he had been dispatched to do so, but when the school counselor called, Anzor said that his son had done the right thing. He probably lacked the English to explain, but it is the older brother’s duty to protect his sisters’ honor. Tamerlan had been vigilant for two years, always lurking around the group of ESL girls Bella had quickly joined, and ensuring that she did no socializing after school, when the rest of the group may have wanted to go to the mall or to hang out at Harvard Square. Tamerlan, then a senior, got a week’s suspension.

Anzor let Bella return to school eventually, after placing severe restrictions on both girls’ movements, but it was too late for her to get credit for junior year. Her schooling was effectively over, so it was time for her to marry. She stayed on in Kazakhstan after Ailina’s wedding that summer, working as a translator at a law firm and circulating in the local Chechen community, where an eligible man was sure to materialize. Within months she was engaged to Rizvan, a young man from Chechnya who had been visiting relatives in Kazakhstan.

Bella and Rizvan went to live with Rizvan’s widowed mother in Chechnya, then still one of the most dangerous and damaged places on the planet (just three years earlier, a United Nations report had called Grozny “the most destroyed city on earth”). Bella became ill with cytomegalovirus, developed complications, and had to be hospitalized in Dagestan, where Anzor and Zubeidat, taking their first trip home—visiting Kazakhstan and Dagestan, that is—found her. It was probably they who persuaded her to return to the United States to give birth to the baby she was carrying. She flew back in the fall of 2007 and became, briefly, the woman doing most of the cooking and cleaning at 410 Norfolk, before giving birth to a boy, named Ramzan, in 2008. Rizvan, who tried to follow his wife, was denied a U.S. visa. When Bella returned to Kazakhstan and Chechnya the next year, she developed an even more serious infection and was hospitalized in life-threatening condition. It is likely to have cost a great deal of money to get her well enough to travel, and to get her on a plane back to the United States; this could only have added to the family’s financial woes.

Bella returned to Cambridge in the winter of 2009. Baby Ramzan was back in Kazakhstan with his father and the father’s relatives. Bella had applied for Russian papers for him, and until they came, he was temporarily unable to travel. Zubeidat flew to Kazakhstan in the spring on a dual mission: to fetch Ramzan and to raise money to repay debts by selling something she claimed was worth a fortune back in the old country. She returned with Ramzan but without the money.

ANZOR did not maintain the pretense of being a lawyer, or aspiring to be one, for long. He was a working man, and Russian speakers who met him at any point during his decade in the United States describe him as such: rabotyaga, a word that suggests a man who works with his hands, a hardworking man, a dependable man, but one who probably drinks when he is not working. He did. Both Kyrgyzstan and Dagestan are proud of their brandy, and so was Anzor proud of the bottle he invariably placed on the table when he went to visit or when someone visited him.

Anzor’s American acquaintances recall that he had health problems—something people who knew him just before he left Russia do not mention. He may have developed them around the time of the move, or they simply may not have seemed like much to his friends back home. What man doesn’t have health problems as he nears forty? All those cigarettes smoked, all that brandy consumed, all those fights—the things that tend to kill a post-Soviet man of Anzor’s generation before he reaches sixty—are bound to start making themselves known. Anzor had persistent abdominal pain, debilitating headaches, and, evidently, night terrors.

But he was a rabotyaga.

In 2004, he became friendly with the owner of a rug shop who let him use his driveway to work on cars. It was old-fashioned Soviet-style work: rather than place a car over a pit or hoist it up on lifts as one would in a garage, Anzor hitched cars up on simple jacks and slid under them, lying on his back for hours, his hands raised to reach the underside of the car. He worked most often on vehicles that would have seemed at home in such a rudimentary care setting—old carburetor clunkers suffering from knocks, whistles, shortness of breath, and other mysterious afflictions. Among Boston-area Russian-speaking owners of cars long past their prime, he developed a reputation as a friendly, inexpensive, and inventive mechanic.

Even being a rabotyaga got him into trouble in America. When the Tsarnaevs moved to Norfolk Street, a condo complex was going up across the street, replacing an old junkyard. It was part of the new Cambridge: cedar-lined structures separated by ersatz-cobblestone paths, with units as small as 230 square feet. The condo complex had something else that 410 Norfolk lacked: a driveway. It was actually a temporary parking lot for up to three cars, for condo residents only, to park for no more than fifteen minutes at a time. This was a perfect place for Anzor to do repairs: enough room to place the car and spread out all his tools, out of the way of traffic. One day Rinat Harel, an Israeli-American art teacher who had bought one of the tiny units, told Anzor that he shouldn’t be doing his work on the association’s property. “His reaction—wow! He puffed up—I saw how tall he was now. And he was screaming in Russian, then there were some English words, the point was, he was telling me I can’t tell him what to do.” Harel, not a small woman and not one to scare easily—this was a point of pride for her as an Israeli—walked away shaken and, after that incident, stopped going through the Norfolk Street entrance, using the back gate to the property instead. Most of the time, the job of shooing Anzor off the premises fell to Chris LaRoche, a hulking software engineer who shared a condo with his husband. His conversations with Anzor generally followed the same script as Harel’s. The consensus at the condo association was that this was one of those typical conflicts that gentrification engenders.

When Anzor and Zubeidat traveled to Kazakhstan in 2007, one of their goals was to seek traditional healing help for Anzor. His health problems had become pronounced enough for even the Russian speakers, at least in Boston, to acknowledge them. The wisdom in the Chechen community was that he had ruined his health by working on cars outside, in all weather, wearing nothing but a sweater.

In the summer of 2009, Anzor managed to rent a garage for a month while the owner traveled home to Ethiopia. He used the time to teach Tamerlan the basics of auto repair. Dzhokhar looked in on some of the lessons too, though he was working at a day camp that summer. In the fall, Anzor got into a fight at a Russian restaurant in Allston. His skull was fractured, landing him in the hospital. Tamerlan got the police involved and they apparently found Anzor not at fault; he even received some financial compensation. But his health suffered further. At the age of forty-three, he had begun to look like an old Chechen man: emaciated rather than slender, gray, and, it seemed, perpetually exhausted.

ZUBEIDAT TRIED perhaps harder than anyone else in the family—for herself and for her children. Her efforts at translating documents or attending classes on negotiation were not just an unreasonable reach given her education and background: they were also unreasonably brave. To help her children succeed, she pursued whatever seemed like a good idea at the moment. In 2004 she asked Joanna to help the girls join a church choir. Joanna enrolled them in the Handel and Haydn Society youth chorus, where they would sing for a year and a half. Joanna did much of the driving for the girls. She also introduced Bella to several folk-dancing groups until the girl joined one she liked in Concord, Massachusetts, fifteen miles away.

In 2006, Zubeidat enrolled in the Catherine Hinds Institute to study to be a beautician—not exactly Harvard Law, but more glamorous than home care. The institute was a good fit. Beautiful herself, chatty, and attentive, Zubeidat was a natural at what was, in effect, her first occupation, acquired at the age of forty. She supplemented her education by taking private lessons in cosmetic tattooing. A Russian woman studying alongside her was planning to open her own salon as soon as they graduated in the spring of 2007. She offered Zubeidat a job, and soon Zubeidat was commuting to Belmont, four miles west of Cambridge. Things at the salon began well but slowed in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. As time went on, Zubeidat got less and less business there. Some of the post-bombing reporting has suggested that her new religiosity was to blame, but this does not appear to have been the sole or possibly even the main reason. Business was slow, and by the end of 2008 the salon shut down.

SOMETIME IN 2010, or maybe 2009, it would have become clear: it was as though the Tsarnaevs had never come to America. They had struggled with the language and with the people, and with buying furniture on credit. The living room now had a large plush sectional sofa, oriental rugs, and a mirrored credenza housing plates and thin-walled cups chosen to look as though they had been in the family for at least a generation. They had achieved the look every Chechen living room had, from Grozny to Tokmok to Boston, but then, their own living rooms in those places had boasted that look as well.

Tamerlan was dealing drugs.

Anzor was fixing clunkers in the street.

The neighbors hated them.

Bella and Ailina had neither graduated from high school nor succeeded in their marriages; their children were with them rather than with the fathers’ families, so their chances of finding new Chechen husbands were vanishingly small. No one had gotten an education, if you did not count Zubeidat’s aesthetician certificate.

Ziaudy, Ailina’s son, had a learning disability.

The apartment was bursting with people. In the second half of 2009, the small three-bedroom was home to: Anzor, Zubeidat, Tamerlan, Dzhokhar, Bella, Ailina, the toddlers Ramzan and Ziaudy, and Malkan’s teenage son Husein, whom Ruslan had brought to the United States but placed with Anzor’s family. In the summer, the teenagers took possession of the barbecue area at the condo association across the street, drinking, smoking, and playing music until all hours; the residents seem to have been too timid to confront them. The apartment was clean, but crowded and cluttered beyond reason: it no longer felt like community—it resembled a refugee camp. Anzor and Zubeidat had stymied Joanna’s efforts to help. Instead of easing the immigrants into her reality, Joanna had fallen into theirs, with its imaginary family heirlooms capable of covering debts that had grown hopeless. At some point the smell of defeat became so thick that everyone had to run away.

At the end of 2008, Zubeidat managed to place Ailina in an independent living arrangement under the auspices of a battered women’s shelter. Ailina stayed a few months and then took off for New York, where she had somehow acquired friends. After her own trip to Kazakhstan to fetch Ramzan, Zubeidat went to New York and brought Ailina and Ziaudy home, too. Bella started attending the Catherine Hinds Institute. Ailina was admitted to a school where she would study to become an X-ray technician, but she could not borrow money for tuition because she had destroyed her American papers. Then Bella’s green card disappeared as well.

At the end of 2009, after two years at Cambridge Rindge and Latin, Husein moved to Maryland to stay with Uncle Alvi.

At the start of the summer of 2010, Zubeidat went to Russia, alone, and stayed for six months.

Soon after she left, Bella and Ailina and their children disappeared—presumably, to New York again. No one at Norfolk Street would hear from them until Zubeidat returned in December. She reported that they were doing all right: Ailina was home with the children and Bella was working as a waitress. Later there was some conflicting information about that. Ailina was apparently back in town in the fall of 2010, at least long enough to get arrested for trying to use counterfeit money to pay a restaurant bill. She was arraigned in Boston in January 2011 but failed to show up for her hearings—when she finally appeared in court two and a half years later, she would tell the judge she had been indigent.

Zubeidat went back to home health aide work, which now seemed to involve more overnights. By mid-2011 she was rarely staying at Norfolk Street.

Dzhokhar graduated from Rindge and in September moved to live on campus at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, just outside New Bedford, about an hour’s drive south of Boston.

In the fall of 2011, Anzor and Zubeidat filed for divorce.

At the start of 2012, the apartment was home to Tamerlan; his wife, Karima; their daughter, Zahira; Zubeidat, who was not really there; and her now ex-husband, Anzor. Zubeidat had also arranged for Ziaudy to attend kindergarten in Cambridge, so he was there, too, primarily in Karima’s care.

In January, Tamerlan went to Dagestan, ostensibly to renew his Russian passport—something that could have been done at the Russian consulate in New York, which would have charged him a lot for it, but still less than the cost of a round-trip ticket to Russia.

In February, Anzor moved out of the apartment to stay with a friend. Once he received his U.S. passport, in May, he left the country. Zubeidat, who was now visiting the apartment only occasionally, said that Anzor was traveling to Germany for diagnosis—a tumor had developed at the site of his skull injury and American doctors wanted to operate, but the Germans might be able to spare him the surgery. In fact, he went straight to Dagestan.

In June, his kindergarten year over, Ziaudy returned to Ailina.

Tamerlan came back from Dagestan in July. Two weeks later, Zubeidat left for Dagestan: she said she had to care for her brother there—he had cancer. When I met Zubeidat a year later, she was indeed caring for him as he died. At the time she left the United States, she was facing criminal charges for shoplifting at a Lord & Taylor in the Boston suburb of Natick—she knew that leaving meant she would be unable to come back, unless she was willing to face jail.

Karima took over Zubeidat’s home health aide work. Tamerlan stayed home with Zahira. He was good at it: responsible and caring and sure to take her for a walk or a tricycle ride at the same time every day. Most days now, he wore loose sweats rather than his flashy “European style” clothes.

WHAT DID AMERICA look like from the third floor of 410 Norfolk Street ten years after Anzor and Zubeidat first crossed the Atlantic Ocean? It made scarcely more sense now than it had back then. Television news combined with their landlady’s conversation and Cambridge’s progressive civics and history lessons never formed a coherent picture, much less the kind of flow of information that allows immigrants—at least those who successfully integrate into their new society—to inhabit the same story as the people among whom they now live. Instead, information continued to come in scraps, as it does to newcomers. Each scrap is tried on for size as a theory of everything. The more crudely it simplifies reality, the better it is suited for that purpose.

Starting in 2009, both Zubeidat and Tamerlan began studying the Koran. Neither of them spent much time in any mosque—though Salafism can allow room for women to study. They both relied on the Internet and on occasional intense conversations with better-informed acquaintances. The Koran did not get in the way of Tamerlan’s lifestyle, at least not in the first few years: he carried a small prayer rug in the trunk of his car and could take it out and spread it anywhere in between smoking a couple of joints. The Muslim Internet did help explain the world, though. Tamerlan, for example, found a compelling video called Zeitgeist: The Movie, one of a series of three two-hour extravaganzas of conspiracy theories purporting to debunk every historical construction, starting with Jesus Christ and ending with the September 11 attacks. The latter, as it explained with high-quality graphics and an articulate narration, was the product of a plot in which the U.S. government had been complicit.

Approaching the Koran also helped Tamerlan and Zubeidat place themselves in the Chechen community even as their family began disintegrating. Everyone here and back home had a relationship to Islam now. Some families split, like Badrudi Tsokaev’s back in Tokmok: his wife and children became observant, holding the fast at Ramadan, while Badrudi insisted that he had not needed religion in Soviet times and did not need it now. Over in Cambridge, his old friend Anzor assumed the same line of argument, even though the two had not spoken in years. Islam provided a new connection to home, too. It seemed the later someone came over, the more likely he or she was to be observant. Musa Khadzhimuratov, who left Chechnya in 2000, prayed five times a day—his prayer rug was also always with him—but his wife Madina wore bright clingy low-cut dresses. Women from a family who came later than the Tsarnaevs were covering themselves—and now so was Zubeidat, abandoning her own collection of revealing dresses. Around 2009, Bella and Ailina began covering as well.

A couple of years into his relationship with the Koran, Tamerlan disposed of some ring binders, but one of them was retrieved. It contained clippings a younger Tamerlan had hoped would help him master the world: instructions on how to seduce women and hypnotize people, articles exposing the dominance of Jewish actors in Russian entertainment, and an article in Russian with references to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Protocols themselves, a tsarist-era forgery purporting to expose a Jewish plot for world domination, had supernatural staying power in Russian culture, where it reentered circulation every few decades, and it had supernatural staying power with Tamerlan as well. In the fall of 2012, while going through his books stored in the basement of the house, he called Joanna’s attention to the Protocols. She took it to read so she could later try to argue Tamerlan out of believing it: Joanna was not one to give up on the power of persuasion. She had not finished the Protocols by the time her tenant died.

Some information about the world outside came courtesy of Donald Larking, a longtime home-care client of Zubeidat’s who was among those she handed over to Karima. In the forty years since Larking had been rendered disabled by a gunshot wound to the face, he had developed an affinity for a variety of conspiracy theories and the media that broadcast them. Larking took to giving the Tsarnaevs copies of newspapers to which he subscribed—The Sovereign, which calls itself “Newspaper of the Resistance!” and on its home page showcases the “9-11 Truth Proclamation,” purporting to prove the Twin Towers in New York were blown up by the U.S. military; and The First Freedom, an Alabama-based tabloid with the tagline “Inviting the Zionist-controlled media’cracy to meet a rising free South.”

Larking read the papers and underlined some passages before gifting them. He also gave Tamerlan and Karima a subscription to the American Free Press, a Washington, D.C.–based weekly full of libertarian, commie-baiting, and anti-Semitic rants with a few conspiracy theories thrown in. It was a lot more accessible than the sort of media Joanna had been recommending, such as Bill Moyers’s television program, with its nuanced approach to complex issues, or the critique of globalization she had given a nineteen-year-old Tamerlan when she found him reading a book by Thomas Friedman. Anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories aside, libertarianism is as good a theory of everything as politics has produced, and as late as 2012 Tamerlan was saying he agreed with Ron Paul, the perennial libertarian presidential candidate, and his analysis of American politics.

That fall Joanna approached Karima to ask her to register to vote so she could support senatorial candidate Elizabeth Warren. Karima demurred. She and Tamerlan had different values—not in the sense that they opposed the Harvard Law professor’s campaign to rein in the banks, but in the sense that they did not vote at all. This did not, however, keep them from continuing to accept public assistance—and it was this contradiction that, after ten years, finally compelled their landlady to ask the three remaining Tsarnaevs to move out.

ONLY DZHOKHAR was still in his cloud of sweetness and light. As his older sisters tumbled into disaster, as his nephews got bounced between cities and continents like a couple of precious but useless objects being regifted, as his brother sank into conspiracies, and as his parents peeled away, Dzhokhar had continued to make good grades and good friends and make everyone happy. He joined the wrestling team and charmed the coach by doing what teenage boys never do: asking what he had done wrong and what he could do better. Soon he was captain.

He was also both smoking and dealing weed, but he was such a perfect mirror of everyone’s best expectations that even the most experienced Rindge teachers saw none of the usual signs: his clothes were purposefully messy, not stoner-messy; his big brown eyes appeared focused, if only ever for the minute or two it took to have a meaningful interaction with any of them in the high school’s vast hallway. Dzhokhar became friendly with one of the school’s most experienced teachers, retired history instructor Larry Aaronson, who was now working as Cambridge Rindge and Latin’s official photographer and unofficial cheerleader. Aaronson first took pictures of Dzhokhar at wrestling practice and then asked him to spell his name for him. It emerged that the boy was Chechen, and from Russia. Aaronson was instantly heartbroken for him, but Dzhokhar insisted: “I am lucky!”

“You are lucky? You were born in Russia, and you are Chechen—and you are lucky?”

“Larry, I got asylum. My whole family got asylum. I live in Cambridge! And I go to Rindge and Latin!”

Aaronson decided that the boy would be his poster child “for these kids from war zones who go to Rindge.” Together they devised a new, easier spelling of the boy’s name: Jahar. This was far more elegant than the solution Tamerlan had found when he was at Rindge; he just started telling people to call him “Timberland, like the shoe.” Tired of explaining what Chechnya was, he had also started saying he was from Russia. At some point Jahar discovered his new friend was also a neighbor. Aaronson lived just a few houses up the street, on the Somerville side of Norfolk. Jahar’s reaction: “I am so lucky!”

Aaronson was the teacher who was still trying to talk sense into his old stoner students Brendan Mess and Erik Weissman, years after they had graduated, yet he missed the signs of chronic pot use in Jahar. Still, he was stymied in his efforts to get to know the boy better. “Whenever I tried to talk to him about being Chechen, it meant nothing to him.”

HAVING YOUR ETHNIC IDENTITY mean nothing to you, however, is unusual for American high school students, especially those attending a progressive, aware school like Cambridge Rindge and Latin. Everyone is somebody, and it always means something. Over at Needham High School, Islam Baiev was struggling: “No one has heard of Chechnya,” he told me. “It gets tiring to explain every time. Normally I say we used to be independent and now we are part of the Russian Federation. And then it gets into this whole debate about whether I’m Russian or not. People have tried to convince me that I’m Russian, and I say, ‘No, we have a completely different language and culture.’” And if Chechens were Russian, perhaps Moscow would not have tried to bomb them out of existence throughout the nineties and the aughts.

That sort of discussion was much too convoluted for Jahar. Perhaps because he felt he needed a smoother narrative, or perhaps because a paper on one’s identity is always a good thing to show an American college, during his senior year at Rindge, Jahar set out to write a paper on being Chechen. It was his second year taking an English class with a young teacher named Steve Matteo, who had on first meeting him made fun of his name, then still spelled Dzhokhar: “Don’t they have vowels in Chechnya?” At least he had heard of Chechnya. In fact, Matteo could claim a connection to Chechnya, through a handshake or two. His wife was Muslim, from Turkey, as was the wife of one of his best friends, Brian Williams, a man who claimed to teach “the world’s only course on Chechnya.” Williams taught at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.

Matteo suggested Jahar contact Williams for help with the paper. He did—as Williams recalled a couple of years later, “His questions were totally uninformed, very general”—and Williams sent him the lengthy syllabus for his course, with advice to pay special attention to two books. One was Khassan Baiev’s Grief of My Heart, with the story line that was intimately familiar to Jahar; the other was Allah’s Mountains: The Battle for Chechnya by British journalist Sebastian Smith, a lucid, if rather romanticized, history of Chechnya and the North Caucasus under Russian domination, including the two post-Soviet wars. From what Matteo could tell when Jahar submitted the paper, he had not read the book.

Williams complains about the myths and misconceptions that abound about Chechens—including the myth of a “Chechen Jihad” and of Chechen involvement in al-Qaida, which, he says, has never been documented but has often been described by those who make generalizations in the absence of evidence. Google “Chechens” and the Chechen Jihad will come up. Williams claims he is “on a one-man mission to debunk the myths” spread by the Internet. In Jahar’s case, he apparently failed. Tamerlan, though, put Allah’s Mountains on his online book list around the time his younger brother would have been considering reading it; with all the time on his hands in 2010–2011, Tamerlan may even have done so.

Around the same time, Jahar took another step toward reconnecting with his Chechen and Russian identities. It was an unusual move, though only in retrospect would it appear disturbing. He started an account on VK.com, a Facebook clone site on which most Russians his age maintained their social media lives. In his profile he indicated that he spoke Russian and Vainakh, the language of the Chechens. The inclusion of his ancestral language was a fib, since he did not really speak it, while the omission of English from the list appears conspicuous. He proceeded to post on the page in Russian—a bit of a linguistic feat for a kid whose Russian-language schooling was interrupted in second grade.

Jahar graduated from Rindge with honors in May 2011. He had been accepted to several colleges. He had not set his sights all that high, ruling out from the start the most competitive Boston-area schools, such as Tufts and Boston University, where Hamzat Umarov’s children were studying. He told friends these schools were too expensive. He would have to finance his education through loans. Of the schools to which he was admitted, Jahar chose the least academically challenging, the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. On the plus side, one of his best friends from Rindge, Robel Phillipos, was also going to go there.

LOOKED AT from a very particular angle, and from a great remove, by the time Anzor and Zubeidat moved back to Dagestan, their children were settled. The girls were in the great city of New York. The baby of the family was attending college on a scholarship: the City of Cambridge had granted Jahar $2,500 upon graduation. Anzor would not tell his friends he had divorced his wife, and her absence from his side would not make anyone suspect a thing, because, as one of their friends in Tokmok told me, if those two ever split up, red snow would fall from the sky. And Zubeidat would tell everyone that her beautiful firstborn son was taking care of the entire family, just as the eldest boy should.

Six HIS PLACE IN THE WORLD

Tamerlan flew to Dagestan in January 2012. Anzor and Zubeidat claimed he needed to renew his Russian passport. This had been the reason for one of their own trips back, but in Tamerlan’s case this was a pretext and almost certainly a lie. Tamerlan was doing what the Tsarnaevs always did: going from one place to another, looking for the one where he belonged. This time, he found it.

Tamerlan had spent less than two years in Dagestan, but at a crucial moment in his life. He had been a young teenager, the age when the world comes into relief. And compared with either the Kyrgyz or the Chechen countryside—the two places he had known before—Makhachkala was spectacular: bursting with life, saturated with people, bordered by the sea. Plus, Zubeidat, who had once run away from Makhachkala, now seemed to think Dagestan was the promised land. It certainly felt like it. When you return after a decade, especially to a place the love of which has been impressed upon you, but even more important, a place where you were a teenager, everything feels right. The air itself is familiar, the light, the sky, the smells; even your own posture seems more comfortable, as though you have returned to the place for which your body was molded.

Makhachkala had changed over the decade: it had, after its own fashion, turned into a city. The most outrageous of the haphazard construction had ceased; kiosks no longer sprouted overnight, blocking sidewalks. Instead, orderly-looking apartment towers went up, even if they were often shoddily built and fated to stay half empty. The city cleaned up its act, polished old monuments and erected a couple of new ones. A new road into the city was paved, smooth enough within city limits to inspire drag racing, rough enough on the outskirts to cause shame. The city’s population sorted itself into groups, classes, and neighborhoods again, and businesses mastered the science of appealing to distinct audiences. There were cafés that served halal food and provided prayer rooms, and clothing shops that sold only to women, and only appropriately concealing dresses; and there were sushi restaurants where waitresses wore short skirts and the sushi tasted as bland as in any such place throughout Russia and most of Eastern Europe.

What made Makhachkala palpably different from every other hub of post-Soviet conspicuous consumption was the distinct and dangerous undercurrent of tension: between the women with exposed long, tan arms and the women in hijabs; between the clean-shaven men and the men with beards; between the local police and the young men suspected of having ties to radical Islam, often on the basis simply of being young and male; between all the locals and the Russian federal law enforcement, which had been policing Dagestan with unwavering brutality for more than a dozen years.

SINCE 1999, when Dagestan outlawed the people it called Wahhabis, life here had settled into a bloody pattern. The federal law enforcement, sometimes acting with or through the local police, hunted down suspected radicals. The bust went down in one of two ways: a young man was detained and disappeared or, far less frequently, tried and convicted of terrorist activity; or a SWAT team surrounded his house and laid siege to it for hours, until at the end of the day the suspected radical died in a blaze of gunfire. Roughly once a month law enforcement reported that a leader of the radical Muslim underground had been “annihilated”—the Russian term of choice, which conveyed much better than simply “killed” a sense that a less-than-human being had been fully destroyed. “Are we supposed to think that the insurgency breeds a new leader every month?” one Dagestani journalist grumbled. For every supposed terrorist who had been “annihilated,” one or two or three of his male relatives joined the resistance, sometimes going so far as to “go into the forest,” meaning to join the guerrilla fighters who lurked in the woods of Dagestan.

The actual size of the guerrilla force at any given time was probably closer to one hundred than to several, but in the imaginations of both sides the might of the forest fighters swelled, as did the fear of escalating violence. The damage “the forest” did was inescapably real: for years, an explosion would kill one or several law enforcement officers every few weeks. Each of these attacks invariably brought another round of retribution from the federal troops, ensuring that the cycle of slow-burning warfare was never broken.

Retribution was not, however, the only or even the most significant motivating factor in this war. Alexei Levinson, a leading Russian sociologist who was studying Dagestan around the time Tamerlan was there, concluded that what he was observing was war for war’s sake. “All this barbarity and brutality stem not from human qualities—it’s not that the federal troops have assembled a collection of lowlifes there, though that’s also the case,” he told me. “What this is, if we are to be exact, is terror.” To a Russian intellectual, the word is more evocative of Stalin’s Great Terror than of the many uses and misuses of it since September 11. Levinson was talking about a system designed for the random application of extreme brutality. And very much like the Great Terror, this system was ineffective and inefficient; if intimidation and control had been the goal, they could have been exercised far less expensively and more consistently. Instead, the machine’s primary function was the reproduction of violence. “If the federal troops succeed in conquering, in suppressing the underground, they have to pack up and go home,” he said. “What they need is a conflict on low heat.” Even the federal troops’ compensation structure reflected this: they were paid extra for the hours spent in combat—hence the long, elaborate siege operations that were, in the end, assassinations by extreme firepower.

The economy of a region locked in a state of permanent war cannot function normally, not just because the constant presence of danger changes preferences and priorities—people invest in nothing, spending their money and themselves fully every day—but also because there can be no consensus on what the law of the land is. Conflicts in Dagestan were decided in accordance with Russian civilian law, Sharia law, or Adat—the set of local customs that mixed reliance on the Koran with tradition passed on through generations. The choice of laws depended on the parties’ preferences, interests, and relative influence. At the same time, the government of Dagestan, which in the Putin era began to be appointed by Moscow rather than elected locally, was forging an ever closer allegiance with the imams representing the Sufi Islam traditional to Dagestan. The government was taking its cues from the Kremlin, which was relying more and more heavily on the Russian Orthodox Church. In Dagestan, as Sufi mosques allied themselves with officialdom and through it with Moscow and the federal troops, nontraditional Salafite mosques began looking increasingly appealing to a growing number of young men.

Men of Tamerlan’s age had grown up in Dagestan’s slow-burning war, and this distinguished them from the previous generation of local Salafites. The new Muslims of the nineties had often studied abroad; their religious evolution represented an investment in their own and their children’s urban, worldly future. The men who came of age in the aughts had, like all children of war, no investments and no future. They also usually had no education past high school and no jobs in any institutional setting: they were overwhelmingly engaged in financial scams. Caught in its own cycle of war, corruption, and blackmail with Dagestan, Moscow kept pouring into the troubled region money from a federal budget swollen with oil revenue. The money failed to ensure peace, but it did provide for the relative economic well-being of a large number of young men. The federal money was recycled into bogus, or at least partly bogus, housing construction, credits and mortgages that would never be repaid, and subsidies that did not always go to persons and institutions that actually existed but always, without exception, involved kickbacks. The combined effect of Dagestan’s shifting religious–political axis and its crooked economy was to turn all of its young men into outlaws and to link them all through an intricate web of money, blood, and what might or might not have been properly considered crime.

WHEN TAMERLAN LANDED in Dagestan, it was not only the physical environment that would have seemed made for him, as if his body had been plugged into its place in a puzzle: there was a social space ready for him as well. Dagestan was full of men in their twenties and early thirties who spent their days talking about themselves, their religion, and the injustices of the world. They sat around at cafés all over Makhachkala, sipping coffee at small round lacquered tables or eating lamb at long wooden ones; they went to one another’s family homes on special occasions and talked there; but most important, they went to the mosque on Kotrov Street.

The mosque is built like so much of Makhachkala: outsize, at once grand and shoddy, whether because of lack of money or lack of skill. Each of its four levels provides a large space for prayer. In its sizable front yard sits a four-foot-high stack of rugs that will be laid out on the concrete come Friday. Even with all that room inside, there is always an overflow crowd of men praying, most of them young men with neatly trimmed beards. Inside is a large light-filled airy space, but the walls in many places are unfinished sheetrock. A rounded wooden stairway that looks like it was airlifted from the private mansion of an aspiring oligarch leads to the imam’s top-floor office, furnished like a Soviet bureaucrat’s. (But perhaps the stairway was here all along: one of Dagestan’s wealthiest men was building a house for his son on this site when he died suddenly in 1998 and someone decided to build a mosque here in his honor.) There is an unmanned security post in the corner of the office, six screens streaming the views from six surveillance cameras and, in front of them, an empty office chair with one missing armrest.

I found the imam himself sitting behind a very large desk in the office. His name was Gasan Gasanaliyev, he was seventy-three, tiny with an unevenly trimmed gray beard, and he had been an imam since he was twenty-five. “Back then, if you studied the Koran, you got five years in jail.” I asked him if he had studied underground. “You could say that,” he answered cautiously. For his first quarter-century as imam, Gasanaliyev was employed as a construction worker: without an official job, he would have been arrested and charged with the crime of parasitism. The imam is a lifelong keeper of secrets. I asked him about Tamerlan Tsarnaev. “I have no idea who comes here and who doesn’t,” he snapped. “But I asked every single person who comes here and none of them ever met him.” He also told me his mosque is Sufi, not Salafite, an assertion that made more than a few Dagestani Salafites laugh when I told them about it.

TAMERLAN REMET HIS RELATIVES, most of them near-mythical figures he had seen only a few times as a child. Jamal, Anzor’s organized-crime uncle, was around; nothing about him was ever clear, but he appeared to be based mostly in Grozny now: the capital of Chechnya is less than a three-hour drive from Makhachkala. Zubeidat’s side of the family hovered over the boy in Dagestan. Although the clan had once been concentrated in Makhachkala, the relatives who remained in Dagestan lived elsewhere now. Her brother, a law enforcement officer, was struggling with cancer up in a mountain village; her cousin lived in Kizlyar, a town of about fifty thousand that had once been part of Chechnya and had been gifted by Stalin to Dagestan in 1944, after the Chechens were deported. That and the town’s proximity to the Chechen border were enough to make it a presumed hotspot of insurgent activity in the eyes of the Russian authorities. Founded as a fortress more than two centuries earlier, Kizlyar felt very much under siege every day.

The drive from Makhachkala to Kizlyar takes two hours through a valley that seems nearly deserted, a jarring impression in this region where land is at a premium. The emptiness is the effect of a war all its own. Dagestan’s nomadic and settled ethnic groups, who had for centuries existed in a state that could reasonably be called peace, were now battling over these lands. The nomads were not only expanding their pastures but also increasingly settling down, especially in the parts of the valley where ethnic Russians now lived. This was the other war the indigenous peoples of Dagestan were waging against Russia, and this one would evidently be won. The Russians were dying out in these parts, and this, too, served to underscore the nature of their presence: it was occupation. For now, you could see Dagestan’s past and future standing side by side along the road from Makhachkala to Kizlyar—abandoned collective-farm structures, long and low barracks-like buildings, and cinder-block private houses, barely half of them inhabited and the rest incomplete, their windows gaping with the dashed hopes of generations. As one got closer to Kizlyar, the Russian-made Lada Prioras increasingly ceded the road to ancient motorcycles with sidecars, and cows—yellow and reddish and brown cows that seemed to wander unattached. A massive federal checkpoint, a hundred-fifty-yard labyrinth of brick half-walls, greeted visitors to Kizlyar. The name of the checkpoint was Lesnoy, or the Forest One.

Kizlyar is low and feels like the valley itself. The center is full of long gray-brick five-story apartment buildings; the outskirts are private houses, hidden behind concrete walls and covered front yards. Small shops sell identical local-fashion T-shirts and trousers with Ferre and Ice labels sloppily appended to them. For young men, the meeting place of choice—not that there is much choice—is Café Nostalgy, a cavernous space with large private booths that have low carpeted platforms for reclining.

Nostalgy was where Tamerlan’s second cousin Magomed Kartashov liked to schedule meetings. The son of Zubeidat’s first cousin, Kartashov would have been considered a close relative by Dagestan standards: ordinarily, he and Tamerlan would have met as small children—Kartashov was less than a decade older—and seen each other at numerous family events throughout their lives. But at the point when Tamerlan was, briefly, a resident of Dagestan in the early aughts, the difference in their ages had been prohibitive. Tamerlan was still a boy, and Kartashov was a young man who had joined the police force in Kizlyar. He resigned a year later, and by the time Tamerlan met him properly in 2012, he was the leader of a group that some people perceived as nebulous and others as menacing; it was probably both.

The Union of the Just, as it was called, was commonly known to be allied with Hizb ut-Tahrir, one of the largest Islamic organizations in the world. Hizb ut-Tahrir proclaims the goal of creating a caliphate that would unite the Muslim lands of the world. This pan-Islamic state should be created by peaceful means, through political and philosophical struggle only. Hizb ut-Tahrir has consistently condemned acts of terror, including the September 11 attacks and the July 2005 bombings in London, but some analysts in both the United States and the United Kingdom have cast doubt on the sincerity of these statements. More to the point, Hizb ut-Tahrir is often viewed as a gateway organization that facilitates young Muslims’ passage from peaceful civilians to jihadis. In Russia, as in a number of other countries, Hizb ut-Tahrir is banned, which is why the Union of the Just kept its affiliation with the group quiet.

Kartashov had launched the Union of the Just a few months before Tamerlan arrived back in Dagestan. In August 2011, Kartashov was one of the organizers of a protest against detentions carried out by law enforcement in and around Kizlyar. By the time he organized his second such protest, in November, his organization had a name and, apparently, a structure: Kartashov was chairman. In addition to protesting detentions, the Union of the Just claimed to address issues of social inequality and injustice in Dagestan—and, depending on whom I talked to, seemed either to have the financial resources to undertake a project of that magnitude or to be financially strapped and full of hot air. One impression local journalists consistently had of the group was that it had a complicated relationship with law enforcement. The head of the Kizlyar police, on one hand, expressed undisguised hatred for his former officer Kartashov; on the other hand, the Union of the Just had a way of learning about detentions before they became public knowledge—suggesting that it had a mole in law enforcement. Then again, as one of Kartashov’s defense lawyers would tell me later, long after his client had been sent to serve time in a prison colony thousands of miles away, “Law enforcement and the insurgents are all equally dumb, uneducated, and all affected by the same virus,” meaning the infectious desire to engage in permanent warfare. He then told me what he thought should be done to solve this conundrum, but he asked me not to print it; his solution was bitter and brutal and desperate.

In all, the Union of the Just, to which Tamerlan discovered he belonged virtually by birthright, was a quintessential Dagestan organization: a group of self-important young men who trafficked mostly in words and yet balanced unmistakably at the edge of constant and extreme danger.

The man with whom Tamerlan connected most closely was not his cousin Magomed Kartashov but Kartashov’s Union of the Just deputy Mohammed Gadzhiev (the two men had the same first name, but Gadzhiev preferred the less Russian-sounding, more Arabic pronunciation). Gadzhiev lived in Makhachkala, where Tamerlan felt much more comfortable than in dangerous, backwater Kizlyar. Gadzhiev was Tamerlan’s age; he was a snappy dresser, though not as flashy as Tamerlan; he had about him the confidence of an extremely good-looking and remarkably well-spoken man: he and Tamerlan were of a kind, and they hit it off instantly when Kartashov introduced them at a friend’s wedding in the spring of 2012. “Meet my American relative,” he said to Gadzhiev, and from that point on the two men saw each other several times a week.

They talked. Tamerlan had things to tell Mohammed about America. He said it was a racist country and a deeply divided one: there was a giant gap between rich and poor. Foreign policy was as xenophobic and as shortsighted as Mohammed had suspected—as bad, in fact, as what he had heard on Russian television, which could be presumed to lie about everything except this. Morally, too, America was in decline. Mohammed had suspected as much, but he was pleased to have his general impressions confirmed and elaborated—and Tamerlan turned out to be a good storyteller, capable of supporting his passionate generalizations with carefully drawn detail. He described his friends, their struggles, the crooked cops of Watertown—he talked so much about this town that Gadzhiev was sure that was where he lived—and, for the first time in his life, Tamerlan got to feel like an expert. Gadzhiev could ask questions for hours, and his interest and trust in Tamerlan’s knowledge never wavered. He even accepted the positive things Tamerlan had to say about America. Tamerlan said there was freedom of speech, it really was a country open to all sorts of people—and it would even give them an education, such as the one Tamerlan’s beloved younger brother was now obtaining, thanks to a city scholarship.

They talked about Russia as well, and concluded that its racism, religious persecution, and propensity for manufacturing criminal charges against undesirables made the two countries substantially similar. Russia’s foreign policy was better—at least it did not support either Israel or the secular forces in the Arab world—but the deep-rooted corruption inside the country more than made up for this comparative advantage over the United States. “I refuse to choose between two kinds of fecal matter,” Gadzhiev concluded. “Both taste like shit.” Tamerlan concurred.

On topics other than the United States, Tamerlan got little credit. Gadzhiev found his knowledge of the Koran cursory at best. He appreciated that Tamerlan claimed being a Muslim as his primary identity, but criticized him for vague statements and uncertain ideas. “If your goal is to fight injustice and promote God’s law in the world, then you have to achieve clarity,” Gadzhiev would say. “As long as your ideas are hard to comprehend, your actions, too, will be dispersed. You have to be specific.” Gadzhiev introduced Tamerlan to the concept of intention, essential to the interpretation of the Koran. “You must know that your actions are right even if you will never see the results of your actions—then you must trust that one of your descendants will see them in the future.” Tamerlan listened.

Gadzhiev saw his friend as a bit of a baby. Tamerlan stood out in Makhachkala. Some days he wore a long Arabic-style shirt of the sort rarely seen in Dagestan, slicked his hair back with peanut oil, and lined his eyes with kohl. Other days, he put on regular trousers with brightly colored sneakers, and this looked as foreign as his ersatz Middle Eastern getup. Gadzhiev himself dressed stylishly, but in keeping with the understated ways of local men: he wore dark-colored T-shirts and trousers over neutral flip-flops. When Gadzhiev reprimanded Tamerlan for sticking out too conspicuously, his American friend seemed to take it as a compliment. Indeed, he regarded all expressions of interest as both complimentary and wondrous. One time a girl at a party slipped him a scrap of paper with her phone number written on it and he showed it around to his friends, asking aloud what it was they thought she wanted. Gadzhiev and others found this indiscretion both regrettable and endearing: Tamerlan’s cockiness had a way of coming off as innocent, and in his friends it produced a feeling of benign condescension.

AFTER THE BOSTON MARATHON BOMBING, there would be much speculation about whether Tamerlan had been “radicalized” in Dagestan. The question was not unreasonable. Dagestan presented many opportunities for a young man in search of a radical future. He could have joined the struggle in Syria; dozens and possibly hundreds of men were recruited in Dagestan around the time he was there. If he was a budding jihadist opposed to U.S. foreign policy, the Syrian opportunity would have seemed perfect—but Tamerlan did not take it. Even more obvious, he could have joined the guerrillas in the forest. He did not, though Kartashov later told the secret police he had talked about it—and Kartashov felt he had talked him down. There were rumors, later, of Tamerlan’s making contact with William Plotnikov, who had emigrated from Russia to Canada at the age of fifteen, become a boxer, and gone to Dagestan to join the Islamic insurgency. There does not, however, appear to have been any connection between the two, aside from the eerie coincidence of superficial details of biography. Plotnikov died in the typical blaze of gunfire in a Russian security operation in July 2012; ultimately the only people who linked him to Tamerlan were unnamed Russian secret-police operatives who leaked the information to an enterprising but notoriously unreliable Russian newspaper. The same unnamed sources claimed Tamerlan was connected to another insurgency fighter, Mahmud Nidal, who, by the time this unsubstantiated leak appeared, had been killed in another firestorm, in May 2012.

In the end it seems that most of what Tamerlan did during his six months in Dagestan was talk. Talking—and having someone not only listen to what he had to say but also take it seriously enough to question and criticize and try to guide him—was a radically new experience for him. Feeling, for the first time in his life, like he belonged most certainly entailed a kind of radicalization, a fundamental shift in the way he perceived the world and himself in it—but that is just as certainly not what anyone has meant by suggesting that Tamerlan might have been radicalized in Dagestan.

IN MID-JULY 2012, Tamerlan told his friends he had an issue with his documents that required him to return to the United States at once. Like the claim that he went to Dagestan to have a new Russian passport made because his old one had expired, this documents story is murky. Given that at the time the Tsarnaevs left Russia the country was issuing only five-year passports, Tamerlan’s Russian passport actually would have expired years earlier. Unless the Tsarnaevs had a passport made for Tamerlan at the Russian consulate in New York—which appears exceedingly unlikely, because Anzor and Zubeidat went back to Russia to get their own documents in 2007—he would have had no Russian document to renew and would have had to travel to Dagestan on his United States documents. Another clue suggesting that Tamerlan was likely traveling as an American is that about halfway through his stay in Dagestan he went to Azerbaijan for a few minutes. Jamal told me about the trip: he drove Tamerlan to the border, and Tamerlan crossed it and came right back. It had something to do with his documents. But if Tamerlan had indeed been in the process of renewing his Russian passport, he would have been unable to leave the country just then. It would appear that he was in Dagestan as an American, with a Russian visa that allowed a maximum three-month stay—and he had to leave and reenter to restart the countdown.

He had no desire to leave Dagestan for even a few minutes. He told Jamal he wanted to stay, and the older man berated him. “What are you going to do here?” he shouted. “Herd sheep? Go back to America and get an education!” Tamerlan told Gadzhiev he wanted to stay, and Gadzhiev understood and welcomed his desire. And when Tamerlan had to leave, he said he would return soon. Whatever was calling him back clearly had nothing to do with his Russian documents: it was an American exigency.

TWO MONTHS after Tamerlan’s departure, the Union of the Just staged a protest that criticized not only the Russian regime but also American foreign policy. Shocking onlookers in Kizlyar, the protesters burned a United States flag—a gesture that had never before been seen in Dagestan. Months later, when Gadzhiev was interviewed by men representing the FBI, he would taunt them by recalling that protest. One could say, if one were so inclined, that it was Tamerlan Tsarnaev who had radicalized the Union of the Just.

Seven PATRIOTS’ DAY

Tamerlan returned to Cambridge in July 2012. A couple of weeks later, Zubeidat left for Dagestan. There was an understanding in the family now: Dagestan was the place to live. Anzor was back there, starting a car-repair business with Jamal’s help. He was not the reason Zubeidat was going back—she had her own family in Dagestan. Jahar was talking about going the following summer. Tamerlan now thought of Dagestan as his home—he just needed to get his U.S. passport and he would be on his way. Joanna asked him once why he would want an American passport, given how he had come to feel about the United States, and he seemed not to understand the question. A U.S. passport was and always would be a valuable commodity—no matter how inherently hypocritical Tamerlan might find the American electoral system or how inherently unjust the American mode of government. It was an odd exchange. Joanna was employing rhetoric that had too often been used against lefties like her: If you hate America so much, why don’t you just get out? Tamerlan saw no contradiction in his response. There were many things he disliked about America, and he saw valor in speaking out about them—but he saw no reason to reject so prized an asset as an American passport. If his English and his political education had been better, he might even have said that dissidence is the highest form of patriotism.

Things had not been good between Tamerlan and Joanna in a while, as this uncharacteristically confrontational encounter might suggest. Norfolk Street, where the Tsarnaevs had lived longer than anywhere else since Zubeidat and Anzor met, was no longer home. In September, Jahar returned to college, leaving only Tamerlan, Karima, and Zahira. In November, Joanna asked them to move out, which she had not done even when the rent was severely in arrears. Now she served Tamerlan a formal eviction notice.

But they were a family breaking up, and the eviction notice was just one of the many steps in this jerky process. Tamerlan and Joanna went through stages when they attempted if not a reconciliation, then at least a connection. In January 2013, Tamerlan gave her a phone number for his sister Bella and suggested she call her. Bella said she had just returned to the New York area from Chechnya, where she had divorced Rizvan. Ramzan, their son, was staying in Chechnya, as the rules required. Bella said her health was worse: the problem had spread to her heart. Perhaps Tamerlan had hoped that Joanna would help Bella seek medical treatment and pay for it; perhaps Joanna tried to. But when she next checked in with Bella, the young woman said she had found medical assistance in New Jersey and was doing all right. Tamerlan said that Ailina had remarried, and her husband was Muslim. Joanna told Tamerlan she would let him stay until June 2013.

Time and again that winter she steered their conversations away from Ron Paul and conspiracy theories, and toward what Tamerlan might do with his life. He said he wanted to go into auto electrics. He mentioned a private school that offered vocational training in that field—a school on a par with the Catherine Hinds Institute. Joanna talked about ways of getting a more serious education. Once when they were standing in the front yard, she suggested he was better than what he was aspiring to. Tamerlan seemed taken aback, sheepish and confused. But what was it that he was better than, exactly? There were so many ways in which Joanna had been disappointed and so many ways in which he had given up trying—but in all likelihood this conversation, too, concerned needing to make a living. This was likely the last time they spoke.

JAHAR HAD A NEW ROOMMATE in room 7341 of Pine Dale Hall, a sophomore dorm at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Andrew Dwinells was a studious engineering major, the kind of kid who would surely turn a degree from a middling state school into a stepping-stone to a decent graduate school, a respectable career, and a solid middle-class childhood for his future offspring. This was supposed to be Jahar’s path—that was the story told in Kyrgyzstan, Dagestan, and even Cambridge—but Dwinells’s presence served up daily reminders of how little Jahar had in common with a young man who was actually living the American ambition. They never talked. They exchanged text messages only when one of them was locked out of the room, which happened often enough. The door locked automatically when shut, leaving whoever had forgotten his key card to stare at the light-wood veneer with the colorful name tags—Andrew and Jahar—and cutout stickers that, with some difficulty and no small doubt, could be identified as a lily pad and a turkey. The residential advisor had placed these on the door, as if the boys were eight years old. Inside, the decor was just as unimaginative and inelegant. Two long, narrow strips of furnishings mirrored each other: twin beds hiked up on banks of drawers; desks pushed up against opposite walls; two narrow cupboards that blocked the window. The two sides of the room were identical, except Jahar’s was always a mess and Andrew’s was neat bordering on uninhabited.

Andrew rose early to go to class. Jahar was invariably asleep when he left. Andrew did most of his studying in the library or the common area in the dorm; when he returned to the room, it was always dark and Jahar was either absent or staring at his computer screen. Sometimes, the small television perched on a desk would be on. Very rarely, one of the boys would make a comment about something that was on television. Once, this was something about September 11, 2001, and Jahar said it had been a government conspiracy. A lot of people at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth believed a lot of different things. Andrew thought Jahar was a weird one, but not in any extraordinary way.

Andrew saw students come in and out of their room. Most came because Jahar was a campus pot dealer; a small group were Jahar’s friends. On occasion, one or two of them would hang with Jahar in their room; more often, their small clump moved off somewhere, in a thick cloud of marijuana smoke.

It was as tight and purposeless a group as any set of college friends ever was. At its core were Jahar and two kids from Kazakhstan who had come to Massachusetts to go to college. Dias Kadyrbayev was a skinny boy from a middle-class family in Almaty. His coming to the United States was a triumph of his and his family’s will. He was the only one in the group who had anything resembling ambition, but much of it was focused on a girl named Bayan, whom he had been dating in Kazakhstan since sixth grade. Bayan came from money and planned to get a business degree in the United States, so Dias beat her to it: the year she was finishing high school back at home, he was already a freshman at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, and Skyping incessantly with her. His sophomore year, Bayan enrolled at Babson College, west of Boston, where she studied business with the sons of Middle Eastern sheikhs; Dias drove sixty miles north every Thursday to pick up Bayan to bring her to his off-campus apartment in New Bedford, next to Dartmouth, for the weekend.

Azamat Tazhayakov, a short boy with a face and broad-chested body that would surely, with age, become as perfectly round as his father’s, was the son of an oil executive who fancied himself one of the dozen most influential men in Kazakhstan and was probably one of a hundred. All the boys in the family would be educated abroad and all would go into oil—this was preordained—but probably because Azamat went first, he landed at UMass by mistake. His father had confused the University of Massachusetts with Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and signed Azamat up for the Bachelor Pathway Program, the fancy name of a revenue-generating program for foreigners that does not guarantee admission to a degree program but does provide English instruction and a way to secure a student visa. Once Azamat arrived, it became clear not only that UMass was not MIT but also that it offered no major appropriate for a future oil magnate. His father wanted Azamat to transfer to the University of Texas, but Azamat, who disliked upheaval more than anything else, showed uncharacteristic resolve and convinced his father that all American universities were essentially the same for the first couple of years. He was allowed to stay.

Azamat and Dias met at the very beginning of freshman year, and both of them met Jahar a short time later. Both the Kazakhs spoke Russian as the second of their household languages, and this made them good and tolerant enough company for Jahar, who was re-Russifying himself. He was spending an increasing amount of time on Russian-language social networks, which provided not only virtual company but also copious amounts of pirated music and films in Russian.

Their first year, Dias and Azamat also made friends with a girl named Pamela Rolon, who introduced them, the following September, to her younger sister, Alexa Guevara, and a medical lab science major named Tiffany Evora. Robel Phillipos, Jahar’s friend from Rindge and Latin, rounded out the group. The Kazakhs managed to persuade their parents to allow them to rent the off-campus apartment in New Bedford starting their sophomore year. They claimed it would be easier for them to study there. By “study,” they—or at least Dias—meant “get stoned.” Jahar provided the weed for free in exchange for Dias’s acting as both a runner and a sort of customer liaison.

The boys furnished their apartment with a sort of 1980s panache that put one in mind of a café on the outskirts of the former Soviet empire. There was a fair amount of black lacquer, there was a plush sectional sofa, and there was a large television set. The group spent three or four evenings a week on that sofa, getting stoned, watching movies, and eating. The boys played FIFA, a soccer video game; the girls talked about which of the boys might be the hottest lovers, though it does not appear that anyone but Dias was getting much action. The group made several weekend runs to New York, though once they got it together to make the three-hour drive, they usually had just time enough to snap a picture in Times Square, or in front of the Statue of Liberty or the New York Times building, and post it on a Russian social network before making the drive back. On one of those trips, though, they found the time to go to New Jersey to buy a used BMW for the Kazakhs. Azamat’s father was bankrolling this purchase—Azamat had explained to him that it was too hard, always having to ask Jahar for a ride to and from campus—and Jahar helped pick out the car, using what Anzor had taught him. It is not clear who picked out the vanity license plate for the front of the car (Massachusetts requires only that the back plate be state-issued) or whether it was there from the start. It read TERRORISTA#1. It was funny.

The Kazakhs and Jahar were practically family. In fact, family was exactly what they were in the eyes of T-Mobile: because Jahar was the only person in the group who had a Social Security number, required to enter into any financial contract in the United States, all four of them—he, Dias, Azamat, and Bayan—had a family cellular plan, with Jahar as the primary subscriber.

At first glance, the group Jahar assembled at college was not dissimilar to the group he had in high school. His ability to make friends with kids different from him and from one another had been one of the qualities that impressed teachers, marked him as a “good kid” in Cambridge’s progressive hierarchy. But a closer look would have shown that something had changed, perhaps profoundly. He was no longer shifting effortlessly among groups. This tiny crowd was insular. And it was, essentially, a group of outcasts. Dias and Azamat were still fairly disoriented in their American life. All the Americans in the group came from difficult families except for Robel, whose mother had raised him resolutely alone. Jahar was the only member of the group who had the option of identifying as white—an option still important for fitting in at a state school in Massachusetts: UMass Dartmouth was roughly seventy percent white. Of course, Jahar was white only in the United States. In Russia his sharp features and curly black hair marked him as “black,” and though he had never experienced this himself, he would have heard from Tamerlan about the ordeal of moving through Russia while being recognizably Chechen in ethnicity; one need only spend a couple of hours in Moscow changing planes in order to feel the hostility and the heightened police attention.

What Jahar did have was the experience of growing up Muslim in the United States after September 11. In his case this experience was barely mitigated by the experience of commonality and belonging that many other Muslims enjoy: he hardly ever went to mosque, and while some years he fasted (and abstained from smoking pot) for the daylight hours during Ramadan, in his family this was an individual rather than a group choice. In his life, being Muslim was purely a mark of otherness. He did not share even this experience with the Kazakhs. Though they were similarly vaguely practicing Muslims for whom Islam was code for heritage and family rather than religious practice, they had grown up in a country where the majority of the population shared their identity. They had never before encountered people who found the very idea of Islam frightening. Toward the end of the first semester of his sophomore year, Jahar tried spending a bit more time at mosque, but this too failed to give him a sense of community. Here he stood out because of his height and his pale skin, and people kept asking him when and why he had converted.

With the possible partial exception of Tiffany, no one in the group was much concerned with studying. Robel was suspended for a marijuana violation toward the end of the first semester of sophomore year and was not allowed to return in the spring. Azamat, the only nonsmoker in the group, got a letter in early January notifying him that he was suspended for failing to maintain the required grade-point average. He did not bother to do anything about this, even though the notice rendered his student visa invalid. As it turned out later, the system had made a mistake: Azamat’s grade-point average was good enough. Jahar’s grades, on the other hand, were slipping. At the start of his sophomore year, he changed his major to biology; this did not seem to help his grades or his morale.

In February or March, Jahar saw Larry Aaronson across Norfolk Street and called out to him.

“Are you in school?” Larry asked. He was always worried about kids staying enrolled—though he had never seen any reason to worry about Jahar.

“Yes.”

“Are you wrestling?”

“No.”

Larry was surprised.

“It’s a lot harder than I thought, this second year,” said Jahar.

Perhaps Aaronson sensed a lost quality in Jahar; perhaps he imagined it later. There was nothing in the boy’s demeanor or dress that seemed to have changed. Larry suggested Jahar could come to him for help with his studies, and Jahar seemed happy at the offer—and when he seemed happy, he always seemed genuinely happy. He never called.

From Cambridge, Tamerlan stayed in touch with his friends back in Dagestan by Skype. Skype has a special place in many Chechen immigrants’ homes. Those who have arrived in the United States after broadband Internet connections became widely available often maintain a semipermanent link with relatives at home, creating a close approximation of daily life still lived as a clan, with news and gossip exchanged while chores are done and meals are consumed or even virtually shared. Tamerlan now had his own connection to “back home.” He showed Mohammed Gadzhiev his daughter and the long beard he had grown as though on behalf of his brothers in Dagestan: they could never wear a beard that ostentatious without being identified, arrested, and likely executed for supposedly being Wahhabis.

Tamerlan boasted of his growing outspokenness. He had twice raised his voice in mosque—in fact, he had twice either staged a walkout or been removed from mosque for objecting to the imam’s acknowledgment of non-Muslim holidays. First it was Thanksgiving, and then Martin Luther King, Jr., Day in January. Gadzhiev reacted with his familiar mix of approval and condescension: Tamerlan was still acting like a big baby—speaking up against the imam in mosque is not a done thing—but on the other hand, his heart was clearly in the right place, even if his intention was still muddled.

On January 23, Tamerlan filed his petition for naturalization as a United States citizen. The form asks applicants if they want to change their name—an option many people take to Americanize their first names and to simplify spellings that have often been copied from foreign-issue documents. Tamerlan wrote that he wanted to change his first name to Muaz, presumably in honor of Emir Muaz, an insurgent killed in Dagestan in 2009. The emir’s name at birth had been Umar Sheikhulaev, and he had been the anointed leader of Dagestan in an aspirational greater Chechen state called the Caucasian Emirate.

ONE EVENING in late February or early March, Azamat, Dias, and the girls were cruising for some weed. The search naturally led them to Jahar. He said he had something else in mind, and everyone got into a car—some people were in the BMW and some were in the car Jahar was driving. He had banged up his green Honda Civic a bit and had given it to Tamerlan to fix, so somehow he had a black Camaro on loan, which gave the evening a tinge of gangster glamour. He led the group to the banks of the Charles River, where he got a black backpack out of the trunk and some fireworks out of the backpack and set them off. Then everyone got back into the cars and drove back to New Bedford, where there was pot to be smoked. It had been pretty. It had also been cold. Fireworks, unless set off by professionals as part of a licensed display, are illegal in Massachusetts. But then, so is the sale of marijuana.

IN EARLY MARCH, Tamerlan was calling Musa Khadzhimuratov in New Hampshire to arrange a time to drop in: Musa’s mother-in-law was visiting from Chechnya, and custom dictated that every Chechen in the area stop by to pay his respects. The matter was urgent because the old woman’s stay was coming to an end. Tamerlan wanted to come on a weekday—he wanted to bring his family, and Karima worked weekends. Musa had endless medical appointments during the week, so he resisted. In the end, Tamerlan and Karima figured out a way to visit on the last weekend of March, which also happened to be the old woman’s last weekend in the country.

Musa’s mother-in-law thought they were a gorgeous family, and attempted to tell Karima as much in Chechen.

“Mama, she doesn’t understand.”

The old woman switched to Russian.

“Mama, she doesn’t understand that, either.”

“What’s such a beautiful boy doing with a girl who doesn’t understand anything?”

Everyone laughed.

Tamerlan made mistakes, as always: he picked up Zahira, in violation of a custom that prohibits Chechen men from picking up children in front of elders. Musa ribbed Tamerlan about being more Dagestani than Chechen. Tamerlan said he still thought of himself as more of a Chechen but regrettably had no family in Chechnya. (Jamal, though he was often there, maintained his home base in central Russia now.) He said his aunt Malkan had recently sold her place in Central Asia to move to Chechnya—maybe he would be able to visit there more often now.

OVER A MEAL IN MARCH, Jahar told Dias and Azamat that he knew how to make a bomb. He said he had learned it in chemistry class. He also said there were things, perhaps some things in the Koran, that were worth fighting for, using force. His friends did not think anything of it: they spent a lot of time together, and a lot of things were said. Jahar was no Muslim fanatic—Dias and Azamat had both seen a couple of those, and Azamat thought maybe Tamerlan was one when he foisted some book on him during the one night Azamat spent at Jahar’s place in Cambridge. Jahar just had a way with random pronouncements. Like, on New Year’s Eve he tweeted, “I meet the most amazing people, spent the day with this Jamaican Muslim convert who shared his whole story with me, my religion is the truth.”

Three weeks later, he tweeted, “To be honest, I don’t care for those people that wanna commit suicide, your life b, do what you think will make you happy. #selfishbastards.”

And in another month he tweeted, “Share the love, the knowledge and the wealth.”

On April 9, he posted several videos on his VK.com page, including one about the carnage in Syria that ended with the line “Syria is calling. We will answer,” and one about a blind boy who spends all his time studying the Koran.

And on April 12 he tweeted, “Now we ain’t come here to start no drama, we are just looking for future baby mamas.”

And eight minutes later, “Dreams really do come true, last night I dreamt I was eating a cheeseburger and in the afternoon today, guess what I’m eating…”

He used his Facebook page that week to advertise some Ed Hardy clothes for sale, new with tags.

And among all that, there were hundreds of tweets and posts about girls, food, sleeping habits, the drudgery of college, and a couple of sophomoric jokes in Russian thrown in. Who knew what could come out of the guy’s mouth?

ONLY THREE STATES in the union observe Patriots’ Day, the anniversary of the 1775 Battles of Lexington and Concord. Massachusetts is the only one of those states that has actual celebratory practices for the holiday: the battles are reenacted; the Red Sox play their home opener at Fenway Park; schools and state offices are closed; and the Boston Marathon is run. It is like Massachusetts’ own big American holiday. Though if you have never lived anywhere in America outside Massachusetts, you might just think Patriots’ Day is a big American holiday, period. Kind of like a second Fourth of July.

Patriots’ Day 2013 fell on April 15, tax day—an ironic coincidence for a big American holiday. At 2:49 p.m. that day, a couple of hours after the winner completed the Boston Marathon, when runners were crossing the finish line in a steady stream, two bombs went off near the end of the route, killing three people and injuring at least 264 others, including sixteen who lost limbs.

Eight THEY ARE US

In the immediate aftermath of the bombing, police scanned the crowd for people who looked suspicious, which is to say Muslim, which is to say darker than Boston-white. A twenty-year-old man from Saudi Arabia was among the walking wounded—the dozens of people with burns, scratches, and bruises from being thrown who were making their way, with the assistance of uninjured runners, to the assembled ambulances. Abdulrahman Ali Alharbi, an English-language student who had been on his way to meet friends for lunch and decided to get a glimpse of the marathon on the way, had been thrown by the second explosion. He had burn injuries on his head, back, and legs. His jeans were torn. He was covered in blood, most of it other people’s. A police officer directed Alharbi, along with other victims, toward the waiting ambulances—but when the student boarded one, several officers followed him into the vehicle. At the hospital, more than twenty police officers and FBI agents surrounded his bed. At 4:28 in the afternoon, less than two hours after the bombs went off, the New York Post reported that law enforcement were talking to a suspect in the bombing. By evening, the media had his name and address, and the FBI had his Facebook password. By Tuesday morning, the Post had published a picture taken in the street in Revere, the Boston suburb where Alharbi lived, Fox News had reported his name, and other media had published a mistranslation of a Facebook post of his: “God is coming to the U.S.” In fact, he had written, “Thank God I arrived in the U.S. after a long trip.” CBS stated that a spectator at the marathon had seen Alharbi “acting suspiciously” and tackled him. Other media reported that he had had burns on his hands, pointing to the probability that he was the bomber.

Alharbi was exonerated by the FBI within twenty-four hours of the bombing, but by this time he had no home—his address was now so widely known that he felt he would be unsafe there—and no money: the FBI never returned his wallet. The Saudi embassy provided Alharbi with food and a hotel room.

After Alharbi came Sunil Tripathi, Salaheddin Barhoum, and Yassine Zaimi. The last two were Moroccan immigrants, a seventeen-year-old high school track competitor and his twenty-four-year-old coach, who had been fingered by amateur online detectives. On Thursday, April 18, the Post published a photograph of them on the cover, with the banner headline BAG MEN: FEDS SEEK THESE TWO PICTURED AT BOSTON MARATHON. The evidence, as analyzed by the online crowd: one of the men was wearing a black backpack—and a black backpack, or what remained of it after a bomb exploded inside, had been found at the scene. Plus, they looked dark and were indeed Muslim.

Sunil Tripathi was a brown-skinned American student at Brown University who had disappeared almost a month before the bombing. This suspect too came courtesy of Internet amateurs, but the social network Reddit gave it such traction that for a day or two those following the case were all but certain this young man was the prime suspect. In fact, he had been dead for weeks—his body was found another week later.

At five o’clock on Thursday, the FBI called a press conference at a Sheraton hotel in Boston. Within half an hour media had released pictures of another pair of young men: one older, one younger, one wearing a white baseball cap and the other a black one—oddly, all of this was also true of the two Moroccans, and in some quarters confusion persisted. The pictures were taken from surveillance tapes; the FBI believed the two men to be the bombers, and was asking the public for help in identifying them.

LARRY AARONSON is the sort of person who engages with everything that happens in his city and feels responsible for everyone he has ever known. This time his personal investment was overwhelming: he knew three of the people who lost limbs. One was the son of a fellow Rindge and Latin teacher, a special boy who had been doing relief work in war zones. Another was the daughter of a teacher. A third was a teacher who was dating a former student. Aaronson felt personally injured, and he was glued to Facebook, where friends and strangers were exchanging the latest news and rumors. His own suspicion was that the bomber was a rogue Tea Party member who had chosen the coincidence of Patriots’ Day and tax day to protest the government by killing amateur athletes.

But then he saw reports on the Saudi student, the Moroccans, and the boy who looked Sri Lankan. They seemed no more and no less absurd than any other possible suspect. Then he saw the picture of the men the FBI said were suspects. One of them looked uncannily like Jahar. As Thursday evening wore on, the pictures Aaronson was seeing on his screens became more and more clear: as the resolution went up, the bombers were coming into focus. Man, this is looking a lot like Jahar, he was thinking. I should call him and tell him, “You better go to the police, because they are showing pictures of this kid who looks just like you.”

Ginny, a receptionist at a Cambridge hospital, recognized Tamerlan right away. She had the day off, so, like many people in the Boston area, she was home in front of her television set when the pictures were first shown. “That’s the fucking guy who used to come in and talk to me!” Ginny shouted to her husband. “He delivered for Mona Lisa!” Mona Lisa was the pizza place down the street from the hospital, just across from Rindge and Latin. It was owned by two brothers—Ginny was pretty sure they were Brazilian (they were actually Egyptian)—and Tamerlan had spent a couple of months delivering for them. On one of his first deliveries, he’d asked the receptionist her name, though he never introduced himself. From then on, he would come in, always dressed in jeans and a hoodie, and say, in his strong accent, “I’m from Mona Lisa. How you doin’, Ginny?” Her first thought on seeing his photo on television was, He knows my name! She barely considered going to the authorities: “I was scared. I didn’t want to become a target.”

OVER AT the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth campus, just about every television set had been on for three straight days. Sixty miles’ distance from Boston made it all feel a bit like a video game. Few of the students were familiar enough with the multimillion-dollar town houses and luxury shops of Back Bay to have the sort of visceral reaction to the television footage through which the brain and the body tell each other, This is us, it is our home that is under attack. The kids at the UMass campus fielded calls and messages from family, affirmed that they were well and far from the scene of the attack, and commenced watching what felt like a reality TV show on the bombing. And then they saw Jahar.

Unlike Larry Aaronson, many of the UMass students saw Jahar several times a week, or even daily. They did not think that television was broadcasting the picture of a kid who looked like Jahar: there was no doubt in their minds that this was Jahar. And then again, there was doubt.

Very soon, many of Tamerlan’s and Jahar’s friends would be telling the FBI and the media that it was impossible that the brothers were the bombers—there had been no sign. Surely, the friends would say, if the two had been plotting something so huge and horrible, they would have seemed distracted. Or emotional. Or pensive. Or somehow, clearly, not themselves. But this assumption was a misconception. The psychiatrist and political scientist Jerrold Post, who has been studying terrorists for decades, writes, “Terrorists are not depressed, severely emotionally disturbed, or crazed fanatics.” Political scientist Louise Richardson, an undisputed star in the tiny academic field of terrorism studies, writes of terrorists: “Their primary shared characteristic is their normalcy, insofar as we understand the term. Psychological studies of terrorism are virtually unanimous on this point.”

Nor do terrorists tend to behave out of character just before committing an act that, to them, appears perfectly rational and fully justified. One of the September 11 hijackers called his wife in Germany on the morning of the attacks to tell her he loved her; she apparently heard nothing extraordinary in his voice. Having made the decision to commit an act of terrorism, the future bomber—even a suicide bomber—develops, it would appear, a sort of two-track mind. On one track, life goes on exactly as before; on the other, he is preparing for the event that will disrupt his life or even end it. It is precisely the ordinary nature of the man and the extraordinary effect of the act about to be committed that ensure the two tracks never cross.

When students at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth saw their classmate’s picture on television, their minds became the perfect mirrors of Jahar’s: on one track was the full knowledge that they were looking at a picture of their friend; on the other was the certainty that Jahar could not possibly be responsible for the marathon bombing. “I knew it was him because I recognized him, but I didn’t believe it was him,” Tiffany Evora said in court fourteen months later. Testifying at the same trial, Alexa Guevara could not force the words out and had to be coaxed by a lawyer.

“When you saw the images, you did not believe it was him, did you?”

“No,” she said, though she had acknowledged that she had recognized Jahar.

“You didn’t believe he was capable of something like that, did you?”

“No,” she said, and started crying.

Between the track that was telling these college kids that the person in the pictures on television was undoubtedly their friend, and the track that kept insisting this was impossible, they chose the middle road. Rather than go to the police or the FBI, as the voices on television kept imploring them to do, they went to Jahar’s dorm. Why? None of them could answer that question clearly in the aftermath, but it seems that in the hope of calming their exploding minds, they wanted to ask Jahar himself if he had set off the bombs.

The door to room 7341, with perhaps a lily pad and a turkey glued to it, was locked. Befuddled students came in a steady stream, tried the door handle, exchanged concerned glances, somber nods, and the occasional unconvincing reassurance, and ambled off, back to the screens in their own dorm rooms.

HAD ANY OF JAHAR’S college friends gone to the police, they could have reported that they had seen Jahar in the days after the bombing—he had been on campus and he had been himself: just Jahar. Azamat could have said what he told the FBI later, that Jahar had not joined his friends for spring break in Florida in mid-March, and that when they returned he had apparently stopped smoking weed—though not necessarily selling it. That he did not see Jahar or text with him on Sunday, April 14—Jahar must have gone to Cambridge for the day or the weekend, which was hardly unusual. Monday was the holiday, another no-school day, and Azamat had texted Jahar, asking if he was around. “I ‘have’ to make my passport, so ‘tomorrow,’” was the response, with the emphasis quotation marks around two words. Then a friend from Kazakhstan had texted Azamat, asking him if he was all right—this was how Azamat found out about the bombing. Azamat texted Jahar, asking in turn if he was all right—and learned that he was. At 4:19, Azamat got another text from Jahar: “Don’t go thinking it’s me, you cooked bastard.” Azamat was thinking no such thing; the only odd thing about this message was that “cooked” means “stoned,” and Azamat never smoked.

On Tuesday, Azamat and Dias drove to Boston. The plan was to do some shopping, which was really an excuse to check out the state of Back Bay. They headed for Boylston Street, only to discover that all the stores there were closed. Dias dropped Azamat off in Cambridge, near Jahar’s house. Jahar came down and drove Azamat back to New Bedford in his green Honda Civic while Dias used the shared BMW with the TERRORISTA#1 license plate to go see Bayan at Babson. Back at Azamat and Dias’s apartment on Carriage Drive, Jahar and Azamat played FIFA on Xbox for hours—except for a short break Jahar took to go into the bathroom and use his phone to Skype with Tamerlan. This was all normal enough. One of the three Kazakhs on the T-Mobile family plan—most likely Dias, who had lost his T-Mobile phone—had failed to pay his share of the monthly bill, and T-Mobile had suspended their account. Now none of them could use regular phone service: they used iMessage, an Apple program, to text, and Skype to talk on the phone, but they could do those things only when they had an Internet connection. There was nothing strange about Jahar’s wanting some privacy for his call with his brother—and Azamat knew whom he was talking to, so Jahar was not exactly being secretive.

That day Jahar also tweeted a bit, as usual. Among other things, he, like millions of other Americans, commented on a picture of a woman who had been injured in the bombings. The photograph had been circulating with a caption that claimed the woman’s boyfriend had been planning to propose to her the day she was injured—and that she had died. “Fake story,” wrote Jahar. It was.

On Wednesday, two days after the bombing, Azamat and Jahar went to the gym together in the evening. Afterward, they played FIFA until midnight. Sometime that evening Jahar also dropped by a soccer-team get-together at an Italian restaurant.

On Thursday Azamat ran into Robel on campus. They had not seen each other in over a month, while Robel was on suspension; now he was on campus for a hearing on his violation. It was around one in the afternoon and they were near the cafeteria, so they got lunch. Robel asked if he could spend the weekend at the apartment on Carriage Drive. Dias had the BMW that day, so after lunch Azamat texted Jahar, asking him for a ride home. Robel and Azamat walked over to Pine Dale Hall. They spent about half an hour in Robel’s friend Lino Rosas’s room. Lino always said he liked Robel the moment he saw him, at the beginning of freshman year, because he had “finally found someone skinnier than me.” Both boys were dark-skinned, well over six feet tall, and so thin they looked breakable and made Azamat seem positively roly-poly. Azamat hung around with them for about half an hour in Lino’s room, then tagged along as they went down to the parking lot, and sat in the back of Lino’s car as they got stoned with the windows rolled up.

It was nearly four in the afternoon when Jahar became available to give Azamat a ride to Carriage Drive. He, Azamat, and Robel spent less than ten minutes in the car on the way to the apartment, and then Robel returned to campus with Jahar. That would make Robel the last person to have seen Jahar before his picture was broadcast to the world—the boys parted ways in Pine Dale Hall less than an hour before the FBI press conference. Before leaving his dorm room, Jahar retweeted a post by a Zimbabwean mufti: “Attitude can take away your beauty no matter how good looking you are or it could enhance your beauty, making you adorable.”

Andrew Dwinells, had he gone to the police, would not have been able to tell them much. His roommate had seemed the same as he’d ever been. He slept when Andrew left for class, and was out when Andrew returned.

And even if all the students who had seen Jahar in the days following the bombing had gone to the authorities with their stories, the FBI would have learned only Jahar’s name. Jahar’s observed behavior contained no clues to what he and Tamerlan were planning to do and where they were planning to hide once their faces were known—because the brothers had no plan. While Boston was reeling from the marathon bombing, nothing extraordinary had happened to the bombers themselves.

AFTER JAHAR dropped him off at Carriage Drive, Azamat took a nap. About an hour and a half later, Dias and Bayan walked in. Now Azamat took the car: he went to the gym, and Dias stayed at the apartment, where, prompted by a text message, he eventually turned on the television and saw the picture of his best friend wearing a white baseball cap with the visor turned back. The first person Dias texted was Jahar:

YO BRO

PICK ME UP PLEASE

IN MY CRIB-

I AM TRYAN TO GO TO UMASS

PLEASE

YO BRO

Dias’s mind had not just split into two tracks: it had all but imploded. He wanted to go to campus to find out if Jahar, his best friend, was the Boston Marathon bomber—and he wanted Jahar, his buddy with the car, who was texting him right back, as usual, to drive him there. It took him a minute to grasp that Jahar was out of reach. At 8:43 in the evening he texted Jahar again.

U SAW THE NEWS?

FOR REAL

U SAW URSELF THERE?

AHAHA

HAHAHA

WHAT’S WRONG WITH YU?

HAHA;)

Dias began frantically texting Azamat, who had finished his workout and gone shopping at Target. In the space of ten minutes Dias sent ten messages, all of them imploring Azamat to pick him up at once. “Azkro,” they began. “What yu doing,” “Will yu pick me up?” “Please,” “Azik!” and so on. Azamat dropped his shopping and rushed home. Dias was waiting for him at the sliding door—this would have shaved half a minute off the time required to exit the apartment and enter the car. Dias told Azamat to drive to campus, then explained that he had seen a photo on the news and it looked like Jahar.

By the time they got to Pine Dale Hall, Jahar had been gone more than four hours and the haphazard pilgrimage to the locked door to his dorm room had lasted more than three. Robel, whom Dias had also texted, was there, as was Lino, who had been smoking weed with Robel in his dorm room. Like all the students who had come here in the last few hours, they knocked, jerked the handle, confirmed that the door was locked, and commenced a few minutes of standing around looking somber. All agreed that the picture on TV looked like Jahar. All nodded their heads. Then there was nothing left to do. The four young men went to Lino’s room and started a game of Xbox. After about five minutes, Dias said he was going back to Jahar’s room, and left.

For every four cramped residential double rooms in Pine Dale Hall, there is one common study area, also cramped; this makes the four rooms a “suite.” Dias found Andrew working on an essay in the common room. When he said he needed Andrew to let him into the dorm room, Andrew thought nothing of it: he had accommodated such requests before, whenever Dias, the only genuinely frequent visitor to Jahar’s side of the room, had forgotten his iPhone charger there. It was in the room that Dias showed Andrew the text message from Jahar: “Ifyu want yu can go to my room and take what’s there:) but ight bro Salam alekum.” To Andrew, who had not yet seen the news, the message read as somewhat cryptic but also unsurprising: he could imagine Jahar, who had never seemed to be quite there in the first place, picking up one day and vanishing.

Dias began a frantic search of Jahar’s side of the room—the wardrobe, the dresser drawers under the bed, the desk. Azamat and Robel came, summoned by a text Dias had sent to Robel: “Come to Jahar’s.” They sat impassively on the bed, staring at images moving across the television screen—it was Project X, an unfunny 2012 comedy about three high school students trying to throw the party of a lifetime—as Dias continued his search. What was he looking for? Pot? But he knew where Jahar kept his stash, so, barring the possibility that he was too agitated to remember even that simple fact, he had no reason to be conducting a search. More likely, he was still seeking what everyone who had knocked on Jahar’s door that day had sought: an answer. He thought he might have found it when he came upon a black JanSport backpack with some emptied-out fireworks in it: a larger hollow cylinder and a half-dozen long ones, barely thicker than a cigarette, which had been removed from the large one and then relieved of the gunpowder. He also found a half-empty jar of Vaseline. From something he had either watched on a screen or heard in conversation, Dias knew that gunpowder and Vaseline could be components of explosive devices. He placed the open backpack in front of Azamat and mouthed the words “I think he used these to make the bombs.” Azamat nodded.

But finding the backpack could not have helped reconcile the conflicting tracks of Dias’s mind. The fireworks looked so ordinary. The larger cylinder was a meek blue; the thin inner cylinders were just paper. They looked like the remnants of a long-ago New Year’s, or like that March night on the bank of the Charles River when Jahar had set off the fireworks while the rest of the crew watched. And the jar of Vaseline was just a jar of Vaseline. Dias may have known that these objects could be the remnants of making a bomb, but all of them were of this reality, not of the fantastical, otherworldly, disastrous realm of the carnage on television.

When Dias, Azamat, and Robel left Jahar’s room after about half an hour, they took with them: the black backpack with the fireworks and the Vaseline, a black Sony VAIO computer, a thumb drive, a brown clay ashtray, a small bag of marijuana, a pair of red Beats headphones that Azamat did not exactly remember loaning to Jahar a few months before, and a red baseball cap that Dias decided he liked.

Andrew returned to the common room and told the friend with whom he had been studying there that Dias and company had been acting “suspiciously.” He texted Jahar: “Hey your friends said you left.” He got no response.

AT SOME POINT he saw the news. He saw Jahar’s face. He also saw, unfolding, one of the most bizarre manhunts ever to reach the small screen. FBI investigators working out of the Boston office had zeroed in on Jahar as early as Wednesday morning—he was the only person on the surveillance tapes who exhibited no reaction to the explosions. While others ran, ducked, or at least screamed in terror, he kept walking, his white baseball cap turned backward, his step bouncy. They noticed Tamerlan second—he was walking a few people away from his brother, but they appeared to be in step. The investigators called them Black Hat and White Hat: they had no names for the suspects and no idea where to look for them. Facial-recognition software evidently could not be used because of the angle at which the surveillance camera had caught the brothers’ faces. So the FBI chose to show the faces to the American public, with a warning: “We consider them to be armed and extremely dangerous.” Said Richard DesLauriers, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Boston division, during the press conference called to release the photographs: “No one should approach them.”

Five hours later, a member of the campus police force at MIT was shot at close range while he sat in his patrol car. According to the media narrative that followed, members of Massachusetts law enforcement were immediately certain that Black Hat and White Hat were behind the murder. It is possible, though, that they reacted with similar certainty to every violent crime committed in and around the city in the days after the bombing. State Police Superintendent Timothy Alben even told the press that the bombers were responsible for the robbery of a 7-Eleven store in Cambridge on Thursday night. At the scene of the MIT murder, police and the FBI found Officer Sean Collier’s body with five gunshot wounds, including two to the head, and no clues that might help them find the brothers, if they were indeed the killers. They had not even taken Collier’s gun—they had been unable to work his locking holster.

It was over an hour before a 911 call came in from a Cambridge gas station. The brothers had hijacked a car driven by a young Chinese-immigrant engineer who would become known to the media as “Danny.” After a meandering, harrowing ride around Watertown and Cambridge, Danny had managed to escape while the brothers were filling up the tank. They were now driving a new Mercedes SUV that belonged to Danny. The car had a GPS device that would allow the police to track the brothers in real time.

From the aimless way the brothers had driven around in his car, Danny ventured that they might return to Watertown. He was right: the Mercedes was next seen in East Watertown, where they had ditched the green Honda a short while earlier. There appeared to be no rhyme or purpose to their actions, either while they were driving around with Danny or now—most likely because they had no plan. With them they had five homemade explosive devices, a semiautomatic handgun, a machete, and a hunting knife—the arsenal of monstrous children who seemed to have packed everything they had in the apartment that was in some way a weapon, and then bought the Ruger 9mm pistol off a Rindge and Latin friend of Jahar’s who had become a far more serious drug dealer than Jahar himself. They had apparently planned to travel in one car—and had transferred their eclectic armory into the Mercedes—but now they decided to reclaim the Honda. They had, it would seem, not considered the possibility of being identified, and they had no idea where and by what means they would go. This made them dangerous in a way entirely different from what those who were looking for them had imagined. Danny, who had had a conversation with Tamerlan as he drove at gunpoint, told the police that his kidnapper had boasted of having set off the bombs at the marathon and that he had mentioned possibly going to New York. He had also identified himself as a Muslim American.

Just before one in the morning, police from Watertown and a number of nearby municipalities converged on Laurel Street, two blocks of modest one- and two-family houses that on any other night or day might have been called sleepy, and began shooting haphazardly. A transit cop named Richard Donohue received the worst gunshot wounds, from one of his own. There is no indication that a negotiating team was present: the only conversation on record appears to be an officer yelling to the brothers to “give up.” In response, Jahar hurled the explosive devices, which turned out to be pipe bombs and a pressure-cooker bomb—literally a pressure cooker stuffed with small metal objects such as nails and ball bearings as well as explosives. The bombs used on Monday at the marathon finish line had been pressure-cooker bombs too. But this time, the explosives going off on a narrow residential street appeared to have injured no one.

The final gun battle took place between Watertown policeman Jeff Pugliese and Tamerlan. Pugliese hit Tamerlan several times; Tamerlan hit nothing aside from the walls of a couple of houses, ran out of ammunition, and threw his gun at Pugliese, finally hitting him. Tamerlan then tried to run, but Pugliese and another officer tackled him, pinning him to the pavement. Jahar jumped behind the wheel of the SUV and charged at the three men struggling on the ground. The officers jumped out of the way, and the Mercedes ran over Tamerlan, dragging him about thirty feet down the block. In a book published a year later, two Boston Globe reporters, Scott Helman and Jenna Russell, wrote: “Tamerlan was left lying on his stomach, clinging to the final moments of his life. He tried to lift up his head. Blood pooled around his body, streak marks visible on the street where the SUV had dragged him. Pugliese ran over, put cuffs on him, and pressed a foot into his back. Then he called for an ambulance. At long last, Tamerlan was theirs.”

Tamerlan was delivered to Beth Israel Deaconess hospital around 1:20 in the morning. He was unconscious and naked—his clothes had been cut away, exposing several gunshot wounds, a large gash on his torso, and burns from being dragged along the street by the SUV. Trauma teams dressed in protective gear first checked him for radioactivity, using a Geiger counter, and then intubated him. At 1:35 they pronounced him dead.

Meanwhile Jahar drove away from the scene of the battle. Probably because they were all still focused on the gunfight and also possibly because they were officers from many different forces acting without a clear center of command, police trailed him by almost a minute, giving him enough time to ditch the Mercedes and vanish into the suburban maze.

LULU EMMONS’S MOTHER called just before six in the morning on Friday and told her to turn on the news. She knew Lulu’s boyfriend left for work at six, and she thought it might not be a good idea for him to go out. Lulu had been living away from her mother for just a short time. She had graduated from Rindge and Latin in 2011, done a year of college, found it very difficult, and was now regrouping, working as a waitress and living with her boyfriend in a neat and homey apartment on the first floor of a house in Watertown. Lulu turned on the news and saw Jahar’s face. She and Jahar had shared at least one class every year of high school. Sometimes they walked over to the athletics building together: he was going to wrestling practice and she to swimming. For a while Lulu dated a boy who was on the wrestling team, and he would often mention Jahar. “The general consensus was that he was really good,” she told me almost a year after the bombing. “Not the best, not like going to go on to something, but good.” She also told me she knew Jahar “was from the Czech Republic, we knew he wasn’t from here because of the way he spelled his name, but his English was fine.” She never knew what his religion might be.

When she saw Jahar’s face on television, Lulu texted a friend from high school: “Do you think it’s Jahar?” They texted each other that they were shocked and crying and did not believe that it was Jahar. But then the television was saying that the surviving suspect in the marathon bombing had been positively identified as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and that he was on the loose after the previous night’s shoot-out in Watertown.

Terrorism works by striking at random. It is the understanding that anyone—including you and your loved ones—could become the victim of a terrorist attack that multiplies the fear-and-shock effect far beyond what simple killing and even carnage could engender. And the effect is multiplied exponentially if you learn that your loved ones, or at least your friends and neighbors, could become not only the victims but the terrorists themselves. “It is not Jahar,” said Lulu, willing her reality to split into two. “It may be his body, but it is not Jahar.”

For the next minutes or hours—they could not tell—Lulu and her boyfriend sat in front of their large-screen television, constantly switching between the news in English and in Spanish, which Lulu’s boyfriend understood better. Then Lulu looked up and saw a group of men in SWAT gear entering the house through the back porch. Their boots stomped simultaneously up and down the back stairs. Lulu called the landlord, who lived upstairs. He said that he was all right: he must have left the basement door ajar and law enforcement noticed it during a sweep of the street. The men in SWAT gear stomped through the house and out of it. Lulu and her boyfriend returned to switching between coverage of the hunt for Jahar in English and coverage of the hunt for Jahar in Spanish.

AFTER LEAVING PINE DALE HALL on Thursday night, Dias, Azamat, and Robel drove to Taco Bell. They ate there and continued to Carriage Drive. Bayan was on the couch, about halfway through The Pursuit of Happyness, a 2006 movie about a salesman who becomes homeless. Azamat and Robel, who gravitated to any lit screen in any room, joined her. Dias filled a pipe with the pot he had taken from Jahar’s room, then joined the other three on the couch. They watched the rest of the movie in the fog of the pot and the nagging anxiety about the television picture that had looked so much like Jahar. The boys occasionally looked at the news on their devices—there was something about a cop shot at MIT, but no information on whether Jahar was really Jahar; Azamat made an attempt to do his homework, without moving from the couch. When the movie ended, a bit after midnight, Dias and Bayan retired to Dias’s bedroom. Azamat and Robel turned the television set to the news but soon dozed off.

Azamat woke up around two o’clock and looked at the video of the FBI press conference again. It still looked like Jahar. He watched it one more time. And one more. Then he started watching Fox News on his computer, then CNN. Both seemed to be showing the same thing.

“Where yu looking?” he messaged Dias at 2:26. Over in the bedroom, Dias had also been watching the news.

“I think they caught his brother,” Azamat messaged at 2:28. Tamerlan had been dead nearly an hour, but some news outlets were reporting that the older and bigger suspect was in custody. CNN had already reported that the suspects were believed to be brothers—and both Dias and Azamat had met Tamerlan. Which mattered if the surviving bomber was indeed Jahar.

In the bedroom, Dias and Bayan started discussing the news. He told her that he had taken a backpack from Jahar’s room that contained emptied-out fireworks and a half-full jar of Vaseline, and that he suspected that Jahar had used these in making the bombs. Bayan took this information badly. “It could be evidence,” she said. “I don’t want it in the apartment!” This must not have occurred to Dias—nor did it occur to either of them now that they should take the backpack to the police, who were chasing after someone who appeared to be Jahar: they just realized that they had come too close to a bad sort of trouble. Dias walked out of the bedroom and either informed his friends that he was now going to dispose of the backpack or consulted them on this matter—later this would be much discussed in court. He removed the laptop from the backpack—there was no talk of getting rid of a perfectly good Sony VAIO just because it might belong to America’s most wanted man of the moment—took a half-full black garbage bag out of the kitchen trash can, stuffed the backpack inside, cinched the bag, and walked out of the apartment to toss the backpack with the fireworks and the Vaseline jar into the apartment complex dumpster.

“No more backpack,” he reported to Bayan when he returned.

“Where is it?”

“Far away.”

WHEN AZAMAT next woke up, Dzhokhar’s name was written on the television screen. A couple of hours earlier, after seeing a picture that was even more clear than all the previous ones—the resolution kept going up—and looked ever more like Jahar, Azamat had Googled “Dzhokhar,” “Dzhakhar,” “Dzhokhar Tsarnaev,” “Djahar Tsarnaev,” and other spellings he could imagine for his friend’s name, and perhaps felt reassured by not finding the name linked to the words “Boston bomber.” But now it was, on television, and now Azamat believed it. He smoked pot for what may have been the first time in his life. He woke up Robel, who was now panicking, too. Robel said he had changed his mind about staying the weekend at the Carriage Drive apartment—and that he urgently needed Azamat to drive him to campus to drop off his backpack. He was afraid the police would now come to search the Kazakh students’ apartment and discover Robel was carrying marijuana.

Azamat and Robel came to UMass Dartmouth a little after nine in the morning, just as dozens of police vehicles were pulling up to campus, which was about to be evacuated. Robel still managed to drop his backpack in a friend’s room. Back at Carriage Drive, he frantically texted another friend, asking to be picked up—and within half an hour, he left Azamat, Dias, and Bayan, none of whom had lived in the United States for more than two years, to wait for what seemed to him an inevitable encounter with law enforcement.

The FBI called in the early afternoon, through a friend—probably because the people at 69A Carriage Drive still had no regular telephone service on their “family plan” and the friend knew to text the Kazakhs first so they could Skype back. Azamat dictated the address, and the three teenagers started waiting for the FBI to come. Azamat Skyped his father, the most powerful man among all their parents.

“The FBI are coming here,” said Azamat.

“Why?” asked Amir, his father.

“Because one of the Boston bombers was our friend.”

“The Chechen?” Amir was beside himself. He had always thought Chechens were trouble—and he certainly did not send his son to the United States so he would make friends with one of them. “Did you have anything to do with the bombing?”

“No.”

“All right, in that case we are not getting a lawyer—that will show that you have nothing to hide. Now show me the apartment.”

Azamat lifted his MacBook to give his father a panoramic view of the place. It looked like a dungeon: they had drawn the blinds and were huddling like three scared kids as they waited.

“Open the blinds!” Amir barked. “You need to give the FBI a clear view inside the apartment so they won’t shoot.”

The kids did as they were told and sat down at the dining table to wait again. Azamat’s family was now looking at them through the Skype window in the laptop perched on the table. After a couple of hours the wait grew tedious; it was now nearly five in the afternoon in New Bedford and four in the morning in Kazakhstan. Amir said he did not think the FBI was coming after all, and said good night to his son and his friends.

Just after he signed off, Azamat looked down at his chest and saw more than a dozen red spots—for the number of gun sights trained on him. The apartment was surrounded by several score law enforcement officers in SWAT gear. Since that morning, a large part of Greater Boston had been in virtual lockdown—residents had been asked to “shelter in place,” meaning not to leave their homes—and police and FBI had been searching for Jahar house by house in Watertown. He seemed nowhere to be found, and that elevated the possibility that he was simply at his best buddies’ apartment. The troops had come here prepared to fight him, or perhaps his allies.

The three Kazakh students were ordered out of the apartment, searched—the boys were directed to remove their shirts—and placed in police vehicles.

“This is the biggest thing since nine-eleven,” Robel had said, ill-advisedly, to Azamat at some point on Friday morning. Massachusetts state authorities and media, the FBI, and the police apparently thought something similar—although, if one measured “big” in loss of life, bigger things, meaning bigger acts of sudden violence, had certainly happened, including the Virginia Tech shooting, which took thirty-three lives in 2007, and the 2012 Aurora, Colorado, shooting, in which twelve people died during a midnight show at a movie theater. Those, however, fell into the “angry white man” category of crimes, which FBI investigators believe they understand well. (In 2009 there was also the Fort Hood shooting, in which an Army major killed thirteen people on a military base, but because the shooter was a Muslim, the crime was seen as belonging to a different category—and a Senate report called it “the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil since September 11, 2001.”) The Boston Marathon bombing, it seemed immediately apparent to investigators, did not fall into the “angry white man” category, if only because the brothers were two, and not exactly white, by virtue of being Muslim. They therefore approached the crime as an attack in progress, as September 11 had been when that investigation first got under way. Following policy and practice established at least fifteen years before September 11, 2001, investigators focused on the suspects’ networks among aliens, presuming these networks to be both extensive and dangerous—in other words, they pursued a lot of dead ends.

Early Friday morning, a neighbor called Larry Aaronson, screaming into the phone: “They are fucking us!” Aaronson thought he was aware of the facts contained in that statement, however one interpreted the syntax. “You don’t think I’m following the news on Facebook?” he asked.

“You don’t understand,” the neighbor shouted. “They went to Rindge and Latin, they live next door, they are fucking us!”

Just then Norfolk Street was starting to fill up—with the FBI and the police, all in SWAT gear, and the media. Chris LaRoche’s husband shook him awake after a friend had called saying, “Your street is on TV.” Chris had seen the suspects’ pictures the previous evening, but he had not recognized the brothers. Now, as he tried to wrap his not-yet-awake mind around the information, someone pounded on the door: “FBI!” The residents were hastily herded up the street and corralled in the garage where condo owners rented parking spaces. They stood there exchanging bits of information and answering questions from reporters who floated up from Norfolk Street every few minutes. Everyone had different impressions of the Tsarnaevs. Someone thought that Tamerlan looked like a good father. Chris had assumed the family had fled conflict in the Balkans, probably Kosovo. Rinat Harel, the art teacher, seemed to be the only one who thought the family was from Chechnya. She caught herself thinking that now, after all these years, she could start using the front entrance to her building again, and immediately felt ashamed. After about an hour, the residents were allowed to leave the garage, but not to return to Norfolk Street. A group went to Dunkin’ Donuts, because it was open. Then Chris and his husband walked to a friend’s house in Porter Square, a couple of miles away. It was eerie: a beautiful sunny morning, and the two of them the only people on the streets in all of Cambridge and Somerville.

ABOUT AN HOUR after law enforcement raided the Carriage Drive apartment, the shelter-in-place request was withdrawn and tens of thousands of people stepped out for the first time that day, tens of thousands of pairs of eyes scanning familiar landscapes for anything that seemed different. Very soon, a Watertown homeowner reported seeing blood on the side of a boat he had stored in the backyard and what he thought was a body inside the boat itself. Jahar was hiding in the covered boat; he might have been there the eighteen hours that the police had been searching for him. The house-by-house search of the neighborhood had missed this house, along with a number of others. Law enforcement once again assembled a SWAT team to take the prisoner. They tried to smoke him out with tear gas, scare him with gunfire, and coax him with words. Finally, an officer approached the boat and barked at Jahar to get down from it. The terrorist responded with a childish “But it’s going to hurt”: it was a seven-foot drop off the edge of the boat, which sat on a wheeled platform. The officers helped him down indelicately.