Rostnikov got in the front seat and Elena into the rear as Sanchez moved briskly to the driver’s side and got in.
“You speak no Spanish?” Sanchez asked.
“None,” said Rostnikov, trying unsuccessfully to maneuver his leg into a position that was not terribly painful.
“Pero usted habla español muy bien, yo pienso,” Sanchez said to Elena, looking at her in his rearview mirror.
Elena looked toward Rostnikov, who was watching the traffic as Sanchez drove slowly out of the parking lot.
“Ah, I see,” said Sanchez in Russian. “You were hoping to keep your knowledge of our language a secret. Well, I wish you luck.”
“Where are we going?” Elena asked.
“Hotel,” said Sanchez. “There are many empty apartments in the Russian embassy. The place is almost abandoned, an echoing sterile mausoleum crying out for history or ghosts. You would be bored. There’s an apartment building for Russians and Bulgarians, the Sierra Maestra on First Street, right on the water, but it’s noisy and most of your people who are still there are a sullen lot, waiting to be called back to whatever country they’ve now become members of. Am I talking too much?”
They flashed down a broad street almost empty of cars. Beyond the rows of houses set back against the trees there were spots of light, suggesting a sleepy village more than a major city.
“No,” said Rostnikov.
“You have questions?” said Sanchez.
“What were you doing in Moscow?” asked Rostnikov, still looking out of the window, his eyelids heavy.
Sanchez laughed.
“I was studying literature and languages,” he said. “At Moscow University. That’s where I met my wife. I was in the army. It was expected by my family that I would come back from your country and become a general, a leader of our nation.”
“But …?” asked Rostnikov.
Sanchez shrugged.
“I lacked ambition,” he said. “To be ambitious in Cuba is to risk the enmity of others who are ambitious. It is difficult enough to survive without creating enemies.”
“But you are a major,” said Elena.
“At my age and with my education, I should be at least a colonel,” said Sanchez.
“So,” said Rostnikov, “we are not to take your assignment to us as a sign of great respect for our mission.”
Sanchez laughed again.
“Precisely,” he said, looking at Elena in the mirror. “Before Yeltsin you would have merited at least a colonel. Now you get an unambitious, overage major. There. On the right. That used to be a Catholic girls’ school. Then it was a school for your people. Now it is empty.”
Rostnikov caught a glimpse of the two-story white house with brown trim and barred windows.
“We would like to see Shemenkov in the morning,” Rostnikov said.
“When you wish,” said Sanchez. “I am at your service.”
Rostnikov smelled the sea. Past Sanchez he could see moonlight on the water as they crossed a small bridge.
“From this point on, the Malecón,” explained Sanchez. “Walkway along the sea. Runs the length of the city. You’ll be at the El Presidente, a short walk to the old stadium, where there’s a complete workout facility. I’ll bring you there tomorrow.”
Rostnikov did not bother to ask how Sanchez knew of his weight-lifting habits. The man obviously delighted in surprises, and Rostnikov had no reason to deny this pleasure to his host.
“That is most kind of you,” said Rostnikov.
“It is both my duty and my pleasure to be gracious,” said Sanchez. “It is also my curse to be honest, so I tell you that he did it.”
“He?” asked Elena from the darkness of the back seat.
“Shemenkov,” said Rostnikov.
“I have a copy of the report in the trunk,” said Sanchez. “In Russian. More detailed than the one we sent to Moscow. We have discovered more. Your engineer is guilty. There were three witnesses. I suggest you talk to him, interview the witnesses, see Havana, sit by the pool for a few days, relax, allow me to entertain you, and go home.”
Sanchez’s eyes met Elena’s in the rearview mirror. She had started to turn away when the Lada came to a sudden halt that threw her awkwardly forward. Rostnikov kept himself from cracking his head into the windshield by pushing against the dashboard.
“Are you all right?” asked Sanchez.
“Yes,” said Elena, sitting back.
Rostnikov nodded and looked out the window at the swiftly moving motorcade of five dark cars that had cut them off and caused Sanchez’s sudden stop. Men wearing fatigue uniforms and carrying weapons looked out of the windows of the cars. In the middle car, the back seat window facing the Lada rolled down and a man with a flowing gray beard looked out, his eyes finding and meeting those of Rostnikov. The two men looked at each other for the beat of a heart and then the window slowly closed as the caravan moved forward and out of sight down a dark street.
“Fidel,” said Sanchez. “He has a house not far from here. No one is supposed to know where it is, but … He has houses everywhere.”
Sanchez drove two blocks along a divided boulevard with empty pedestals on the median strip.
“This is the Avenue of the Presidents. Each of those pedestals held the statue of a Cuban president. They were all torn down after the revolution.”
“We have some fresh empty pedestals in Moscow,” said Rostnikov, as Sanchez turned down a narrow street of three-story homes, made a right, and then another right to pull up in front of a hotel. Three taxis and a bus were parked in front of the hotel and a few people were seated on white plastic chairs beyond a low stone balustrade.
“The food is adequate, the rooms sufficient, the plumbing bad, and the toilet paper scarce,” said Sanchez. “One of the better hotels in Havana.”
“We appreciate your choice of accommodations,” said Rostnikov.
“There was another reason for putting you into this hotel,” said Sanchez, his smile now gone. “Maria Fernandez worked here. But your countryman had the minimal good taste to murder her in an apartment on the other side of the city. Your Russian stabbed her fourteen times, including three rather deep thrusts in the right eye. I have managed through persuasion and what little influence I have to get you the very room where Señorita Fernandez sometimes entertained visitors from a variety of countries dealing in hard currency. Señorita Timofeyeva, usted tiene la cuadra próxima, trescientos cuarenta y cinco.”
“Muchas gracias,” Elena responded as Sanchez got out of the car.
“You speak Spanish like an American,” he said, opening the door for her as Rostnikov struggled out of the passenger side.
“I learned in New York,” she said.
Across the top of the Lada, Rostnikov watched as Sanchez held on to Elena’s hand, smiled, and said, “I have always had an attraction to Russian women.”
“You must learn to control it,” she answered, removing her hand. “In the long run it will lead you to disaster.”
“Qué lástima,” he said with a sigh.
“Sin vergüenza, es verdad,” she said.
While Sanchez moved to the trunk of the car and opened it, Rostnikov surveyed what appeared to be a giant rat on one of the three stone steps leading up to the patio in front of the hotel. A second look told him that it was a small, diseased dog.
“Many dogs in the city,” said Sanchez, handing Rostnikov his suitcase. “Not much food. You have hard currency?”
“No,” said Rostnikov. “Only rubles.”
“Worth nothing,” said Sanchez, handing Elena her suitcase. “I’ll get you Canadian dollars in the morning. They’ll take them at the restaurant, and the café, and the shop near the pool.”
He slammed the trunk shut and held out his hand toward the hotel entrance.
“There are American movies on the television every night,” he said, leading the way. “New movies. We don’t pay the Americans. What can they do, sue us?”
The lobby o
f the El Presidente resembled the lobby of a small hotel in Yalta in which Rostnikov had stayed less than a year before. The furniture was imitation eighteenth-century French, and the walls were papered. The lobby was bright, and a handful of people were at a small bar in the far corner laughing and talking in German.
There were two clerks at the desk, both in blue uniforms. One was a young woman with red hair, the other a young man with blond hair and blue eyes. Neither spoke Russian.
“They speak some English,” Sanchez said in English. “I understand your English is very respectable, Inspector.”
“It has been adequate in the past,” Rostnikov replied in English.
Sanchez smiled once more, handed each of them a key he had received from the blond desk clerk, and said, “The elevators are right there. Slow, but …”
“We shall be comfortable,” said Rostnikov.
“Shall I meet you in the restaurant for breakfast?” Sanchez asked.
“Late lunch would be better,” replied Rostnikov.
“Perhaps …?” Sanchez said, turning to Elena.
“Late lunch will be fine,” she said.
Sanchez shrugged and handed Rostnikov a brown folder stuffed with paper. Rostnikov took it, shook his host’s hand, and said, “Two o’clock in the restaurant.”
“As you wish,” Sanchez said. “Welcome to Havana and have a good night’s sleep. The television movie tonight is Scent of a Woman. Al Pacino. Magnificent performance.”
“We appreciate your hospitality, Major Sanchez, and your movie review,” said Rostnikov.
In the mirror over the check-in desk Elena watched the door of the hotel open and the thin KGB man from the airplane enter. The thin man paid no attention to the Cuban in the blue uniform and no attention to Rostnikov or Elena. He crossed the lobby, suitcase in hand, and moved immediately toward the bar.
“May you have an interesting visit,” said Sanchez, catching Elena’s eye. “Buenos noches.”
THREE
The man who said “pardon me” as he accidentally jostled a fat woman standing next to him on the bus was tall, erect, and athletic-looking in his American jeans, yellow pullover shirt, and denim jacket. He had a full head of dark hair and wore blue contact lenses, which he had paid for dearly at the medical center where he worked six hours a week to supplement his salary.
The red-and-white bus lurched along the section of Lenin Prospekt that had once been called the Kaluga Road. Moscow’s first hospitals had been built along this stretch of road when it was still mud and brick.
Though he was only a few miles from Sokolniki Park, where he had murdered Iliana Ivanova early this morning, Yevgeny Odom was not the least bit worried that he might be recognized by any of the people he had encountered near the bus stop or in the park.
He had been careful, as always. Before he had driven the car back to the little parking lot across from the medical center, he had driven to the crumbling barn on his uncle’s abandoned little farm where, using the tools he had hidden, he rolled back the mileage on the odometer, carefully calculating and subtracting the additional five kilometers it would take to get back to the parking lot. Then he added just enough gas to get the gauge back to where it was when he took the car. He was as confident of his ability to manipulate the Volga as he was of his ability to return the vehicle before its owner, a nurse who worked the day shift, would notice it was gone. He had spent nine weeks looking out the window near his table at the clinic, watching the woman arrive, watching her leave. The woman never came out during the day, never.
The bus stopped in front of the ornamental park that held the former Neskuchny Castle, the home of the now dying Soviet Academy of Sciences. As the apartment buildings around the academy were vacated by scientists fleeing to other countries, former Communist party hacks with no education were getting ruble-rich renting the apartments to those who could afford them, including those who pooled their resources or resorted to crime to get the money.
He would never use the car again. He was almost certain that no one had seen him in the park and no one had seen him get in to or out of the car. Nonetheless, he would never use it again. Nor would he ever again be the bald, bespectacled businessman. The bald man had not been one of his most satisfying creations, but it was getting to be quite a challenge to come up with new identities after almost forty killings.
Yevgeny smelled the bodies pressed against him and looked out the window as the bus crossed Gagarin Square and entered the Southwestern District. Yevgeny lived there, in one of the large interconnecting housing areas beyond the Lenin Hills on the site of the former village of Cheryomushki.
The bus was now a five-minute walk from where it had all begun a dozen years before. He had been on the edge of despair, looking forward to a life of no meaning, a job without prospects, a dreary one-room apartment, and a few nights a week out with Boris or Ripkin, getting drunk and talking about women and the hell of Boris’s marriage.
The first murder had been an accident. It had been in December. He had been waiting for a bus, much like the one he was now on. It was night. He had been just a bit drunk, dreading the return to his apartment, when she moved to his side. He could remember her in perfect detail, far better than he could remember any of them since, including the girl this morning. She had been as thin as his mother and she wore too much makeup. Her name, she said, was Dmitria and she smelled of artificial flowers. Had she been a whore he would simply have dismissed her, but there was something about her that made it clear to him that approaching him had been difficult for her. Still, he had not been excited till she asked him if he could lend her a ruble or two, even some kopecks, to get home. She had, she said, just come from the park in front of the university where there had been a gathering of students and young people mourning the anniversary of the death of the Beatle, John Lennon. She claimed that she had miscalculated when she went to the commemoration, and she promised to return the money.
He didn’t know why, but he immediately said that he would be happy to drive her home, that his name was Illya Ripkin, that he was an Olympic ski trainer. The sense of excitement had been amazing. It had been the most dangerous of all the murders since all the subsequent ones were carefully planned. He took her in the darkness of a windowless dead-end alleyway behind the Riga Railway Station. The creature within him had gone mad with the smell of blood and lust, and for the first time, Yevgeny had let it free. It had leaped at the frightened girl, who screamed, scratched and clawed with dirty fingernails as the animal fed from a hunger that had been suppressed for forty years. It was the most vivid night of his life, more vivid even than the night he had sat up waiting at his mother’s bedside for her to die, watching her spit blood and babble of someone named Yuri whom she called her only love.
Now there were two parts of Yevgeny Odom. The pleasant man with the ready smile donned disguises and found victims who would satisfy the beast caged within him, the beast he nurtured, soothed, then set free.
When he was a child, he loved to go to his uncle’s farm, the farm where he had taken the car. When there had been rain, a pond of mud formed in the thick weeds behind the barn.
Yevgeny would slip into the mud and the mud would take him lovingly. He had fallen in love with the mud, had felt it seep under his pants and tug at his penis and testicles. Dmitria and the others had been like the mud pond, only better, much better.
Yevgeny decided as he looked out the window that he would visit his father very soon. Yevgeny’s mother was long dead. His father lived far outside the city, in a home for retired railway and Metro workers. He would bring his father a gift, one of the mementos he had taken from a victim. The African boy’s neck charm. No, his father wouldn’t like that. The pocketknife of the boy who said he was from Kiev. White horn handle. Yes, that would be perfect.
Yevgeny worked his way toward the exit door and eased himself out when the bus came to a stop. The night air was crisp and cool, and he was anxious to get to his apartment. There was so much to
get done. Since he had discovered and acknowledged his need, he had spent one hour each day preparing his body-push-ups, sit-ups, hundreds of them turning his body hard. Running in place for hours in his bare feet till he was drenched, depleted, exhausted, and ready. He called the beast Kola, his own nickname as a child. Kola was his secret child, a child who needed protection. It was Yevgeny’s mission to devote himself to that protection.
Yevgeny read everything he could find on serial murderers. He had taught himself to read English and French, since most of what was available on the subject was in these two languages. From his reading he learned what to do and what to avoid. There was no pattern to the killings he planned for Kola, neither in location nor in time. All that was similar was the method and the approximate age of the victims. He had no choice in that. Kola’s satisfaction depended on it.
Now, as he walked boldly down the street, the shiver of anxiety he had felt exactly four times in the past few weeks scratched sharply down his back, followed by the urge to find someone he could tell what he had done, someone who would appreciate the commitment and difficulty and need.
Old Mrs. Allyamakaya, who lived just below him, was sitting in front of the apartment building with a woman who could almost have been her twin. Both women looked up as he approached.
“Dobriy vyehcher,” he said.
“Good evening,” Mrs. Allyamakaya said with a toothless grin.
“The night is beautiful,” he said, looking to the sky.
This was evidently something she and her friend had not considered before, so they looked upward.
“Beautiful,” Mrs. Allyamakaya’s friend said.
“Here,” he said, reaching into his bag. “I have three peaches. Too ripe to save. They must all be eaten tonight. One for each of us.”
He handed a peach to each of the women and they beamed at him gratefully.
“We live in troubled times,” he said with a deep sigh. “Very troubled times. But we must be grateful for the opportunity to enjoy the taste of a peach.”
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