These, he believed, were not unreasonable hopes for a policeman who had just put in a fourteen-hour shift dealing with murder and bureaucracy. Murder had been far easier to cope with.
Sasha missed his former partner, Zelach, who had recently returned to limited desk work after almost being killed as a result of Sasha’s negligence. Karpo was reliable and professional, and he expected Tkach to be the same. Zelach was, putting it kindly, slow-witted, but with Zelach, there was no doubt that Sasha was in charge. His more recent partner, Elena Timofeyeva, was smart, efficient, ambitious, and, though he had more experience than she did, she was older than he and maddeningly confident.
When Elena was selected to accompany Porfiry Petrovich to Cuba, Sasha had been jealous. The prospect of private nights away from his family in a place where he heard there was still a reasonable supply of food was something to fight for, but the crucial issue had been a simple one. His French was nearly perfect, but Sasha spoke no Spanish.
So, at the moment, he was asking very little, as he closed the door to the living room, turned the locks without letting them click noisily, and made his way carefully across the room.
Before he had taken five steps he knew something was wrong. When he took the sixth, he knew what it was. His mother was not snoring. Her snoring had necessitated moving himself, Maya, and the children into the bedroom. Perhaps, he thought hopefully, she is dead, if she is, I’ll simply let her he there and discover the body in the morning.
“Sasha,” came his mother’s familiar loud voice.
Lydia was nearly deaf and far too proud to admit it.
In the bedroom beyond the door, Maya or one of the children stirred.
Sasha stood still.
“I see you there,” Lydia said. “What are you doing?”
Useless though it was, Sasha whispered loudly, “Shh, Mother. You’ll wake-”
“Turn on the light,” she ordered. As he obeyed he stepped on something hard.
Lydia was sitting up in bed ready for combat, her gray-black hair a wild nest, her small face pinched in the glare of sudden light.
“Are you hurt?” she asked.
Another sound from the bedroom.
“No, Mother. Maya and the children are-”
“Then why are you limping?”
“I just stepped on-”
“There’s no point in lying. You’re working with that Karpo. He is mad.”
Lydia was convinced that each of her son’s colleagues had some dangerous deficiency that would result in the maiming or death of her only child. The result of this conviction was that she was almost always angry with her son. The irony of this was that Sasha was convinced that he was a constant danger to those who worked with him. It was Sasha whose passions had betrayed him and almost gotten Zelach killed. It was Sasha whose depression had gotten him into a terrible and unnecessary fight in a bar while he and Elena Timofeyeva were conducting an investigation. Elena had not been hurt, but Sasha had suffered both broken ribs and painful bruises.
“I’m well, Mother,” he said. “I just want to eat something and go to sleep. Let me turn out the light and-”
“What are you hiding?” Lydia asked suspiciously as the bedroom door opened. Sasha suddenly felt massively sorry for himself.
“Hiding? Nothing.”
Maya stepped into the room wearing a giant T-shirt with the words “Comic Relief” printed on it in red letters. With her fingers she was brushing her long auburn hair away from her sleepy face.
Sasha shrugged as Maya reached back to close the bedroom door.
“He’s been hurt,” Lydia insisted.
“No,” said Sasha.
“Come,” called Maya, motioning to her husband.
Sasha dutifully took the five steps to the door. Maya turned to Lydia and said, “I’ll deal with him.”
Lydia was on her way to turn off the light when Sasha and Maya closed the door behind them.
“Hungry?”
“Ya galohdyen. Ya oostahl,” he whispered back. “I am hungry. I am tired.”
“Tense?”
“Tense,” he agreed.
She rubbed his cheek and chest while she unbuttoned his shirt.
“Let’s go in the bathroom,” she said.
They had been reduced to making infrequent love in the small bathroom. Sasha was excited, but the thought of the rusting toilet bolts and ceaseless dripping in the sink depressed him.
“Lydia is moving back to her apartment next week,” Maya whispered so softly that he wasn’t sure he had heard her correctly.
“Moving?” he repeated.
“Definitely,” she said. “I am well enough to take care of the baby. She can come over after work a few hours and help with Pulcharia.”
“She agreed to this?”
“She agreed.”
“That is a miracle. Miracles should be celebrated,” Sasha said. “Let’s go in the bathroom.”
At that moment Pulcharia said, “I want a drink.” Ilya awoke and began crying, and Lydia rushed into the bedroom without knocking.
Much to his wife’s relief, Sasha Tkach laughed.
After he had pulled the curtain on the single window in his one-room apartment, it took Yevgeny Odom twenty minutes to convert the space from a drab jumble of third-hand furniture into a war room that he was confident would earn the admiration and respect of Marshal Tutianovich himself had he been alive to see it.
On one wall of the small room hung the large chart that he had pulled from beneath his bed and carefully put in place. He had searched the Lucite surface carefully, as he always did, for signs of cracking or wear. There had been none, though a small patch in the lower right-hand corner would bear watching. He had checked his markers-red, black, and green with backups-and, satisfied, hung the black-and-white street map of Moscow on the opposite wall. It too was covered with Lucite and he checked it as carefully as he had the chart.
Was that a tiny crease, a shadow? He checked it again. It seemed to be all right.
He removed the ugly blue vase and the tablecloth from the metal tabletop and rolled the table from its place in the corner to the center of the room.
Next Yevgeny rolled a chair next to the table. The chair with its black metal arms and its woven green seat and back was his prize possession. He had spent a month’s wages and part of his savings on the chair four years earlier.
Then Yevgeny sat in his chair and checked the books he had placed on the metal table to be sure they were lined up and ready for use.
Then, as he always did, he swiveled first to the chart and then to the map to be sure that they needed no adjustment. His perspective seated in the center of the planning room was different from his perspective standing.
The chart, in neatly ruled columns, listed each of Yevgeny’s victims, along with age, approximate height, weight (again approximate), color of hair and eyes, description of clothing, place of birth, address (if known), place where he had killed them, details of the killing (weapon, number of wounds, etc.), date and time of killing, phase of the moon, the weather. Some of the information was missing, but not much. He had made it a matter of great importance to collect details from investigation of the victims’ possessions. There had been several times when he had been forced to travel as far as Kiev to get information and one time when he had to pose as a policeman to get data from the neighbor of a young woman Kola had killed not far from the Slavyansky Bazaar on … what was the new name of the street? Yes, Nikolskaya. Madness. It had been Twenty-fifth of October Street all his life, and now they had changed all the street names. As if changing a name changed history.
Yevgeny checked his markers again to be sure they were moist and sharp. Then he looked at the charts.
The information was color coded. Personal information about each victim was in red. Information about the location of the attack was in green. Data about the weather, phases of the moon, the time and day in general, were in black. He could have coded further, but Yevgeny did not want t
he chart to look like some festive game.
The map was stark. He had drawn it himself from a street map he purchased at a tourist bookshop. He had done it first in pencil. He had read a book on scale drawing and another on charting before he had begun. When he had been satisfied with the map, he had painstakingly gone over every line with carefully applied India ink and he had changed the names of streets as anti-Communist fervor erupted.
The Moscow map carried small red circles at the precise location of each murder. Next to each circle was the date of the killing and the name of the victim.
Yevgeny had shaved, cold showered, and changed into his hand-washed slacks and drip-dry white shirt.
He was ready.
The room existed, as all war rooms do, to plan the defeat of the enemy. In Yevgeny’s case, the enemy was any agency of the law that had been searching for him and for Kola.
The task was to provide his pursuers with no trail to follow. He was the lone submarine being pursued by a massive armada, but through wit and cunning he would elude them all.
To confuse them, Yevgeny would make them think there was a pattern. He would commit three consecutive attacks on the same day of the week, two or three exactly ten days apart, two in a row during full moons, every other attack in a park.
It was essential to keep checking, to be sure he had not accidentally or unconsciously fallen into a real pattern. Another concern was that some policeman would see a pattern where none existed and blunder onto his next attack by mistake.
He lacked one thing-someone with whom he could share his victories. He wasn’t sure when this need … no, he was not prepared to call it a need … this wish to tell someone had begun. Some time after the African boy on … He looked up at his chart. The girl this morning had been young and pale. There had been a tattoo of a yellow angel on one of her buttocks. Kola had removed her liver and taken two or three bites. And the eye … This was the kind of young girl who might carry the virus, but Kola was not afraid of such things.
Yevgeny put his hands behind his head, examined the chart and then the map, considered, and then made a decision.
He had never committed an attack in a Metro station. There was a very good reason why he had not done so, but a Metro station would be perfect. In fact, he suddenly understood, a Metro station was essential if the police were not to wonder at some point why he had avoided such an obvious place.
He would have to ride the lines and look at the stations that he already knew down to the last detail of each mural.
He would have to look with a fresh professional eye, considering the best place and time. It would have to be done soon. He knew that. Kola wanted to get out. There had even been times, like this morning, when Kola had almost burst out before it was safe.
A thought rose in the mind of Yevgeny Odom, the thought that he might be going mad. Perhaps that was another reason to make contact with someone who might understand, someone who could confirm that he was not insane. It was a powerful thought, but he pushed it away. His mind filled instead with visions of Metro stations buried deep below the ground, the massive escalator system, so deep, the deepest of the stations such as Revolution Square and Mayavovsky Square.
He would get little sleep this night, but it would be a night worth living.
FIVE
Elena Timofeyeva sat in the empty cafeteria of the women’s prison waiting for Victoria Oliveras. The stone tables and benches were gray and clean. The light from the narrow windows was bright, and the large photographs of Castro, Che Guevara, and Celia Sanchez that looked down at Elena were depressing.
The ride to the women’s prison had taken about an hour, during which the driver of the ancient Buick and his partner, both un-uniformed men in their early thirties, had argued about whether they had enough gas and if the tires would make it.
They had been recruited by Major Sanchez to take Elena Timofeyeva. He had told them that they would be paid for their service to Cuba when they brought her back. The two men, Jaime and Abel, had accepted humbly and gratefully, but once in the car they had begun to complain.
It was also clear to Elena as they drove down narrow roads past African-style thatched huts and through small towns where apparently windowless little homes were jammed next to each other that the two men had no idea she could understand their language.
On several occasions during the journey, the young men had discussed her sexually. She had looked out of the window as they gave her high marks for body and face and low marks for potential passion. But, ultimately, they seemed more interested in the possibility of the Buick’s actually completing the journey.
And then, when they had reached the prison, the men had asked for money so they could go to a nearby small town to get something to eat.
Elena had let them mime and speak loudly in simple Spanish, repeating the word pesos and pointing to their mouths.
While they were going through this a woman in a light khaki uniform appeared. There was a star on her collar and above the right pocket of her blouse a white-on-black patch saying “Ministerio del Interior.”
“Can I help?” asked the woman in Russian.
“No, gracias, pienso que yo puedo hacerlo,” Elena answered in Spanish, certain that Jaime and Abel could hear her.
Then Elena gave them some Cuban pesos and told them to return in two hours.
When they drove off, the woman in uniform identified herself as Lieutenant Colonel Lopez, director of the City of Havana Women’s Prison. She was a tall, slender mulatto with a handsome, weary face. Her skin was clear and her manner efficient, which had suited Elena.
Elena had been expected and the order had come down for her to have a complete tour of the prison before meeting Victoria Oliveras.
“Victoria is working,” Lieutenant Colonel Lopez said. “She will be available in one hour. Meanwhile, I have been instructed to show you our prison.”
The tour had been as efficient as Lieutenant Colonel Lopez’s manner and it was evident to Elena from the start that what she was seeing was a showcase, a model prison maintained for foreigners. She knew because the Soviet Union had also maintained such prisons and she had visited both the showcases and the much more numerous and punitive remnants of the past.
The “work with internment” prison itself consisted of three two-story buildings, one building for the guards, most of whom were women, and the two cell blocks. Beyond the gates of the prison and the fifteen-foot-high metal fence was lush, green jungle through which Elena had been driven for the last five miles of the journey.
Elena was told by the lieutenant colonel that though the building had been built in the 1960s for nine hundred women, there were only four hundred now inside. Their sentences ranged from one month to twenty years for nonviolent felonies such as petty theft, drug sales, and economic crime.
The tour had taken Elena through fluorescent-lit corridors. She was shown large cells for four to six women, each cell individually coordinated in identical bedspreads and pillows with matching pillowcases. It looked better than any Moscow University dormitory room. It looked better than the tiny dark apartment in Moscow Elena shared with her aunt.
Flowers were everywhere-in cells, offices, the pharmacy, the twenty-four-bed hospital staffed by two full-time physicians. There was a baby ward in the prison hospital. The nearby conjugal visiting rooms reminded Elena of low-cost American motels she had been in when she had studied in the United States.
“The babies stay here for forty-five to ninety days after they are born,” a young woman doctor in a white smock explained. “Then they go to relatives or the state center for orphans.”
From the hospital Elena was taken to the heart of the prison, the textile factory. She was told that prisoners were paid to work an eight-hour-a-day schedule. There was also schooling in weaving, sewing, and knitting.
“The policy of Fidel, the Central Committee, and the Ministry of the Interior is reeducation before release,” Lieutenant Colonel Lopez said. “We have psyc
hologists, social workers, and lawyers on the staff. Some of our women choose to live in the nearby towns when they are released. They can continue to work in the prison factory and earn the same or better wages than they would in the city.”
Elena had asked a few polite questions, accepted the offer of orange juice, and was led to the cafeteria, where she sat drinking alone and listening to the distant sounds of the prison, the chatter of women’s voices, the churning of sewing machines.
Then a woman guard appeared with a full-lipped, angry young woman. The young woman’s dark hair was long, straight, and tied back at the neck. She was short and lean with the body of a model. She wore denim slacks and a denim blouse with denim buttons.
Elena asked Victoria to sit and the guard to excuse them for a few minutes. The guard nodded and disappeared, but Victoria did not sit. She crossed her arms defiantly and stood across from the Russian detective. Elena took her notebook from her pocket and went over her notes once more before looking back up at Victoria.
“You are not Cuban,” Victoria said.
“I am not Cuban.”
“You are some kind of Russian.”
“I am some kind of Russian.”
“Your Spanish stinks.”
“We can speak Russian.”
“I don’t speak Russian. Just Spanish.”
“Then you will have to suffer my Spanish.”
“Or not talk.”
“We will talk,” Elena said. “Sit.”
“You like men?”
“As a gender or …”
“For sex,” said Victoria, rubbing her finger along her lower lip.
“That is not relevant to our conversation,” said Elena. “Now sit.”
“It is relevant to our conversation,” said Victoria. “Maria liked men and women. Have you ever made love to a woman?”
“No,” said Elena. “Now you sit.”
“What is so important about my sitting?”
“I don’t like looking up, and I don’t want you uncomfortable and hostile.”
Victoria shrugged and sat across from Elena on the stone bench. She kept her arms folded and her eyes defiant.
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