Hard Currency

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

“No,” said Elena. She glanced at Rostnikov, who was occupied with the darkness of the liquid in his coffee cup.

  Sanchez shrugged and left the room, closing the door behind him.

  Rostnikov avoided looking at Elena, though he was sure her eyes were now moist. The door opened and Igor Shemenkov lumbered in.

  The door closed behind him and he stood there looking at his two fellow Russians. There was hope in his sunken eyes. He had shaved badly; he had cut himself just below the nose.

  “We will file a report from Moscow,” said Rostnikov. “The report will provide evidence and reasonable speculation that you are innocent of the murder of Maria Fernandez. Major Sanchez has said that he believes the evidence will not be accepted. We shall see. Meanwhile, you will remain in the custody of the Cuban police.”

  “I will be free?” Shemenkov said, looking first at Rostnikov and then at Elena.

  “If the Cuban government is convinced by our evidence,” said Rostnikov. “And I believe they have reason to be convinced.”

  Shemenkov looked stunned, but a broad smile came to his face. He moved heavily forward with arms open, perhaps to embrace Rostnikov with gratitude, but before Shemenkov could reach them, Rostnikov slapped the Russian twice. As Shemenkov staggered backward, Rostnikov took Elena Timofeyeva by the arm and led her out of the office and toward the street.

  FIFTEEN

  “I WANT THAT ONE,” the man said, pointing at Yevgeny Odom.

  He was talking to a thin woman with wild prematurely gray hair and the pinched face of one whose suffering is greater than your own. The woman wore a worn but clean white smock and a determined attitude as she tried to guide the old man into a chair across the room.

  Yevgeny did not look up from the fat girl from whom he was drawing two vials of blood. The fat girl looked up at him in gratitude.

  “They say he doesn’t hurt,” said the old man as he reluctantly sat down in the wooden chair to which the gray-haired woman had guided him.

  Once in the chair, the old man dutifully removed his hat and looked up at the woman who was preparing her vial and needle.

  “Look,” said the old man, “the girl is smiling.”

  “It’s her birthday,” said the pinched-face woman. “Hold out your arm. Make a fist.”

  “What has her birthday got to—”

  He stopped as the needle went into a bulging vein in his forearm.

  “Let’s see. Is it bleeding?” Yevgeny asked, examining the fat girl’s arm as he removed the needle. “No. Go. You are free.”

  And the girl wobbled through the open door to her waiting mother in the other room.

  Yevgeny stood up and turned to face the old man and the woman who was drawing his blood.

  “I’m going,” Yevgeny said. “I’m due at work in twenty minutes.”

  The old man grimaced as the needle was withdrawn.

  “My arm will be black. Look, it’s bleeding,” the old man complained.

  “You will survive,” said the woman. She put the hypodermic carefully on a towel.

  The old man rose, looked at Yevgeny, and left the room.

  “How many more out there?” Yevgeny asked, removing his white smock.

  “He was the last,” she said. She turned to Yevgeny and folded her arms. “You look tired.”

  “I did not sleep well last night,” Yevgeny admitted.

  “You work too hard. The Metro, here. May I ask you something?”

  “No,” he said, rolling down his sleeves and buttoning his shirt.

  “Why do you do it?” she asked, reaching into her pocket for a package of cigarettes.

  “Do … ?”

  “Work so hard,” she said. “You live alone. You have only yourself to support. But you’re always running. It’s a killing pace.”

  Yevgeny removed the Metro motorman’s jacket from the peg behind the door and put it on. The woman lit her cigarette and watched him.

  “I’m a restless person,” he said. “It is a combination of my genes and the hell of life in Moscow. I run to stay ahead of the two-headed monsters who pursue me. I run so I can find a place I can hide and then leap upon the back of the monster and ride him till he breaks.”

  “And then what happens?” the woman said with a smirk.

  “Well, then,” said Yevgeny, adjusting his Metro line cap, “I become the monster.”

  “Odom,” she said, inhaling deeply, “I think you may be a little bit mad.”

  “In a city of madness, with whom do you compare me to make such a judgment?” he asked.

  “You’re going to kill yourself at this pace.”

  “I think there is a good chance that you are right.” He headed for the door. “I think there is a good chance that I will die this very night.”

  “In Moscow, that is always possible,” she said, looking around the room, deciding that there was much to clean up before she could head home, wondering if her husband was out drunk or had actually spent time in some food line so that there might be something for her to eat at home besides stale bread and pasty tasteless yogurt.

  He left her standing in the middle of the room, whose alcohol odor always remained with Yevgeny for hours after he left the clinic. He wondered for the first time if he smelled of alcohol and whether those he found for Kola thought perhaps that he was drunk.

  He moved slowly through the halls of the clinic. The place was almost empty.

  In the small lobby of peeling linoleum a woman had set up a table to sell small baked biscuits. Now she was packing up what she had not been able to sell.

  “Wait,” said Yevgeny. “What have you left?”

  The dry, sagging woman turned with the pain of an arthritic, a pain Yevgeny’s own mother had suffered as long as he could remember.

  “Three left,” the woman said. “Twenty rubles.”

  He dug in his pocket for the money and handed it to her. She took the money and looked at him as she reached into her cloth sack.

  “They are a little dry,” she said.

  “That doesn’t matter,” said Yevgeny.

  “And,” she said, handing the small biscuits to him in her knotted hand, “they may have lost some of their taste. Flour is—”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Yevgeny. “It will fill my stomach. The sky is dark early tonight. Go carefully and be safe.”

  Yevgeny ate the first biscuit in two bites as he stepped onto the street. The night was heavy and the air moist. He breathed deeply and considered the possibility of returning to the clinic, letting Kola murder both the biscuit seller and Lana, who thought her pain was so great. He had to clasp the nails of his left hand into his fisted palm to keep from trembling at the release it would give him to let Kola bring them to their knees and then tear their self-pitying faces.

  A pair of young lovers, both with long hair and wearing identical black jackets, watched him as he forced the molecules of his body to stop vibrating. He imagined himself breaking up into molecules—not exploding but simply breaking up and joining with the air and the bricks of buildings.

  He walked along briskly past the Peking Hotel and across the intersection toward the Metro station.

  “Soon,” he said. He was unaware that he had spoken aloud, and unaware that a well-dressed man carrying a newspaper under his arm had heard him and automatically cut around him and down the stairs, a maneuver most Muscovites had perfected over years of encounters with an increasingly mad population that talked frequently to invisible gods and demons.

  Yevgeny checked his watch and hurried down the steps, past a pair of begging Gypsies—mother and sleeping child—to whom he handed the last of his biscuits. The woman accepted the food, looked at the hurrying man in uniform, and crossed herself over the sleeping child.

  A pair of boys, one with green hair and the other with scarlet, jostled past him, taking the steps down two, three at a time.

  Yevgeny Odom followed them into the hole of the earth, toward the sounds of roaring metal beasts that swallowed the waili
ng somnambulists of Moscow’s living dead.

  Sasha Tkach was riding the Metro and trying not to blow his nose. He pretended to read a book about welding and watched passengers come and go. From time to time at a station, he would get off, find the phone, check with Karpo, and resume his aimless riding.

  A peddler of viruses and promises, he thought. He thought of Pulcharia, blowing her nose with the help of Lydia, who muttered about the way children had been cared for better when she was a young mother.

  Sasha smiled.

  There was little to do and much time to think. Other Metro engineers had been lulled by the routine; some had been known to fall asleep, others to write poetry. At least four that Yevgeny Odom knew of had gone mad, overridden the controls, and sent their trains smashing into waiting trains in stations ahead of them.

  Stop. Ease forward. Switch. Open. Roar. Sway. Hush. Lulling lights. Burst. Ease. Doors open.

  It took Yevgeny five stops to notice the pairs and trios of young people with wild rainbows of hair. They were roaming the stations, riding the trains, laughing, looking while trying not to look. There were always some of these in the Metro. More all the time. It was not their number that Yevgeny noticed but how evenly dispersed they seemed to be. They were, in fact, at every station, VDNKh, Rizhskaya, Prospekt Mira, Kolkhoznaya.

  It was something to think about while he searched for Kola’s prey. Was this some new game? A mass robbery of passengers at a given time? The passenger load was light at this hour. What could they be up to? Could it be a bizarre coincidence? Were they all heading for some site where a ritual would take place?

  He thought of other things too. When he ended his shift, he would ride, blending in among the neon and the sleepy, one of many late-night uniforms, until he spotted a lone victim lounging, waiting, just getting off of a train at an empty station.

  After the first hour, he could not deny the presence of this army of pale, rainbow-haired, animal youths.

  Halfway through his shift, Yevgeny Odom developed a theory, perhaps a fantasy. They were looking for him. Somehow, Karpo, the policeman with the flat voice, had wormed into his brain, torn open his plan with his teeth, and enlisted an army of the damned that now lay in wait for him. No, it could not be. The police had their own armies.

  Something else struck Yevgeny as the train pulled out. Where were the Metro police—the nonuniformed men who dealt with thieves, muggers, and pickpockets? He knew them all by sight and had seen none tonight.

  Yevgeny Odom decided that he would not change his plans. Kola might have to kill more quickly than in the past, but he would do what he had planned. It was the only way to quiet Kola.

  Then, suddenly, he saw one of those Kola had killed, pack on his back, hair in his eyes, slouching. The young man looked miserable. He sneezed, blew his nose with a much-used handkerchief, and got on the train.

  Process. Sound of doors sliding closed. Computer silent. Lurch. Forward into tunnel semidarkness.

  Yevgeny was sure Kola had killed this one recently. But when? A few days ago? Last week? A year? He needed his notes, his board, to be sure. They all looked somewhat alike, that was true, all the young men, all the young women. He had been careful to seek out variety, but he knew now that he had also chosen the same. He knew that he had always known.

  The collar of his uniform was tight. Its frayed edges prickled the rough edges of the hair at the back of his neck.

  It was not the young man Kola had killed. This one looked a little older, more solid, angrier.

  A choked voice within Yevgeny wanted to tell him who his victims had been, but he wouldn’t hear it.

  “I want to tell you,” the voice said to the soothing rhythm of metal wheels against metal track. “I want to tell you.”

  He could not escape the melody. “I want to tell you.”

  He recited a poem he had memorized as a child. He remembered his mother prompting, his sister smirking.

  When a forest of night hid shadows of our heroes standing alone as the enemy advanced …

  “I want to tell you,” the singsong voice insisted playfully like a small child.

  The spirit of those who had fallen laid hands upon their brows and shielded them from fear.

  A station. An orange-haired boy. A blue-and-white-haired girl. They got on.

  Doors closed.

  “I want to tell you.”

  And as they stepped from shadow into moonlight

  To stand armed with Lenin’s courage and Stalin’s power, the enemy grew pale …

  “I want to tell you. It is you, you, you, you, you.”

  the enemy grew pale …

  “I want to tell you. It is you, you hate and kill. You. You as boy. You as girl. You alone.”

  the enemy grew pale …

  “You.”

  “No,” said Yevgeny as the train pulled into the next stop. “No.” He spoke to the distorted image of a tall, pale man in black, a vampire from nightmares and childhood memories who looked at him and looked away. “No.”

  the enemy grew pale knowing they could but slay men and not the Revolution which would rise in many bodies, with many faces till each pale enemy was crushed to dust and forgotten.

  Anatoli Xeromen sat on a bench next to one of the red marble columns on the Mayakovskaya platform. His eyes rose and examined the cartoon mosaics or scanned the arriving and departing passengers. He sat patiently as reports were brought to him by his sunglassed soldiers, though his stomach strangled with the wish to act. After two hours he considered ordering the Capones to rob everyone they could see and then head back to the Gray Blocks. Anatoli had a Moscow apartment with a bath, a CD player, a television, and a VCR with movies about rich Americans, monsters from space, gangsters with ancient guns, and his own secret favorites, the sad ones with Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, and Bette Davis that made him weep. But he would go home to the Gray Blocks if there was no action today.

  Anatoli hated the subway, though he told no one. He hated the deep feeling of the damp grave. He feared that some lunatic’s bomb would send millions of pounds of rock and dirt down on him, burying him forever.

  But he waited and he was calm. He had his reputation. Sooner or later one of the Capones, possibly Dmitri, or Leonid, or Lev, would step forward and dare to ask how long they were going to keep it up. Anatoli knew just how he would smile and wave his hand to show that he could wait a week, a month, forever that no one who had ever lived had the patience of Anatoli Xeromen.

  But that moment never came. After four hours had passed a girl hurried toward him like one who had urgent news.

  As soon as Yevgeny had finished his shift, he checked out with the night duty officer and got back on the Green line carrying his night bag.

  There were very few people on the train, and he stayed as far from them as he could until fortune offered him his prey. He had seen the victim earlier—an angry lost lover, a wandering student, or possibly even a police decoy sent to trap him.

  The enemy grew pale, he thought, and when a dozing woman looked up at him he knew that once again he had spoken aloud.

  He watched the victim take out a handkerchief. He was willing to take a chance tonight to still Kola and to laugh at the policeman named Karpo. He would call him tomorrow and taunt him, but now, now …

  Inside his night pack were a folded pair of socks, a book, and a short, black, very heavy hammer with a flat, shiny head and a sharpened claw.

  The train stopped. The woman who had looked at Yevgeny got off without looking at him. Then his prey rose and stepped to the door. No one else got up. The victim looked around, then got out. There was no one on the platform. Yevgeny hurried off the train. He was twenty feet behind his prey.

  The rush of air and the grinding of the departing train covered Yevgeny’s first ten feet.

  Ten feet more.

  Each pale enemy was crushed to dust and forgotten, he recited, looking up through the past at the beaming reflection of his mother in the mirror.

&nbs
p; His hand went into the bag. His fingers circled the handle. He looked around. No one. Even if the victim turned, there would be no reason to fear a uniformed Metro man.

  He had to decide quickly. Claw or hammer. Claw or hammer. Kola roared. Yevgeny could not control him. The pale enemy heard or sensed someone behind and began to turn. The claw, Kola decided, and he struck.

  “Pack,” said Rostnikov, “and meet me back here in the lobby. Twenty minutes. I’ll arrange for the flight to Moscow.”

  They had found a taxi waiting in front of the station when they came out. Elena doubted it was a coincidence. Rostnikov had gotten in and looked out the window. Elena had given the driver the name of the hotel.

  Rostnikov had not spoken and she had not been willing to speak. At one point, when they passed a block of stained ancient buildings, Rostnikov had muttered something. She thought he said “Atlantis,” but she was not sure.

  Only when they had reached the hotel and gotten out of the taxi did he speak and that was only to tell her to pack. When she got to her room, the bed had been made and her bag had been packed for her.

  She did not want to look at the bed or wait in the room. She was back in the lobby five minutes after Porfiry Petrovich had left her. She stood, too nervous to sit, and watched the thin KGB agent, who sat in the middle of a sofa near the bar, looking at her and her bag.

  Ten minutes later Rostnikov emerged from the elevator carrying his bag. His limp was more pronounced now than it had been since they had arrived in Havana. Elena wanted to ask about his pain, about why he had slapped Shemenkov, about why they were hurrying, possibly even about Sanchez. She wanted to know and she wanted to confess at the same time, but Rostnikov’s face was distant.

  “Your bag was packed?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “Mine too. Get a cab. I’ve arranged for a flight.” Elena nodded and headed for the door, her bag in hand. She looked back to see Rostnikov, who had dropped his suitcase, walking directly toward the KGB agent.

  Elena found a cab, told the driver to open his trunk, and waited for Rostnikov. She got in the cab and then got out again. On the curb across the street a child with short dark hair played with a tiny black-and-white dog that looked seriously ill.