“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 the 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.