“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.