Karimov justified his crazy scheme by thinking: «How am I any worse than God? Doesn't he hide away from us like a criminal? Doesn't he kill us on the sly when we least expect to encounter him?»
Karimov didn't watch television and, when television programs were being discussed, he would leave the table, noisily pushing his chair away. Loneliness rose like bile in his mouth. He was bored in the evenings and lay on his bed, listening to Bach in an attempt to drown out the mutterings of radios and televisions in the neighbouring hotel rooms.
«All the world's a hotel and we are merely random guests,» Karimov would say with a helpless gesture in reply to bewildered questions as to why he didn't move into a flat of his own.
Winter lasts for six months in the Arctic Circle, night gives way to night and in the impenetrable darkness all sense of time is lost so that it seems as though the winter and the night will last forever. Looking at the frosted window, Karimov thought life was like the patterns frost makes on glass: from a distance it seems beautiful and ornate but up close it means nothing. Karimov drove these thoughts away and once again imagined himself as a killer. He got dressed quickly and left the room. He waved away the security man and ran down the steps, whistling a Bach fugue, and the soles of his feet tingled with anticipation. Turning up his collar, he concealed the predatory nose that could easily give him away and plunged into the darkness.
The infrequent streetlights only illuminated parts of the streets and people walked as though blind through the scrunching, glistening snow. In Moscow the snow would melt straight away into a dirty sludge but here it was like flaky pastry, layers of snow alternating with layers of mineral dust that settled in a grey film on snow drifts and faces. A fat woman, laden with shopping bags, waddled along, cautiously descending an icy hill, her arms held out so widely she seemed to be carrying buckets on a yoke. Following her, Karimov turned down a side street. He was mulling over how he would take out his pistol and silencer, hold it to her ear like a finger, shoot twice and, supporting the now limp body, lower it carefully onto the blood-reddened snow. Hiding the gun in his jacket, he would cross the courtyard, leave via the archway and, lighting a cigarette, hurry back to the hotel. Crossing the courtyard, Karimov discovered that it really did have an archway and if he did shoot the fat woman he would be able to hide there. He turned and went back the way he had come, without even looking at the woman who had put her bags down in the snow to get her breath back.
«They're killing each other!» The Chief's cry rang through the town. «They're all killing each other!» Rolling his mad eyes, he tried to grasp passers-by by the hand.
«And that's the truth,» agreed an old man as he hurried by, not even slowing his pace. «There's death everywhere! People got on better in the old days. Even dying was a cheerier business.»
Karimov sneered and hurried across the road.
As he went back to the hotel, he measured himself against the people he encountered: some he strangled in dark alleys, others he waylaid in entrance halls. Even so, Karimov decided as he banged the snow off his boots against the steps, it was too risky to be killing people in the evening, in full view of everyone. He was so exhausted by his murder rehearsals that he hardly had time to take his clothes off before he fell on the bed and into a deep and dreamless sleep.
The idea was becoming an obsession. There was no let-up day or night. Karimov was scared he'd kill someone, get a taste for it and be unable to stop, but if he didn't at least have a go, he'd go mad. He ruminated on murder, relishing the details and roamed the streets in the evenings mentally picking potential victims out of the dusk. The bodyguards he left behind when he went walking were worried about him and gave him a gun. Weighing the cold and heavy barrel in his hands, Karimov finally made up his mind. He asked them to attach a silencer and, trembling with excitement, could hardly wait for nightfall.
The town was preparing for the end-of-year holidays. Multicoloured fairy lights twinkled and decorated Christmas trees looked out of the shop windows like nosy neighbours. Someone could die right now and the lights would continue to sparkle, painting the snowdrifts with all the colours of the rainbow, and when Karimov pulled the trigger and put an end to someone's life the residents of the little town would be asleep, unaware of the victim's groan or the killer's footsteps.
Karimov shivered as he remembered freezing on the steps of the children's home as a baby. It had been so very cold that it had stayed with him all his life. It had penetrated his soul and everyone he spoke to could feel the chill. Loneliness is our original sin. We carry its mark when we are born and we die without knowing why we went through such torment. Only death as it closes our eyes momentarily shares the burden of our loneliness. Death, however, which had already been creeping up on the baby swaddled in its mother's dress, was frightened away by a stranger who clutched the child to his breast. Karimov walked the sleeping town and wondered why he felt neither gratitude nor love for his foster father but only a cold, detached hatred. Was it because he'd driven away Karimov's death, leaving his soul the permanent dwelling place of all-consuming loneliness?
His thoughts were interrupted by a reddish fur coat lying in a snowdrift. When he went nearer, Karimov could see a drunken woman trying to stand up by clutching at a tree. Her tights were in shreds, her neck was crimson under the scarf and the lipstick smeared across her face was like a bleeding wound.
It couldn't have been better engineered: the street was deserted, the woman was defenceless and Karimov decided that he could easily strangle her and not waste a cartridge. He reached for her neck, then drew his hands back as if they'd been scalded. Cursing his own cowardice, he again went to take her by the neck where he could see the blue of a swollen artery. He squeezed and the woman, opening her puffy eyes, moaned something softly. Karimov relaxed his grip. Hovering uncertainly, he lit a cigarette and looked around. The woman was looking at him, smiling, as she muttered drunkenly. «Coward!» Karimov cursed himself. «Loser!» Grabbing his gun, he trained the barrel on the woman and turned his head away, ready to shoot. There was the sound of a car. Headlights flashed in the distance and Karimov, hiding the gun, made off, slipping on the icy road.
Back at the hotel, he opened a bottle of the reserve brandy he kept for special occasions, ran a hot bath and sat in it until morning, sipping at the golden elixir until the water was completely cold. He went over and over his night-time adventure in his head, trying to work out whether the woman he had had in his sights would be able to remember him and then, calming down, decided that even if she could, no-one would believe her.
From then on, Karimov put his crazy scheme out of his head. His murders were only on paper as he sacked employees and shut down factories. Staff lists that were just a meaningless set of names to other people took on particular significance for Karimov. There was a face behind every name and a destiny as grey as the town outside and crossing the name out was like slitting someone's throat and hearing their death rattle. When Savely Savage shot Coffin, however, Karimov was suddenly wracked with an envy that stuck in his flesh like a sharp thorn and he didn't know how to take it out.
Time passes more slowly in the provinces and news from the capital arrives with chunks bitten off, like a half-eaten apple, and with a new meaning. In the metropolis, just like in a lift, people pretend not to see one another whereas in small towns everyone is exposed and other people's lives become more interesting than your own. Savage's life, though, was inconspicuous and uninteresting even to him. He was the sort of person who is only remembered when his obituary appears in the local paper. His wife had long considered herself unmarried and his daughter couldn't care less about him while Savage himself didn't know if he existed or not. And yet, in his dreams he lived nine lives every day like a cat and tried on thousands of destinies without finding a single one to fit.