nowhere in particular on the metro system. The system opened each morning at six and closed at one the following morning. That gave the cleaning crews a little over five hours to clean the platforms, walls, pillars, and tracks, and repair any broken windows or chipped paint. The cleaning crews worked quickly and generally efficiently, depending on who headed each particular crew.
There was a lack of funds for metro repairs and cleaning, though the stations were more cosmetically acceptable than the interior of most of the city’s hotels. The metro system was a symbol of Russian accomplishment, a source of pride along with the space program and the Trans-Siberian Railroad system. The mayor of Moscow was a man who built his career on the image of the city, and he saw to it that the metro stations were clean and well-maintained. Efficient, sometimes magnificent, each station-all built during the Stalin era-was in a different style.
Guidebooks told tourists that they should not miss a tour of the metro stations, and few of them did.
One of the most opulent examples of the old Soviet system was the Komsomolskaya station, dedicated to the Komsomol, the Young Communist League, whose members provided labor during construction of the metro.
Many metro stations had undergone name changes after the fall of the Soviet Union. If the Komsomolskaya had undergone such a change, few Moscovites who rode it were aware of this rejection of Communism. It was still and would probably remain the Komsomol station to all who rode it.
One of the regular riders was Toomas Vana. Toomas, born in Tallinn in Estonia, had come to Moscow to work in the office of the state gas company when he was fourteen. His father had been an unpopular and very corrupt commissar in Estonia, who thought the way for his son to achieve political position at a high level in the Soviet Union was to move the boy to Moscow. Toomas had, indeed, moved up, but not politically. He earned his university degree and developed a passion for gas. He wanted, not political power, but to be the world’s foremost authority on natural gas and its uses. At the age of forty-six he was certainly among the elite of the world in that knowledge.
And Toomas had a very valuable skill which added to his stature. Tallinn, Estonia, is sixty miles across the Gulf of Finland from Helsinki. The Estonians of the region spoke a language almost identical to that of Finland, and until the age of fourteen when he was sent off to Moscow he had regularly listened to and watched Finnish television, a link to the Western world available to few in the Soviet Union.
Toomas traveled frequently to Finland to consult on that country’s attempts to expand its use of natural gas.
This morning Toomas did not have the correct change. He stopped at the change machine and then proceeded to the automatic gate and dropped in his coins.
The platform was crowded. It always was around lunchtime. Toomas stood against a pillar, briefcase in one hand, a report on the cost of pipeline repairs in the other. Moscow was heated and cooled by natural gas. The gas company was still a great government bureaucracy to be reckoned with, the largest natural-gas company in the world.
Had he not stood on this same platform at this same pillar thousands of times before he would certainly have looked up at the decorated arched ceiling with its massive, ornate, and multilamped chandeliers running the length of the platform longer than a soccer field and nearly as wide. He would have noted the arches above the pillars echoing the elegant medieval theme of the station. He might have looked straight up, as he had many years earlier, at the huge, multicolored mosaic of a warrior with shield and lance upon a prancing white horse and admired the elaborate design of curlicues and flowers that framed it.
But this was today and his mind was on rusting gas pipes.
He barely noticed the woman walking slowly in his direction. People were moving. She would pass him and move to the edge of the platform to look for an incoming train. Toomas never bothered to move for the train until he heard it coming with a roar down the tunnel. Then he would make a slow turn, always to the right, and place himself exactly where the train door would slide open. He knew the spot. He didn’t have to think about it. Now he heard the first distant rumble of the approaching train.
The woman stood in front of him. She was probably going to ask him a question about the train schedule, or perhaps she was going to ask him for some coins, which he would not give her. To encourage one is to encourage all, he thought. He read the report.
And then the report exploded in his hands, split in two, and he felt a sudden pain, saw a flash of bright light. The world turned into a sparkling light show. Fireworks. Strobe lights. A bomb, he thought. Terrorists. Chechins. A bomb. They had bombed underpasses and now a metro station. It made sense.
He knew he had slumped back against the flat pillar. Toomas did not panic. Someone or something was punching him in the stomach. An aftershock from a bomb? Wait. Was there a gas main under this station? A gas explosion? It had happened before, many times before, but there was no gas main under the platform or nearby.
His head ached. The fireworks stopped. The punching ceased, leaving nausea. Toomas felt himself passing out. At least he thought he was passing out. In fact, he was dying.
Inna Dalipovna stepped back and turned away from the falling man in the dark suit. She tucked the knife into her deep coat pocket. She would wash it when she got home. She would sharpen it with oil on the rectangular stone when she got home. She would use the knife to make dinner for her father tonight. She would use it to slice the sausage into the thin, almost transparent slices he liked to heap upon his bread.
The attack had been quick. Some people thought it was probably a husband and wife quarreling. Some people pretended to see nothing. Most on the crowded platform did not notice. When it was over, however, a woman screamed. Inna, now at the end of the platform, nearing the escalator steps, heard the scream above the noise of the crowd and the approaching train.
The screaming woman, who stood hand in hand with her six-year-old granddaughter, looked down at the man who lay before her, his right eye socket a small pool of blood, his neck pulsing red, and spots of darkness quickly forming and spreading on his white shirt and dark suit.
“Don’t be afraid, Grandma,” the child said. “It’s just a dead man.
Inna did not look back. Her wrist felt numb. She had used her right hand, had taped it thickly and tightly with white adhesive. She had planned to thrust without turning her hand, but when she had seen the man standing there, had known it would be him, she had forgotten everything, had gone into some kind of automatic state, had let it take over. And now she felt both pain and satisfaction. Only when she reached the street and stepped into the falling snow did she examine herself for bloodstains. She could see none. No one had looked at her strangely so she assumed that her face and neck were untouched, but she paused at a window to be sure.
The woman looking back at her was the one she saw each morning in the mirror. It was not her own face but the face of her mother.
No policeman had appeared during or immediately after Inna’s attack on Toomas Vana. There had been no policeman on the platform for a very good reason. None had been assigned to this station.
The Komsomolskaya station was on the red line, the Kirovsko-Frunzenskaya line, not on the line where Inna had attacked before.
Five minutes later when Elena and Iosef were informed of the murder they realized that there were now more than ninety stations where their killer might strike. To patrol the stations in two shifts would require about two hundred officers. The chances of their getting two hundred officers assigned to the case were nonexistent.
They would have to find another way to the woman or wait for her to make a mistake.
Sasha had tried to pack. It was useless. The scuffed but serviceable dark-leather suitcase that had once been his father’s lay open on the bed. His mother, who had been in the apartment uninvited when he arrived, had criticized him as he placed the first item, a pair of trousers, at the bottom of the case.
“You will squash it,” Lydia had shouted.
She was a wiry wraith who denied her near deafness, loved Sasha and her grandchildren to the point where she would die for them, and drove her son nearly to madness each time they spoke.
“It will be fine,” he said.
“You will pile things on it. It will wrinkle. You will not have a pair of decent pants. Where can you get pants cleaned and pressed on a train?”
He flattened the pants with the palms of his hands and reached for the first of the three shirts he had placed
