imitation Delsey he had purchased at a street market. It contained, among other things, hundreds of rubles. It had become a necessity with insane inflation to carry a bag of money to buy even the most mundane of things. Street vendors sold cans of Pepsi, jars of pickles, postcards, and political sketches at one stand, pathetic onions, fur hats, religious icons, and cans of olives at the next. Food was suddenly plentiful and the lines were short in stores. The problem was that very few Russians had enough money to buy anything.
Yevgeny’s needs were limited, but one had to be prepared.
This day should be no different from all the rest. He placed the bag behind the table at which he drew the blood and entered into the morning routine with enthusiasm, offering support and sympathy to each person who dutifully made a fist while he prepared the needle.
During the previous night he had made his decision. It had come partly from logic and cunning, partly from this faint sense of separation he had begun to feel. He would double-check before locking the plan into place, but he could see no great problem with it.
“Fist please,” he said to the heavy, dark man in the chair. The man was frightened and trying not to show it. There was the look of a drinker in the man’s skin and eyes; his blood would probably be rejected, but that was not Yevgeny Odom’s concern.
The man cringed as Yevgeny tightened the yellow elastic band around his bicep. The man tried to look away as the needle approached skin but he could not resist and turned at the last instant. Into his arm went the needle, smoothly, easily. The man let out the breath of air he had been holding.
“Hurt?” asked Yevgeny.
“No,” said the man with a smile.
“Good, it’s over.”
The man moved away quickly, and Yevgeny smiled in amusement. He hoped that there was a policeman or a team of policemen assigned to him. It was reasonable that there would be. He preferred to imagine real human beings rather than a computer and a set of standard Ministry of the Interior guidelines for identifying and apprehending serial killers.
Yevgeny had considered his options carefully. He contemplated a faceless, androgynous victim along a riverbank in Klin, but rejected the distant riverbank as somehow unsatisfying even though it would make sense to strike next far from the city. He chose not to explore the reasons for this decision, but something inside told him that the decision to remain in the city was correct.
A thin, thirtyish woman with an aggressive look on her face was the next donor. Her washed-out blond hair was tied back with a band, making her face even more taut and tense than the situation merited.
“Sit, please,” Yevgeny said, holding his large hands open to show they were empty and harmless.
The thin woman sat cautiously.
“This will not hurt. I promise you.”
She watched him aggressively and he smiled at her. He preferred the aggressive ones like this to the ones who chatted, seeking contact and kinship in an effort to obtain more gentle treatment. They always walked away thinking that their transparent efforts had been the cause of his care. He preferred ones like this, who had no choice but to credit him for the ease of these few moments.
“Please pull up the sleeve of your dress,” he said. Reluctantly the woman did so.
Perhaps she was one of those who believed that her anger would generate a fear in him that would result in his taking extra care. Then she, too, would walk away crediting not him but her own actions. In fact, it mattered not to Yevgeny whether they pleaded, tried to make friends, cast warning looks, or resigned themselves to their fate. He treated them all the same. He wanted donors, victims, and the police to treat him with the respect he deserved as a professional.
The woman turned out to be another satisfied donor. Her anger turned to relief, and she managed to mumble a thank-you as she rolled down her sleeve and hurried away.
At precisely 11:00 A.M., Yevgeny was relieved by Karin. He did not know her last name, nor did he want to know. She was his age perhaps, a bit plump, with dark hair and good skin. She was not terribly bright and tried to mask it with a weary Moscow cynicism. Yevgeny knew that if he wanted her she would be more than willing to come to his apartment, but he did not want her. He exchanged pleasant greetings, wished her a hearty good day, and hurried off with his carry-on bag. He had just enough time to change into his uniform and make it to his shift on the Kaluzhsko-Rizhskaya Metro Line.
Two of the three young men who waited for Rostnikov outside the sports center were getting impatient and distinctly nervous.
Their names were Juan and Martin. They were twin brothers, but not identical. Juan looked very much like their mother-thin and dark-while Martin was the image of their father, who was also named Martin. Martin was very big and looked quite as stupid as he was. People who met the brothers often mistakenly believed that the crafty-looking one, Juan, provided whatever thinking the pair could generate. In fact, Juan was every bit as stupid as his brother. Martin’s pride, what there was of it, came from his strength, which he had been born with. Juan’s pride was derived from his knife.
Both Juan and Martin relied on the third young man who stood with them. His name was Lupe and he was younger than they. He was a brooding, good-looking young man with thick dark hair and full lips. Lupe had led the twins from failed career to failed career. They had failed in the black market trying to sell imitation American clothes. They had failed at petty extortion, almost getting caught when a shopkeeper on Calle Composteta called for the police. They had even failed at reasonably honest work, first because they had no heart for long hours and later because there was no work to be had.
Supposedly the trio were now farmworkers on a citrus farm somewhere in the northern provinces. In fact, they were muggers with a reasonably successful two months behind them.
Lupe chose their victims well, foreigners who would be carrying hard currency or jewelry that could be sold for hard currency. The foreigners were usually women or men who did not look as if they could defend themselves.
The one he had chosen today seemed perfect, a washtub of a man comically dressed in a sweat suit, a towel draped around his neck, and a light jacket over his shoulders. The man walked with a decided limp. There was no way he could chase them. They would simply wait till he emerged from whatever workout he had planned, pull him behind the tin-roofed hut beyond the sports complex, grab his jacket and wallet and the wedding band on his left hand, and run while he shouted for help and limped after them.
The only question was, how long would the lame foreigner be inside the sports complex?
The answer was forty-five minutes.
Inside the complex, in a vast room the size of a small airplane hangar, the sound of grunts and the echo of weights clanging on gray mats was music to the ears of Porfiry Petrovich. There were perhaps fifteen people using the old, worn weights, of which there were plenty. Rostnikov preferred to work out alone in his own apartment, on his own pull-out bench, with his own weights that he stored in the cabinet in the living room-kitchen. At home he savored his routine, but he was not at home.
He found a relatively private corner, removed his sweatshirt, and pulled down the T-shirt that bore the fading words “Moscow Senior Championship 1983” across the back.
The bench nearby was not as low as his own bench, but it was not bad. He arranged the weights, preparing them so that he could alter the weight on the bar. Even though there were enough weights and bars to allow him to use different ones, his familiar routine was more important than convenience.
As he set to work, humming “Mean to Me,” he tried to recall the almost childlike trill in the voice of Dinah Washington as she sang “It must be great fun to be mean to me.”
Soon he was almost lost in the memory of his tape and the painful comfort of the weights. He closed his eyes as he sat on the bench doing his set of forty curls with a fifty-pound weight in each hand.
When he opened his eyes, he found himself looking at a quartet of boys all around ten years old who were leaning against a pipe railing about fifteen yards away.
Rostnikov smiled at the boys. They smiled back and it was clear that they were not going to depart. So Rostnikov moved away from the bench to pick up the bar on which he had placed two hundred pounds. He bent over and knelt toward the bar. It would have been better if he could squat, but his damaged leg had never permitted him the proper form.
He chalked his hands, closed his eyes, gripped the bar, and tried to think of the circle of the moon as he
