Stuart Kaminsky - Hard Currency

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.

He would get little sleep this night, but it would be a night worth living.

Elena Timofeyeva sat in the empty cafeteria of the women’s prison waiting for Victoria Oliveras. The stone tables and benches were gray and clean. The light from the narrow windows was bright, and the large photographs of Castro, Che Guevara, and Celia Sanchez that looked down at Elena were depressing.

The ride to the women’s prison had taken about an hour, during which the driver of the ancient Buick and his partner, both un-uniformed men in their early thirties, had argued about whether they had enough gas and if the tires would make it.

They had been recruited by Major Sanchez to take Elena Timofeyeva. He had told them that they would be paid for their service to Cuba when they brought her back. The two men, Jaime and Abel, had accepted humbly and gratefully, but once in the car they had begun to complain.

It was also clear to Elena as they drove down narrow roads past African-style thatched huts and through small towns where apparently windowless little homes were jammed next to each other that the two men had no idea she could understand their language.

On several occasions during the journey, the young men had discussed her sexually. She had looked out of the window as they gave her high marks for body and face and low marks for potential passion. But, ultimately, they seemed more interested in the possibility of the Buick’s actually completing the journey.

And then, when they had reached the prison, the men had asked for money so they could go to a nearby small town to get something to eat.

Elena had let them mime and speak loudly in simple Spanish, repeating the word pesos and pointing to their mouths.

While they were going through this a woman in a light khaki uniform appeared. There was a star on her collar and above the right pocket of her blouse a white-on-black patch saying “Ministerio del Interior.”

“Can I help?” asked the woman in Russian.

“No, gracias, pienso que yo puedo hacerlo,” Elena answered in Spanish, certain that Jaime and Abel could hear her.

Then Elena gave them some Cuban pesos and told them to return in two hours.

When they drove off, the woman in uniform identified herself as Lieutenant Colonel Lopez, director of the City of Havana Women’s Prison. She was a tall, slender mulatto with a handsome, weary face. Her skin was clear and her manner efficient, which had suited Elena.

Elena had been expected and the order had come down for her to have a complete tour of the prison before meeting Victoria Oliveras.

“Victoria is working,” Lieutenant Colonel Lopez said. “She will be available in one hour. Meanwhile, I have been instructed to show you our prison.”

The tour had been as efficient as Lieutenant Colonel Lopez’s manner and it was evident to Elena from the start that what she was seeing was a showcase, a model prison maintained for foreigners. She knew because the Soviet Union had also maintained such prisons and she had visited both the showcases and the much more numerous and punitive remnants of the past.

The “work with internment” prison itself consisted of three two-story buildings, one building for the guards, most of whom were women, and the two cell blocks. Beyond the gates of the prison and the fifteen-foot-high metal fence was lush, green jungle through which Elena had been driven for the last five miles of the journey.

Elena was told by the lieutenant colonel that though the building had been built in the 1960s for nine hundred women, there were only four hundred now inside. Their sentences ranged from one month to twenty years for nonviolent felonies such as petty theft, drug sales, and economic crime.

The tour had taken Elena through fluorescent-lit corridors. She was shown large cells for four to six women, each cell individually coordinated in identical bedspreads and pillows with matching pillowcases. It looked better than any Moscow University dormitory room. It looked better than the tiny dark apartment in Moscow Elena shared with her aunt.

Flowers were everywhere-in cells, offices, the pharmacy, the twenty-four-bed hospital staffed by two full-time physicians. There was a baby ward in the prison hospital. The nearby conjugal visiting rooms reminded Elena of low-cost American motels she had been in when she had studied in the United States.

“The babies stay here for forty-five to ninety days after they are born,” a young woman doctor in a white smock explained. “Then they go to relatives or the state center for orphans.”

From the hospital Elena was taken to the heart of the prison, the textile factory. She was told that prisoners were paid to work an eight-hour-a-day schedule. There was also schooling in weaving, sewing, and knitting.

“The policy of Fidel, the Central Committee, and the Ministry of the Interior is reeducation before release,” Lieutenant Colonel Lopez said. “We have psychologists, social workers, and lawyers on the staff. Some of our women choose to live in the nearby towns when they are released. They can continue to work in the prison factory and earn the same or better wages than they would in the city.”