The Troika Dolls

by Miranda Darling

  His enemies therefore were now: all the banks, and anyone who had ever profited, or intended to profit, from the laundering of money through them. The list was a driftnet of the powerful, including senior members of the Russian government.

  Stevie had puzzled over why his nomination was approved in the first place—but then no one in power had known he would go after the banks so hard.

  In 1998, Russia faced a financial crisis. The International Monetary Fund agreed to lend the country money only on the condition that Russia establish an independent central bank. Kozkov had been the IMF’s preferred candidate and he was subsequently appointed Head of the Central Bank. He spent his time poring through the accounts, combing through the tangles, talking to people. As he bothered no one, no one thought to replace him with someone more malleable. Then one day he emerged suddenly from the concrete chrysalis of his office and announced that everything was going to change—and it did.

  The point was that Kozkov therefore was not a man to be suddenly seized by panic. He and his family had lived with a certain level of threat since his appointment, a good ten years ago. So what was going on? What were Henning and the family not telling her?

  A plan involving some kind of action was needed fast because a) Stevie was starving and b) her curiosity—always a vulnerable point— was driving her wild. You’re good, Henning. I will give you that. You’re good, getting me hooked in like this. But don’t think you are going to get away with a thing.

  Kozkov shook his head and spoke. ‘I’m sorry. I am a terrible host.

  You must be hungry after your trip. We don’t have much, our cook had to leave us suddenly. But perhaps you would eat an omelette?’

  Stevie smiled. ‘I would like that very much. Let me help.’ She wondered if they had got rid of the cook as a security precaution. Staff were a vulnerability. She followed Valery into the kitchen. Irina was already there.

  The Kozkov kitchen cupboards were rather bare. It looked as if little more than tea had been made for days. Everything was exceptionally clean, Stevie noticed; probably Irina in a fit of nervous mania.

  In the simple kitchen, working on the scrubbed wooden table that stood in the centre of the black-and-white tiled floor, Irina handed Stevie eggs, one by one, and Stevie broke them into a large ceramic bowl. There were nine eggs—just enough. They would be six people if the daughter was home. Irina watched her work, eyes like a sleepwalker. Stevie decided she had better take over the cooking.

  She asked for directions to a frying pan, a wooden spatula, a bread knife. Irina answered in careful, soft monosyllables, as if she were afraid of her own voice. But at least she was speaking.

  Irina went to the window and drew back the curtains. In Russia, the windows have two panes, to keep out the cold. By opening the inside pane, you can get a little fresh air without inviting in the arctic temperatures outside. There is also a space between the panes—a ledge—that is used as a cool box in winter. Irina opened the inside window and pulled out a bottle of vodka, completely chilled. She poured two glasses and gave one to Stevie.

  ‘Nazdarovye.’ Cheers.

  She would get good value from vodka on a desperately empty stomach.

  Behind Stevie, Irina was setting the table. She had poured two more glasses of vodka. As Stevie set down her second empty glass—now feeling rather warm inside—she counted the plates.

  ‘Is your daughter not joining us for dinner?’

  This was not, apparently, the right thing to ask. Irina mutely shook her head. She sat down at the kitchen table and began to weep.

  So that’s it. The daughter.

  Stevie turned back to the frying pan.

  Kozkov, Vadim and Henning walked in; Kozkov laid a hand on his wife’s bent shoulders and kept it there. No one mentioned the weeping.

  ‘You haven’t been introduced to my son, Vadim,’ Kozkov said, gesturing for Vadim to offer Stevie a greeting. They shook hands.

  Up close, Vadim was even more ghostly. His hair and skin were almost the same colour; even his eyebrows and eyelashes were blond. It was as if the boy had been completely drained of pigment.

  Stevie had read that loss of pigmentation was a common side effect of being hit by lightning, but surely . . . A long scar over his eye—badly stitched at the time—made violence of that sort seem almost possible. She served the omelette, hot and soft and buttery, then watched Vadim pour the vodka into every glass. His voice, his scar, his pallor made her wonder whether he were a boy at all and not some weary old man.

  ‘Nazdarovye,’ said Kozkov, eyes on his son.

  Stevie took a breath. ‘Where is your daughter tonight?’

  Vadim refilled the glasses. ‘To Anya,’ he whispered.

  ‘Our daughter Anya is missing.’ It was Irina who spoke, as if her daughter’s name had jolted her from her torpor. Stevie shot a glance at Henning who still refused to meet her gaze.

  ‘What happened?’

  Irina took a quick breath and the words poured out in sharp bursts.

  ‘She went to GUM, the department store, with her friend Petra, to do some shopping. They went to a café. Petra went to pay for coffee at the counter. There was a line and she had to wait a while. When she came back, the table was empty and Anya was gone. No one has heard anything from her since.’

  ‘When was this?’ Stevie asked quickly.

  ‘Four and a half days now.’

  Too long. Far too long.

  ‘And you’ve asked Petra—’ ‘Of course.’

  ‘How old is Anya?’

  ‘She’s fifteen.’

  ‘And you’ve spoken to Anya’s school teachers?’

  ‘Her physics teacher suggested she might have run away to America with a secret boyfriend.’ Irina blinked twice. ‘Her teachers live in a world that has long gone. They don’t understand.’

  ‘This is the new Russia—the era of the Novi Ruski.’ Kozkov’s voice had a bitter edge. ‘Sudden unexplained absences are seldom voluntary.’

  ‘So you think she has been kidnapped?’ Stevie was dreading the answer.

  Kozkov nodded. ‘But there has been no word, no ransom demand.

  Nothing.’

  ‘Have you told anyone, the police?’ Stevie asked, although she feared she knew the answer. ‘It’s been four and a half days—’

  ‘It is too risky. We didn’t know what to do. The security forces, the police could be cooperating with whoever took her.’ Kozkov was now pacing the kitchen. He stopped to light a cigarette, his hands shaking. ‘The list of suspects is so long: criminals, corrupt officials, even members of Russia’s Federal Security Service. Information in Moscow is about as watertight as a colander. Even if the officials weren’t involved, they would likely just mess it up and get Anya . . .’

  ‘So my father has decided to do nothing—to sit and wait for them to come to us,’ Vadim cut in. Kozkov tried to put his hand on Vadim’s arm but he pulled away violently. ‘You sacrificed me, and now Anya!’

  ‘Vadim, you are angry at the wrong person. If you have to be angry, be angry at a system, a government, so corrupted that this can be allowed to happen. If I had done anything, the slightest untoward thing, my enemies would have crucified me.’

  ‘It’s alright for you to have your principles,’ Vadim’s voice shook with fury. ‘You work from your nice safe office. You’re too important to kill. But we pay the price. And now you won’t lean on your connections to find her.’

  ‘I don’t know who has taken her, Vadim.’ Kozkov closed his eyes. ‘My connections could be involved for all we know.’

  ‘Don’t tell me there is anything that cannot be bought in Russia—’ Vadim rose in frustration ‘—except of course you,’ he spat over his shoulder as he left the kitchen.

  His father leaned forward on his elbows and bowed his head over the kitchen table, a crumpled man. Henning went to him and laid a hand on his friend’s shoulder.

  ‘This is why I thought of you, Stevie,’ Henning said. ‘You’re presence is u
nlikely to provoke anyone who may be watching the Kozkovs.

  You could be a family friend.’

  ‘I could certainly put you in touch with the specialists at Hazard.

  They could send a team—’ ‘We can’t risk the provocation,’ Henning interrupted. ‘We need a woman—delicate and unnoticeable and competent. We need you.’

  A crashing sound came from along the corridor and Henning went out to look for Vadim. Irina began to wash the few dishes.

  ‘Irina, tell me about Anya. What is she like?’ Stevie was most careful to use the present tense. Meanwhile her mind was spinning in tumult.

  ‘She is a very beautiful girl. She plays violin at the conservatorium most afternoons. She’s very bright, a good girl, good at school. Vadim and Anya are so close. They are almost like twins. That’s why he’s so angry.’

  Stevie wasn’t so sure that was the whole story. ‘What did Vadim mean when he said he’d been sacrificed, and now Anya?’

  Irina glanced towards her husband but he was gone. With that, she withdrew back into herself.

  During a Moscow winter, it is an adventure just to leave the house. Tonight, the thermometer, fixed to the wall in the vodka gap between the kitchen windows, read –30 degrees. At these temperatures, the air actually hurts. It’s difficult to breathe. Exposed skin burns. But you don’t get shivery cold, like on a chilly day; the cold feels hard, it stings, like bees and breaking plates.

  It was into this night that Stevie insisted on walking home from the Kozkovs’, which meant that Henning would have to accompany her. It was not possible for a woman to stroll alone on the streets at night. Stevie wanted to get Henning by himself, and for longer than the short car ride to the hotel. She also needed air after the suffocating dinner.

  Stevie and Henning made their way through the layer-cake of steel doors. When they opened the final door and stepped into the white street, they both gasped quietly with the shock of the cold.

  The boulevard was bright, the waist-high snow reflecting the greenish light of the street lamps. Not a soul was out walking and the vast expanse was deserted. It made Stevie think of Dante, the medieval Italian poet who had portrayed the circles of hell, and she remembered that the deepest, darkest circle of the inferno—where the devil himself lives—is not a fiery furnace but a frozen lake. In the depths of the ninth circle, the villains are coated in ice, trapped ‘like straw in glass’. Everything is still and silent. There, Dante’s pilgrim meets the treacherous— those who have betrayed the bonds of love and trust; those who have betrayed their homeland; further down, those who have betrayed friends or guests. At the very bottom he finds Judas Iscariot.

  Stevie took Henning’s arm lest she slip on ice. ‘Henning, why didn’t you tell me it was a missing persons case?’

  ‘Anya has been kidnapped, Stevie.’ Henning spoke slowly. ‘I don’t think there can be any doubt that she is not missing of her own free will.’

  ‘There’s been no communication to that effect yet.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean—’ ‘No. No it doesn’t.’ Stevie tightened her grip on his arm. ‘I’m just playing devil’s advocate. The police will tell you teenagers run away. I believe the family. Still, you should have told me before I left London.’

  Henning kept his gaze fixed on the slippery white path ahead.

  ‘You wouldn’t have come, would you?’

  ‘I can’t hunt for Anya.’ Stevie searched Henning’s face for understanding, but his strong profile betrayed nothing. ‘I’m not a private investigator. You know that, Henning. No matter how hard you try to seduce me with that poor family’s pain. These are not decisions that can be made emotionally. Too much is at stake.’

  Henning stopped walking and looked down at her. ‘There is too much at stake to do nothing, Stevie. You have the chance to make all the difference in the world.’

  Stevie looked away, uncomfortable. Her words tumbled out quickly, almost automatically. ‘Kozkov needs to hire a “Kidnap and Ransom” team with a trained negotiator. I am not trained to negotiate and I can’t take that risk for Anya. I can recommend a really good guy— got those Italian engineers back alive when their tanker was seized by Somali pirates. He’s done kids, too, does lots of work in the Balkans and Russia.’

  Henning shook his head. ‘A negotiator with a team is not an option. There’s been no contact, no ransom demand. Stevie, I’m afraid that whoever took Anya wants more than Kozkov’s money. They want his integrity. They want to take his soul. They may never give Anya back.’

  ‘Why not just kill her then?’ The white puffs of smoke that accompanied Stevie’s words refused to evaporate into the ether. She regretted saying that out loud.

  They walked on in silence. Perhaps it was the cold that was making her ears ring so painfully.

  ‘I’m sorry, Henning. I didn’t mean to sound harsh. But this is out of my league. I’m not that girl, the heroine who makes a stand. I am very human and I get scared like anyone else. Anya needs the best. If I mess it up, she dies.’

  ‘I convinced Kozkov to have faith in you, that it was the only way.’

  Stevie stopped. ‘But why?’

  ‘Because I have faith in you.’ He said it as simply as a marriage vow: I, Henning, have faith in you, Stevie Margaret Duveen, as if having that sort of faith in another person was something straightforward. Stevie knew it was not. That pledge was, to her, the most devastating compliment.

  They wandered on down the lonely boulevard, past the metal doors, the stone doorways, the beautiful pale green domes of St Vladimir’s Church, tucked like pear blossoms between brutal Soviet towers.

  ‘What is it exactly you think I can do for them?’ Stevie asked carefully, having regained her composure.

  ‘Be there to help guide the Kozkovs through these bad days, help them know what to expect; find out as much as you can about what happened and who might have taken Anya—anything that might help.’ Henning paused. ‘Then be there when the kidnappers call.’

  They passed by a casino kiosk. There are lots of these in Moscow, dotted about near metro stations. They look like newsstands, small white cabins brightly painted with gambling chips and bouquets of hearts in revolutionary red. Standing in the street, pedestrians can lean through the barred window and place a bet on a roulette wheel any time of the day or night.

  As if anyone ever found love by gambling, thought Stevie, looking at the hearts. Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the only way to find love is to gamble . . .

  Hearts and arrows and Cyrillic letters blinked and flashed in hot neon, dancing on the snow, on Stevie, on Henning, like a shower of fireworks.

  He turned to her. ‘You told me in London that you were protecting the wrong people. Well, these are the right people.’

  ‘Henning, I can’t do it. I’m sorry.’

  Stevie peered into the casino window. A tired old babushka sat wrapped in so many layers she could have been a caterpillar. A roulette wheel spun idly in front of her, the little white ball making a joyless clicking every time it leaped numbers.

  ‘Do you remember the girls on the park bench you saw that day I called you? They were haunting you.’

  The ball finally settled on 8 and was still.

  ‘Think of Anya as a girl on a park bench. Only this time, Stevie, don’t walk away.’

  Stevie looked at Henning’s flickering face, his serious eyes, his kind mouth. Bastard. He was trying to hold her to her principles.

  ‘That’s a cheap trick.’

  ‘Is it, Stevie? You didn’t mean those things you said? You don’t care what happens?’ he challenged.

  She snapped. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Henning. Of course I care. But you can’t go around caring about every single horror story in the world.

  You just can’t. It doesn’t do anyone any good.’

  ‘No. It doesn’t. But you should have compassion for the people who cross your life, however briefly. Those are the ones you can help, the ones you can touch.’

  Of course he
was right. Stevie knew that. But doing wasn’t the same as wanting to do. It was infinitely more troublesome. And dangerous. Tonight was the third time in two days that she had felt like a coward. There was a desperate family, a girl in mortal danger, and she was thinking of herself.

  ‘Just until the kidnappers make contact, Stevie,’ Henning pleaded softly. ‘When contact is made, we’ll get your negotiator in. I promise.’

  Stevie just shook her head. She and Henning stood transfixed as the babushka dropped the ball and spun the wheel.

  ‘What’s your number at roulette?’ Henning spoke without moving his eyes from the wheel.

  ‘Thirteen.’

  If that little roulette ball lands on thirteen, Stevie thought, I’m in. If it lands on any other number, I go home tomorrow and practise being brave somewhere else.

  ‘You should have made a bet, Stevie.’ Henning gestured with his hand in the pocket of his coat. The ball lay cradled in number thirteen.

  4

  ‘It will be enough to tell them she is still alive.’

  A rough hand reached down and ripped Anya’s thin gold chain from her neck. From it hung an orthodox crucifix and a small evil eye made of blue glass.

  She was still alive, but for how much longer?

  Everything she could do to make her situation better, she had done. But that was not much. The blindfold had not once been removed. Only her ears and nose and touch told her she wasn’t alone, that there were people around, that she was still in Russia, that her captors enjoyed the radio, that they ate a lot of boiled meat and argued frequently.

  The radio helped her play the mental games she knew would keep her sharp. The security coordinator at her father’s bank had once told her about kidnappings, emphasised the importance of the role of the kidnapping victim in securing their own freedom. It was important, he had drummed into her, to do mental exercises if imprisoned. In the event that an opportunity came to escape, or that someone mounted a rescue attempt, she would have to be quick and lucid enough to respond properly. Blindfolded, she couldn’t read, so anticipating the next song was a game she played with herself, and memorising the words to songs and the weather forecasts was another.