The Troika Dolls

by Miranda Darling

  ‘Ah, but you see, those flowers haven’t been given to us.’ Henning picked a piece of fern from the arrangement. ‘If the waiter had come over and handed you the vase with the flowers, it would be different.

  There would have been a message, an intention. Flowers are offered instead of words. They say the unspoken. That is what is beautiful about them, the subtlety of the message.’

  ‘People send flowers with cards,’ Stevie reminded him.

  ‘They do.’ Henning nodded. ‘But the cards may not convey the intention of the flowers at all; words are clumsy, people are timid, they say less rather than more.’ Henning put his glass down on the table. ‘Think of the man who will send flowers to a woman he is pining for. It’s her birthday. He sends an enormous arrangement of roses. The card reads simply, “Happy Birthday. John.” Which message is the true one? “Happy Birthday. John” or the passion of three dozen red roses?’

  ‘But surely it can’t have been that obvious?’ Stevie remained sceptical. ‘The sultan and his eunuchs would get a bit suspicious if bunches of elaborate red roses were being delivered to some harem beauty on a regular basis.’

  Henning’s lips twitched with amusement. ‘They had many, many different flowers and each one was given a meaning, or a narrow range of meanings. The lovers would arrange small posies, bouquets, that conveyed a particular message: “I burn for you”, or “meet me”, or “we are being watched”, or—’ here, Henning’s voice softened—‘ “I admire you from afar”.’

  ‘What if,’ Stevie’s green eyes narrowed, ‘you wanted to declare that you were suspicious of someone’s intentions?’

  Henning’s face split into a grin. ‘Then you would send mushrooms.’

  Stevie laughed. ‘How elegant.’

  ‘The beauty of the secret language of flowers lies in utter deniability.’ Henning picked a small white rose from the table vase and held it out to Stevie. ‘You see? It’s just a rose. It’s pretty. Lightly scented. I thought it might please you. Nothing more.’

  Stevie examined Henning. There was no denying his amusement. Was she falling into a trap? She took the rose without saying a word. Laid it on the table.

  She paused. ‘Henning, what would a primrose mean, in this code?’

  Henning gave it some thought. ‘If I’m not mistaken, it declares inconstancy.’

  So. It was simple. Stevie had failed to read the signs. Joss Carey’s intentions had been telegraphed well ahead of time, even unbeknownst to him. Well, she knew better now than to give anyone the chance to make a fool of her heart again. No matter how charming, nor how tall.

  Stevie and Henning stepped outside into the icy night.

  ‘I still think we should have taken a hotel car, Stevie.’

  ‘It would hardly be discreet, turning up at a seedy bar in a chauffeured Mercedes. We want to blend in.’

  Henning stopped and looked somewhat sceptically at his companion. Stevie was wearing a huge fox fur aviator’s hat and an ankle-length double-breasted navy coat with brass buttons. ‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘we’ll take a Moscow taxi.’

  Moscow had so few proper taxis that the easiest way to get around was to hail any car on the street, hop in, name your destination and agree on a fee. This system worked pretty well. The fees were generally well established; the driver would take you as close as was convenient to your destination.

  Henning stepped into the icy slush and stuck his arm out. A small black car swayed over from the other side of the road and stopped at the curb. Stevie jumped into the back, Henning in the front.

  ‘Dobri vyecher!’

  Off they went, into the Moscow night. The driver was young, his face doughy, and the car was fogged with cigarette smoke. Stevie could smell beer and worse. Yes, he knew the bar—no problem—and turned up the volume on the stereo. Wild Russian techno pounded through the speakers. Satisfied, the driver accelerated and they scudded off through the streets.

  At a set of lights, a Hummer idled beside them, its rear bumper crusted with filthy snow. Stevie tried to see the passengers but it was impossible through the black glass.

  Suddenly, there were three sharp metallic taps at the driver’s window, and the tip of a submachine gun. A face leaned in. Militzia. The driver rolled the window down and inch an a half.

  ‘Papers!’

  ‘A minute.’ The driver pulled out his papers and a wad of roubles.

  Small denominations. He slid these carefully through the crack in the window. The roubles vanished into the policeman’s padded jacket. He slid the documents back through the opening.

  ‘Spasiba,’ said the driver and rolled the window back up, quick as a fish.

  ‘If they smell the beer, they want three times as much,’ the driver complained to Henning as the lights changed. ‘It can get very expensive.’

  The cheap tyres spun on the ice then carried them forward with a lurch.

  _________

  The Boar was dark and fetid: a cavernous room with long trestle tables, a bar down the length of the right side, and a small dance floor at the back. It felt like an ugly beer hall. Stevie and Henning headed for the bar and ordered two beers. The barman served them in tankards bigger than Stevie’s head.

  Henning gallantly helped Stevie up onto the high stool and handed her a tankard. He smiled at her. ‘I think that just about completes the picture.’

  The place wasn’t very busy yet. Small clusters of three and four, couples, a few women dancing joylessly on their own near the speakers at the back of the room. Many of the customers and all of the dancing women were black, unusual for Russia.

  Stevie took a sip of her beer. ‘I asked around; some friends know this place quite well.’

  ‘The Italians?’ Henning raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Brazilians. You know foreigners, they often see more than people who are from the city. Anyway, the Brazilians said that The Boar is a favourite with slimy middle-aged ex-patriots, lots of Armenians and Cypriots and Nigerians. The bar started as a “prostitute-free zone”, they were banned from operating here. But then the owner’s “roof”—the guy he pays protection to—insisted he allow them in. The roof gets a cut from the pimps too, so it’s very profitable for him. But the compromise was that the girls were not to approach the clients.’

  ‘Hence the dancing.’ Henning nodded towards the girls by the speakers.

  ‘I’m guessing, yes.’

  The room darkened a little more. A huge picture of wolves running, slavering, through snow was projected above the trestle tables, covering the whole wall. The fangs of the first wolf were the size of Stevie’s forearm.

  ‘Most of the girls here are Senegalese,’ Stevie murmured over her tankard of beer. ‘Trafficked into prostitution.’

  When Marcus the Brazilian had told Stevie this over the phone, it had been just another grim statistic of Moscow life. But now, saying those words aloud to Henning, here in the bar surrounded by the girls, seeing their faces, the statistic took on a whole new horror.

  Stevie searched their faces for a clue or a sign of their desperation, something, but they showed nothing. She watched a young girl in a canary yellow top—sleeveless and tight—dancing alone by the bar. What must life be for her? Trapped in a foreign country buried in snow, not speaking the language, forced to go to bed with all these strange men, the moustaches, the cheap suits, the wiry hair and cigars, the overpowering aftershave Stevie could smell from where she sat.

  Perhaps one or two would be kind. She guessed most would not care a moment for the girl whose body was giving them so much pleasure. Until they came, they owned the canary girl. Then it would be back to selling radiator grills or gaskets or anti-freeze, endless bad hotels in small-town Russia.

  The men’s buyers in turn wouldn’t spare a thought for all the lonely nights, the boredom or the ugliness of the gasket-seller’s life on the road. They would just complain about the existing order, place a new one and move on. So the cycle of indifference continued. It was easier to pretend oth
er people didn’t exist.

  There was a smash at the end of the bar. A man careened like a skittle into the bar stools, reeling from a punch in the face. His beer glass shattered on the concrete floor. Skittle man picked up the glass handle, now a jagged weapon, and hurled himself at the man who had hit him. Stevie saw blood. Strangely, neither man made a noise; there was only the sound of smashing furniture and the shouts of the barman.

  The customers had turned their eyes to the fight but even this seemed not to touch them, to bore them even. The bouncer stepped in and smashed both men with his massive fist then threw them, bleeding, out the door. He wore knuckledusters.

  ‘The bouncer’s been to prison. Did you see the tattoos on his hands?’ Stevie murmured to Henning.

  Henning glanced over his shoulder then gave her a slight frown.

  ‘And you can tell he got them in prison?’

  Stevie nodded. ‘There’s a whole tattoo language among the Russian criminals. They cover their bodies in code. It’s their way of declaring things about themselves to other criminals, like their status. It’s a tradition that goes way back into the 1920s and 30s, into Stalin’s gulags.

  That scarab with the cross on the middle finger means “convicted for robbery”, and the eagle on the thumb means “I am an important thief”.’

  ‘A secret language,’ Henning spoke slowly, ‘only with meanings quite unlike the harem flowers, I imagine.’

  ‘Quite.’ Stevie took a long sip from her enormous beer and carefully removed the foam moustache it left on her upper lip. ‘Some of the tattoos are pornographic, especially the ones forcefully applied to someone as punishment. But there are recurring symbols and themes, mostly animal: the head that’s half cat, half horned werewolf; or half man, half cat; a skull with eagle wings; a devil with wolf’s ears, and so on.’ She placed the heavy glass back on the bar. ‘The werewolf is at the heart of it all, being a creature that dwells between worlds: man and animal, night and day, living and dead.’

  She dipped her finger in a puddle of beer on the bar and absentmindedly drew the outline of a snarling wolf’s head. ‘The raven, the bat, the cat and the wolf are also symbols of the werewolf.’

  Henning was deep in thought. ‘Nocturnal beast, predator, devil and man, twilight dweller. I can see the symbolism. I suppose prison is limbo, no place and yet their place.’ He laughed unexpectedly. ‘And you know all this from your time in the Moscow underworld?’

  Stevie straightened her shoulders. ‘I happen to own an encyclopaedia of criminal tattoos—both volumes,’ she added, a little defensively.

  She scanned the crowd. It was getting warm in the bar. Several men had rolled their sleeves up, one or two had taken their shirts off, which Stevie considered a little excessive for the hours before midnight.

  She spotted a skinny man with a wormwood face. He headed to the bar, then settled himself one man up from Stevie. His forearm had a large tattoo of half a wolf’s head and half a woman’s head, with a dagger dividing the two. A cobra was coiled around the handle and there were roman letters on the top and bottom.

  Stevie nudged Henning. ‘Can you read those letters? What do they say?’

  Henning shot a surreptitious glance over Stevie’s shoulder. ‘Homo homini lupus est. Gnothi seauton.

  ’ ‘ “Man is wolf to man”,’ Stevie muttered. ‘I got the Latin, what’s the other?’

  ‘Greek. “Know thyself”.’

  Stevie edged imperceptibly further from the wolf man. ‘At least he’s not operating under any delusions,’ she whispered.

  Then an extraordinary woman appeared. She was dressed in the tightest blue denim—matching jeans and jacket—stamped all over with Dior. She carried a gold evening bag on a chain.

  The woman’s hair was an impossible red and arranged in ringlets that bounced with every painful step of her stiletto boots, the heels of which were so high she pitched forward, her knees pigeon-toed. The barman hurried to kiss her powdered cheeks, light her cigarette and pour her a drink. She received his attentions as she had received those of the bouncer, with long-suffering acceptance that she would have to be so openly adored wherever she went.

  Two men came in after her. One bent to kiss her, his eyes closed in tenderness. The face under the ringlets never softened. For a man with such visibly rough hands, he caressed the woman’s back with great gentleness. Under his fur-trimmed hat was the face of someone who had seen little of that gentleness himself.

  Stevie strained to catch his companion’s face. As he called an order to the barman Stevie started in shock. The tattooed neck, the mouth full of gold teeth . . .

  Stevie didn’t move quickly. She turned languidly towards Henning, then pulled out a cigarette.

  ‘Henning—’ She realised her fingers were shaking and put the cigarette back. ‘You won’t believe this. It’s the shooter from the car park.’

  Henning kept his eyes on the canary girl. ‘Where?’ he hissed.

  ‘Behind me. Bald. Your three o’clock.’

  Stevie’s face prickled with fear, even though the shooter wasn’t interested in her. If he wanted to kill random women he would have shot her that afternoon. But his reappearance at the bar reminded her how connected the world really was. It was easy to forget, she thought. Worlds seem to separate us from the Russian hit man, the war lord, the rapist, the suffering prostitute . . . but really—she swung her feet nervously— we are all closer to each other than we think.

  The shooter’s companion shouted at the barman for a beer. Stevie froze. She knew that voice. It had played over in her head since that meeting with Masha in the music rooms: Gregori Petrovitch Maraschenko; biznessman.

  Goldie’s companion placed his hands on the bar. There, plain for all to see, was a tattoo of a grinning cat smoking a pipe.

  Stevie casually took out her mobile, turned her face away from Maraschenko and spoke into the phone, carefully photographing his face over her shoulder with the tiny camera lens on the back. It was dark but he wasn’t far away and it was worth a try.

  She sent the photo straight to Josie Wang in Confidential Investigations at Hazard, with the message: Can you identify asap?

  Josie always worked late and if there was anything on record for Maraschenko, she would find it.

  The bar began filling with people. A man with a blond handlebar moustache joined Maraschenko. Stevie’s seeking ears caught part of their conversation.

  ‘—so many damn Nigerians in this city!’

  ‘Nigeria and Russia—the two biggest money-laundering countries in the world.’

  ‘Ha!’

  The moustachioed man spat on the floor. Stevie suspected he resented being twinned in any way with Africa.

  It was odd—you didn’t see the Nigerians during the day. You wouldn’t know they were in Moscow at all. But in the safety of the black night, in the dark club, out they crept, to drink and dance in their brightly coloured tennis shoes and white smiles.

  Stevie turned to Henning. ‘He could be holding the girl in his flat.’

  ‘Do you really think so?’

  She shrugged. ‘It could be that simple. Often it is.’

  ‘What do we do, follow them?’ But Henning’s voice was full of doubt.

  Stevie nodded slowly, feeling unsure herself. It wasn’t going to be easy to follow them without being noticed. There was no guarantee, apart from a hunch, that Anya was at the flat, and the worst thing for Anya would be if the kidnappers discovered someone was sniffing around.

  Stevie tapped her nail rapidly on the bar. ‘I’m worried that no one has made contact yet, apart from the necklace. I don’t understand. The people who took Anya must want something. But this Maraschenko doesn’t look like the sort of criminal who would be laundering large amounts of money through the banks, not if he’s drinking here. So pressuring Kozkov won’t be his motive for the kidnapping. He’s either working for someone, or he’s done it for money—’

  ‘Or some other nefarious motive . . .’ Henning’s vo
ice was barely audible.

  Stevie quickly shook her head. ‘You don’t take a girl like Anya for that. The risk is too expensive. You take someone no one will miss—that girl, for example.’ She indicated the canary girl with her head. They both watched her a moment in silence.

  ‘Can we really do no more than wait?’ Stevie said it more to herself, hoping the answer was no.

  The little group was noisily getting ready to leave. Suddenly she came to a decision.

  ‘Henning, listen, I think we have to try. We’ll follow from a distance, be very careful. They’re all sailing a few sheets to the wind, I doubt they’ll notice even if we breathe down their necks.’

  Henning’s face said it all.

  ‘And we’ll need a ride, fast.’

  Scared, but knowing she must, Stevie shrugged on her coat, slid off the stool and hurried to follow Maraschenko.

  Henning laid a hand on her shoulder. ‘Wait.’ He grabbed his overcoat and walked out, his hand hanging on to her, stumbling slightly.

  They walked past Maraschenko and his group waiting for their coats, and stepped into the frosty night. Henning’s phone rang. He listened to the voice on the other end, his face serious.

  ‘Harasho. We’re outside The Boar.’ He hung up and Stevie turned to him expectantly.

  ‘That was Maxim,’ he said, pocketing the phone. ‘The arms dealer from the club.’

  ‘I remember him.’

  ‘There’s not much he doesn’t get to hear about in Moscow. It always surprises me, but it shouldn’t.’ Henning put both hands on Stevie’s shoulders. ‘He knows who you are, Stevie, and why you are in Moscow. He says Kozkov’s business is none of his business, but that, as you and I are obviously . . .’ Henning cleared his throat awkwardly. ‘As you and I are obviously friends, he wanted to do me a small favour. He has some information for you.’

  ‘Nothing more?’ Stevie’s mouth was dry, her words whispers.

  ‘No.’ Henning shook his head. ‘He’s nervous about telephones as it is. He’s sending a car.’ He squeezed her shoulders, concerned. ‘Are you afraid?’ he asked. ‘I’m sorry I got you mixed up with him. But he won’t hurt you.’