The Troika Dolls

by Miranda Darling

  Stevie stepped out into the pale blue light of the early afternoon. The scent of birch and brittle ice was crisp and unfamiliar, not the pine-scented air she knew from the alps. It was more than silent. It was stillness distilled: the heavy snow, the viscous rays of dying daylight, no birds or bells or distant engines.

  Then Saskia bounded out of the back seat, warm and full of life, brushing past Stevie, out to sniff the snow. She ran about, her long fur standing and thickening in the cold. This winter world was the one she had been created for and she was a happy dog.

  Along the front of the dacha ran a wooden verandah overhung with snow; three steps up, there was a heavy door. The generator was out of oil and Vadim was sent to investigate; there were only candles but many of them, on every sill and table and even the floor. Irina floated around the house in the semi-darkness lighting them. The place smelt of pale wood and tea leaves.

  Stevie was shown to a small room—the smaller rooms, Irina explained, would be warmer—with wooden floors, walls and ceiling; a wrought-iron bed in one corner, a chest of drawers against the far wall. It was a room that had been furnished for the summer months.

  Stevie threw down her crocodile bag and peered out from the small window. It was black outside; darkness had fallen quickly. Checking her phone, she saw there was no reception. The house had no landline.

  She went in search of Constantine. The Greek was in his room, staring out at the white fields. He was a lean man with longish curling hair and a sharp nose. He came from a family of traders in the Balkans and spoke just about every language under the sun. Stevie had often wanted to ask how he had come into this line of work, but Constantine was not a man of superfluous words, if he spoke at all. The words he did use, he made count. He was, like David Rice, a man you wanted on your side in battle.

  ‘Does your mobile have reception, Constantine?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Hence the satellite phone . . .’ Stevie added.

  Constantine nodded. ‘They have isolated us very nicely. Anyone coming or going will be easily noticed by surveillance. There is no way to communicate with the outside world. The satellite phone has no doubt been programmed to receive calls only.’

  Stevie took one of Constantine’s offered cigarettes even though they were much too strong for her.

  ‘The family?’ he asked.

  Stevie told him what she knew about the Kozkovs, about Anya, about what had happened to her and why, and who they suspected was responsible.

  Constantine did not interrupt, just nodded from time to time.

  When she had finished he said simply, ‘Best we stay close to them.’

  In the sitting room, a huge fire was spreading heat through the chilly air. Irina had laid a white cloth on the table and placed several bottles, clean glasses and an unopened tin of olives. Silently she poured five glasses of vodka, her face paler than ever, her mouth drawn tight. The tin of olives was covered in dust and no one had thought to bring a tin opener.

  ‘This is usually such a happy place.’ Kozkov was staring into the fire. ‘We’ve had so many wonderful summers together. The place is quite different then, full of sunlight and laughter and wild flowers.’

  He addressed Stevie. ‘You must come again in the summer, when all this . . .’ He waved his hand, lost for the right words to describe what was happening.

  ‘There is a lake not far from the house—you can see it from here when it’s not all covered in snow,’ Irina said, her face suddenly animated. ‘Anya and Vadim used to float about in a little dinghy. It only had one oar and they used to just go in circles.’ To Stevie’s surprise, she laughed. ‘It was magical.’

  Irina handed round the rather large glasses of vodka and sat down. ‘I feel we should have more hope than this,’ she said quietly, her face losing its flash of joy. ‘We are all sitting here wondering if we will ever have another summer like those past, with everyone together. We are admitting a defeat before we have even begun. I believe we will get Anya back and everything will be alright.’ Her eyes sought Kozkov. ‘I need to believe that.’

  ‘Irina, there is every reason to hope.’ Stevie moved to stand beside her. ‘The kidnappers have made contact and will contact us again tomorrow. They will make their demands and from then, it becomes a matter of negotiation.’ Stevie looked to Constantine for support.

  ‘There exists, somewhere between you and them, a point where you are able to meet the demands, and at which the kidnappers will be satisfied.’ Constantine’s voice was steady and calm. It could make anyone trust him. ‘We simply find that point.’

  ‘And then they will return her?’ Vadim was staring straight at Constantine. The Greek said nothing; Stevie jumped in. ‘Yes, then they will return her.’ And she believed it. There was no reason, at that point, not to.

  They tried to talk about other things but there was mostly silence. The vodka and the fire had driven out the cold but they hadn’t brought any food. Stevie went through the kitchen cupboards, disturbing a few dried spiders, noting the tin of Italian coffee with relief. She found a bag of white rice, and a tin of tuna, some capers and spices. With these she cobbled together a kedgeree of sorts.

  Constantine and the family sat around the table. The kedgeree was unspectacular but it was filling and hot, and they would need the energy tomorrow. In any case, food and the table nourished more than stomachs in Stevie’s experience. Constantine ran through the battle plan.

  Details were a good way to focus the tension.

  ‘Initially, we do exactly as they ask. We want to win their trust. When the phone rings, you, Valery, will answer. If they will not agree to speak to me, then you must speak. Try to write down words that will let me know what is going on. We need to know if this Maraschenko is still holding Anya, or if she has been moved. Anything you can learn through your ears can help.’ Valery nodded, his face drawn and tight.

  Vadim stood and filled everyone’s glass with vodka. Kozkov downed his quickly. After a time, he began to speak, leaning back in his chair, his voice low.

  ‘My banking reforms were supposed to make a real difference. I spent my first years in the job quietly pulling everything apart and putting it back together to find the rot. I decided not to make waves unless it was absolutely necessary. I am not,’ he shrugged with a wry smile, ‘suicidal. My intervention was going to be surgical. What I found was a banking legislation so full of loopholes that it was hard to believe it was not intentional. I began to believe that people in the treasury and legislators were operating together to draft deliberately flawed legislation. When I began to freeze bank assets, I began to get death threats. It was, of course, expected. Anya—that was not.’

  No sane man would envy his job, thought Stevie. ‘Your reputation as an incorruptible figure may have worked against you, Valery. Money, political favours, a villa in St Tropez might have swayed many men in positions of power.’

  Kozkov nodded. ‘It has made me many enemies.’

  ‘Surely it has made you friends, too,’ she asked.

  ‘Outside Russia . . . perhaps.’ He shrugged again. ‘But perhaps no one outside Russia cares what happens here.’

  ‘You still have nuclear weapons and energy,’ Stevie replied. ‘The world will always care.’

  ‘Not for the fate of the Russian people, only for the geo-political entity.’

  Vadim pushed his plate away and lit a cigarette, glowering at his father. Kozkov appeared not to notice. He continued talking. ‘Not even the Russian people care about the fate of the Russian people.’

  ‘Surely that’s not true,’ Stevie began to protest, thinking of Galina, of Masha.

  ‘Let me give you an example of what I mean.’ Kozkov turned his tired eyes to her. ‘When Anya went missing, I kept up appearances. I kept going in to the office, every morning at eight, same clothes, same hat, everything. All my colleagues at the bank knew something was terribly wrong but no one said a word to me. This wasn’t for discretion, or fear of saying the wrong thi
ng, like it might be in your country. The long reign of violence and fear in the old Russia, and now the corruption of the new, has so brutalised their sensibilities that not one dared to speak a compassionate word.’

  Vadim pushed his chair away from the table and went to help his mother wash the few plates in the sink.

  ‘It is exactly this—this paralysing mistrust—that I am trying to crush. Trust is the foundation of a proper market economy. Anything else is a shambles.’

  Kozkov’s eyes glinted, his cheeks grew a little redder. Here was a man passionate about changing the social fabric of his country. There was no doubt: head of the Russian Central Bank was not just a position for him, it was a vocation. He didn’t know whom he could turn to. The system itself was suspect—corrupt elements, the wheels of politics were all hidden behind the metal doors and tinted windows of life in the new Russia.

  ‘Valery, what do you know about the siloviki?’ Stevie said the name warily, as if to say it out loud would somehow evoke them. ‘Do they really exist?’

  There was a pause as Valery leaned back in his chair and stared at Stevie. He reached for his packet of cigarettes and shook one loose, tapped it twice on the tabletop and put it in his mouth.

  ‘The siloviki,’ he said slowly. He looked around for a match. ‘They are the—how would you call them?—the bogeymen of the Kremlin.’ He struck the match and lit his cigarette. ‘Do they exist as an organised circle with members and specific goals? I don’t know. Are there men within the government who serve only their own interests, who are morally bankrupt, who have links to organised crime, and who are efficiently ruthless in the pursuit of what they want? Yes. Are there men who still believe in a system of government that relies on personal conceptions of power? Incredible as it may seem, yes.’ He exhaled a long column of smoke. ‘You can give these men a name—the siloviki—perhaps it makes them somehow more manageable. But I see them only as the locus of a cancerous corruption that has spread nationwide. As it was before, so it is now: no one can be trusted.’

  Irina and Vadim left the room. They were probably not in the mood to hear about their country’s problems when they were being crushed under the weight of their own anguish.

  Kozkov glanced at the doorway his wife had just walked through, then leaned forward on his elbows. ‘I’m being torn in two directions. On the one hand I have my integrity, my refusal to be pressured; then there is this most terrible strain . . . this horrible concern, and love I feel for my daughter.’

  He reached for the vodka bottle then thought the better of it. ‘I can’t speak to Irina about this. I don’t think she would understand—or could bear to have the conversation.’

  Stevie kept her voice low, not wanting to be overheard, but she had to ask. ‘What are you going to do, Valery, if the kidnappers ask you to compromise your ideals?’

  Anya’s father stubbed out his cigarette, screwing the butt viciously into the ashtray. ‘Everything I have fought for for Russia’s future—Russia’s future itself perhaps—is at stake. To give in is almost unthinkable.’ He gave a bitter smile. ‘The incorruptible Kozkov crumbling, yet another betrayal of Russia’s chances.’

  He looked up at Stevie. The fire leaving his face abruptly. ‘And yet there is a little space, Stevie, between unthinkable and possible, and in that little space lies for me all the world.’ His voice was almost a whisper. ‘Does that answer your question?’

  They joined the others by the fire in the next room. Stevie sat on the floor in front of it, warming her toes. Saskia lay at Irina’s feet, her own delicate paws stretched towards the flames.

  ‘Can I ask you,’ Stevie turned to Anya’s father, ‘does the name Felix Dragoman mean anything to you?’

  Kozkov drew his eyebrows together. ‘The name is familiar . . .’

  It was Vadim, flushed, who spoke. ‘I know the name—he runs smuggling rings all over the continent, Japan, the UK, Siberia, Turkey, and everywhere else. We all knew about him in the army.’ He glanced across at his father. ‘Some officers were making a fortune on the side, selling stuff on the black market. They would be assigned to guard a defunct nuclear facility or a pharmaceutical plant and they would sell uranium or plutonium or drugs or whatever out the back door to Dragoman and his men.’

  ‘How high up did this go?’ Stevie hugged her knees to her chest.

  ‘I would guess all the way to the top.’ Vadim shrugged. ‘There was too much money changing hands for it have remained of no interest to the higher-ups.’ Stevie nodded, hugging her knees tighter and staring at the flickering flames in front of her. ‘The trade in fake or expired pharmaceuticals is a huge business. And I can think of at least three rogue governments who would pay fortunes for nuclear materials or even weapons, not to mention any number of terrorist organisations, provided they could afford it.’

  ‘Surely it’s not that easy . . .’ Kozkov looked horrified and Stevie was surprised he didn’t seem to be aware of it.

  ‘The beauty of this black market,’ she explained, ‘lies in its deniability: the army report, say, a nuclear warhead as stolen and then launder the proceeds through Niue or Nauru or Tuvalu or some other Pacific Island micro-state, for example. Even if the warhead is found and traced, no one can be held officially responsible for the “stolen” goods, and there is no money trail to follow.’

  ‘And that’s where the banks come in,’ Kozkov said, the pieces coming together in his mind.

  ‘And therefore you.’

  He sat forward, his eyes too drawn by the flames. ‘Trouble is, there are so many banks, so many under investigation, so many I have already closed down. It just doesn’t narrow it down enough.’

  ‘Maxim Krutchik was certain that Dragoman has binding ties to the siloviki, that they’re taking cuts of his profits in exchange for favourable legislation, or for turning a blind eye,’ Stevie informed Kozkov, her voice quiet. ‘He thinks a man like Dragoman might be interested in influencing you.’

  Kozkov frowned in concentration. ‘If this Dragoman is tied to the siloviki in that way, then they would both have an interest in making sure a system of laundering profits through the banks was in place. It widens the circle of suspicion even further.’

  ‘So, is Maraschenko working for Dragoman?’ Vadim’s eyes were glowing in the firelight.

  Kozkov replied, his voice hollow now. ‘We don’t even know Dragoman is in this picture yet.’ He directed his next words to Stevie.

  ‘He is just a name you tell me is being whispered in the underworld.

  You also say that Maraschenko is most likely an opportunist. He saw his chance with Anya and took it off his own initiative. But is all this guesswork helpful?’ He pulled his forelock, staring into the fire. ‘How do we know Dragoman or the siloviki have anything at all to do with Anya?’

  From the corner, Irina spoke, her eyes fixed on the tapestry in her lap. ‘We are not investigating. I don’t care who took Anya. All that matters is that we follow the instructions and get her back safely.’

  Irina was right. Anya’s safe return was the only thing that mattered. The rest—truth and justice—was garnish.

  Suddenly, Irina stopped sewing and looked up. ‘Listen. Shh . . . can you hear that?’

  They all stilled. There was only the crackle of the fire. Saskia stood up, the hair on her neck rising.

  ‘What is it, Irina?’ Stevie barely whispered. Could the house be under surveillance? Had Rice kept his men on after all? Was someone else out there?

  Then it came, the long hollow howl of a wolf. The sound crept in around them like a low wind. It was, even as they sat safe around the house fire, a lonely and frightening sound. They listened as the invisible wolf howled in wave after wave, building up to some sort of crescendo.

  ‘She’s hungry.’ Vadim spoke normally. ‘I’ve heard the howls before, when we were in the Caucasus. It’s a hungry she-wolf. She’s probably calling the pack to help her hunt. She must have found tracks.’

  Vadim kept his face turned to the
window, staring at nothing. ‘This area was known for its wolf packs. In particularly hard winters, the wolves would get so hungry they would try to bring down the horses pulling the sleighs.

  ‘The sleigh would flee as fast as it could from the pack,’ Vadim continued, his voice as flat as the white plains outside, ‘hoping to outrun it. The horses would get too tired to outrun the wolves, no matter how frightened they were. So the footman would begin to throw some of the luggage off to lighten the load. Still the wolf pack would gain on the fleeing sleigh.

  ‘When all the luggage was gone and there was nothing left to throw, they would pick the most dispensable person—usually a young servant girl, or perhaps the footman—and thrown them off the back of the sleigh. The person would fall straight into the path of the wolves.’

  No one could speak when the story finished, and Stevie knew she was not the only one in the room who saw Anya’s face on Vadim’s servant girl.

  ‘How far away do you think she is?’ Stevie’s voice was as soft as the falling snow.

  Kozkov poked a fallen log back into the fire. ‘Not very.’

  Stevie was woken the next morning by sweet Saskia sniffing her chin.

  She reached out and stroked the gentle hunter’s sleek head. Outside it was still dark. The starlight, reflected and magnified ten thousand times in the ice crystals of the snow, cast an eerie glow in the pre-dawn. Stevie lay still, wishing today was not the day that they would take the life of a teenage girl into their hands.

  After dressing, she made a pot of strong coffee and re-set the fire, then stared out into the grey snow. A low-lying fog surrounded the dacha like a petticoat, creeping up the windows and hovering there.

  With a start, she noticed a man walking towards her through the snow. He was carrying a torch and his lower body was obscured by the fog. The flames lit the mist around him and he seemed almost to float, legless, through it. It was Valery Kozkov.

  A raven began to caw, then another. Stevie was surprised that birds would sing (could you call it that? They sounded more like angry children . . . ) in the darkness. Perhaps the star-lit blush of the snow had been enough to disturb them. She caught sight of one perching in the bare branches above Kozkov, watching him. It was as big as a cat.