The Troika Dolls

by Miranda Darling

  ‘But wasn’t that terribly dangerous? They would have had their heads cut right off for the least suspicion I’m sure.’

  ‘But think, Stevie: one man and over one hundred, two hundred wives. Most of them essentially ignored, given luxury but denied love or acknowledgement. Indignation can embolden the most feeble heart.’

  ‘And you found their code?’ Stevie smiled into the phone, glad Henning had called.

  ‘It’s beautifully illustrated, too.’

  She could hear Turkish music blaring in the background. ‘How is Istanbul?’ Stevie closed her eyes and dreamed of the city.

  ‘It’s covered in snow. The minarets have little white caps, and today they were just jutting out from the fog. The light is this soft grey colour, like daylight through a paper screen.’

  ‘I’ve never been to Istanbul,’ Stevie said wistfully. ‘They say the most romantic sight in the world is the Bosphorous by moonlight.’

  ‘By moonlight, from the water, when the city is covered in snow.

  It would break your heart.’

  Stevie sighed. ‘Are you going then, tonight, with raki bottles and daggers, to raid the other boats?’

  Henning harrumphed in amusement. ‘Perhaps another night. It’s not something I would want to do alone. Perhaps if you were here with me, the adventure would hold more charm.’

  His words stirred in Stevie something tiny, a butterfly wing of undefined emotion. Was it sorrow?

  Stevie sat at the table by the window in her bathrobe and pearls. There was nothing to see outside. A freezing fog was hovering over the boulevards, cloaking everything in a dove-grey tinged with dirty yellow. Out in the nothingness, it was –40 degrees. She had been chewing away at the Moscow situation report for Hazard since the night before.

  The headlines of the morning papers carried news of the murder of the programming head of the largest state-run news agency, Itar-–Tass— stabbed multiple times in his flat while his driver waited outside for three hours before anyone was called.

  Regular situation reports kept Hazard at peak readiness to meet whatever challenges their clients’ operating environments presented.

  Stevie had started from the ground up. Lawlessness was the problems on the Moscow street—skinhead gangs attacking foreign students of Asian, African or Indian descent was big. Fifteen thugs had attacked an African-American student only the other day, screaming, ‘Blacks out of Russia.’ The boy was bashed in broad daylight, in the centre of town, with hundreds of bystanders. No one stopped them. The Russian security services were so unable (or unwilling) to deal with incidents like this that they were becoming diplomatic incidents. It was a symptom of the greater rot.

  These gangs had initially stepped in to provide protection in the vacuum left when the judicial and police institutions of Russia had crumbled. Skinheads had allegedly been called to a town three time zones away to punish a man who had raped a girl. The gang flayed the man alive with razor blades.

  Tiger kidnappings were also on the rise: bank managers, truck drivers moving precious cargos, jewellers—anyone who had access to valuables—were snatched and ‘persuaded’ to hand over the goods. Kidnap for ransom was a real risk for anyone who was prominent, and executed by professionals and opportunists alike. Companies doing business in Russia faced the conundrum of bribes—to pay or not to pay—and the risk of violence. Organised crime favoured assassinations as a negotiating tool in their ‘business’.

  By 1995, after the fall of the Soviet Union, murder figures had tripled. Organised crime gangs became the most stable, most powerful organisations in Russia. As the country privatised, these groups had the cash to snap up properties. This gave them great economic and political clout.

  Forty per cent of KGB members left the organisation and many joined criminal groups, or offered personal protection to oligarchs. They took with them their sophisticated training, specialist knowledge, and powerful weaponry and connections. Organised crime gangs were transformed. By this time, crushing them would have destabilised the fragile nation.

  As the country slowly stabilised under the iron grip of the government of the new millennium, the crackdown on the criminal gangs had begun.

  The ex-USSR had plenty of other security issues. Military-grade radioactive material had become a hot commodity. The moment the Soviet Union had collapsed, criminal gangs of all persuasions had descended like hungry maggots on the abandoned nuclear facilities and research labs dotted around the vast territory and stripped them bare. The high levels of secrecy that had surrounded these projects meant that no one quite knew what was taken.

  The Americans spent millions trying to help the Russian government secure these facilities, but the thefts kept happening. The fear was that the materials would be trafficked and used by terrorists to make a dirty bomb. Rumours of missing ‘suitcase bombs’—nuclear devices that the KGB had allegedly constructed, small enough to fit in a suitcase— still circulated although none of the missing suitcases had yet been recovered.

  Despite the massive wealth of a handful of men, life for ordinary Russians remained unforgivably grim. Looking out onto the city, Stevie felt the weight of all those crushed generations crowded in the cold fog and the streets outside, and wondered how Russians found the energy to keep on going.

  Vadim called from Moscow State University, told Stevie to come as quickly as she could. Stevie fastened fourteen buttons on her woollen sailor’s trousers, pulled on her fur-lined black boots and threw her astrakhan over everything. She was starting to get used to these morning calls.

  Outside, a pale fog dimmed even the neon signs, shining like artificial suns from the tops of buildings. The thermometer read –41 degrees. It was getting colder. Head down, she made for the nearest metro. It was certainly the quickest way out to MGU—Moscow State University.

  The heavy swinging doors at the entrance of the metro station are lethal. You have to time your entry just right—either moving through close behind the person in front, or far enough back from them that the door can complete its thudding back-swing before being pushed forward again.

  It was peak hour and body after muffled body streamed through the guillotine doors—headscarves, fur hats, leather caps, woollen beanies, military hats—one after the other were fed in. Stevie knew a crack from the doors could knock her senseless, so she followed right on the heels of a dumpy babushka, knowing from experience that nothing ever got in the way of a babushka.

  One, two, three—go!

  The metro stations in Moscow are famous for their art deco celebrations of Soviet Glory. Each station has its own design, its own mood. Some are mausoleum-black, plated in heavy marble; others are dedicated to martial glory, overseen by monolithic metal statues of soldiers. Red hammer-and-sickles are studded on the vaulted ceilings in others. In all of them you can sense the power of history hanging over the rush of small men below.

  Street life in a Moscow winter happens in these deep and beautiful tunnels. The underground arcades are well heated, with marble floors and carved benches. Young people meet after school, grouping in small knots of two or three or four. Above ground the snow is waist high so meeting in the metro made sense.

  Stevie found herself squeezed next to a stout woman in a ginger fur coat and matching hat and hair. In her arms, the woman was carrying a ginger cat, invisible in the fur but for its green eyes and pointed ears. Was the cat afraid of all the fur, she wondered, or did it feel at home? Stevie reached out and secretly touched the woman’s fur. The coat was so soft. The cat glared at her.

  The way a crowd moves in an underground train station says a lot about the character of the people trapped within it. Milanese crowds bustle, move quickly, shout, dodge umbrellas, and people move at different speeds. In London, travellers are brisk, polite and silent, all standing carefully to one side in the unspoken understanding that those not moving on the escalator should stand to the left.

  In Moscow, the travellers mass at the top of the escalator, waiting their tur
n to descend to the trains below. As they inch forward, the crowd begins to sway, rhythmically, from one foot to the other like sailors on the deck of a rocking ship.

  The babushki are so tightly bound in layers of clothing, scarves and tights that they feel completely solid to the touch, like logs wrapped in felt. They come up behind you and start rocking, propelling themselves forward, unstoppable in their steady, insistent motion that speaks of eternal resignation.

  Resignation is different to patience: the latter is sustained by hope, the former has let it go. Waiting was a fact of life—the essence of life—under Soviet communism. The static existence continued for many under the current president as people waited for opportunity.

  This eternal state of pause seemed to have created its own collective gesture: the sideways roll. The silence in such a physical crush of people was striking. The crowd was not aggressive. It pushed and surged around Stevie but with no personal grudge, no animosity, and no apology if someone stepped on your foot. As the people in it rock with slow, grim focus, she was compelled by physical pressure to do likewise.

  Stevie’s stomach fluttered as she stepped onto the down escalator. The depth of the tunnel, the incline, was vertiginous. The original stations had been built far underground so they could be used as air-raid shelters, until the arrival of the nuclear age, when people realised that you just couldn’t dig deep enough. The newer stations were much shallower. As she descended into the darkness, Stevie concentrated on the faces rising towards her on the escalator opposite, all so white. It was unusual to see an Asian face or a dark face—a black face rare indeed. No one wore any brightly coloured clothing, no one was laughing or talking.

  Two pale boys on military service, conscripts, rose up towards her. They looked so young in their great coats with their soft mouths and apple cheeks. Stevie thought of Vadim’s stories, of the mothers in Red Square screaming for justice.

  Stevie doubted it was much easier for any of the girls. She watched two friends in their early twenties, perfectly made-up. It wasn’t yet ten o’clock in the morning but they were drinking beer from big cans. They obviously took great care of their appearance. Beauty was one of the easiest ways out of the life of stagnation offered by the concrete monoliths on Moscow’s outskirts. Stevie thought of the clubs and restaurants and bars, the girls on display in lingerie and heels, part of the wallpaper.

  For these young people in particular, their communist past seemed to have been vacuumed away. The present had roared in on a Hummer, past protesting pensioners in shabby clothing, bringing with it a Wild West of neon lights and dirty snow, of assassinations and pounding house music. There was, Stevie supposed, no middle way in Moscow. Everything was extreme.

  There was no noise in the train carriage. No one wanted to draw the attention of the other passengers. Life here seemed to be an intensely private and interior matter, to be hidden from strangers—guarded from the state—at all cost. Any social capital Moscow may once have had, long ago, had truly been eroded and none of the developments since the fall of communism had been very effective in restoring any.

  Stevie surfaced at Universitet station, past the kiosks selling beer and vodka to morning workers. If anything, the gloom was even more pronounced out here. The avenues of bare trees, the tall wrought-iron fence that ringed the university grounds, stood out black and lean against the snow. There was no colour, only shades of grey fading to black. The whole scene could have been an old photo capturing a lost moment in history.

  Anya must have walked this way so many times, on her way to her music lesson. She must have walked through the trees, towards the monolithic university buildings—a central Gotham tower that should have had gargoyles instead of heroic statues and ceremonial urns and would have been more at home in uptown New York, with smaller, twenty-storey wings radiating off it. She would have carried her violin case, her school books, perhaps a snack.

  Stevie casually glanced behind her. The feeling was back, even stronger now, that someone was following her. Had that man been in her metro car? Did it mean anything? Did she recognise the blue-grey jacket from GUM? She couldn’t be sure . . .

  Stevie hurried towards the university. A tall figure strode out of the main building, past two gigantic bronze statues of a boy and girl made heroic through study, and down the ripple of stairs that ran to the grounds. Coat flapping behind him like a heavy wing-fall, Vadim came to find the woman who might help free his sister.

  ‘The music rooms are not, unfortunately, located in the main building,’ he said in greeting. ‘They are around the back.’

  Stevie and Vadim strode out into the black-and-white park, the only movement in an otherwise frozen landscape. It was exceptionally cold. The blacks were growing blacker, the whites whiter, the greys taking sides.

  Dumps of rusting metal, steel containers, corroding beams lined one side of the snowy track—for the neat path by now had become a track. On the other side was the music building. A staircase ran up to the front door on the first floor, but some of the steps were missing and it was obviously not viable. Stevie thought at first that it was an abandoned block, but then she noticed that lights were on and, some of the windows not being boarded and taped, that students were eating at a communal table on the ground floor. Like a threadbare jumper, the concrete was eaten away in patches, exposing a jumble of wires, more beams. Three stray dogs ran about the foreground, obviously starving and manic with cold.

  ‘It’s not as bad as it looks inside. It’s warm at least.’ Vadim looked down at Stevie puffing along beside him. ‘You’re shocked?’

  ‘It’s the dogs really, Vadim. They make it all feel so . . . desolate, so deeply forsaken. Is my nose red?’

  Vadim smiled. Of course it was.

  Inside, the halls were dimly lit, the ceilings a patchwork of waffled squares stained by years of water damage.

  ‘Anya’s music teacher is a gentle, kind woman,’ Vadim told her. ‘Her name is Galina Alexandreyevna Ovchinnikov. And there is someone else I want you to talk to. She works in the room next door to Galina, a friend of hers. She might have some information that will help us find Anya.’

  Galina’s music room had managed, by one of those small miracles that turn up the colours of life for those standing still enough to notice them, to completely reject its surroundings. It smelt of pine—rosin dust from violin bows—of cinnamon biscuits and freshly printed ink. The light was warm with hints of gold around the edges, it bounced from the corners of a highly polished upright piano, the rim of a music stand filled with sheets; the arm of a metronome, trapped behind its clasp, was still.

  Galina herself was golden, in her mid-forties, dark-blonde hair in a waved bob, greying a little in single strands sketched here and there on her head. She wore a hand-knitted jumper in thick moss-green wool, lovingly embroidered with strawberries. She smiled as Vadim entered, then rose to greet Stevie.

  ‘I am waiting for a pupil,’ she said, as if apologising for seeming idle. She kissed Vadim hello, and her hazel eyes told Stevie she knew Anya was missing.

  With the delicacy of a refined sensibility, Galina intuited why Stevie had come and spared her the awkwardness of having to ask the first question.

  ‘Anya is exceptionally talented, even amongst my own pupils. But she is at that age—glitter is everything.’ Galina gestured to a small chair next to the piano. ‘Please.’ Stevie turned it to face Galina, who sat back down on her piano stool. ‘She wants to be a model in New York. We had an argument in her last lesson. I told her I couldn’t understand why she would want to kick her musical gift into a corner and show her legs to strangers for money instead. But Anya is starstruck. She says she needs to experience life before she can really play. But I don’t think she ran away. I believe deep down she still wants to be a serious musician.’

  ‘Did she mention any new friends to you, new people she had met recently?’ Stevie asked.

  ‘No. Not anyone new.’ Galina frowned. ‘She became very close to Petra this
year but they have known each other since they were children.

  I don’t think Petra was a good influence on her. Petra’s talent is mediocre at best. She can afford to let it drop for a bit. Anya is in a different league. They both loved to talk about film stars and models, you know, chasing glamour.’

  ‘Yes, I met Petra and I think I know what you mean.’

  Galina took a deep breath, looking down at her fine hands, then back at Stevie. ‘The other influence in her life was a positive one, her godfather, Kirril Marijinski. He is a famous conductor but I think he lives in Zurich now. Something happened, no one really knows, but Kirril left Russia a few years ago and swore he would never return. It’s a great pity.’

  Stevie nodded. Irina had mentioned Marijinski. She leaned forward in her chair. ‘Did Anya have any troubles with her parents? Any worries at all?’

  Galina shook her head. ‘She was a fortunate daughter to fortunate parents, true, Vadim? They are a close family. They enjoy each other’s company. I don’t know of any problems.’

  Vadim was leafing through the music sheets on the stand, his mind elsewhere. ‘Except the modelling thing,’ he said suddenly. ‘My parents weren’t very happy about that.’

  ‘But what sensible parent would be?’ Galina smiled but she had tears in her eyes. ‘I only hope her dream hasn’t taken her to dark places.’

  Vadim unhooked the arm of the metronome and let it swing freely, side to side on its spring. Its ticking kept perfect time for the lament, that saddest of arias, that vibrated on every surface, in every heart, in that tiny music room.

  Anya.

  There was a pin-board on the wall, a lesson timetable. Galina had her students’ names written in the spaces, one every hour aside from a lunch break at one. Anya Kozkov had two lessons a week, one at three in the afternoon, another at four-thirty. Petra was up there as well. Galina seemed very much in demand.

  ‘You’ve heard nothing from her since?’ Stevie asked softly.