The Troika Dolls

by Miranda Darling

  Kozkov stamped his boots on the verandah. ‘I couldn’t sleep— went out to look for wolf tracks,’ he explained. ‘I wanted to take Saskia but she was hiding from me. Didn’t like the idea of wolves, I suppose.’ He cast a reproving eye on the animal, lying happily at Stevie’s feet by the fire. Stevie did not blame Saskia.

  ‘She was keeping me company. Did you find any tracks?’

  Kozkov shook his head. ‘But it snowed a little last night, enough to cover them a bit, and the fog makes them harder to spot.’

  Stevie poured him a cup of boiling coffee; Kozkov filled it with sugar. ‘I can’t seem to shake the feeling that we are being watched,’ he said.

  ‘Is that why you went out?’

  He nodded. ‘I wanted to see if I could find anything but—nothing . . . I hate feeling trapped, helpless. I am never powerless but in this . . .’

  ‘It’s exactly what the kidnappers want you to feel, Valery,’ Constantine said, entering the room with soft steps. ‘They want to make you feel powerless so that you will do whatever they say and not think you have any choice.’ Stevie was grateful for Constantine’s presence and poured him his coffee. He drank, seeming not to notice it was scalding hot. ‘From what you and Stevie have told me, these men may not just want money. The persuasion factor is even more important to them.’

  Stevie stood by the door and watched Saskia run out into the snow to sniff about and do her morning business. It was breathtakingly cold, the frozen purple landscape could have belonged to the moon or a distant star. The magic of nature was on display and Stevie had never seen anything like it. It helped her faith to gaze out upon the frozen crystals, the pale silver trees, the happy dog.

  Things will be alright in the end.

  Saskia came bounding up the steps and dropped something with a clunk at Stevie’s feet. It looked like a stick of wood. Stevie bent to pick it up and throw it. As her hand touched it, she realised it was a dead mole, frozen solid. The poor creature, its little body stiff under the soft fur, tiny eyes welded shut—it must have somehow got caught outside its burrow. You didn’t usually find moles out in winter. Stevie picked it up carefully between two fingers and buried it in the snow at the bottom of the verandah. As she patted down the snow, she hoped that it wasn’t a bad omen.

  At midday the satellite phone rang. Everyone was ready, but it startled them nonetheless. Kozkov let it ring twice then picked it up.

  ‘Ya slushayu. I’m listening.’

  Constantine pushed a pad of paper and a pencil closer to him.

  Kozkov was to write down what was being said so Constantine could see. Clues to whom he might be speaking to could be important. He picked up the pencil and wrote: Ukrainian.

  So, not Maraschenko on the phone.

  ‘Let me speak to Anya—how do I know she is still alive? That you even have her?’

  Good, thought Stevie, Kozkov’s voice was calm.

  ‘I can’t continue this without the proof. You will understand my position, surely.’

  ‘Be reasonable,’ Constantine had urged him. ‘Don’t show anger or fear.’

  Kozkov wrote: Voice odd—out of breath?

  Constantine returned: Top guy?

  Kozkov nodded.

  Good! This Constantine underlined.

  ‘Please, just let me hear Anya’s voice. It’s not an unreasonable request,’ Kozkov repeated.

  This would help ascertain if Anya was being held elsewhere or wherever the speaker was.

  Unexpectedly, Kozkov’s face cracked, lit up in pain and eagerness.

  ‘Anya! Have they hurt you? My darling . . .’

  She’s there! he wrote frantically.

  ‘We’re going to get you home, I swear on my life, Anyushka—’ Stevie felt relief. They had a proof of life—the girl was still alive.

  Kozkov looked at Constantine, the knuckles of his hand white where he held the phone. ‘Will you speak with a friend of the family? He is acting on my behalf in this—’ Kozkov waited for the answer and shook his head at Constantine.

  They would speak only to Kozkov.

  He was listening intently, then he said, ‘I understand.’

  Impossible! he wrote on the pad.

  ‘These measures . . . I’m not sure they can be reversed. It takes time but—’ Kozkov listened some more, then his whole face hardened like a ghastly plaster cast.

  ‘You can’t do that.’ His voice had shrunken to a whisper now.

  ‘My God. You can’t do that.’ He went to write on the pad but the pencil snapped in his fingers and they began to shake uncontrollably.

  ‘Please, no.’

  The receiver went limp in his hand. The man on the other end had terminated the phone call.

  Nobody could move.

  Then, ‘Irina?’ Valery’s voice was hoarse. ‘I spoke to her.’

  Tears were running down Irina’s face.

  ‘She sounds alright.’ He was trying to reassure his wife but the blood had not returned to his face and he wouldn’t meet Irina’s eyes. He looked awful.

  Kozkov placed the telephone, the only connection he now had with his daughter, back on the table with heartbreaking gentleness. ‘The man sounded . . . he seemed to be panting for breath . . . asthmatic.’

  ‘What did he say?’ Stevie tried to control the trembling in her voice.

  Kozkov moved to the window and gazed out. ‘He said Anya was unharmed and that nothing would happen to her as long as I did what he asked.’

  The ravens were now three, still on the branch outside.

  ‘He asked me to reverse my banking reforms, re-open the banks, unfreeze the assets.’

  But Kozkov still hadn’t answered the question everyone was silently asking. Saskia whimpered and went to him. ‘He said he was going to keep Anya. He was going to keep her as his safeguard.’

  ‘What do you mean, keep her? For how long?’ Irina was trying hard to pull her voice back from the edge of hysteria.

  ‘It could take years.’

  There would be no bargaining or deals now, just an insidious vice tightening around the family.

  It was Vadim who broke the horrified deadlock in the room.

  ‘What do we do now?’ he asked Constantine.

  ‘This is now a hostage situation,’ the negotiator’s voice was flat.

  ‘You’re going to have to mount a search-and-rescue operation. You will need to involve the authorities.’

  There was nothing else for it. Waiting was not an option.

  ‘The authorities?’ Vadim’s voice was high, sarcastic. ‘You mean the police? The secret service? Perhaps the army?’

  His father turned back from the window. ‘What else can we do?

  We are powerless. The demons have no intention of giving Anya back.

  We need to hunt for her and we can’t do that without the cooperation of the FSB.’

  He lit a cigarette and turned his gaze back to the window. ‘The matter is out of our hands. It is the right thing to do.’

  For a moment no one said a word. Then Vadim exploded.

  ‘How can you dare even say that? How can you stand there and blow smoke and wash your hands of the matter?! Trust in the authorities— the right thing to do? The right thing to do?! Ha!’ He spat like a viper into the fire.

  When he spoke again, his voice was thick, bloody. ‘Let me remind you, Papa, what the authorities think is “the right thing to do”.’ Vadim ripped off his jumper and began unbuttoning his shirt.

  ‘Vadim,’ Kozkov spoke sharply, but his son took no notice. He opened the left side of his shirt wide.

  The young skin of his chest was deformed by a mass of scarred flesh, the kind of mark that is left by a deep burn. The scar was shaped like a ring, about the size of a large grapefruit. The inside was burnt in a pattern of sorts . . . Stevie realised with horror that it was the mark of a brand.

  Vadim removed his shirt completely and turned to show his back. It was pocked with dark marks that Stevie immediately recognised as cigarett
e burns. Other scars were faintly visible on his white skin, around the ribs and kidneys. He had the torso of a prisoner of some horrible war. She reminded herself that Vadim was only eighteen.

  ‘The military.’ Vadim’s head was bent, his eyes hidden.

  ‘Which military?’ Stevie swallowed. ‘Were you a prisoner somewhere?’ She tried to think of where Vadim could have fallen into the hands of savage fighters. Chechnya?

  ‘Military service. I went in with skin as pure as yours and came out—like this.’ His smile was bitter, twisting up the corner of his mouth.

  ‘Were you sent to Chechnya?’

  Kozkov was holding his forehead, his head bowed.

  ‘I was,’ Vadim replied in a low voice. ‘But it wasn’t the rebels who did this. It was my commanding officer, the officers of the Russian army.’ Vadim shrugged his shirt back on and lit a cigarette. Stevie noticed his left hand was trembling.

  ‘The same “authorities” that now my father wants to get to help Anya.’

  ‘They aren’t all like that, Vadim.’ Kozkov stretched a hand out towards his son. ‘There are some good men who still hold on to ideals of service—the patriots. If everyone believed that the authorities—’

  ‘What? That the authorities are corrupt and violent?’ The heat was back in Vadim’s voice. ‘Everyone knows that already. You don’t remember giving me exactly the same reasoning when I came to you with my papers that day and asked for your help?’

  ‘Vadim,’ Kozkov’s eyes held pure heartbreak, ‘I didn’t know what was going to happen to you.’

  ‘You did,’ he accused, unforgiving. ‘I told you the reputation of that platoon and what had happened to my friend Sergei under the same officers. You even met his mother, Milla, who had a funeral for her son’s skull because no one seems to know where the rest of the body is.’

  Vadim turned to Stevie. ‘In the official explanation—when Milla finally got one—they said Sergei died of “heart failure”. Everyone knows he was beaten to death by his superiors, drunk, bored—they did it just for fun.’

  ‘I thought I was doing the right thing, Vadim.’ Kozkov was shaking his head. ‘If people would only return to the ideas of duty and service and strength in adversity, Russia could be saved from total ruin. I still believe that now. But how could I publicly promote these values and then, privately, use my influence to protect my son from the difficulties of the same?’

  Kozkov turned away from his son, his back bowed in defeat.

  ‘My enemies would have screamed hypocrisy, it would have broken my bond of trust with the citizens. They need to trust the head of the Central Bank. With their trust, I have the power to do something real to stop us all sinking into this morass of rot and corruption. Can you see I had no choice?’

  Vadim’s eyes burned at his father’s back; he struggled to keep his voice steady. ‘What I see is that you chose to sacrifice me to your ideals and you proved nothing. You could have had me transferred, you could have spoken out about Sergei, you could have asked questions about what happens to Russian conscripts. But you did nothing. Fine. I survived, you got your chance to change the world. But I won’t let you do the same to Anya. If you make the same choice now, I will never forgive you.’

  There was a long, deep silence, all words buried by the horror— by the snow and the desperation that surrounded them all.

  Finally Kozkov spoke. ‘Vadim is right. My fight for Russia is over.

  Now I must fight for my family. I will retire immediately, become useless to my enemies.’

  Constantine shook his head; Stevie spoke for him. ‘If you do that, you’ll make the men now holding Anya very angry. They will kill her just to show you that you can’t win. It’s not an option, Valery, I’m sorry. Anya is only safe while you are still useful to them.’

  The sound of Kozkov’s fist smashing through the window surprised them all. He pulled his bloody hand back without another sound and thundered out of the dacha into the deep snow. From inside, they watched him fight through the drifts, running towards the birches, floundering like a man unspooling.

  Then came a howl of rage that could have belonged to another wolf but this time belonged to a man.

  Saskia slipped out after him. Stevie could see her sniffing anxiously at the garnet trail left in the snow by her master’s bleeding hand. She stepped daintily, not sinking, carefully and methodically choosing her way.

  Sound in the snow is muffled. The tiny droplets of moisture in the air that usually help carry noise from the source are frozen. That’s why it always seems so quiet in a blizzard. But they could still make out Kozkov’s words, and the strain of hysteria and frustration in his voice.

  ‘Take me, you predators!’ He splayed his arms like a man ready to be crucified. ‘I’m the one you want. Take me, you wolves!’ he screamed into the birch forest.

  When there was no reply from the forest or the mist or the frozen hills, Kozkov began shouting at himself. He blamed himself for everything that had happened. At one point he raised his bleeding hand towards the sky in a gesture of despair that would have been melodramatic had it not been so awfully genuine.

  Stevie felt terrible watching a man in agony, seeing his mind collapse. She was intruding on a most private pain. She found she couldn’t make herself walk out to him.

  In the end it was Irina who left the room. Stevie watched Saskia run in grateful circles around her as she climbed through the snow, stepping carefully in her husband’s footprints.

  Irina called out to him in a silvery voice that carried. ‘Valera.’ She went straight to him and embraced him tightly, pinning his arms to his sides.

  Stevie turned away from the window as the two parents wept, clasped together and rocking like a ship in a wild sea.

  Later that evening, they were all sitting around the fire, the bottle of whisky on the table almost empty. Stevie couldn’t shake the image of Vadim’s milky skin twisted with the hot pink and brown welts of the brand. Why were the officers so brutal with their charges? Perhaps it made a twisted sense: if you want to dehumanise a man, it is easier to begin with the boy. Youth is malleable, soft, more ready to take the impression of things brought to bear on it; the young are more eager to please. The officers of the Russian army had obviously understood this well; the Chechen fighters had, too. Suffering done unto them; suffering done unto others—that way the cycle of pain was never broken. Isn’t that what they wanted? Stevie wanted to see the scars again, ask more questions, but now wasn’t the time.

  Kozkov had calmed down but his face—drained and drawn— showed the toll the afternoon had taken on him. He looked smaller, older and more fragile. His hand had been carefully bandaged by Irina, and she was now sitting close by his side. Even Vadim seemed spent. They hadn’t eaten since breakfast and no one felt they could now.

  ‘Vadim, I am going to fix this. I am making this a promise to you.’

  Kozkov laid his bandaged hand on Saskia’s head. He spoke softly, almost to himself. ‘They steal my daughter, I become compliant, too afraid to tell anyone she is missing, so no one knows officially. I back off the banks, Anya is returned and there is no evidence of coercion or corruption. I never forget how vulnerable I am. I lose the will to fight.’

  He raised his head and looked at Stevie. ‘But perhaps they underestimate what I am capable of. Choosing the path for good is not a preordained destiny; it is a conscious and difficult decision. My enemies think my idealism makes me weak. Perhaps I will surprise them.’ Kozkov turned his whisky glass slowly in his good hand, the amber liquid catching the fire from the candles. ‘Since I took my position at the bank, I have been quietly investigating “gifts” from both oligarchs and organised crime bosses, to parliamentary committee members considering banking reforms.’ He directed this to Stevie and Constantine. ‘I have names, details, irrefutable evidence. No one knows about this list. But there are names on it that might convince elements of the FSB that Anya ought to be found quickly and safely.’

  Consta
ntine shifted in his seat, his black eyes bright. ‘You think the secret police are involved in Anya’s kidnapping?’

  Kozkov put his glass down and lit his hundredth cigarette. ‘Not directly. They prefer killing. But little goes on in Russia without their knowledge. Sometimes they can’t or won’t act; sometimes they do, and with great efficiency. I plan to offer a stick and a carrot, as they say.’

  Stevie didn’t like the sound of his carrot and stick. ‘What do you mean exactly?’

  ‘Very carefully, I will put the word out about the list and that I am prepared to make it public to the world. Someone will get nervous and turn.’

  ‘If you alarm them, Anya could disappear forever.’ Stevie said it softly, half hoping Irina wouldn’t hear her.

  ‘All I can try to do is put pressure where I suspect it might have an effect.’ Kozkov looked at Irina, then Vadim. ‘If giving up my position won’t get a result, I am going to do everything in my power—scrupulous or not—to get Anya back. Even if it means blackmail.’

  ‘I think the threats could backfire,’ Stevie persisted, feeling increasingly nervous about Kozkov’s reasoning and his state of mind. ‘There are men in the FSB whom even the mafia treat with respect—they haven’t forgotten a thing they learned in the KGB. It could be very dangerous for you.’

  Kozkov shook his head slowly. ‘Vadim is right. I should have done more to protect my family. Anya is still somewhere out there and I have to find her.’ He reached over and took Irina’s small hand in his, his eyes on Stevie. ‘I think it’s better I handle this alone from now on. I know the Kremlin, I know its people. Thank you both for trying to help us. Stevie, your efforts are appreciated, but they are no longer enough. It’s time you and Constantine went home.’

  Stevie flushed to her roots, embarrassed. She nodded to Kozkov and took a long sip of her whisky, hoping it would compose her voice. ‘I understand and I apologise. I’m sorry we couldn’t do more—that I couldn’t do more. I really am.’