The Troika Dolls

by Miranda Darling

  Right on time, she swept through the grand door of the opera house and took her seat, high up and to the left of the stage.

  Kirril Marijinski was magnetic. He had wild grey hair that swept up and down like the surf with his more violent movements, and the music was splendid. It was, however, Kirril’s hands that mesmerised Ste-vie. They were pale and long-fingered, the most delicate hands she had ever seen on a man—perhaps on anyone. As he directed the orchestra, they fluttered like two white doves against the black of his tailcoat. They were a thing of heartbreaking beauty and yet there was something ever so slightly wrong about them. She couldn’t place it . . .

  Stevie pulled out her mini-binoculars and watched Kirril’s face: handsome, intelligent, deeply furrowed. What had happened between him and Kozkov to get him banished from their lives?

  She was waiting for him by the artists’ entrance at the end of the performance. He came striding out, accompanied by his first violinist and one of the clarinet players.

  ‘Izvinite pozhaluista—vi Kirril Marijinski?

  ’ He turned abruptly at the Russian words, but stopped walking when he caught sight of the delicate face, the red lips—a young woman.

  ‘Da. Who are you?’

  ‘My name is Stevie Duveen. I am a friend of the Kozkovs.’

  Kirril’s face froze. He waved the two musicians brusquely away and took a step towards Stevie.

  ‘So then, why are you speaking to me?’

  ‘Can we go somewhere warm, have a drink? I need to tell you something very important.’

  Kirril stared hard into Stevie’s face for a moment then shrugged.

  She led him quickly to the bar at the Kronenhalle—not far, just across the Bellevue Platz—before he could change his mind. The bar was full, warm, smoky, comfortable. Stevie realised she didn’t really know how to begin.

  ‘Would you like a drink?’

  ‘Kir Royale.’

  ‘I think I’ll join you.’ Stevie found crème de cassis a little sweet— she preferred her champagne plain—but choosing the same drink, like mimicking body language, helped people relax.

  ‘It’s about your goddaughter, Anya.’

  Kirril’s eyes grew wary. He untied his bowtie and opened the top button on his shirt. Stevie wondered why he had left his gloves on. Perhaps the hands were too precious to be unsheathed in social situations. You never knew with artists . . .

  ‘Vadim told me you two keep in touch. Mr Marijinsky, there is no easy way to tell you: Anya’s been kidnapped.’

  Kirril’s face lost all colour. Stevie thought he might be sick. But he recovered himself and took a sip of his drink. Stevie continued, her eyes on his face. ‘She was taken while shopping with her friend at GUM. I work for a risk management company that specialises in this area. I was supposed to help get Anya back.’

  Stevie took a gulp of her kir and swallowed. ‘The men holding her have demanded that Valery reverse his stance on the banks. I don’t know if you are aware that he has been—’ ‘I know what he has been doing!’ Kirril was suddenly furious.

  ‘I follow everything from here! And now the mad fool won’t give in!

  I cannot believe he would sacrifice his daughter’s life to his damn principles!’

  Stevie remembered Vadim saying the same thing at the dacha.

  ‘Valery is willing to do anything to get her back. The kidnappers said they are going to hold Anya until they are satisfied. Valery is desperate— I’m afraid he is about to do something very dangerous.’

  ‘You are advising him?’ Kirril’s magnificent head turned to her.

  Stevie blushed. ‘He sent me home because I couldn’t help. Before I left, I promised Vadim I would talk to you. Please. Anything might help.’

  ‘You want to know what happened between us.’ Kirril drained his glass. Stevie quickly ordered him another, wanting to keep him talking.

  ‘Please,’ she whispered.

  After a moment’s hesitation, Kirril began. ‘I used to live in Moscow. I conducted an orchestra there. One day two men came to see me in my dressing-room after a concert. They told me the man they worked for had enjoyed the concert very much and wanted to become my patron. In exchange for a large cash patronage, I would resign and leave with my best musicians. We would become his private minstrels. I at first laughed. The idea was quite mad. But the men were not joking. I then told them that I was happy where I was and that it was my belief that music was there to be shared with the public, and that none of my musicians would consent to having their talent locked away and kept for a handful of over-moneyed, overfed vulgarians. I was angry. The men left. I thought little more of it.’

  Two fresh kir arrived. Kirril sipped again, his face still ashen. ‘One night after a concert, I was late leaving and I was alone in my dressing-room. The same two men reappeared, this time with their boss. He repeated his offer to me and again I completely refused. One of the men grabbed me and pinned my arm to the table. The other man—’ Kirril took off his gloves and laid his left hand on the table. His ring finger and pinkie had been severed at the knuckle.

  ‘Bolt cutters.’

  Stevie choked back her gasp. The sight of those extraordinarily beautiful and expressive hands so mutilated made her feel sick.

  ‘The man was a mafiya boss,’ Kirril’s voice was low and rough. ‘I didn’t know it at the time. After that, I forgot my principles and I left Russia forever, taking my music and my musicians with me.’

  They sat in silence for a long time, Stevie forcing herself to look at Kirril’s fingers, Kirril leaving them lying bare on the table for her to see. Finally she asked, ‘Was Valery angry that you left?’

  Kirril shook his head. ‘Another man approached me, here in Zurich, a Siberian; his name doesn’t matter. He heard the story and he offered me protection. I didn’t even ask what he might want in return or what kind of man he was. I didn’t care. I accepted. I accepted because I was afraid.’

  Kirril took his fingers off the table and pulled on his gloves. ‘Valery was so angry. He called my patron a criminal of the worst kind, said I was a coward. He thought I should have stayed, made my story public, fought for my freedom. But the price was too high for me. For Valery, no price is too high. This is what we fought about.’

  ‘Vadim . . .’ The name escaped Stevie’s lips, her mind turning to the memory of his scarred young torso.

  ‘Vadim, too. That boy has suffered.’

  Stevie looked around. No one seemed out of place—two men arrived in deep-green Lodens, others milling at the bar dressed in the brown tweeds and corduroys of winter; the women in cashmere jumpers, jewels, painted lips—but you could never be sure if someone was listening.

  ‘If you’re warm enough,’ Stevie suggested, ‘shall we walk a little?’

  Outside, a low fog had settled along the shores of the lake. The avenues of trees were crisscrossed with tiny lights hung in the shapes of stars and hearts; it felt like fairyland off-kilter. Stevie thought of the mangled hand nestling in Kirril Marijinsky’s overcoat pocket and breathed a lungful of the freezing black air.

  She glanced over her shoulder before she spoke, but the shore was deserted. ‘Valery thinks he can get Anya back with blackmail.’

  Their steps were now clanging in unison on the frozen concrete.

  Stevie was trying to be careful not to say too much. What did she know of Kirril? Had she revealed too much already?

  ‘Ah,’ Kirril nodded and exhaled a puff of smoke. ‘The insurance policy. You’re talking about Valery’s list.’

  ‘List?’ Stevie asked cautiously.

  ‘He began compiling it years ago, when we were still as close as brothers, cataloguing the “gifts” bestowed on politicians assessing bank-sector reform, following the money that flowed in and out of the special slush fund they had set up especially. That list could do untold damage to many powerful people.’

  Kirril stopped walking. Any trace of vulnerability from the bar had vanished. His eyes were hard now. ‘B
ut you knew that already, Miss Duveen. What do you want from me? Why did you come here?’

  ‘I thought maybe . . .’ Stevie was no longer sure of anything, hovering in the dark grey mist, alone with Kirril on the edge of the frozen lake. She suddenly wished there were people about. ‘I’m just trying to help Anya,’ she said finally.

  ‘You are involving yourself in something that does not concern you and you are putting everyone in great danger.’

  Stevie put a hand on Kirril’s arm. ‘Anya is already in great danger.

  You are her godfather—don’t you want to help her?’

  ‘Perhaps I would have—before everything happened.’ Kirril pulled his arm away. ‘But Anya belongs to another world now. There is nothing I can do.’

  Stevie flushed with anger, her body hot and trembling at Kirril Marijinsky’s indifference. Any shred of fear fled. She wanted to slap him, but she kept her voice steady, her hands safely in her pockets.

  ‘You could go to your patron. He must have connections, beg him to help you.’

  Kirril snorted. ‘And risk everything? My life is comfortable. I want to keep it that way.’

  Stevie’s mind raced for a way to hold this man, this musical magician with doves for hands and a vanished heart.

  ‘Do the siloviki mean anything to you?’ Stevie saw the fear creep into Kirril’s eyes. ‘Do you know that half the names on Valery’s list belong to the siloviki? I’m going to guess the name of your patron is on it. When Valery makes that list public, my guess is the siloviki will turn on him, too. No one will be able to protect you. You should make your choice now and leave your world of fear and coercion. Don’t you want to be free again? Or was Valery right about you?’

  Kirril turned his back on Stevie and began to walk away. He called out without turning around, already half-invisible in the fog, ‘Go home, Stevie Duveen.’

  ‘I am home, Mr Marijinsky,’ she called back.

  ‘Then go to hell.’

  Decidedly unsuccessful, possibly downright stupid was Stevie’s assessment of her meeting with Kirril. There had been little to gain from the conversation. She could see now why he and Valery had fought.

  There had been traces of what the old Kirril must have been like, but the men who had taken his fingers had taken much more than sinews and bone. They had shattered him. He had become an indifferent colluder with the forces of evil.

  Was that too harsh?

  Stevie thought of Anya and decided it was not. She still had a niggling worry that she had said too much—but it was Kirril who had brought up the list.

  The train for Chur pulled into the Hauptbahnhof. Stevie dismissed her worries, swung her soft duffle bag over her shoulder and leapt aboard.

  By eleven, she was settled in a window seat on the Glacier Express, en route to St Moritz. The little red train chugged its ways through the valleys and peaks. When the sun shone, it was one of the most scenic journeys in the world, but today everything was half obscured by low cloud and dulled by a grey light.

  The pretty alpine villages lay hidden, only their church steeples poking through the fog. The bare rock of the mountains loomed black and forbidding where it was too steep for snow to cling. Great icicles menaced the track like Damoclean swords.

  Before the Alps had become a holidaymaker’s paradise, they had been the terror of travellers. Spurred by stories of wild mountain men and plague-ridden villages, travellers hurried through as fast as they could, hands on their purses and hearts in their mouths. On a day like today, it was easy to imagine what it had been like then. There were still many villages cut so deeply into steep valleys that the sun only ever reached them for a few days in mid-summer. These villages wouldn’t have noticed that it had been months since the sun had shone anywhere in Europe.

  Stevie flicked through the pages of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. There was an article about some scientists in Poland who were heralding the coming of a new mini ice age. Many were publicly scoffing at their findings, saying they had it the wrong way around—that the planet was heating up—but looking out onto the glaciers, Stevie thought that the Europe she knew seemed only to be getting colder.

  Another article, this time a scandal involving fake formula that had been imported from China and fed to babies in North Western Russia. Many had died as a result of malnutrition. The horror.

  Stevie turned the page. It was too much to bear thinking about.

  Another article, this time it was about the wildlife that was flourishing in the Dead Zone, after Chernobyl. The fact that no humans could live there due to the residual radiation meant the area had turned into a haven for all kinds of animals.

  Stevie’s mind turned to The Man from Chernobyl. The accident had obviously changed Dragoman’s world. He had lost everything. In a way, she supposed, it must have shaped him or he wouldn’t have that nickname. She guessed April 1986 had probably shaped the lives of everyone who had lived through it.

  The rocking motion of the train set her thoughts adrift as she stared at the blank white window. In a way, everyone became what they chose to be defined by: their manhood, an act of shame, of heroism, kindness, a humiliation, their mother’s country, the unfairness in their lives, an illness, their faith, an accident. In every person’s past and present and future, so many patchwork pieces were represented. As people chose to keep some things and to discard others, they set in motion a sorting process that gradually created their identities.

  Tragedy and fortune weren’t distributed evenly through the world, Stevie thought; so few things were, not even sunlight. But in this way, while it wasn’t possible to change the past, it was possible to change the way it shaped us. Sometimes it was other people who branded us for easy consumption. The subtle patchwork disappeared, and we became one single, adjectival being: ‘poor Fatima’, ‘a strong man’, ‘a dark past’, ‘a good woman’. Perhaps sometimes it could seem like a comfort to have the burden of self-fashioning taken from our shoulders. The crude equation had then an equally crude answer that would satisfy a blunted mind: you are unhappy because—

  But Stevie thought about how nothing was ever that simple, no matter how much we wanted it to be. The human mind had the power to create Heaven and Hell and all things in between. It was a gift and a burden, bestowed by God, the universe, by an accident of biology, to every person on the planet to use as they could.

  Fortunately the conductor arrived to remind her that lunch was being served in the restaurant car and Stevie was able to turn her thoughts to the menu.

  Over a Bündnerteller with pickles and a small carafe of red wine, Stevie read Josie’s notes on Alexander Nikolaievitch Yudorov and caught up on the Hammer-Belle situation.

  11

  The tea must have been drugged—just like the first time, at GUM.

  Anya woke in degrees, slipping and sliding reluctantly towards consciousness. She knew without opening her eyes that she was lying across the backseat of a car.

  She was getting pretty good at knowing where she was without even opening her eyes. Although, since Gregori and Tamara had handed her on to these guys, she hadn’t been blindfolded. They had taken it off to photograph her and the flash had been so bright after all the days in the dark that she saw red suns in her eyelids for hours afterwards.

  Anya couldn’t decide if it was a good or a bad thing that she was no longer blindfolded. She liked being able to open her eyes, but was it ominous that the men didn’t mind if she saw their faces?

  Not that being able to see around her had told her much. She had a picaresque impression of dark, deserted streets, a man with a fat, square face, the car stopping, starting, doors slamming—had she been locked into the boot at some point? And voices outside the car speaking in Ukranian?

  She couldn’t trust her muddled senses. All she could think about was hearing her father’s voice on the phone, the concern in it, imagine his strained face. All the feelings and tears she had frozen deep in her heart for the last few days had rushed up to the surface and exp
loded.

  She wept. The pictures in her head broke her heart over and over again.

  All she wanted was to see her family again. Nothing else mattered— not glamour, not fame, not even music. Only love could fight terror and cold and death. It was as simple as that, and it had taken this nightmare for her to understand. Worst of all, her hope—so carefully nurtured and sustained so far—was ebbing away like water down a plughole.

  Anya had no idea where Gregori and Tamara were, nor who these new people were, or where they were taking her. But she had clung to the thought that whoever was holding her prisoner wanted money from her father. It followed that once the ransom call had been made, her father would give them the money and it would all be over. But now it seemed that the nightmare was only just beginning.

  The thing that frightened her most—if it were really possible to pick one single thing—was the growing certainty that she was no longer in Russia. She had been taken out of the country and she despaired that she would ever be found.

  Happily, Yudorov’s chalet was a stone’s throw from the Suvretta House Hotel and a room had been booked for Stevie there. Although the Suvretta was enormous—and rather fabulous in its own right—it was five minutes’ drive from the centre of town and less popular with the Euro flash/cash/trash set. They all preferred the more famous Palace Hotel in the centre of town, with its luxury boutiques and full-voltage visibility. While the guests at the Suvretta still came for the skiing, at the Palace, hair stylists, beauticians and shop assistants could hardly keep up with the demands of guests who were only interested in the après ski—preferably without the ‘ski’.

  Yudorov had insisted that there was no room for any but his own security staff—and twenty guests—in the chalet itself. This was probably wise, Stevie thought. Yudorov’s own people would be highly professional and carefully vetted. There could be no guaranteeing his guests had been as careful. Allowing them to have their own armed guards in the chalet would have been a serious security risk. Stevie would have made the same recommendation if she had been Yudorov’s risk assessor.