The Troika Dolls (14 page)

‘Maybe she just ran away? You know she always wanted to model . . .’ Petra could see she was getting Vadim’s attention and continued eagerly along this track. ‘Maybe she was trying to sign up with an agency in New York. She always wanted to go there. She would have done anything to be a model.’

Stevie picked up the jealousy in Petra’s reasoning and pounced.

‘Petra, did anyone ever approach Anya about modelling?’

Petra began to pick at the blanket on her bed, ripping out the cotton threads one by one. Finally she spoke.

‘Yeah. At Zima’s model comp. They picked both of us, you know.’

‘Yes. You are very beautiful, Petra. You would make a very good model.’ Stevie laid her words carefully on the girl. She brightened under her bandage.

‘Yeah. After this nose job I’m going to go for it. I’m getting a contract, you know.’

‘Did Anya get a contract?’

‘Umm. Well, she was going to and . . . yeah. I mean, I don’t know.’

It was unlikely this sort of information would have slipped Petra’s mind. Stevie watched her face, the picking fingers, said nothing.

Petra didn’t like silence. She found it uncomfortable when no one was talking. And she wanted to show off to Vadim.

‘She was going to be in the finals of the modelling competition,’ she said.

‘Go on, Petra. You’re being very helpful.’ Stevie smiled at her with a warmth she did not feel. Petra knew something and she wasn’t telling them.

‘Anyway, it doesn’t mean that much.’

Stevie kept her eyes steady on Petra’s face. ‘Were you also going to be in the competition?’

‘They asked but I said no. I wanted to get my nose job first.’

Petra was lying. It wasn’t hard to spot. The organisers had obviously asked Anya and not Petra to model for them and she was understandably jealous.

‘Vadim, have you got—?’ Vadim handed Stevie Anya’s chain. Stevie let the evil eye spin and sway in the air, the blue glass bright in the dim hospital light.

‘They called it
nazaar-a shaitaan
in Persia—the eye of Satan, who is the great tempter. Anya had it on her chain.’ Stevie paused slightly, watching for Petra’s reaction. ‘In tradition, the evil eye is cast by envious thoughts that bring the envied person withering and harm. People wear a blue eye because it is supposed to bounce the thoughts back to the person who is thinking them.’

‘So? It’s a stupid club thing. I don’t know why she wore it.’

Stevie kept her voice low and steady. ‘I think she wore it because she knew you were jealous.’

‘
Crap!
I don’t need to be jealous of her.’ Petra was angry now.

Good.

‘I’ve got my own contract lined up. I’m going to be shit-hot famous. Like Natalia Vodianova. That was the deal.’

That was the deal.

Stevie stood over Petra, leaned down. ‘Listen, Petra,’ her voice was a razor blade. ‘Anya’s been kidnapped by some very dangerous people. If you don’t tell me exactly what happened, the next time they call about the money I’m going to tell them you told us everything.’

No one had made verbal contact yet but Petra wasn’t to know that.

‘Do you know what people like that do to girls who snitch?’ Stevie leaned further in, her voice almost a whisper. ‘They call it “the joker”. They slice the corners of the girl’s mouth up on either side with razor blades, halfway through the cheek. For the rest of her life, the horrible scar makes the girl look like she’s smiling.’ Stevie saw the terror well up in Petra’s eyes and pressed on. ‘You wouldn’t want that to happen, would you?’

Petra shook her head, numb.

‘It would be so easy for me to let your name slip,’ Stevie whispered.

‘I’d take it back—I really would if I could!’ Petra’s voice was laced with panic.

‘It’s too late, Petra. You made your choice. Helping us now is the only thing you can do to start making this right.’

Petra was crying now, her purple slits spilling trickles of clear slime.

‘This guy started talking to me at the club,’ she whimpered. ‘Anya had gone on stage and I was watching her. He said, “Oh she’s not as pretty as you!” then he said he was sorry and that Anya was obviously my friend and he shouldn’t say things like that. I said not to worry, that Anya thought she was so pretty, but that I was going to get a nose job and show everyone.’

Stevie nodded. ‘Good girl, go on.’

‘The guy said that Anya would do very well in a secondary market— like Greece or Japan—but that I had the potential to be a “top girl” and work in Paris and New York. He said he would like to introduce Anya to his friend who had an agency in Japan. If I would set up the meeting, he would persuade her to go to Japan and I would get a contract with a top agency. They told me to take her to tea at GUM the day after next, to tell her they were friends of mine, good guys, who had modelling contracts for both of us. It was easy. Anya wanted to go to New York so badly.’

Petra raised her eyes to Vadim’s, but they were like chips of ice.

Petra quailed. ‘He promised to make me famous! Really famous!’

‘You didn’t think about what might happen to Anya?’ Vadim’s voice was hoarse with anger.

‘I didn’t care! Anya thought she was so beautiful. This guy said I would be on billboards in Times Square!’ Petra was not finding the understanding she craved from the two people in the room.

Stevie pulled the interrogation back on track. ‘Were these men Russian?’

Petra nodded. ‘One was quite short, dark hair, kind of a lumpy face. I think he said his name was Sascha. The other guy was tall. He never told us his name.’

‘You sold Anya because you wanted to be a supermodel,’ Vadim was trembling. Stevie watched closely in case he made a sudden lunge at the girl in the bed.

‘I didn’t know they were bad guys!’

Vadim just stared at her, struck dumb by Petra’s stupidity. Petra turned to Stevie, angry at her now, angry that Stevie had made Vadim hate her so.

‘We all want to get out! We have to do what we can to survive. You wouldn’t understand!’

‘Petra, you bought your dog diamonds.’ Vadim’s words were soft with hate. ‘How can you justify it that way? You cashed in my sister’s life to buy the one thing you couldn’t charge to your black Amex: fame!’

Minutes later Stevie and Vadim
were hurrying back across Red Square, the extreme cold making it difficult to breathe and walk and talk at the same time.

‘This place,’ Vadim spat, gesturing at the Kremlin walls, ‘it deforms people’s souls.’

It didn’t take a Moscow upbringing for that. Unfortunately, Stevie had met people all over the world who might have made the same trade as Petra.

‘So how do we find this Sascha, Stevie? What do we do now? I could kill that girl.’

‘Vadim, save your energy for your sister—’

Puff.

‘—you will need it when the kidnappers call. I’m afraid hunting for a “Sascha”—a nickname and probably not even real—and whose physical description matches almost every man in Zima—’

Huff.

‘—is not going to be a good use of our time. But—’
Puff puff.

‘—we do know this—’

Huff huff puff.

‘—do you think we could talk somewhere inside, Vadim?’

The snow had begun to fall heavily and it was difficult not to inhale the huge flakes with every breath.

They went through the revolving glass doors and into the blessed warmth of GUM. The place was gigantic, galleries filled with shoppers running under a vast glass dome. It was the sort of place where no one would be able to remember a face.

Stevie paused. She had the distinct feeling that they were being watched. She couldn’t spot a tail, but that didn’t mean anything. Good surveillance was very difficult to detect. A shiver crawled across her scalp and she hurried to catch up to Vadim.

The café was on the ground floor. Vadim said he had been there every day since Anya’s disappearance, asking the staff if they remembered her. It seemed no one did.

‘Either no one remembers her, or this Sascha paid them to forget.’

He suddenly sounded very tired. ‘We won’t get anywhere with our questions here.’

Stevie put her hand on the young man’s arm. ‘Well, it was the smart thing to do, Vadim. Sascha was probably trusted muscle hired to do the actual kidnapping. I doubt a key person would have risked being seen here. Shall we sit down?’

Stevie took the menu, her eyes hovering between coffee, and the strawberry
tsarina
, a drink made of strawberry ice-cream and champagne.

When the
tsarina
arrived, pale pink in a long flute, Stevie was glad she hadn’t chosen coffee. It was not necessary to be sensible in Moscow. She took a cautious sip.

‘I think the people who took Anya are professionals,’ she told Vadim. ‘They didn’t just want some girl, they wanted her specifically. They did extensive target surveillance from the sound of it, and certainly had been watching Anya for a while before Petra was approached. This is pretty standard kidnapper
modus operandi
.’

Stevie lit one of her black cigarettes and considered her next words. ‘It would have been simple to pass the girls invitations to the model night at Zima. What teenage girl could resist, especially Petra. From there, it was a pretty safe bet that Anya would come to the club— without her parents—and they were smart enough to figure out that Petra was the weak link—’

‘—to say the least!’

‘Right. But the point of Petra is, had these guys been after money, why not take her? She is impressionable and gullible and her father has a lot more money. No. They wanted Anya because of
who
she was. They want to get to your father.’

‘To take revenge?’

Stevie took another sip of the magical
tsarina
. ‘If they had just wanted to punish your father,’ Stevie looked into Vadim’s glacier eyes, ‘they would probably have shot Anya dead outside the house. They didn’t do that. They chose a much riskier plan.’

‘How is not killing someone riskier?’

‘Kidnapping someone involves all sorts of extras: you need to have a safe hideout where you can keep the victim hidden and stop them escaping, which means armed guards, food supplies and so on. You have to establish ways to communicate with each other, and with the family of the victim. It is a lot more dangerous than assassinating someone because there are lots more ways of getting caught.’

Vadim snorted. ‘This is Russia. No one gets caught if they can pay their way out. You remember when Klebnikov was shot?’

‘The Russian editor of
Forbes
, yes.’

‘The only two people the police arrested got let off in May. It’s not a great deterrent to murder, is it?’

‘Look, Vadim, the more things drag on, the more people begin to ask uncomfortable questions and the more room there is for things to go wrong. That means that the people who took Anya have every reason to make contact. I think as long as your father is useful to the kidnappers, Anya is safe.’

‘Safe?’

‘It’s relative. They won’t kill her.’

Vadim grew silent, taking this in. Stevie finished her drink and they stood to go. Outside, the snow was falling so heavily that the Kremlin walls had all but been obscured by cascading flakes. Stevie wondered what the birds did when the weather was like this. Probably migrated.

They trudged through the snow without talking. Suddenly, Vadim turned to her. ‘Is it true what you said to Petra, about the joker?’

‘I got it from a Batman film. I was hoping Petra hadn’t seen it. It was all I could think—’ A huge sneeze blew away the end of her sentence.

6

It was true, thought Anya,
that you heard more with your eyes closed. Anya’s hearing had always been good but now, after so long with a blindfold— how long had it been?—it felt as if her hearing had become almost superhuman.

She now knew, for example, that she was being held in a tiny bathroom in a large block of flats. The hollow sound of the paperboard walls, the muffled noise of living—radios, voices, clashing cooking pots, water pipes, children running—wafted all around her. It was a symphony of sounds that could only have been composed by layers of people living on top of each other.

She also knew that she was being held by two people, a man and a woman. His name was Gregori and hers was Tamara. They argued a lot, mostly about money.

Right now, although she couldn’t see out of the window, she knew it was snowing heavily. Tamara was complaining it would ruin her hair. Anya guessed by the strong perfume Tamara wore that she had long and elaborate hair. She knew she wore lots of rings by the sound her fingers made when she picked up a mug or a glass.

Sometimes Tamara would get bored and slide the bathroom door open and talk to her, mostly about celebrity gossip. Anya knew conversation with her captors was a good thing so she tried to forget how strange it was to be discussing Nicole Kidman’s latest hair style, or Sandy Belle’s newest handbag, with the woman who was holding her prisoner, blindfolded, her hands tied firmly to a drainpipe.

Tamara was jealous of everyone. She read endless gossip magazines and worshipped Sandy Belle. Anya thought that maybe seeing how much some people had made you feel dissatisfied with what you had. People became envious and hungry and mean.

She thought about Petra. Someone had told a story about Natalia Vodianova, Russia’s most famous supermodel, who had returned home to Nizhny Novgorod for a visit with her husband. She had gone out to a restaurant and a girl had tried to throw acid in her face. Petra had thought the story funny.

Had Petra known Anya was going to be kidnapped? Anya had run over it a thousand times but she found it too hard to believe. Petra was not evil; she was just weak. Maybe being weak made it easier to do evil things.

Anya shook her head. She didn’t want to think about her. She didn’t want to think about anything. She had cried till her blindfold was soggy so many times. She tried to distract herself by listening even harder to the conversation in the kitchen.

‘We shouldn’t even be arguing about this, Gregori.’ Tamara was in full flight. Anya could tell she was smoking as she shouted.