The Troika Dolls - Miranda Darling [107]
She felt rather proud that she had foiled the afternoon’s attack on Sandy, but she knew it had partially been luck. The IRA had said it after their Brighton bomb failed to kill Margaret Thatcher: ‘You have to be lucky all the time. We only have to be lucky once.’ Once was enough.
The host had changed into something more casual (a Superman T-shirt) and he was sitting with four other men on a divan in the main room. His polo team had lost the match and the men were toasting him—it is Russian custom to toast a failure as well as a win—with shots of vodka. Stevie moved a step closer to listen. She knew she was
safe; Russian men never paid attention to women they didn’t want to sleep with. They had moved on to anecdotes about Alexander ‘Sascha’ Nikolaievitch Yudorov.
‘Sascha is a man who has saved presidents, entire governments, and no one even knows it. Like that time in Africa, we were with Thabo Mbeki, and he is toasting Sascha, and he gets the toast the wrong way round and shouts “up bottoms”!’
They all roared with laughter.
‘I’ve known Sascha since he was a boy—I had just had my bar mitzvah, he was a few years older. He asked me to come and help him move some garbage bags—big black ones. He needed to bury them, he said. So we dug a large hole and dragged the bags over. They were so heavy. And then I’m sure I heard a groan from inside one of the bags. I was too scared to say anything. I just buried the bags.’
More laughter.
‘And then what about the sheikh in Dubai who presented you with that extraordinary watch—it would have been worth $100,000 at least!’
‘It was the most hideous thing I’d ever seen,’ Yudorov drawled, then lit a cigar.
‘Whatever happened to it? It went missing after dinner.’
Yudorov expelled a puff of smoke and smiled. ‘I gave it to the waiter on the way out.’
More laughter, more vodka, much smoking.
Yudorov’s wife was standing in a corner talking to the head caterer, her black hair falling like two perfect ink waterfalls on either side of her face. Had the face not been so terribly strained, it might have resembled Cleopatra’s.
Hers was the life that so many girls like Tara and Tatiana—the two having dinner at Chesa Veglia—wanted: married to a Russian oligarch of unbelievable wealth, private jets and homes around the world,
diamonds everywhere and an army of people to take care of her. Amalia Yudorov was living their dream and she didn’t look like she was enjoying one minute of it.
She had paid a heavy price, thought Stevie, and if only those girls could see this. Would they notice? Would they see how taut, how pale, her face was? It looked like a mask and she was barely thirty years old.
How tight and controlled her movements, how brittle her spirit? Or would they just see the huge diamonds on her fingers?
Josie had included a lot of detail about Amalia’s life in her notes to Stevie: Amalia never knew where in the world her husband was, let alone what he was doing there or who he was with. She never knew if she would have to pack up and leave the next day to meet him wherever he was, nor where she would be going. Her job was to make sure all of his many houses around the world ran like clockwork, were luxuriously furnished, fully staffed, and organised for his needs. The rest—well, there was no rest. Amalia had no life outside of Yudorov, and she had no life with him. She saw him for about six weeks a year in total and they slept in separate bedrooms.
Stevie watched Amalia greeting the guests as they came in: ‘Cristal, or Dom Perignon ’98? Crocodile sashimi or scrambled quail’s eggs with truffles?’ She was holding on to her tiny smile so hard it had become a grimace.
Stevie guessed Yudorov enjoyed playing mind games with his wife, keeping her close to the edge of a breakdown and completely constricted by his world. She looked like she hadn’t been held in years.
Stevie checked her phone again. The Kantonspolizei had promised to call with an update on their arrest that afternoon. Although Stevie knew the Swiss police to be utterly incorruptible, she hoped Lazarev had not somehow