The Troika Dolls - Miranda Darling [114]
The girl stopped struggling and started to listen.
‘I can also tell you that the man he is talking to is Arik Joel, the biggest movie producer in the world. I’m going to ask you some questions and if you answer them truthfully, I will introduce you to him and tell him he should put you in a movie.’
The girl’s eyes widened. Stevie’s instincts had been correct. This was not a girl who would scare easily—she had been threatened too many times in her young life for that—but she would respond to incentive.
Stevie played her final card. ‘Wouldn’t you like to go to Hollywood?’
The girl crumbled completely and Stevie pulled her into the butler’s pantry, away from curious eyes.
‘Who are the men you came with?’
‘We only know they are called Sascha and Yuri.’ The fawn’s eyes flickered nervously. ‘We don’t know their last names but they are very rich.’
Never mind, thought Stevie, she could get their names from Paul at the Palace.
‘So, how did you get to be here with them? Where did you meet them?’ she fired at the foul-mouthed fawn.
‘We are a gift from Yudorov.’
‘A gift?’ Stevie asked, unsure she had heard correctly.
The girl shrugged and lit a cigarette. ‘Some men talked to us in Moscow at a club and then said did we want to meet rich men and so we said yes and then they took us on a private plane and we arrived in this place. They took us to a big hotel and told Sascha and Yuri that we were a gift from Yudorov.’
‘You don’t even know where you are, do you?’
The girl blew a thick stream of smoke at the ceiling. ‘Does it matter?’
‘You’re in Switzerland,’ Stevie told her. ‘Just for the record. Now, there are three men staying in the suites on the eighth floor. Was the third man—Sergei Lazarev—a friend of the other two?’
The girl scowled—suspicion was at war with Stevie’s promise of stardom. Then her forehead cleared: the fantasy had prevailed. There was nothing more powerful than The Dream.
‘They didn’t speak,’ she said quietly. ‘Only one time I heard Yuri. Your man left and Yuri spat on the floor. I don’t think they were friends.’
Stevie shook her head. ‘Does that happen often—men come up to you and invite you to a party and you just go?’
The fawn made a face, rolled her eyes. ‘Men always invite us, promise things, offer money or a trip overseas to work as a model. It is the way it is at this club.’
It was all sounding familiar . . .
‘Wait a minute,’ Stevie put a hand on the girl’s arm, ‘Which club were you in, when the men came?’
‘Zima.’
The same club Anya and Petra had gone to the night before Anya disappeared. She was sure she still had . . . there it was. Stevie pulled the photo she had stolen from the nightclub wall from her back pocket. Pretty girls always remembered the faces of other pretty girls. She unfolded it and held it up for the fawn to see.
‘Recognise her?’
The girl barely glanced at it. ‘No.’
Stevie stepped in closer, her hand gripping the girl’s arm tightly. ‘Don’t mess with me, devochka. I am not in the mood. Look at her face. She is fifteen years old.’
Something in Stevie’s eyes must have changed the fawn’s mind. She shrugged. ‘She won the competition one week. I don’t even know her name. But I was at the club that night.’
Stevie relaxed her grip. ‘Who owns the club?’
The girl was getting impatient with Stevie’s questions. ‘Look, lady, I don’t know why you want to know all this. There’s nothing to tell. It’s simple. We want to find rich boyfriends and you have to go to parties like this to find them. The men buy us expensive presents, we dance for them, sometimes we sleep with them—it’s better than stripping in the clubs. Does it matter where we are, or who the men are? They’re all the same. They want sex and we want money.’
The girl eyed Stevie defiantly. She would have been all of eighteen.
‘And the other girls?’ pressed Stevie. ‘Do they feel the same way?’
‘We look out for each other a bit: word gets around who’s bad news, who the traffickers are . . .’ The girl exhaled a