The Troika Dolls - Miranda Darling [167]
‘Well, if there’s anything I can do to help,’ Stevie gave a little shrug, ‘tell me.’
‘Masha is writing an article. Apparently my father sent her some papers before he died—I don’t know what they were. Masha is very excited. She won’t say anything more—only that my father asked her to memorise the papers and destroy them if he was killed. Masha wants the article published all over the world. Then the red walls of the Kremlin will tremble like an earthquake, she says. Perhaps you can help us get the article published in England.’
Stevie felt a wild surge of hope. Could the papers Masha was talking about be Kozkov’s list? She would say nothing about it. Masha was right. The less anyone knew, the better.
‘I think I can help with that,’ Stevie said slowly. She could call Rosie for starters, and David Rice knew everyone. He would help. In fact, she ought really to call him back.
She stepped outside the café and dialled his number. Secretly she admitted to herself that she wanted his praise for getting Anya back.
‘Rice.’
‘It’s Stevie.’
‘How and where the hell are you?’
‘Zurich. Anya’s with us. She’s safe.’
‘I heard the good tidings. Thank God,’ he huffed out. There was a brief pause, then he said, ‘Stevie, have you seen the news broadcast this morning?’
‘It’s not on the news is it?’ Stevie was dismayed. ‘I haven’t told anyone—I thought it would be safer for all the Kozkovs if they were just quietly forgotten. I’ll murder whoever blew their cover!’
There was another, longer pause. ‘No, you did a good job with that. I assumed as much. Discretion has always been your virtue in this job.’
The announcement for platform five drowned out most of what came next. Stevie managed to catch—
‘—damn fine.’
Did he mean her? She was too shy to ask him to repeat himself. Anyway, it was too late. Rice had rung off.
Stevie wandered about the station aimlessly. She didn’t feel like going back into the bar. Hadn’t Rice mentioned the news?
There was a screen above the escalators. The daily news was constantly on play, the ticker tape running a foot high beneath it. She stood and watched, all of a sudden feeling very tired.
Just as she was about to turn back to join the others, a bulletin stopped her in her tracks. The television was showing a human shape on a snowy footpath. The snow all around had been stained red. Stevie’s eyes strained to read the words on the ticker tape.
She couldn’t believe it. Not again.
Masha Ivanovna Osipova had apparently jumped from her fifth-floor window, committed suicide.
Stevie, her hand to her mouth, began to cry.
The television showed a close-up, the body, the blood, a brown bag of groceries spilling open. Stevie knew at once Masha had not jumped. No one committed suicide with a full bag of shopping. There was to have been a vegetable soup, some smoked fish, black bread— perhaps an almond cake—in her future, to be shared most likely with her thirteen-year-old son. The groceries were an undeniable testament that Masha had intended to keep on living. Her assassination was a statement of utter indifference to her intentions, a blunt denial of her right to consider her life her own. She had been tossed out her own window like orange peel.
Stevie imagined Masha’s flight through the morning air, the buckling of bones and the exploding of organs as her body hit, then the pooling blood on ice and the unravelling of carefully laid plans for the summer.
Moscow and Masha’s world seemed a million miles away from Zurich, but it was only a plane ride. What could be thought of a place that tolerated the murder of journalists—of anyone inconvenient? The annoying, the unwelcome, were disposed of like old Friday girls. Whoever had killed Masha hadn’t even bothered to make it look like a proper suicide. Because they knew no one would want to find the truth. To the siloviki, and those who lived in the vile shadow of their protection, Masha was better off