The Troika Dolls - Miranda Darling [25]
Stevie had replied in English too, not in Russian, because that would have suggested that she did not think Kozkov’s English was as good as her Russian. It was most certainly better than her efforts. While she spoke Russian fluently, her accent was poor, as it was in any of the languages she spoke. Come to think of it, even her English was accented, although with what she had no idea . . .
It was the probable result of having no native tongue. Asked to pick one, she would have chosen English, but she had learned that language from her Scottish father, Lockie. It had taken a few years of English and international schools to prune the burr down.
Stevie’s real mother-tongue was a mixture of Italian, French and Farsi—her grandmother Didi had spent her childhood in Persia and she passed to Stevie the childhood songs and games and stories that had stayed with her. For much of her childhood, Stevie thought it was all one language.
She spoke Italian with a French accent, Farsi with an Italian one, and French with a Persian twang. Her English was faintly Scottish. German and Swiss German came from growing up in Switzerland; Spanish she’d picked up along the way. She had studied Russian at Oxford. These three languages she spoke with an English accent. Nowhere in the world, as fluent as her sentences were, would Stevie have passed as a native.
‘An honour? Surely not.’ Valery Kozkov took tea from his automatic wife and was now sitting beside her, directly opposite Stevie.
‘It takes enormous courage to do what you are doing.’ Stevie wanted to get to the point fast, leave as little room for false premises as possible. ‘You have put yourself in a very dangerous position.’
‘In Russia today we live with illegal advantage,’ he began softly. ‘It is easier and more profitable to ignore the rules than to abide by them. Illegality is the norm, legality the unaffordable luxury for most people. It is this equation that I am trying to change. When breaking the law becomes too risky and expensive, people will naturally begin to live by it. Confidence will return. That is what I work for.’
A tall boy, about eighteen, blond and wax-pale, appeared in the doorway. He stared at Stevie. His big, blue eyes were not as dark as his mother’s but Stevie recognised the Kozkovs’ son from the birch-wood photo. He had changed much since then. Framed by the dark hallway he could almost have been a ghost. Kozkov turned his head, sensing him.
‘Vadim!’ The boy shifted his eyes to his father.
‘What fine speeches you make, father. What principles you have. If only you could be such a strong hero for your family.’ Vadim’s voice was quiet, hoarse, bitter. Not at all the voice Stevie had expected would come from a man so young. It surprised her.
‘Come and sit with us, Vadim,’ his father urged. But the boy vanished back into the hall. Irina got up and slowly went after him, the tap of her heels fading into the darkness.
The music had stopped and the loud ticking clock took over. Kozkov seemed lost in thoughts that were taking him far from the sitting room. Stevie shot a questioning look at Henning but he avoided her eyes.
The clock struck nine. Nobody seemed about to move and Stevie was crumbling with hunger. She began to assess what she had seen of the Kozkov family’s situation so far: There was a passivity in the house, a frozen silence, that was all wrong. The room held the world’s biggest elephant and no one wanted to mention it.
Usually, one of the biggest hurdles Stevie faced was getting a new client to accept that real danger existed—at least until something frightening happened to them. By signing a contract with Hazard Limited, they were getting themselves over that first difficult psychological barrier.
Kozkov’s position at the bank entitled him to armed protection twenty-four hours a day, paid for by the state. This would have included being chauffeured everywhere in an armour-plated limousine, and being shadowed by bodyguards. From her readings about him,