The Troika Dolls - Miranda Darling [28]
‘So my father has decided to do nothing—to sit and wait for them to come to us,’ Vadim cut in. Kozkov tried to put his hand on Vadim’s arm but he pulled away violently. ‘You sacrificed me, and now Anya!’
‘Vadim, you are angry at the wrong person. If you have to be angry, be angry at a system, a government, so corrupted that this can be allowed to happen. If I had done anything, the slightest untoward thing, my enemies would have crucified me.’
‘It’s alright for you to have your principles,’ Vadim’s voice shook with fury. ‘You work from your nice safe office. You’re too important to kill. But we pay the price. And now you won’t lean on your connections to find her.’
‘I don’t know who has taken her, Vadim.’ Kozkov closed his eyes. ‘My connections could be involved for all we know.’
‘Don’t tell me there is anything that cannot be bought in Russia—’ Vadim rose in frustration ‘—except of course you,’ he spat over his shoulder as he left the kitchen.
His father leaned forward on his elbows and bowed his head over the kitchen table, a crumpled man. Henning went to him and laid a hand on his friend’s shoulder.
‘This is why I thought of you, Stevie,’ Henning said. ‘You’re presence is unlikely to provoke anyone who may be watching the Kozkovs.
You could be a family friend.’
‘I could certainly put you in touch with the specialists at Hazard.
They could send a team—’ ‘We can’t risk the provocation,’ Henning interrupted. ‘We need a woman—delicate and unnoticeable and competent. We need you.’
A crashing sound came from along the corridor and Henning went out to look for Vadim. Irina began to wash the few dishes.
‘Irina, tell me about Anya. What is she like?’ Stevie was most careful to use the present tense. Meanwhile her mind was spinning in tumult.
‘She is a very beautiful girl. She plays violin at the conservatorium most afternoons. She’s very bright, a good girl, good at school. Vadim and Anya are so close. They are almost like twins. That’s why he’s so angry.’
Stevie wasn’t so sure that was the whole story. ‘What did Vadim mean when he said he’d been sacrificed, and now Anya?’
Irina glanced towards her husband but he was gone. With that, she withdrew back into herself.
During a Moscow winter, it is an adventure just to leave the house. Tonight, the thermometer, fixed to the wall in the vodka gap between the kitchen windows, read –30 degrees. At these temperatures, the air actually hurts. It’s difficult to breathe. Exposed skin burns. But you don’t get shivery cold, like on a chilly day; the cold feels hard, it stings, like bees and breaking plates.
It was into this night that Stevie insisted on walking home from the Kozkovs’, which meant that Henning would have to accompany her. It was not possible for a woman to stroll alone on the streets at night. Stevie wanted to get Henning by himself, and for longer than the short car ride to the hotel. She also needed air after the suffocating dinner.
Stevie and Henning made their way through the layer-cake of steel doors. When they opened the final door and stepped into the white street, they both gasped quietly with the shock of the cold.
The boulevard was bright, the waist-high snow reflecting the greenish light of the street lamps. Not a soul was out walking and the vast expanse was deserted. It made Stevie think of Dante, the medieval Italian poet who had portrayed the circles of hell, and she remembered that the deepest, darkest circle of the inferno—where the devil himself lives—is not a fiery furnace but a frozen lake. In the depths of the ninth circle, the villains are coated in ice, trapped ‘like straw in glass’. Everything is still and silent. There, Dante’s pilgrim meets the treacherous— those