The Troika Dolls - Miranda Darling [64]
Pull yourself together, Stevie, for goodness sake. You have to be stronger than this.
Considering the adventures of the day, Stevie thought a medicinal afternoon cocktail would not be inappropriate. Not wanting to be alone, she decided on the Metropole bar.
She floated in, having changed into an emerald-green silk kimono coat covered in birds of paradise, small gold birdcages hanging from her earlobes, and ordered a Brandy Crusta. It was a good drink for dealing with death: brandy, cream and brown sugar on the rim of the glass. Her grandmother’s friends served them at wakes.
A small television was on behind the bar. Stevie fixed on it, hoping to distract herself from the vivid blood balloon in her thoughts. It was broadcasting a story about Sokolniki Park. The park at this time of year was virtually abandoned, the fun fair, under tarpaulin drapes, sad as only once-happy places can be.
During the Cold War it had been a famous meeting place for spies and their sources. People thought that had all ended with the thaw, but the activity, if anything, had intensified. Only a few months ago, the British secret service had been discovered planting fake rocks under park benches in Sokolniki. These plastic rocks contained transmitters that could either scramble and send information in lightning bursts (therefore reducing the chances of interception) or record nearby conversations. It had been a major gaffe, a source of much amusement among Muscovites. Children had hunted the park for the plastic rocks and jokes grew up in bars: ‘Ssh, the rocks might hear you’ was particularly funny after a few drinks.
Stevie placed a cigarette carefully between her damaged lips and reached for the matches, but her fingers were still shaking and she put the box down. Instead, she concentrated on a breathing technique she’d learned on one of her training courses. It was designed to calm the central nervous system.
A news programme was starting. Stevie held her breath, but there was nothing at all about the shooting. Perhaps it was too soon, but news crews were usually pretty good at sniffing out crimes as visually arresting as the one she had witnessed. There was nothing about Anya Kozkov on the news, not about a disappearance—nor a body, Stevie forced herself to add.
Perhaps she had been paranoid to think the 4WD was after her, but at least her instincts were still working: the car had been trouble. What would have happened if she had been shot as well? Gunned down on the street like the two men? Would militzia have rifled her pockets and left the body lying in a red lake? And how would David Rice have reacted when told Stevie Duveen had been shot dead on a Moscow street?
It was so easy to fall through the cracks of life. Or be pushed.
Would news of her death have made it to Switzerland, or would she just have disappeared into the Moscow city morgue, to lie in a steel tomb unclaimed?
What mattered in the end, Stevie supposed, was that someone remembered that you had existed. A memory was everyone’s legacy, the small consolation of the dying. The ancient Romans had understood how important remembrance was. It was they who passed damnatio memoriae, the extreme form of dishonour, which ‘removed from remembrance’ the traitor who had shamed the Roman State. Every trace of the condemned man’s life was erased, cancelled, wiped out, as if he had never existed.
We all do it, erase our ex-lover’s phone number, tear up photos, forbid the mention of his name.
Stevie was trying very hard to bury Joss Carey in the deepest oubliette she could find, hoping he would quietly starve . . .
The Soviets, like the Romans, had eliminated people from public memory. It was the ultimate death. Stalin had had all his opponents during the Great Purge removed from history books, and had them doctored out of photographs. Children were instructed to scratch out the faces of ‘traitors’ in their school textbooks as a gesture of patriotism and loyalty.
Now, as then, history was under strict Kremlin control. To record another