The Troika Dolls - Miranda Darling [67]
Henning stopped and looked somewhat sceptically at his companion. Stevie was wearing a huge fox fur aviator’s hat and an ankle-length double-breasted navy coat with brass buttons. ‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘we’ll take a Moscow taxi.’
Moscow had so few proper taxis that the easiest way to get around was to hail any car on the street, hop in, name your destination and agree on a fee. This system worked pretty well. The fees were generally well established; the driver would take you as close as was convenient to your destination.
Henning stepped into the icy slush and stuck his arm out. A small black car swayed over from the other side of the road and stopped at the curb. Stevie jumped into the back, Henning in the front.
‘Dobri vyecher!’
Off they went, into the Moscow night. The driver was young, his face doughy, and the car was fogged with cigarette smoke. Stevie could smell beer and worse. Yes, he knew the bar—no problem—and turned up the volume on the stereo. Wild Russian techno pounded through the speakers. Satisfied, the driver accelerated and they scudded off through the streets.
At a set of lights, a Hummer idled beside them, its rear bumper crusted with filthy snow. Stevie tried to see the passengers but it was impossible through the black glass.
Suddenly, there were three sharp metallic taps at the driver’s window, and the tip of a submachine gun. A face leaned in. Militzia. The driver rolled the window down and inch an a half.
‘Papers!’
‘A minute.’ The driver pulled out his papers and a wad of roubles.
Small denominations. He slid these carefully through the crack in the window. The roubles vanished into the policeman’s padded jacket. He slid the documents back through the opening.
‘Spasiba,’ said the driver and rolled the window back up, quick as a fish.
‘If they smell the beer, they want three times as much,’ the driver complained to Henning as the lights changed. ‘It can get very expensive.’
The cheap tyres spun on the ice then carried them forward with a lurch.
_________
The Boar was dark and fetid: a cavernous room with long trestle tables, a bar down the length of the right side, and a small dance floor at the back. It felt like an ugly beer hall. Stevie and Henning headed for the bar and ordered two beers. The barman served them in tankards bigger than Stevie’s head.
Henning gallantly helped Stevie up onto the high stool and handed her a tankard. He smiled at her. ‘I think that just about completes the picture.’
The place wasn’t very busy yet. Small clusters of three and four, couples, a few women dancing joylessly on their own near the speakers at the back of the room. Many of the customers and all of the dancing women were black, unusual for Russia.
Stevie took a sip of her beer. ‘I asked around; some friends know this place quite well.’
‘The Italians?’ Henning raised an eyebrow.
‘Brazilians. You know foreigners, they often see more than people who are from the city. Anyway, the Brazilians said that The Boar is a favourite with slimy middle-aged ex-patriots, lots of Armenians and Cypriots and Nigerians. The bar started as a “prostitute-free zone”, they were banned from operating here. But then the owner’s “roof”—the guy he pays protection to—insisted he allow them in. The roof gets a cut from the pimps too, so it’s very profitable for him. But the compromise was that the girls were not to approach the clients.’
‘Hence the dancing.’ Henning nodded towards the girls by the speakers.
‘I’m guessing, yes.’
The room darkened a little more. A huge picture of wolves running, slavering, through snow was projected above the trestle tables, covering the whole wall. The fangs of the first wolf were the size of Stevie’s forearm.
‘Most of the girls here are Senegalese,’ Stevie murmured over her tankard of beer. ‘Trafficked into prostitution.’
When Marcus the Brazilian had told Stevie this over the phone, it had been just another grim statistic of Moscow life. But now, saying those words aloud to Henning, here in the bar surrounded by the girls, seeing their faces, the statistic