The Troika Dolls - Miranda Darling [68]
Stevie searched their faces for a clue or a sign of their desperation, something, but they showed nothing. She watched a young girl in a canary yellow top—sleeveless and tight—dancing alone by the bar. What must life be for her? Trapped in a foreign country buried in snow, not speaking the language, forced to go to bed with all these strange men, the moustaches, the cheap suits, the wiry hair and cigars, the overpowering aftershave Stevie could smell from where she sat.
Perhaps one or two would be kind. She guessed most would not care a moment for the girl whose body was giving them so much pleasure. Until they came, they owned the canary girl. Then it would be back to selling radiator grills or gaskets or anti-freeze, endless bad hotels in small-town Russia.
The men’s buyers in turn wouldn’t spare a thought for all the lonely nights, the boredom or the ugliness of the gasket-seller’s life on the road. They would just complain about the existing order, place a new one and move on. So the cycle of indifference continued. It was easier to pretend other people didn’t exist.
There was a smash at the end of the bar. A man careened like a skittle into the bar stools, reeling from a punch in the face. His beer glass shattered on the concrete floor. Skittle man picked up the glass handle, now a jagged weapon, and hurled himself at the man who had hit him. Stevie saw blood. Strangely, neither man made a noise; there was only the sound of smashing furniture and the shouts of the barman.
The customers had turned their eyes to the fight but even this seemed not to touch them, to bore them even. The bouncer stepped in and smashed both men with his massive fist then threw them, bleeding, out the door. He wore knuckledusters.
‘The bouncer’s been to prison. Did you see the tattoos on his hands?’ Stevie murmured to Henning.
Henning glanced over his shoulder then gave her a slight frown.
‘And you can tell he got them in prison?’
Stevie nodded. ‘There’s a whole tattoo language among the Russian criminals. They cover their bodies in code. It’s their way of declaring things about themselves to other criminals, like their status. It’s a tradition that goes way back into the 1920s and 30s, into Stalin’s gulags.
That scarab with the cross on the middle finger means “convicted for robbery”, and the eagle on the thumb means “I am an important thief”.’
‘A secret language,’ Henning spoke slowly, ‘only with meanings quite unlike the harem flowers, I imagine.’
‘Quite.’ Stevie took a long sip from her enormous beer and carefully removed the foam moustache it left on her upper lip. ‘Some of the tattoos are pornographic, especially the ones forcefully applied to someone as punishment. But there are recurring symbols and themes, mostly animal: the head that’s half cat, half horned werewolf; or half man, half cat; a skull with eagle wings; a devil with wolf’s ears, and so on.’ She placed the heavy glass back on the bar. ‘The werewolf is at the heart of it all, being a creature that dwells between worlds: man and animal, night and day, living and dead.’
She dipped her finger in a puddle of beer on the bar and absentmindedly drew the outline of a snarling wolf’s head. ‘The raven, the bat, the cat and the wolf are also symbols of the werewolf.’
Henning was deep in thought. ‘Nocturnal beast, predator, devil and man, twilight dweller. I can see the symbolism. I suppose prison is limbo, no place and yet their place.’ He laughed unexpectedly. ‘And you know all this from your time in the Moscow underworld?’
Stevie straightened her shoulders. ‘I happen to own an encyclopaedia of criminal tattoos—both volumes,’ she added, a little defensively.
She scanned the crowd. It was getting warm in the bar. Several men had rolled their sleeves up, one or two had taken their shirts off, which Stevie considered a little excessive for the hours before midnight.
She spotted a skinny man with a wormwood face. He headed to the bar, then settled himself one man up from Stevie. His forearm had a large tattoo of half a wolf’s head and half