The Troika Dolls - Miranda Darling [81]
No sane man would envy his job, thought Stevie. ‘Your reputation as an incorruptible figure may have worked against you, Valery. Money, political favours, a villa in St Tropez might have swayed many men in positions of power.’
Kozkov nodded. ‘It has made me many enemies.’
‘Surely it has made you friends, too,’ she asked.
‘Outside Russia . . . perhaps.’ He shrugged again. ‘But perhaps no one outside Russia cares what happens here.’
‘You still have nuclear weapons and energy,’ Stevie replied. ‘The world will always care.’
‘Not for the fate of the Russian people, only for the geo-political entity.’
Vadim pushed his plate away and lit a cigarette, glowering at his father. Kozkov appeared not to notice. He continued talking. ‘Not even the Russian people care about the fate of the Russian people.’
‘Surely that’s not true,’ Stevie began to protest, thinking of Galina, of Masha.
‘Let me give you an example of what I mean.’ Kozkov turned his tired eyes to her. ‘When Anya went missing, I kept up appearances. I kept going in to the office, every morning at eight, same clothes, same hat, everything. All my colleagues at the bank knew something was terribly wrong but no one said a word to me. This wasn’t for discretion, or fear of saying the wrong thing, like it might be in your country. The long reign of violence and fear in the old Russia, and now the corruption of the new, has so brutalised their sensibilities that not one dared to speak a compassionate word.’
Vadim pushed his chair away from the table and went to help his mother wash the few plates in the sink.
‘It is exactly this—this paralysing mistrust—that I am trying to crush. Trust is the foundation of a proper market economy. Anything else is a shambles.’
Kozkov’s eyes glinted, his cheeks grew a little redder. Here was a man passionate about changing the social fabric of his country. There was no doubt: head of the Russian Central Bank was not just a position for him, it was a vocation. He didn’t know whom he could turn to. The system itself was suspect—corrupt elements, the wheels of politics were all hidden behind the metal doors and tinted windows of life in the new Russia.
‘Valery, what do you know about the siloviki?’ Stevie said the name warily, as if to say it out loud would somehow evoke them. ‘Do they really exist?’
There was a pause as Valery leaned back in his chair and stared at Stevie. He reached for his packet of cigarettes and shook one loose, tapped it twice on the tabletop and put it in his mouth.
‘The siloviki,’ he said slowly. He looked around for a match. ‘They are the—how would you call them?—the bogeymen of the Kremlin.’ He struck the match and lit his cigarette. ‘Do they exist as an organised circle with members and specific goals? I don’t know. Are there men within the government who serve only their own interests, who are morally bankrupt, who have links to organised crime, and who are efficiently ruthless in the pursuit of what they want? Yes. Are there men who still believe in a system of government that relies on personal conceptions of power? Incredible as it may seem, yes.’ He exhaled a long column of smoke. ‘You can give these men a name—the siloviki—perhaps it makes them somehow more manageable. But I see them only as the locus of a cancerous corruption that has spread nationwide. As it was before, so it is now: no one can be trusted.’
Irina and Vadim left the room. They were probably not in the mood to hear about their country’s problems when they were being crushed under the weight of their own anguish.
Kozkov glanced at the doorway his wife had just walked through, then