When she saw that Henning and Maxim were deep in conversation, Stevie leaned back into the sofa and became invisible.
Good
.
Now, where’s that photo wall . . .
She scanned the gallery. The back wall was covered with the faces of girls who had been plucked from the crowd to compete for the modelling contract. All very young, most stunning, others a little stunned by the flash. Many of the photos had phone numbers written on them, the girls maybe hoping they would take some VIP man’s fancy and be called up and swept off their feet.
It did not take Stevie long to find Anya’s face. She had definitely been here and she had been singled out. She would have been very happy. The photographer had taken three photos: her wide-set eyes were huge in her face, her wavy blonde hair almost angelic in the harsh light of the flash. In two pictures, she was standing beside a dark-haired girl with beautiful dark eyes and a strong nose.
We should have brought Vadim up here with us, Stevie thought. He would surely recognise the girl. Stevie would have to steal a photo. Her mild kleptomania—usually triggered by bouts of stress—had been useful more than once. Not even the wall noticed as Stevie stepped up, removed a photo and slipped it into her purse.
Back at the table, she sat down and caught Henning’s eye. He rose, Maxim hugging him, kissing him on the lips in the Russian way. Stevie was a little horrified for Henning. Maxim looked like a man who would certainly have ghastly breath.
‘Are you sure you’ve told me the truth, Henning?’ Stevie took his arm as they headed back downstairs to find Vadim. ‘I find it hard to believe that a humble librarian would know people like Maxim Krutchik.’
Henning sighed. ‘I’m not exactly a librarian, Stevie. I’ve explained it to you before: I’m a cataloguer of rare books. The former Soviet Union is full of them, forgotten pieces of odd literature. Many items are instant collectibles. Worth a fortune to some people.’
‘People like Maxim?’ she asked in disbelief.
‘You’d be surprised.’
Vadim stood out on account of his stillness amongst the heaving mass of bodies. He was leaning on the bar, still smoking, still staring at another rum and coke. His pallor, his white hair, his lashless eyes were lit for a moment by a roving spotlight that came to rest on him. For those three seconds, he was incandescent.
Seeing the photo distressed him, reminded him of Anya—as if she was ever far from his mind. But he recognised Petra straightaway.
Stevie put the photo back in her bag. ‘Let’s see if she’s here.’ They split up and set off.
In the centre of the club was a raised stage. On it, a floorshow was in full swing. Three girls in fluorescent bikinis—one with tassels, another with feathers, another with not much on at all—were dancing and gyrating like rubber bands. Diego appeared at Stevie’s side.
‘This is where all the main strippers dance.’ He gestured happily. ‘I am going with Iacopo to the bar. We get you vodka.’
‘Thank you, Diego,’ she called after him, but he had already been swallowed by the crowd.
They were good dancers, quality girls with perfect legs and pretty faces. More expensive than the other girls, Stevie assumed. Petra was not among them. Nor did she appear to be any of the women in tight jeans dotted around the stage, many twisting to the music in a way that suggested they too had spent time on a podium. Smoke machines fed with apple tobacco were pumping out mist like a narghile. It made it hard to see.
Suddenly there was an explosion—somewhere up in the roof. Stevie scanned the gallery, looking for danger. But the faces were upturned in expectation, not fear.
A man was standing on a railing, five floors up. His arms were raised and Stevie saw there were copper wings strapped to his back. Leaning out, he allowed his body to arc through the air and plummet earthwards, a bungee cord spooling out behind him.
Before he could hit the dancers on the stage, he bounced, flying backwards through the air like Icarus rewound. He tumbled and somersaulted through the foggy air with extraordinary grace.
That’s what I need in life, thought Stevie, a bungee cord.
A shower of glitter rained down as if from some invisible silver cloud. Strobe lights kicked in like flak. The winged man flew, the dancers gyrated with even more energy, and the whole club became a snow-dome of male pleasure.
The Icarus landed gently on the stage and was unhooked from his umbilical cords. He was a small man, almost dwarfish, a hump deforming the upper part of his spine. He climbed quickly down from the podium and pushed his way roughly through the crowd. Stevie thought about how tall and graceful he had looked in the air; how small and constricted on the ground.
She scanned the galleries. The men stared down at the women below, confident in the invisibility of vertical distance. Henning and Vadim were hunting up on levels three and four.
Diego and Iacopo reappeared. ‘We couldn’t see you!’
‘You look like a tiny
bambi
—big eyes,’ Iacopo gestured, ‘like this!’
‘All
minuscola—
like
un foglio di musica
, a piece of sheet music,’ added Diego.
Stevie smiled. ‘That is so I can slip in and out of people’s thoughts unnoticed.’
‘We brought you a drink—’
‘Russian Standard vodka. If you drink only this—’ ‘—you get no hangover. Now you see is three am and is a new show.’
‘The three o’clock show is much more
erotica
.’
‘Come to dance with us!’
Stevie shook her head. The house music was getting heavier.
Stevie pushed through to the other side of the stage. Nobody took any notice of her. It was impossible to find Petra. The place was enormous.
Fresh girls were taking up their positions on the stage. The promoter was clicking his fingers at them, herding them like fowl. These ones looked very young, probably still in their teens. They wore only g-strings and leather caps, backsides swinging, lifting up to the waiting, watching crowd.
The chubby man with the enormous tongue that had so disgusted Stevie was right up front. A tender honey-blonde was waving her buttocks in his face. He was stuffing money into her garter, slowly, making her beg, owning her.
Stevie was mesmerised, not by their bodies but by their faces. They had developed an armour of expression, impenetrable. She thought of the love that must have once been invested by the parents in the future of each dancing girl. That it had come to this.
Stevie finished off the vodka with a deep swallow. It had been a large glass. She knew she was a little drunk. Sadness—or was it anger, despair?—rushed through her. Perhaps it was the stabbing of the pain the faces of the girls could not, would not show . . . did not feel?
What would Anya have felt when she saw them?
Dancing was a good job for girls in Moscow. There was so very little else—for anyone. These girls would be earning, but that their hopes for the future lay in proffering their bottoms to an indifferent crowd seemed like a symptom that the world was off-kilter. No human—no heart—should be so utterly expendable.
Out of nowhere, American dollar bills began to rain down. Stevie raised her eyes to the invisible ceiling, saw the counterfeit fortune in the air, but thought—actually felt; she was no longer thinking—only of the girls, all with mothers, all with dreams. She left her face turned skyward. She didn’t want to see any more dancing babies.
A large bearded man in a leather vest pushed his way through the crowd holding his camera over his head, over the crowd, and started firing. His flashes mixed with the strobe lights and for a second Stevie didn’t notice he was shooting her.
Too late, she spun around. She turned back but the man had disappeared. Ice crackled through her veins. Why had the man photographed her? Who was he? Was he just a Moscow society snapper, or were the kidnappers watching the Kozkovs’ building? Whoever the man was, it was too late to stop him.
You’re a fool to let your guard down like that.
She wondered if he would notice, when he printed the pictures, the two fat tears that were tumbling out of her eyes.
The phone rang far too
shrilly for the morning after a visit to a club. It took Stevie a long time to swim to the surface from her sleep.
‘Hello?’ The phone rang again, startling her. The receiver was in her hand . . .
Oh. The button.
It was Vadim. ‘
Prostite
—sorry for waking you, but I know where Petra is.’
‘Oh, well done, Vadim.’ Her voice was croaking. Dreadfully embarrassing. In the mirror opposite, Stevie caught sight of her tangled hair, her eyes swollen to the shape of almonds.
‘I talked to Anya’s music teacher.’ Vadim’s voice was excited, urgent. ‘Petra and Anya have the same one. She told me Petra hadn’t come to her lesson because she is in hospital for a small operation.’
‘Well done,’ she repeated. ‘Get visiting hours and we’ll go as soon as we can.’ Stevie struggled to disentangle herself from the heavy bedclothes.
‘Also, Henning left a message for you, Stevie. But he asked me to tell you as well, in case you didn’t check.’
Stevie thanked Vadim and hung up with a groan. She pressed the flashing message button on the hotel phone.
I’m sorry, Stevie, but some manuscripts have been discovered between
the walls of a sultan’s palace. They could possibly date from the
Ottoman empire. Or they could be some naughty child’s homework.
Anyway, it may be a huge find. The museum has gone berserk and
they’ll have my head if I don’t get down there immediately, before the
treasure hunters do.
A headache began to pound through Stevie’s temples like the cavalry. So much for Diego and Iacopo’s Russian Standard vodka theory . . . Or it could have been the nightcap glass of champagne she had drunk in bed before going to sleep.
She had been too emotional to go right to sleep. The dancing girls, Anya’s photo, the girls on the park bench in London, the primrose in Joss’ bed, Norah Wolfe and her hungry smile, all mixed in together, going round and round in her mind, keeping her wide awake. The champagne had seemed like a good idea at the time.
Henning’s voice continued on the phone.
I’ll be back as soon as I possibly can . . . And Stevie, take Vadim if
you go anywhere. Please . . . It’s safer, and it’s doing him good to be
involved. Alright . . .
There was a tiny pause, a minute awkwardness that came through even on the recorded message, as Henning tried to decide what to say next.
Bye now.
Stevie reached for the house phone to ring her grandmother then thought the better of it and picked up her mobile. You never knew who was listening in hotels and she would never compromise Didi’s safety in the slightest degree.
There was no answer at the house in Zurich. Stevie frowned. It was early, but her grandmother always rose at six. She must still be out on her
vita parcours
—a ritual she followed unfailingly every morning and in all weather.
The
vita parcours
was an obstacle course of sorts, a set of tree stumps
and gym bars and elevated planks set up at various intervals on the forest trail, with instructions on what exercises had to be performed before one could move on. The formidable lady no longer ran between stations— she walked—but it kept her fit as an eighty-two-year-old fiddle.
Didi had taken Stevie with her every morning when she was a child and she vividly remembered the burn of the freezing air puffing out of her little lungs as she ran along in her thick winter tracksuit, or jogged along under the cool of the heavy green leaves in summer. Their morning run would be followed by a breakfast of blueberry yoghurt with heavy, homemade muesli, then a spoonful of a revolting treacly-brown syrup made of yeast and mountain herbs that Didi insisted was the elixir of life.
Stevie’s flat was near the woods and she still ran the same
vita
parcours
every morning that she was home. Some mornings, if she was feeling feeble, she even took the spoonful of yeast syrup.
She lay her head back gingerly on the enormous pillow. The headache had transformed itself into a full body ache. This was no hangover, alas. It was definitely the opening sally of some horrid Slavic flu. There was nothing for it but to swallow aspirin and eat a lemon, rind and all.
She would make her bath extra hot this morning.
The Metropole hotel was a stone’s throw from Red Square. The roads had been salted earlier that morning and the ice was fast turning into filthy sludge. Passing cars, their windows tinted even though the sun never seemed to shine, sprayed muck, the grime conveniently obscuring their number plates.
Muscovites in matching fur hats and coats strode the boulevards, on some immutable course. In the pale blue mist they looked like bears out for their morning feed. A patrol of four
militzia
—police—crossed at the lights, so padded in their grey jackets and fur-trimmed hats, submachine guns slung casually over one shoulder, like teddy bears playing at war.
Stevie watched them home in on a shabbily bundled couple. He had a thick black beard. That was suspicion enough. They would have to be stopped, papers scrutinised.
Friday was the day to avoid being stopped if you were a foreigner because the
militzia
patrols went out looking for vodka money. Although it wasn’t Friday, Stevie avoided crossing just there. She set off to meet Vadim at a tea house, just outside the great red walls of the square.
Stevie passed through the guarded gatehouse, up a small slope, and into Krasnaya Ploshyad. She caught her breath. Every time she came here, she felt she was standing on the top of a beautiful, malevolent mountain. Today, it was covered in snow and people were crisscrossing it on their way to work.
St Basil’s church, with its wildly coloured onion domes and its golden exploding stars, sat like a Faberge jewel at the far side. On Stevie’s left was GUM, the famous shopping arcade, a delicate stone building the colour of vanilla, intricately carved and tipped with pointed copper roofs, now a weathered green. On her right was part of the wall that surrounded the Kremlin, the palace of government itself. The walls were fortress height and the colour of dried blood. Red Square. A massive wrought-iron gate sealed the entrance.