The Domino Conspiracy

by Joseph Heywood

  “You can’t jump to conclusions like that,” Sylvia said with a sigh. “Can I have a towel?” Frash’s brief stint in Paris had also bothered her, but she had kept this to herself.

  He looked at the shelf above her. “You’re closer.”

  “Don’t be a jerk.”

  “What’s the big deal? As I remember, it’s familiar territory.” He smiled for effect. He had startled her, but she was calmer now and he sensed she was protesting more out of protocol than conviction. Or was this a miscalculation on his part? With most women he usually knew right away, but it was turning out that Sylvia was not like other women. He got a towel, handed it to her and turned away. “Understand what I’m getting at?”

  She stood up and wrapped the towel around her. “You’re not exactly the world’s greatest mystery.” She put her hand on the small of his back and shoved him toward the door. “Paris has a substantial Albanian expatriate community,” she added.

  When he turned to say something more she let the towel drop, smiled, stood still for a second to give him a good look and then closed the door in his face.

  “You did that on purpose,” he complained.

  “It didn’t look like you were seeing familiar territory,” she called through the door.

  When she emerged a few minutes later she was dressed in a robe and her hair was wrapped in a towel. “Li will help us,” she said. Then she saw that he had a peculiar look on his face. “What’s with you?”

  “You actually like me,” he said with mock astonishment.

  She closed her eyes, grimaced and collapsed backward on the couch.

  59 WEDNESDAY, MARCH 22, 1961, 1:00 P.M.Moscow

  In the old days Melko had operated out of the Marina Roscha district northwest of the Moscow River near Timiryazev Park. Then, as now, the area was known simply as the Zone, a gathering place for criminals, dregs and toothless counterrevolutionaries, a center within a center, a sort of counterbalance to the Kremlin. It was a place the Moscow police avoided, and when they did go there, it was always in force and then only briefly. No authority prevailed in the Zone except what could be exercised hour to hour and day to day inside the five square kilometers of dark twisting streets that reeked of garbage, dog shit, boiled cabbage, urine, open sewage and human sweat. As it had been in Stalin’s heyday and long before, the Zone was part of the Soviet state, but the Soviet state was not part of the Zone. It was a place foreigners might hear about but never saw. The district had not changed since the civil war. A neighborhood long past its prime, it had no factories, no majestic war memorials or schools, no Young Pioneers or trade union halls, no flower stalls, state stores or schools. Its colors were earth tones, with none of the flamboyance of the Arbat; houses and buildings changed color only as years passed and grime and soot from the rest of the city built up layer by filthy layer. The Zone’s denizens tended to be stunted, dark-skinned, swarthy creatures with predators’ eyes, the flotsam of nearly every Soviet republic; they savored all possible addictions, fought to the death over insults real and imagined, and adhered to their own loose rules. Simply put, the Zone was Moscow’s no-man’s-land, and the ideal place for Melko to meet undisturbed with Annochka.

  The place Melko had selected was a third-floor garret over a coffee house owned by a one-legged Armenian. Georgian homosexuals called Black Asses controlled the second floor, which stank worse than the camps. The Black Asses were not criminals in the traditional sense; theirs was a violation of party-sanctioned morality, but unlike the foppish, effeminate Russian homosexuals who cruised near the Bolshoi, the Georgians were a fierce and violent lot.

  The front of the brown building had a hand-painted sign proclaiming fresh mushrooms, though nothing served by the Armenian was fresh or edible, even by Russian standards. The garret consisted of a single room with a low ceiling in desperate need of repair. There were several holes and exposed beams, and day or night small pairs of red eyes peered down from the darkness. The room was furnished with a sagging brass bed turned green and black by oxidation; an unpainted door set across two sawhorses served as a table. There were two ways into the building on the ground floor, a single set of stairs leading up to the third floor and an easy jump down to a nearby rooftop, which in an emergency would be their way out.

  Melko’s note had instructed Annochka to change taxis three times, then take the metro to a station one kilometer from the flat, walk past her destination and take a city bus back to a drop-off where Bailov would monitor her arrival, then trail her to the rendezvous to make sure there was no tail.

  Melko had paid the Armenian and his Georgian neighbors a fee for making sure that no unauthorized personnel entered the building when Annochka was there; as long as the payments continued he was fairly certain they would be secure. If she was disturbed by the condition of the flat, she never let on. They met for an hour every other day, made love and talked. Melko recorded their sessions on a small tape recorder.

  Annochka undressed as she walked to the bed, leaving a trail of garments from the door. He turned on the recorder, set it on the chair by the bed, and joined her; she sat on top of him, pressed the palms of her hands against his shoulders and moved her hips slowly as she talked. It was odd how she could be passionate and matter-of-fact in alternating moments.

  “Not even a kiss?” he said.

  “I don’t do this for your kisses.”

  “I’m an old-fashioned boy. Making love begins with kisses and embraces.”

  “I’m a modernist,” she said. “Fucking is not the same as lovemaking.

  Melko laughed. “One must be true to one’s values. What does a modernist believe in?”

  “I’m sitting on it.” She shifted her hips, lowered her right knee to the mattress and began a rapid forward thrusting.

  “How is your lieutenant colonel?”

  “Haunted,” she gasped. Petrov wanted Melko to use Annochka to ascertain the current mood in the KGB, and she had already revealed that Shelepin’s appointment as KGB chairman had created a nasty backlash among the apparatchiki who had worked their way up through the ranks. Shelepin’s predecessor, the foulmouthed, crude General Ivan Serov, was no favorite either, but at least he was one of them, a former deputy of Beria in the classic mold. By contrast Shelepin was polished and glib, but he was an outsider and worst of all an amateur, his career having been forged in the Komsomol, the Communist Youth Organization. Serov was now the head of the much smaller GRU, its mission considerably narrower and less politically important than his previous position. For as long as anyone could remember, state and military security had been at each other’s throat, each working to infiltrate the other; despite this, there was now apparently a regular but informal exchange of information between the competing agencies. Oddly enough, these contacts were between the echelon of deputies that reported to Shelepin, the same people that he and Khrushchev had installed since 1958. Bailov said that this was surprising; assuming old loyalties, it would have been more likely that the contacts would be with Serov’s former appointees, not Shelepin’s, but this apparently was not the case. Did this signify that Shelepin did not have ironclad control of his organization?

  “My husband is obsessed with making his mark in the way our fathers did, but poor Yeroslav doesn’t have our fathers’ instincts,” she said. Melko lay back and let her talk.

  “A little harder, please,” she said, shifting her weight. “Yeroslav is not his father, but he’s loyal to the state and he works hard. His father’s strength was in grand schemes, but Yeroslav is more like an accountant,” she said with a moan, “a master of details and small tasks.”

  After they finished she rolled off him onto the bed. Melko went to the window, lit a cigarette, inhaled once and put the butt out against the wall. “Yeroslav has discovered a series of accounts,” she said. “They’re open-ended and apparently not earmarked for particular departments or projects. Such unassigned accounts are strictly forbidden by policy, yet he’s found them, and having discovered them, it’
s his duty to report them. But to whom? He says to me, ‘If I make the report to my superior, he will take credit or he will blame me. Either way there is no advantage to my doing my duty.” She sat on the side of the bed, stretched her legs out and rubbed her neck. “We’re not finished, are we?”

  “In a minute,” he said. “What will your Yeroslav do about his discovery?”

  “I advised him to talk to my father; he always knows what to do. Yeroslav spoke to him off the record last night and my father advised him to ignore what he has found and to keep his mind on his own direct responsibilities. My father said that the special accounts are called kadrirovannye, skeletons, used to finance special KGB initiatives. Only one department uses them.”

  “Which one?”

  “Department Five, First Directorate.”

  “That’s it?”

  “The skeletons are marked with a sequence of numbers that are coded in the same way that special files are coded in the Third Directorate, where Yeroslav is assigned.” Annochka got off the bed, walked over to him and bit him hard on the upper arm, but got no reaction. “You still feel no pain. I like toughness in a man. If I nipped Yeroslav like that he’d whine for a week.” She stared out the window for several seconds, then ran her hand along the wall. “Why do you suppose there’s such a close connection between pleasure and pain?” When Melko didn’t answer she went on. “Because the coding of the skeletons is the same as in the Third Directorate,” she continued, “Yeroslav has concluded that they are tied to the Odessa Military District. The chief of the Third Directorate is Menkov, who reports to General Perevertkin, who is one of Shelepin’s people. The general’s brother is in the Foreign Ministry.” Annochka traced her finger along the tattoos on Melko’s chest.

  “Menkov’s brother or Perevertkin’s? Which one has the Foreign Ministry connection?”

  “Perevertkin’s brother, but he’s just a flunky.”

  “What does all this mean?”

  “You asked for information; I brought it. What it means is your business. Now, can we do something more than talk?”

  60WEDNESDAY, MARCH 22, 1961, 7:30 P.M.Tirana, Albania

  Mehmet Shehu walked slowly across Victory Square, paying little attention to the packs of bicycles that swarmed around the huge space during the compulsory public recreation period. Kasi was sitting on a stone bench at the edge of the square eyeing several jackdaws strutting in the grass. “You’ve seen Hoxha?” he asked.

  “Kennedy will agree to meet with Khrushchev,” Shehu said. “Our sources in France say the American will visit de Gaulle in late May. The Americans are practical. He’ll meet Khrushchev during the same trip.”

  Kasi tried to envision the two enemy leaders standing side by side.

  “The girl did well in Paris?”

  “She followed orders without hesitation,” Kasi assured him.

  After a long silence Shehu got up. “Don’t let up on her; there’ll be only one opportunity.”

  “She’ll be ready.”

  61THURSDAY, MARCH 23, 1961, 8:15 P.M.Moscow

  The train from Odessa was a soot-covered, battered derelict hauled by an ancient black locomotive that got up to fifty kilometers an hour on infrequent stretches of stable track, but averaged far less. The trip included numerous stops for passengers and long delays on sidings so that angry or confused dispatchers could resolve schedule conflicts—firsthand testimony to the inefficiency of the Soviet rail system. “Miserable Reds couldn’t build a privy,” Ezdovo sputtered during the journey. “They pack us together like ants on a dunghill. How can they run a country if they can’t run a bloody railroad? If we had flown,” he added, “we’d be there already—or dead. Either result would be an improvement on this.”

  These complaints did not amuse Petrov, who hated to fly; every time Ezdovo mentioned airplanes the color drained from his jaundiced face. As far as the Special Operations Group knew, flying was Petrov’s only fear, and it seemed to be worse now than in the old days.

  Ezdovo hated the trip. In the Yablonovy Mountains people talked of European Russia as if it were some sort of utopia; this train proved that it was anything but. The fifty-year-old cars, called wagons, were made of wood; the air inside stank of unwashed human bodies, and the latrine was a malodorous cubicle wedged into the end of the car, fine for someone of Petrov’s stature, but a torture chamber for the muscular Siberian, who had to sit with the door open. Their compartment was classified as a soft sleeper, which translated into two hinged platforms covered with thin canvas pallets stuffed with lumps of old straw; with all their gear there was barely enough room for them. There was no dining car, so from time to time Ezdovo jumped out at stops in small villages and bought sandwiches or meat pies. Petrov ate nothing and drank little.

  During the trip Ezdovo pulled steadily on a bottle of fiery cognac. “Best go easy on that,” Petrov warned. The Siberian’s separation from his wife seemed to be causing him some distress. He made a mental note to talk to Talia about this; if her husband could not concentrate on the mission, he would have to be dropped, a decision he would not like to make, but would if it became necessary. The man’s emotional state was ample evidence of the destructive power of romantic human attachments, Petrov observed.

  By midnight Ezdovo was drunk and shouting from the latrine at the end of the aisle. “Look at me! I’m a bloody czar. Where are the servants to strip down my trousers while I fertilize Ukrainian soil with royal turds!” Once he stumbled back to the compartment and lowered his voice to a whisper. “It’s just shit,” he confided. “Living cells out with the dead. Every shit is one shit closer to death. Remember that,” he said, poking his chief with a thick finger.

  When Ezdovo slept, his mouth hung open and he made sounds like a pig, his snores enormous and unpredictable.

  Petrov sat with folded arms. Right now the pain was faint, but eventually it would intensify. For a year he had been learning its cycle. “It’s not death that’s ugly,” he said out loud at one point. “It’s the dying.”

  “What?” Ezdovo mumbled.

  “Go back to sleep.”

  It was cool and still dark when they disembarked at a station in a southern district of Moscow. Bailov was waiting in a windowless van with red crosses. Ezdovo looked around anxiously for Talia, but neither she nor Gnedin were there. Bailov understood and patted his comrade on the shoulder. “She’s fine,” he said softly; then, looking toward Petrov, “How is he?”

  “Not the old Petrov.”

  They helped their leader into the back of the van. When they got to the top step Petrov sniffed the air. “Red Rome,” he said to no one in particular. “Before the fall.”

  Bailov raised an eyebrow and looked at Ezdovo, who wiggled a finger by the side of his head and shrugged.

  62FRIDAY, MARCH 24, 1961, 10:00 P.M.Kosino, Russia

  Gnedin wanted to put Petrov in a hospital, but the old man stubbornly refused. Melko had been instructed to take possession of a certain house in Kosino, and here they delivered him. The unpainted structure sat a few meters from the reedy shore of Holy Lake, where a youthful Peter the Great had often come to sail his wooden boats and dream of a royal Russian navy. The oval lake had once been far outside the city; now it was an easy twenty-minute walk from Ring Road, the city’s current border. The lake itself was a shallow body of brackish water choked with stunted fish and ringed by small weathered shacks under stands of leafless oaks and diseased elms.

  It was a cold night, with paper-thin surface ice jamming the shoreline. Petrov asked Melko to break a hole in the shallows, then lowered himself into the dark water, which for centuries had been linked to miraculous cures; nowadays few Russians believed in such miracles and the old ways and beliefs were fading fast. From where they stood they could see the lights from banks of apartment complexes being built by the Khrushchev regime. Like a patient predator, each month the city crept closer; eventually it would engulf the village.

  Petrov sat in the lake with only his small head protruding fr
om the water.

  Talia watched briefly, then jerked Gnedin away from the others and unleashed her fury. “You approve of this? You let him sit in the water like a fool? You know about the cancer!” she snapped. “Get him out of there and into a hospital and do it now.”

  The doctor pulled away from her. “It’s his decision. He refuses a hospital, and yes, he told me about the cancer, but he ordered me to keep it to myself.” He paused for a moment to collect his thoughts. “There’s nothing I can do. At the end I can blunt the pain with morphine, but that’s all. My options are strictly palliative. If he believes in the curative power of the lake, who are we to tell him he’s wrong?”

  “He’ll catch pneumonia,” she complained.

  “It’s what he wants,” Gnedin said. “And he is the leader.”

  “Superstitions don’t cure cancer,” she snapped, keeping her voice low so that the others wouldn’t hear.

  “They work as well as anything else at our disposal,” he said. “With cancer and any other serious illness the patient’s mental attitude is crucial.”

  “What about surgery?”

  “He rejects everything but this.” Gnedin had debated this with Petrov in Odessa, and again this morning, but their leader’s mind was set. “Leave it alone,” he told her. “He’s made up his mind.”

  Eventually Petrov asked to be lifted out. Melko hustled him into the house, placed him in front of the fire and tried to dry him with a towel, but the old man snatched it from him and stiff-armed him in the chest. “I can take care of myself,” he snapped.

  The Special Operations Group gathered silently around their leader. “How is Nikita Sergeievich?” Petrov asked Talia.