When Venema reached the San Diego airport, he tried to call Arizona but was told he was unavailable, which in CIA parlance could mean anything from being dead to taking a crap.
68TUESDAY, MARCH 28, 1961, 2:00 P.M.Moscow
The gaudy central spire of the dormitory of Moscow State University was wholly out of character for an academic institution, even a Russian one, Bailov thought. At night it was lit with thousands of small lights, like a Western Christmas tree, and by day looked like New York’s Empire State Building. Outside the main entrance was a polyglot of pale-skinned men from the Baltic states, blue-black Africans in caftans, short Congolese with kinky reddish-brown hair and pale palms, a Yakut in oilskins, the ever-present Chinese, who moved in clusters, never alone, Russians, Georgians and Ukes, who stared with hatred at one another, Hungarians and Czechs, even East Germans, who stood apart but not together, each trying to be more arrogant than the next.
“Like a zoo,” Bailov said. “A menagerie of exotics from the far reaches of the empire.”
Gnedin smiled. There was more truth to this than his colleague could know. Most students here were selected for their connections and commitment, not their brainpower. A willingness to commit mayhem for socialist causes was a sure ticket to a Soviet education.
The university records section on the third floor of the main building was a windowless warren of large rooms connected by narrow halls stacked with cartons overflowing with papers. “Chaos,” Bailov complained. In the First Brigade records were meticulously kept. “Our primary resource is people,” he would tell his clerks. “Records represent people; treat them with respect.” They did.
The chief administrator was a dwarf named Miss Yezhov, her name crudely painted on the outer door. She reached hardly to their waists, a bent young woman like no one either had seen before, a living ogre with a giant head, long frizzy brown hair, black high-buttoned shoes, no cosmetics, a huge nose, bowed bird legs, square-cut fingernails, intense green eyes and a falsetto voice. “I am Miss Yezhov,” she proclaimed. “Did you come to admire my body, comrades?” She chuckled.
The two men looked at each other, then turned away trying to stifle laughter.
“Pity,” she said. “If not my body, then my mind will have to suffice. I can read your faces,” she croaked. “Chekists.” She held up a hand, which was normal size and therefore all the more incongruous in contrast to her stunted body. “You saw my name and you wonder, can this Yezhov be related to the Yezhov who was Stalin’s monster?”
All Russians were well acquainted with the name of Nikolai Yezhov, who for a brief but bloody period had reigned over Stalin’s purges. A dwarf with a crippled leg, Yezhov, the Bloody Dwarf, had in only eight months ordered the killing of three thousand NKVD men—his men. He had been a hideous creature who fancied tall, beautiful women, ballroom dancing and torture. It was said that in Lubyanka he spent his nights stalking the forest-green torture cells, moving from one to another, inflicting pain, teaching techniques, immersed in his work, drunk on blood. Predictably, in 1938 Stalin accused him of being a foreign spy, and he was tried, sentenced to death and shot by the same men he had trained. Yezhov had been but a brief interlude in Russian history, yet he had done more than anyone else to instill intense fear of the security apparatus.
“Yezhov was my father,” the dwarf proclaimed. “The likeness is undeniable. I was illegitimate, my mother normal—quite beautiful, in fact—but inexplicably she succumbed to him. I was born in 1938, six months after his death. My brains come to me from my mother, rest her pitiful soul, my body from my father, may dogs shit on his grave. My mother was executed in 1940. Her crime? Fucking Yezhov. I can’t argue with that. What was I to do? The Bolshoi has no roles for dwarves, and who wants damaged goods for a wife? Education,” she said. “Education was my way out. If the body offers no hope, use the mind, and that’s what I did. Library sciences. I’ve been here since I was sixteen, the director at twenty-one, proof that the Party rewards competence. I have this position because I’m smarter than the rest of them. I work harder, too. No diversions. Don’t be fooled by my appearance or that of my children,” she warned, gesturing at the musty rooms behind her. “It’s all here, every line, every form, all the secrets. Whoever passes through this university is my child. I own the facts of their lives, comrades.” Despite her appearance and strange voice, she had fire inside her. “So what will it be? A Presidium member who diddles boys? A general caught masturbating in his tank? A chief engineer who failed math and chemistry? A spy, defector, drunkard, cheat? Tell me; my children await.” She stood with her hands on her hips, challenging.
“A student, last known surname Lumbas,” Gnedin told her.
Miss Yezhov pressed her forefingers to her temples and closed her eyes. Seconds passed; then her eyes popped open and she grinned. “Got him! Vilco Laz, later Villam Lumbas. Albanian-born, educated here. His parents were diplomats. Adil and Nora Laz.”
Bailov was impressed. “You have them all memorized?”
“All the memorable ones and most of the rabble, but the damned African names give me trouble. However, in time I shall conquer our chocolate guests, you can be assured of that.” Then she was off, rooting through boxes in a nearby room, mumbling to herself. When five minutes turned to thirty her mumbling faded to silence. Boxes were handled roughly and several crashed, raising clouds of dust that wafted through the doorway. When she finally returned she was carrying a thin manila folder with a single sheet of paper.
“Impossible,” she said, slapping the folder on her desk. “Outrageous!”
“A problem?” Gnedin asked.
“I read this file one year ago and it was much thicker then. Now there is only a sanitized summary. I do not permit sanitization here. Never! It violates Miss Yezhov’s principles.”
“I don’t understand,” Bailov said.
She held the sheet of paper up for them to see. It had only the man’s name and a red stamp that proclaimed, RECORDS TRANSFERRED TO SECURITY STATUS.
“What’s it mean?” Bailov asked.
Miss Yezhov was on the verge of explosion now, her words issuing in tight bursts. “It means, comrades—that—one of my—children—no, I—have been raped.”
“Stolen?”
“Removed, transferred, stolen—it’s all the same. Violated!” She flung the paper down in disgust, then plopped into a backless chair with several thick books stacked to provide elevation, opened a desk drawer and extracted cigarette papers and a pouch of strong-smelling tobacco. She rolled a cigarette faster than they had ever seen anyone do, propped her tiny feet on the edge of the desk and leaned back in an impossible position, seeming to levitate over the floor. “Can’t offer you one,” she said. “Might stunt your growth!” Her giggle turned into a deep racking cough; then her feet hit the floor and she snapped back into a sitting position. “There, a smoke calms the nerves and allows the brain to function. The brain is no more than a network of chemical connections, but you have to let it have its own way, and now mine has. They have the file, but I have the information. You can steal one of my children, but not my memories.” Her eyes snapped shut. “1949–1952. Chemical and electrical engineering. Laz was a near genius; he picked up where the Nazis left off with plastics called polymers and had some interesting ideas about electrical microcircuits. Komsomol member. Floor commissar. Performed at the highest levels in all academic subjects. Exemplary deportment. Selected by the Foreign Ministry in 1952, but stayed on to finish his studies here. Much in demand. One of our prized graduates.”
“And then?” Gnedin asked.
She pursed her lips and raised her bushy eyebrows. “Not my child any longer.”
“That’s it?”
“Let me think.” She closed her eyes again. “His roommate was also Albanian. In those days they tried to pair students by race and nationality. That’s changed,” she added with obvious disapproval. “Now we have Asians, blacks, Arabs, Russians all mixed together. Men sleep with women, men with men, women
with women, all in broad daylight and on the same floor. A lot of abortions. Moral disintegration.”
“The roommate’s name?”
She grinned. “Frascetti, Myslim. A brute with brains. Not of his friend’s magnitude, and older, but another one in great demand by the Chekists. A partisan during the war and a wrestler afterward, I believe. Never defeated. Broke an opponent’s neck once—an Armenian, I think; the boy died. It was a match, not a brawl, and all within the rules, so there was no trouble. Frascetti went to the KGB, a perfect choice for them.”
“Is there a way to trace them now?”
“Nothing I can do. A mother’s children always leave her. It’s an immutable law of nature.”
They thanked her and turned to go but she followed close behind. “Yezhov,” she said. “Miss Yezhov. Remember that name. My father was a monster. Come back soon. I’m always here with my children.”
69THURSDAY, MARCH 30, 1961, 10:00 A.M.Paris
It was a neighborhood full of mature oaks, high flagstone walls around the properties, and not at all what Sylvia had expected. Last Saturday’s funeral had been modest and the mourners were shabbily dressed, but the house in front of her suggested wealth. The grounds were immense, the trees pruned and wrapped, flower beds spaded and weeded, the grass trimmed.
An Arab maid in black showed her into a library with high ceilings and books in several languages. Madame Celiku was seated in her wheelchair near a bay window. “Sit,” she said. “Let’s skip the nonsense. You’ve been asking around. Such things are never secret in Paris.” There were hard lines around her eyes. “I’m French,” she said. “Now. Once I was one of them, but no longer. They waste their lives making air castles, and for what?”
“They want to go home,” Sylvia ventured.
The old woman cackled. “To what? Enver Hoxha? I know that one. Or Shehu the butcher?”
Sylvia let her talk. “I left Tirana in ’32. I’d studied here and gone home to teach. But you can’t teach that sort. Tribes, you know. They wear clothes, of course, but beyond that they are no different from the savages that live along the rivers of central Africa. I saw what was coming. Zog!” She hissed. “A sergeant playing king, licking Italian boots and worse. I said, To hell with them all, came back to Paris, married well, raised my children and left all that behind me.”
“Why did you agree to meet me?”
The woman’s head bobbed several times. “I’m not senile. Only my body fails me.” She paused to catch her breath. “You’re intelligence. You worked your way to me.”
“Certain people suggested that you might be of assistance.”
“No,” the woman said. “You were told I opposed the royalists; based on this, you thought I would tell you things the others would not.”
“Is that true?” Sylvia sensed an open door. She had been told no such thing.
The woman smiled. “That I opposed them? Of course. But what else you get from me will depend.”
“On what?”
“You’ve been asking questions about the deaths,” Madame Celiku said, evading the question.
“Murders,” Sylvia corrected her.
“The police think it’s a local affair,” the old woman said, “but I still read the newspapers.”
“You disagree?”
“Revenge is the Albanian raison d’être, but the tamed Albanians of Paris no longer have any fire. They sit in their cafés and lie to each other. They are cowards, not patriots; the good ones stayed on to resist and have paid with their lives.”
“You fled.”
The woman cracked a smile. “True enough, but unlike the others I haven’t spent my life looking backward. When the Nazis came here I fought them as hard as any native Frenchman. Had I remained in Albania I would have fought the Nazis and the Communists, but it was my decision to leave and I don’t regret it.” She gazed into space briefly. “Ten years ago the Americans and British tried to unseat Hoxha. Did you know that?”
“No.” Was this what Harry had alluded to?
“They recruited Albanian refugees from DP camps, trained them on Cyprus and sent them in to make a counterrevolution. It was a complete failure because the Russians compromised it. Hundreds were killed, perhaps more; certainly only a few escaped.”
This reminded Sylvia of the news stories Gabler had shown them, and she saw a possible connection. Maybe Valentine’s conclusion had substance. “It’s been said that not to learn from history is to risk repeating it.” Frash’s record had also said something about Cyprus, hadn’t it?
“Sound advice,” the old woman said. “Very sound indeed. You know about the new American initiative?”
A surprise here. “I’m aware of nothing of the sort.” If there was anything like it, she was certain she would have heard rumors. Perhaps years ago the Company could hide covert military operations, but not anymore; the sloppy security around the Cuban operation proved that. “There is no plan,” Sylvia repeated. “There have been news reports based on Albanian radio broadcasts, but it’s well known that the Albanians make groundless allegations when they’re suppressing internal political opposition.”
“Ummm,” the old woman said. “I see.” Her tone said she disagreed.
Sylvia passed a photograph of Frash to her. “Do you know this man?”
The woman adjusted her glasses. “Why do you want to know?”
“I can’t go into that.”
“He’s missing, is that it?” Then to herself, Of course he’s missing. Why else would she be here? He’s gone and you can’t find him. His network here has gone to ground and Shehu has his thugs here killing them. The French don’t understand, but you do, don’t you, girl?
She was beginning to. “His name is Albert Frash,” Sylvia said, impressed by the woman’s intensity.
“No,” the old woman said. “His name is Ali Frascetti, and he was born in France in 1923. I knew his father. He’s dead now, like most of the old ones. He was posted in France when Albania fell to the Italians but he moved to America and tried to keep the dream alive, and for that he was a damned fool.” Again her gaze went blank.
Frash was Frascetti? There was nothing of this in the records. The file they had said Frash had been born in Boston. Had Arizona given them a legend rather than an actual history? “Please,” Sylvia said. “Have you ever seen the man in the photograph?”
“His father married the whore with a child; later this one was born,” Madame Celiku said, tapping the photograph. “He was a boy when they left Paris for America. They were diplomats, then academics—you know, professors. The whore was smart, I’ll give her that, but he was a fool to marry her, a fool to leave France, a fool in all ways. She was the true zealot.”
“Frash’s father?” The old woman was rambling. Get her back to the point and keep her focused.
“How well does any woman know any man?” Madame Celiku asked. “You care for them, worry about them, cry with them, sleep with them, but do you ever really know them? I knew him well enough, but he chose the whore. Said he was sorry, that it was love. What was it we had? I asked him. Also love, he said, but different, and he begged me to forgive him and to understand. He came back to Paris after the war, supposedly to attend scholarly conferences, but he always met with the others and sometimes I saw him. I had a husband by then and my own family, of course, but I went to him anyway. That’s what a man can do to you if you’re not strong, understand?”
Sylvia had known such men, one of them her current partner, but so far, Galveston notwithstanding, she had resisted him.
“It was the usual sort of affair, obsessive, centered on sex and romance. Then he asked me for money. My husband is from an old family and was very successful in his own right. I refused, of course, and told him to go away. He called me and wrote to me after that, but I never saw him again.”
“What about his son?”
“He was here, sat right where you’re sitting—to pay his respects, he said.”
“When was this?”
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br /> “Just over a year ago. He said he knew of me through his parents, and since he had just moved to Paris he was looking up their old friends.”
“Did he also want money?”
“No, nothing like that; it was merely social, he said. He claimed that his company had transferred him to Paris but I think he was evaluating me. He had his mother’s eyes, her intensity too. It was only a small surprise to me when he appeared. I had already heard that he was in Paris initiating contacts with the so-called Albanian Freedom Front.”
“But he didn’t tell you about this.”
“He didn’t have to. As I said earlier, there are no secrets in Paris, and I have excellent contacts. Albanians are notoriously bad with secrets, especially when their self-esteem derives from them. My sources said he was with the CIA, sent here to help the royalists, but this part I heard after he came here to visit me.”
“What do you think he wanted?”
“As I heard it, he was gauging opposition to Hoxha. Later I heard that a new operation was being mounted.”
“Against Hoxha?”
“Presumably.”
“Do you think that the recent murders are connected to this?”
“It’s an old pattern. Shehu has a long reach.”
“If that’s true, why haven’t the authorities made the connection?”
“In part because French ethnocentricity precludes their understanding anything that’s not exclusively French. But the French are also weary of trivial Albanian plots. They are concocted in cafés and there is always a new one, like hatches of newborn insects lifting off ponds, never to be seen again. Nothing comes of all this scheming, you see, and the French have grown tired of it, so they pay no attention. The émigrés tell the Sûreté that this bogey man or that one is after them, and it is like the little boy crying wolf.”
“But you think it was real?”
“I heard that weapons were sent from Marseilles to Trieste. A lot of weapons—small arms, mortars, land mines, grenades. At least this is what’s being said.”
The Domino Conspiracy Page 29