The Domino Conspiracy

by Joseph Heywood

  While Lejla was in the bathroom Kasi laid the garment on the bed. The dress was made of dark material, similar to what Albanian women wore year round in the mountains. When she emerged from her bath, he told her to try it on.

  “Again?”

  “It has to look right.” The Austrians were taking great pains to make sure that their role in the summit was played flawlessly; the essence of his plan resided in their ability to be invisible, to be there but unseen.

  The girl pivoted once to show him. “It’s hot,” she said.

  She wondered if there had actually been a time in her life when she actually cared how her clothes fit. She had rebelled over her parents’ recall to Albania; she couldn’t understand how they would willingly return to such an awful place. New York City was filthy and dangerous, but at least there was freedom. She had begged her father to defect, but he had said it was impossible, and now he was in a Sigurimi jail cell.

  Kasi pinched the fabric at her waist. “Too loose. It needs to be taken in some more.”

  “I don’t sew,” Lejla said, slipping the dress over her head.

  “I do.”

  She remained silent, trying to banish the anger that threatened to erupt. How could she chastise her father now when his life depended on her? Feel nothing. Kasi’s trousers bulged. How long would it be before she had to endure that too? Do as you are told, she reminded herself.

  176THURSDAY, MAY 18, 1961, 11:00 A.M.Vienna

  They had gotten nothing at their first four stops. The fifth postmaster was a tall man with an aristocratic bearing and a gray pallor, his skin so thin that it was transparent and showed crisscrossing matrices of small blue veins.

  Sylvia had convinced the others that the approach to the postmasters would be best handled by her and with each stop she had grown more confident in her routine. She smeared on lipstick, doused herself with perfume, smiled at Valentine, marched into the man’s office, held out her hand and started talking before he could react.

  “We’ve just now arrived from America,” she announced. “We intended to surprise our friends, but when we got here we discovered that they were gone. We’re on holiday, an entire month in Austria. Most Americans rave about London, Paris or Rome, but we love Vienna.”

  “We welcome tourists in our country,” the postmaster said hesitantly. “Do you have an appointment?” He glanced at his calendar.

  Sylvia ignored the question. “It’s a silly problem, you see, entirely our fault to think that our friends would be here to show us around, but they’re not here, so we’re at a loss.” She gave him a long face to underscore her disappointment.

  “Perhaps you should have informed your friends before you came,” he said cautiously.

  She had guessed there would be a little I-told-you-so and countered with a smile. “You’re quite right, but that would have ruined the surprise, which was the whole point of not calling.”

  “Some people do not relish surprises,” the postmaster said. Which was undoubtedly his view on the subject, since she was clearly an unwelcome surprise as well, exactly what she intended to be.

  “No, no, you don’t understand. Our friends love surprises,” she said, trying to reassure him. “Last year they came to Chicago,” she said. “Did I tell you we’re from Chicago?” She didn’t give him time to answer. “Filthy place, too many people, foul air, noisy factories everywhere, no history, totally unlike Vienna. Anyway, they surprised us last year and we’re here to return the favor, so you’ve just got to help us.”

  The postmaster nervously checked his watch. If he didn’t do something, she would talk the morning away. “How may I assist you?” He even managed a smile.

  “You’re so kind,” Sylvia said. “I don’t know how to thank you.”

  “It’s not necessary,” he assured her and checked his watch again, hoping she would get the hint, though in his experience Americans were not good at social conventions, even obvious ones.

  “I don’t even know if it will help.”

  “What?” Anything to get rid of her.

  “It’s really a wild idea, more hope than anything else, but we Americans are known for playing hunches, aren’t we?” She saw by his face that she had stretched him to the edge of his patience.

  “I really don’t know about such things,” he said. “I’ve had very little interaction with Americans.”

  “You should,” she bubbled. “Really, we’re not the bores some make us out to be. Chicago is a dreadful city but if you were to visit you’d find the people quite friendly. We love to have foreigners visit. Our friends couldn’t get over how open Americans were.”

  “You were saying your friends were gone,” he said, trying to steer the conversation back.

  “Yes,” she said disconsolately. “So disappointing. You look forward to something and poof! then it goes wrong. Not fair, but then my husband always says we should expect it. Do you agree?”

  “I’m not sure that I understand,” the postmaster said. It was time to get rid of her. “I’m sorry,” he added, “but I have another appointment.” He tapped his watch to confirm it.

  Sylvia clasped her hand over her mouth, then reached suddenly to touch his hand, which he pulled away as if she were a poisonous snake. “Oh, I’m terribly sorry! You must forgive me. My husband says I ramble on, and I suppose he’s right, though I don’t think I ramble on that much, do you?”

  “Not at all,” he said. What sort of man was the husband who would put up with this ridiculous female?

  “Do you think you could help?”

  “How?” Finally she was going to get to the point.

  “We had an idea—” she said, then stopped and began again. “My husband had the idea that perhaps our friends went on a trip. When we do that we always ask our post office to hold our mail until we get back. We used to ask a neighbor’s son to collect the mail, but he was a teenager and unreliable, and we found out that he was bringing his girlfriends into the house—fornicating in our bed, drinking our beer if you can imagine it—so now we do what we should have done in the first place and let the post office handle it.”

  Now he understood; what she wanted was against the rules, but this was an instance where an exception could be made for his own peace of mind. “You want to know when your friends will return, is that it?”

  “Yes,” Sylvia said, clapping her hands to show him how pleased she was. “If we know when they’ll be back then we can go ahead with other plans and return to Vienna when they do.” Suddenly she changed expressions and leaned forward. “You don’t think they’ll be gone the whole month, do you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She giggled and fluttered her eyes. “How stupid of me! Of course you don’t know. I don’t understand where my mind goes sometimes.”

  “The names of your friends?” He gave her a pencil and paper.

  She printed the names and the address.

  The postmaster took the slip of paper, left the office and returned five minutes later. “Your friends left on May 8 and asked that their mail be held until we receive further instructions from them.”

  “How odd,” Sylvia said.

  “Not at all. It is perfectly normal for people who are in the process of changing residences.” He held up the card for her to see.

  “This may be the one,” Sylvia told Valentine and Bailov. “They cleared out the day before the Albanians arrived and left no forwarding address. They’ll send it after they get settled.” She was proud of herself.

  “They stopped the mail but not the phone,” Bailov said. “That makes no sense.”

  “It does if they knew the phone was going to be used,” Valentine said. “By somebody else.”

  177FRIDAY, MAY 19, 1961, 9:30 A.M.Vienna

  The hotel was small, the front walk lined with beds of geraniums planted in black soil. The woman behind the reception desk was middle-aged, with smooth white skin, frizzled brown hair and eyes that assessed him as he looked around the tiny lobby. “I’m l
ooking for Sirini,” Ezdovo said.

  “Are you a relative?”

  “A friend.”

  “He checked out.”

  “When?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “Alone?”

  “I’m not his keeper.”

  Ezdovo showed her the photograph that the Americans had provided. “This him?”

  She looked at the photograph, then at Ezdovo. “You’re Russian,” she said. “Your people took everything when they were here before.”

  He placed a roll of schillings on the desk. “The photo.”

  She counted the money, folded it, slipped it into her dress, opened the guest book and turned it so Ezdovo could see. “There,” she said, pointing to Sirini’s name. “He’s the one—same as the photograph, though his hair is shorter and darker now.”

  178FRIDAY, MAY 19, 1961, 9:45 A.M.Vienna

  The streets were jammed with slow-walking people, some of whom congregated in groups around several flower stalls and a bakery, examining and admiring more than buying. On the corner a dark-haired young girl with ringlets snapped a tattered red parasol open and closed like a three-dimensional klieg light, oblivious to passersby who flowed by her like water around a boulder in a stream.

  The two men in the truck dropped Sylvia just beyond an intersection where a narrow cobblestone street met a boulevard several lanes wide. They had not discussed the next step in detail, but both of them had warned her to take care. There was no time for discussion, and it was obvious what needed doing: somebody had to house-watch. Sylvia thought she would be the least obtrusive and had volunteered, certain that her surveillance skills were superior to Valentine’s. She kept this opinion to herself, however, and the Russians didn’t object.

  When she got out of the truck, she melted into the midday crowd without looking back. People were dressed in clean but drab work clothes, not the splashy styles of the Kohlmarkt and wealthier districts. Most of the women wore sleeveless blouses, but had substantial sweaters draped over their shoulders. When the Viennese sun went down it got cold quickly even if the day had been sunny. Today the sun was in and out of moving banks of clouds and the air had a bite to it.

  The address led her to a narrow, multistory building with a shiny stone facade. There were steps up to the first floor and black iron bars covering the ground-floor windows, evidence that the neighborhood had its share of crime. There would be no unlocked doors here. Several apartments had flower boxes filled with yellow and white flowers. The buildings on either side of the address were shabbier, their fronts blackened, the stone sills chipped. The target building was better cared for than those around it, but it was difficult to believe that property anywhere in this area would sell at the prices listed at the city hall.

  Sylvia walked up the steps into the entryway and checked the mailboxes, four rows of two, eight in all, stacked like tiny file drawers. Only one was labeled; it said ROMONA, written with a thick crayon. She peeked into the letter slots and saw envelopes in two of them. Incoming or outgoing? There was no way to tell. The numbering on the doors showed odd-numbered apartments to the left, even numbers to the right.

  The flat in question was on the second floor. There were only two flats to a floor, each taking one side of the building, each facing both front and back, meaning that there were at least three ways out. There was an exit at the back of the entry hall on the first floor; she walked to it and looked out into a courtyard of fine gravel interrupted by a single mottled linden tree with stunted white blossoms. The building at the far side of the courtyard had brick walls with mud stains.

  Without more people to cover all the possible exits, the building might as well be a fortress. Moving back to the street, Sylvia went into an adjacent building and climbed to the roof, which had a low wall around the perimeter; the center was filled with sagging clotheslines. The roofs of the buildings abutted each other, with no space between. She estimated there were ten to twelve buildings on each side of the street, and that there would be no difficulty going from roof to roof, which meant they would need somebody up here as well. She unpinned some clothes, taking a tan long-sleeved blouse, an indigo skirt and a threadbare gabardine coat, peeled off her own clothes, including her stockings, put on the new ones, and looked for somewhere to stash her things, but found nothing suitable. In the end she stole a towel and wrapped her clothes in it. The Albanians, she told herself, might be alert, but so far there was no reason for them to suspect that anyone was watching them. Because there was no way to cover all the exits, she decided to sit on the front steps of the building next door. If they came in or out she hoped they would use the front entrance. By sitting on the same side of the street she could not be seen from the flat above, and with her borrowed clothing she would blend in except for her shoes, which she kicked off and tucked under the fold of her skirt. She hoped the owner of the clothes wouldn’t discover her loss for a while.

  Thirty minutes after she took up her post, an old woman with a shopping bag lurched to a halt in front of her, stared at her bare feet and flashed a disapproving look. “A proper lady wears shoes when she is in public,” she croaked. “This is Vienna, not the farm.” Sylvia slid on her shoes until the woman disappeared down the street, then removed them again.

  179FRIDAY, MAY 19, 1961, NOONVienna

  It was no surprise that Mignonne Mock liked having her orders followed without question; this had been his mother’s way as well. The more you got to know a woman, the more their physical attributes seemed to fade. The more beautiful the woman, the greater the ugliness inside. They were all demons at heart, and whores eager for men with big money. Mock wanted him to go to the railroad station and look it over in anticipation of Khrushchev’s arrival.

  “Talk to people,” she said. “Learn which track he’ll arrive on and find a place where you’ll be able to get some clear pictures of Zakharov.” Whatever was brewing in Berlin, the mysterious Zakharov would be at the center of it, and while the summit was today’s story her intuition told her that Berlin was the future news.

  “You don’t even know whether I can take a picture.”

  “I have faith,” she said, which was not exactly true.

  “What if my credentials are challenged?”

  “They won’t be. I’ve taken care of everything,” Mock said, and gave him an irritated look. “The help should be careful about questioning their superiors.”

  “I’m not accustomed to being categorized as mere help.”

  “Just get the station scouted. If there are guards, shoot a roll of them. The public needs to see how much it costs for Khrushchev to be guarded when he leaves his own country.”

  “The Austrian guards also protect the American president.”

  “That’s not my story.”

  “I thought journalists were supposed to be objective.”

  She laughed. “There’s no objectivity in a war.”

  “War?”

  “The ideological shadow boxing that invariably precedes the real fight. Ideas lead to words, and words lead to acts. It’s an old formula.”

  “You think the Americans and Soviets will fight each other?”

  “Their histories prove that both are inherently violent. To tell a story, you have to pick a slant, which means that you’ve already made a judgment.”

  “Your slant being that the Soviets are inherently evil?”

  “They are evil. The so-called Soviets are Russian slaves, just as some Austrians were Soviet slaves after the war.”

  “So it’s personal, is that it? A vendetta?”

  “I grew up with them,” Mock snapped. “What does an Italian know about such things?”

  “I know that it’s not a good idea to have you for an enemy,” Albert said, trying to ease the tension. This sort of talk was a waste of time.

  “The worst.”

  “I’ll try to remember that.”

  “Good. Remember it while you scout the station.”

  “Photos of armed guards.”
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  “Pick those that look the most menacing. Like you.”

  Frash left ten minutes later, taking Sirini’s cameras with him. He would do what she wanted, then tend to some of his own business. Let her worry about Khrushchev.

  180FRIDAY, MAY 19, 1961, 9:00 P.M.Vienna

  Mignonne Mock’s address led Ezdovo to a flat over one of the city’s most popular coffee houses. Even to his eyes the area looked worn and not the sort of place to attract a woman who reputedly considered herself one of the city’s most important people. A few subtle questions in the coffee house brought blank stares and an unspoken message that people here minded their own business. Circling the block, he found that all the buildings were connected and that all the entrances were public and right on the street, which left no choice but to wait until dark.

  There was a shed built off the back of the coffee house, and above it hung a rusty fire escape. When he was sure he was alone Ezdovo used a parked truck to reach the shed roof, from there grasped the metal ladder and climbed as quickly and quietly as he could. Mock’s window was locked, which came as no surprise. Those who tried to unlock others’ secrets were generally fanatical about safeguarding their own. A careful look told him there was no alarm, and in less than a minute he had jimmied the lock and was inside, careful to shut the window behind him. It was dark, but after a few minutes his eyes adjusted.

  It was a large flat, as big as their stable in the Yablonovy mountains, the air thick with scents of perfume and soap. The kitchen was clean, with no dirty dishes and a scoured coffeepot left upside down to drain. There was a small refrigerator with some food, all of it carefully aligned. In Tanga they still depended on blocks of ice cut from the frozen river in winter and stored underground in straw. The dishes in the cabinets and the flatware in the drawers were lined up as neatly as a surgeon’s tools, and in the bedroom Mock’s dresses were evenly spaced on hangers in a cedar armoire. Here was a woman who liked order and was attentive to detail. It meant she was a slave to her habits.