The Domino Conspiracy

by Joseph Heywood

  Kristo had met Paula when he was eighteen, become her lover at nineteen and for two years depended on her generosity for the financing of various projects, which until recently mostly involved feeble attempts to print leaflets calling attention to the royalist cause. Paula was anxious to do more, but Kristo lacked both vision and discipline; the affair had begun with him as the aggressor, but the dynamic had shifted.

  When Ramiz told Paula that he needed a secure place for a meeting, she quickly suggested that they use her flat on the rue de Seine, two doors from the flat where the author Colette had slaved in an attic to produce stories published under her husband’s name. Paula often thought about Colette, whose life had been a lesson to all women: Fight or die the slow, sure death of inequality. The flat was a walk-up, on the sixth of seven floors, and had nine rooms, including four with canopied beds and a bizarre mixture of furnishings from fashionable periods of four different centuries. It was not her residence but her hideaway, a place where she could be alone with friends, cavort with lovers or meditate.

  The other flat on the sixth floor was owned by a Hungarian sculptor, whose studio was one floor above. Paula had confessed to Kristo that from time to time she posed nude for the sculptor in his cluttered studio. Now she was leaning against a bed. She wore Italian-made flats, a black leotard, a blue skirt, red lipstick and long silver earrings from Algeria. “I want to participate,” she said, “to actually be part of everything.”

  “Impossible,” Kristo told her. They’d had this discussion before, but never in such close proximity to his superiors.

  “I give you money, places to meet, entertain you and your friends. . . . Fuck you: Why not?”

  “It’s not our way,” he said, wanting to avoid what was sure to follow.

  “Ah,” she said softly. “A woman is anybody’s daughter. You damned Albanians, you still live in the Dark Ages. A woman has no rights. You make no such distinctions when you want me in your bed.”

  “Please. It’s not the right time for this.”

  “I give you money, my loyalty, my pussy, but I can’t be part of it, not a real part. It’s unfair.”

  He leaned toward her. She was barely five feet tall, and he more than six. “It’s impossible. To be part of a cause as important as this requires self-discipline and training. It’s designed so that everyone knows only a small part of what is happening; it’s a matter of security. Your parents would understand from their experience during the war.”

  Though she was independent, Paula was proud of her parents’ role in the Resistance, and he hoped to appeal to this. “That was different,” she said quickly. “The enemy was here and the whole damned world was fighting.”

  “Our enemies are as real here and they watch us. They put pressure on friends and relatives.”

  Paula shook her head. “Now, chéri. You are twisting the truth because you cannot accept a woman as your equal. I hate this in you—in all of you.”

  “It won’t be like this always.” Kristo wanted to appease her. “There will be a day when we will all step into the light together.”

  She crossed her arms and pouted. “Maybe I should throw my resources over to the opposition. At least the Communists provide equal opportunity for their women. I have a girlfriend in the Party; she leads her cell and writes editorials for L’umanité. She doesn’t have to produce a penis as an admission fee.”

  This was an entirely new tactic and Kristo was dumbfounded. “You can’t talk like that,” he said quietly. “If they hear you. . . .” He didn’t finish the sentence.

  “Nevertheless it’s true. Your side can’t hope to win by ignoring half the available resources. It’s inefficient. A woman can do anything a man does.”

  “We’re not ignoring anything.” He was flustered now. “All we’re doing is compartmentalizing operations.”

  “Semantics! I call it exclusion.”

  “Call it what you will, but that’s the way it is, and it is not intended to demean you. Can’t you accept this?”

  “Intellectualize or rationalize it all you want, Ramiz, but I feel demeaned, and my feelings are important to me.”

  It was time to end this. “You can’t attend the meeting.”

  Paula threw herself on the bed, then propped herself on her elbows. “What’s to stop me? I could just walk in. After all, it is my place.”

  Kristo approached the bed and tried to summon a stern voice. “I’m going to go into the meeting now; you’re going to stay here. That’s all I have to say. Do as you’re ordered.”

  “I’m accustomed to leading my own life and making my own decisions.”

  “If you value that life, you’ll stay here and keep quiet. The people in there have very strict rules.”

  She stared at him. “They would dare threaten me?”

  “They would do more than threaten,” Kristo warned her. “This is not a game.”

  “Just because I saw them? They would do that?” Her voice reflected fascination, not fear.

  “With no remorse. Remember, we are at war.”

  Paula threw her legs over the edge of the bed and sat up. “I’ve never thought about the possibility of being killed,” she said. There was an edge to her voice. “Have you ever thought about dying?”

  “No.” It was the truth. The war was more a philosophical contest in his own mind.

  “They would kill me for no other reason than that I saw them.” Her voice trailed off to a whisper.

  When Kristo emerged from the bedroom he was immediately confronted by the others. “Why is the girl here?” Lazer Kryeziu demanded.

  “It’s her place,” Kristo said. “It’s normal for her to be here. Alone we would raise suspicions.” First the woman had wanted to argue, now Kryeziu, and he was in no mood for it.

  Kryeziu was in his late sixties, the eldest son of one of the most powerful tribal leaders in northeast Albania. He had left Albania before Mussolini invaded in 1939, had graduated from Sandhurst, fought as a British commando in the war and afterward entered private business. To the outside world he was a wealthy restaurateur with successful establishments in New York, London, Paris and Rome, but nearly all that he made went to the cause and to his dream of returning to his homeland and assuming the rightful leadership of his clan. Only this mattered.

  The man with Kryeziu was known to Kristo only by reputation, which was a considerable one. Kristo considered telling them what Paula had said to him, but restrained himself.

  “Zog is ill again,” Kryeziu announced. “The ulcers are bleeding.”

  “Prognosis?” the other man asked.

  “Who knows? He’s frail and there’s no fight left in him. He spends all his time on his memoirs; a man who wallows in his past has no interest in his future.”

  “What about Leka?” Kristo and Prince Leka were the same age, and though Kristo did not know the prince well, the few times they had met he had been impressed by his bearing.

  “He’s still a cub,” Kryeziu said. “He has a good record at Sandhurst, but it remains to be seen what he’s made of.”

  “I think he’ll do well,” Kristo offered.

  Kryeziu frowned. “What do you know? You’re still a cub yourself. When you have scars, you’ll be entitled to an opinion.”

  “I’m a soldier in the cause,” Kristo said defensively.

  “Soldiers take orders and keep their mouths shut,” the third man said. “For now we keep the crown prince out of it. Our sole objective is to cut our losses. The operation is destroyed and we have to start over.”

  “There’s nothing that can be salvaged?” Kryeziu asked. How could this be? They had been so careful this time.

  “Shehu is in a frenzy. There have been many arrests. He knows we got close this time,” the stranger said. “The pieces were in place.”

  “Another week,” Kryeziu said. “Ten days at the most. That’s all we needed.”

  “Next time will be different,” Kristo said confidently.

  “First we must surv
ive in order to have a next time,” the stranger reminded him.

  “You think Hoxha will move against us?” Kristo asked. “Here?”

  “Not Hoxha. This is Shehu’s kind of work. We have to assume that his retribution will have a long reach. We must disband and leave no loose ends. If we leave that bastard the tiniest opening, he’ll follow it all the way to our throats. Even to you, boy.” The stranger pulled up his shirt; his chest was crisscrossed with swollen, shiny scar tissue. “Shehu is a maniac. I was lucky.”

  Kristo stared. The stranger worked for Admiral Pinajot Pijaku, who had fled Albania and now coordinated loyalist operations against the Albanian regime from the Kosovo district of Yugoslavia. The stranger was called only the Major, and it was said that he had sworn one day to kill Shehu with his bare hands. The scars helped to explain why.

  “How would Shehu find us?” Kristo asked.

  “He has agents here, sympathizers among the French Communists and the Chinese. Their ambassador is close to Hoxha’s ambassador. In this sort of business geography and political borders are meaningless. Shehu’s people are like the tracking dogs raised by the mountain tribes. They need very little to work with.”

  The Major’s words rang in Kristo’s ears: sympathizers among the French Communists. Have you ever been close to dying? Paula had asked. “The girl,” Kristo said suddenly, and the rest was out before he could stop himself.

  Neither man reacted visibly to the information. It was the Major who finally spoke to Kryeziu. “Get him out of here. The network will be reactivated when it’s time; in the meanwhile, if you value your lives, don’t deviate from the plan.”

  Kryeziu stood up. “Let’s go,” he said to Kristo. “Now.”

  “What about Paula?”

  The Major had already moved toward her bedroom door, a knife in his hand.

  Kristo followed Kryeziu down the stairs. His legs were weak and he felt bile rising in his throat. Was this what it felt like to be at war? Birds were singing in leafless trees along the street and the air was soft. An old man urinated against a brick wall.

  8 THURSDAY, DECEMBER 1, 1960, 10:00 P.M.Moscow

  Someone was whimpering in a nearby flat and the couple across the hall was arguing over a pair of socks as bits of music wafted through loosely fitted doors; down below several dogs were yowling with the same tone of hopelessness as their owners. Roman Trubkin sat at a small table watching a sliver of lemon float in lazy circles in his tea and tried to block the sounds of real life and its petty miseries. He had lived high, and now low, and having seen bottom, he wanted to be back up where clawing hour by hour was unnecessary. In his years as a test pilot and short time as a cosmonaut trainee he had met a lot of people and made a lot of contacts; at the time it had seemed that they would always be there, but now he realized this had been an illusion.

  Lumbas had proved impossible to track, and the man’s records provided by Rocket Force Personnel had turned out to be fiction, which had necessitated another journey to the cosmodrome in the desert. He had not let on there was a problem but asked who had responsibility for security checks on Rocket Force personnel, and was told, as if he were a moron or had just arrived on the planet, that this duty fell to the KGB. How long had Lumbas been part of the R-7 project? They referred him to the bogus records. Did they have a photograph of the man? See the records, they said, but there was no photo in the folder; when he asked how this could happen, his answer was a bureaucratic shrug.

  An audience with General Engineer Korolev had been more fruitful. How had Lumbas come to the project? The stout, bullet-headed leader had the demeanor of a Red Army sergeant. “Sent to us,” he said.

  “You knew him previously?”

  The general frowned. “I just said he was sent.” Korolev had spent the better part of his years in the gulags for reasons known only to Stalin.

  “But I had the impression that all your people are handpicked.”

  Korolev laughed. “They are, but not by me. I take what’s sent.”

  “Then Lumbas was transferred.”

  “We went over this during your last visit,” Korolev said as he glanced at some papers on his desk, his attention invariably returning to his only interest in life. “Moscow sendeth and taketh away, all of which is beyond my control.”

  How was it that the chief of such an important project did not have the power to pick his own people? Was this by Khrushchev’s design? “Lumbas was competent?”

  The general mulled this over before answering, in part because his eyes had settled on a sheet of paper with a column of numbers written in red and green ink. “He had skills and a good mind, but his heart was never in the project. He did what was required, no more, no less.” Suddenly he reached into his desk and pulled out several stacks of three-by-five cards held by gray rubber bands, broke a stack apart, fanned the cards, found one, stared at it briefly, then sailed it over the desk to Trubkin. “Forever mixing names and faces. Somebody came up with the idea that I needed to be more personal, whatever that means. I’m supposed to look at these pictures before my meetings to help me to match names and faces.”

  Trubkin studied the face in the photo. It was round, almost babyish, with close-together eyes and a pouting mouth. “Did it work?”

  “Don’t know,” Korolev admitted. “Always forget I’ve got them.”

  When Trubkin got back to Moscow he had the photograph wired to all Soviet security agencies with a request for information on the individual in the photograph, the order going out over Khrushchev’s name. There was no response, but he told himself that it was only a matter of time. When the General Secretary asked for a progress report, Trubkin gave him an ambiguous answer and made a point of staying out of Khrushchev’s way until he had something substantial to tell him. The whole affair was beginning to make him nervous. He couldn’t bear the thought of another failure.

  9 SUNDAY, JANUARY 1, 1961, 12:05 A.M.Novosibirsk Region, Siberia

  The room was narrow, twenty meters long by six meters wide, with walls of flat-faced black logs and a low bark ceiling patched with pieces of stiff, shellacked canvas, now yellowed. The two narrow windows on each side were nailed tight; pages of ancient copies of Izvestia had been pasted over them to seal them against the winter winds, but they were poor insulation. Thirty-seven men were seated in a U pattern on plank benches; two more men sat on dried cedar stumps in front of the others at the open end of the U. Another man was bound, gagged and blindfolded in the middle of the bare floor. From time to time he rolled around trying to slip his bindings; whenever he got too far, two or three men dragged him back to the middle and kicked him several times in the stomach to keep him still. Mostly, however, the assembly ignored the man’s struggles; instead, they riveted their attention on the two men in front. This was a dangerous situation and all of them knew it.

  Several bottles of spirt made their way from man to man. The clear alcohol was 192 proof and they sipped prudently. Later the blood brotherhood of the lyudi—the people—would drink to celebrate the new year, but now they had business to transact that demanded clear heads: a life hung in the balance. They called themselves lyudi because they lived by their own laws, separate from normal Soviet peoples, and in Special Regime Camp No. 9 their own laws and customs pertained, not the nonsense of the apparatchiki. Lyudi to themselves, they were urki to others, the Soviet Union’s professional criminals and fiercely proud of their status, even of their captivity.

  Melko, their leader, was much the larger of the two men in front. He was six feet four inches tall, broad-shouldered, with curly brown hair and thick, well-muscled arms connected to broad hands that danced in front of him when he spoke. He had a high, flat forehead and pale blue eyes that seemed to deepen to sapphire when he was angry or perplexed. Normally Melko wore a thick vest of brown bear fur over his wide-striped prison shirt, but tonight he had stripped to the waist. Dozens of tattoos stretched from his neck down, front and back, including his arms all the way to his wide wrists. Many of the de
signs were intricate geometric patterns, but there were also ornate Rubenesque women with flowing hair and full, rounded breasts with prominent nipples.

  Though he was one of the brotherhood of criminals now, Melko had come to the lyudi from a legitimate past. He had been a graduate engineer from Leningrad; during the war he had been an officer in the tank corps, seriously wounded twice and decorated twice as a Hero of the Soviet Union. After the war he left the army and worked as an engineer in Moscow at a plant making special alloys for military use. But the work was unchallenging, and after his wartime experience he needed a stimulus in his life, not the boredom and whining of incompetent colleagues and harassment from the sort of Party bosses who flourished in the dirty factory. After a thorough analysis of possibilities, Melko decided to become a professional thief—not a petty thief but a great and famous thief, one who used a combination of intelligence, specialized information and exquisite skills in precise and demanding ways. It was an essential part of Melko’s character to want to be the best at whatever he did.

  Among Soviet thieves there is a pecking order from bottom to top: those who attack drunks, women, the elderly or handicapped; common armed robbers; murderers; pickpockets; bunco artists; and at the pinnacle safecrackers, whom the brotherhood called medvezbatniki or “bear killers.” To prepare for his debut, Melko began an exhaustive study of his chosen field. By the time he judged himself ready for his initial venture, his knowledge of safes and their locking mechanisms was unparalleled, so that when he began his new career, he was an immediate and consistent success. For eight years he averaged more than one major theft a month, stealing hundreds of thousand of rubles and personal valuables. His victims were always selected from the elite of Soviet society, not because he viewed himself as a modern Robin Hood but because the Soviet elite were the only people with anything worth stealing. Melko was an educated man with a normal upbringing; he knew right from wrong, but he did not view his thievery from Party bigshots as stealing per se; he took what he saw as his due, and always from those who could afford it. There was nothing chivalrous in this; these upper echelons of the Party and government were taking care of themselves, so why shouldn’t he do the same? What he stole he kept. Had Marx not written, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”? Melko’s need was intense.