The Domino Conspiracy

by Joseph Heywood

  The other woman’s voice was shrill. “A whore, is it? You of all women would know about such things, you who ran with a criminal!”

  Annochka’s voice calmed. “I’m now a properly married woman with children, my dear Helen, while you are still what you always were.”

  “Don’t call me Helen!”

  “I give my husband children. What do you give yours?”

  “Bitch,” the woman hissed as her stepdaughter trotted upstairs.

  Melko ducked into a room and saw Annochka walk past. She had a triumphant smile on her face, which had matured; she was not as gaunt as when he had last seen her. After a few minutes, when he was certain nobody would follow her he went to her suite, let himself in quietly, latched the door behind him, sat in a chair just inside the doorway to the bedroom and watched her, his heart pounding. “You still sleep like a little girl,” he called softly.

  Annochka rolled over and sat up, her eyes wide. “You?”

  “Melko.”

  “You’re dead.” She pointed her finger at him. “Father said they executed you.”

  “As you can see, I am alive and well. Your father lied.”

  Her mouth was open, her fists clenched. “No!”

  “But I’ve asked for nothing,” he said. “Do you answer no to nothing?”

  “They wanted to try me, to send me to the gulag, but my father stopped them.”

  “Bullshit,” he said. “Dependents of the privileged don’t suffer such treatment. Your father simply wanted to reassert his control—for his benefit, not yours.”

  “I was younger then,” she snapped. “And foolish.”

  “Ah,” he said. “I see. Melko was a stupid mistake of youth and now you are ashamed of him. Is that it?”

  Their eyes locked. “They nearly sent me to the camps,” she said. “Can’t you understand?”

  “I told you that you were never in such danger, and in any event the camps aren’t so difficult. I enjoyed their hospitality for six years.”

  “You broke out?”

  “In a sense.” He smiled. “And as good as ever.”

  “How?”

  “Why is more important than how. As always, it pays to have powerful friends.”

  “You? You’re nothing.”

  “Even the urki can have influence. That’s the wonder of our society. One day you’re on the bottom and the next day on top. Like magic.”

  She drew back against the pillows and balled her legs under her. “I’m married now. I have children and responsibilities.”

  “I heard.”

  “Things have changed. I have a husband. He’s just been promoted to lieutenant colonel in the KGB. Do you know what that means?”

  Melko understood: lieutenant colonel was the critical rank to attain in a man’s career with the KGB. The promotion moved him into the inner sanctum for the genuine perquisites of power. “So you are satisfied with your life? A husband with promise, children, the continuation of power. Your father must be pleased.”

  “My father is my father. I’m older now. I understand things better.”

  “For me as well, Annochka. The camps afford survivors an excellent education. No other institution provides such insight, not even the Kremlin.”

  There was fear in her eyes. “You’re a criminal.”

  Melko smiled. “Who is to say who is a criminal in our country? Stalin wasn’t and now he is. You see how it works? Definitions are ambiguous. I was the best and you helped me to be even better. Do you help your husband with the same ardor?”

  “I embrace my duty,” she said tentatively.

  Melko nodded his understanding and crossed his arms. “A wife should understand her duty, Annochka. Even a thief’s woman has duties.”

  “Go away,” she said. “My stepmother will be up here at any moment. She always looks in on me when I nap.”

  “Yes, I heard you talking to your stepmother. It’s clear that you have great affection for each other.”

  “Fool!”

  “One might argue that I am worse than a fool for getting mixed up with you,” he said, “but all that’s behind us. My only concern now is the future.”

  “I thought the lyudi lived solely for the present.”

  Melko stood up and took a step toward her. “The importance of the present is assumed.”

  She drew back against the headboard, but he stepped back to the doorway. “What do you want?” she demanded.

  “Only a look at you.” He pivoted into the parlor and heard the springs of the bed as she got up.

  “That’s all?” she asked, following him into the other room. “To look? What kind of shit is this? What are you up to?”

  “What more can there be? You have your duties, and as a lieutenant colonel’s wife you should mind your paranoia.”

  “Just like that? You disappear all these years, then come back to look? For only ten minutes!”

  Melko checked his watch. “More like five, which has been more than adequate.”

  She rushed past him and blocked the door. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means I made a mistake,” he said, and gave her an exaggerated bow. “I hope the lieutenant colonel’s wife will forgive me.”

  She was shaking her head violently. “No.”

  He reached for the doorknob, but she pushed his hand away, threw her arms around his neck and kissed him hard, her mouth open, tongue extended and demanding. “Tell me what you want,” she whispered. She was shaking as she twisted one of her arms behind her back and fumbled with the mother-of-pearl buttons that stretched the length of her dress, but she was too excited to manage them and in frustration ripped the dress downward and let it fall. “I thought you were dead,” she whispered as she embraced him again and pushed her hips against him.

  Melko slid his hand against the silk fabric between her legs and felt the wet.

  “The bed,” she said, arching her back, her eyes closed, but he pushed her away and opened the door. Her eyes popped open. “What?” Then, understanding, she grabbed at him. “No!”

  “Why did you marry into the KGB?” he asked. “Your father’s idea?”

  “Survival,” she said as she desperately tried to pull him back.

  He stared at her with hard eyes. “Think about your duties, Annochka. Think very hard about them. I’ll be back, but you must decide if you’re willing to lose all that you think you have.” He opened the door, looked into the hallway to make sure it was clear, then stepped out of the room.

  She stared at him, disbelieving. “What about me?”

  “That’s exactly what I want you to think about,” Melko said.

  56 MONDAY, MARCH 20, 1961, 5:18 P.M.Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia

  Valentine had taken a cab to the railway station in Belgrade, caught the first available train to Sarajevo, changed to Titograd, and there switched again, this time to Dubrovnik on the Dalmatian coast of the Adriatic. The trains stopped frequently and the passengers made such a din that he couldn’t relax. At one point the train sat on a siding for nine hours. In Dubrovnik he caught a cab to the isthmus of Lapad and got out on a small street lined with houses with orange-tiled roofs and whitewashed limestone walls. When the cab was gone he backtracked to a street that paralleled Sumartin Bay and checked into a small hotel called the Blue Madonna.

  Sylvia was in the lobby when he arrived; he ignored her as he checked in, then went up to his room and left the door open a crack. She slid in five minutes later, eyes weary, hair plastered down, looking drained.

  “Harry’s dead,” she said. “Peresic too, both of them asphyxiated in his car. Their bodies were discovered at the airport two days ago. The official story is that he was giving her a lift and that the deaths were an accident. Unofficially the embassy is saying it was a double suicide. Harry’s married, his wife wouldn’t divorce him, and he was due for a transfer. He couldn’t take his lover with him, so they killed themselves rather than be separated.”

  “Horseshit. Do they know the truth?�
��

  “Part of it. They know it was neither accident nor suicide but beyond that they’re lost. I think Harry was handling this alone because it had to be done so fast.”

  “Jesus,” Valentine said.

  He looked miserable and she was sure he was having the same thoughts. “It’s not our fault. These things happen. Nature of our business,” this as much for herself as for him.

  For a moment she thought there were tears in his eyes, but they never fell. “Could it have been an accident?” he asked.

  She shook her head and sat down in a canvas-back chair. “You and I know what was going on; the embassy doesn’t. Somebody took them, worked them over, dumped the bodies at the airport, and tried to make it look like a suicide.”

  “Where are the bodies now?”

  “The Yugos have them; they refuse to release Harry’s until their investigation has been completed.”

  “Autopsies?”

  “They’re not saying.”

  “How do you know they were worked over?”

  “Harry’s secretary and one of the embassy Marines identified the body.”

  “You talked to them?”

  “Briefly. The secretary saw one of Harry’s wrists; she said the hand was angled in an odd way, the skin discolored. Lividity, she said, a sign he had been tied up. The sergeant said he got a good look at both bodies before the Yugos came in and sent him packing. He said the marks on the wrists showed that they had been tied up with wire, not rope, and that there were a lot of cigarette burns on Peresic’s stomach. Brutal, he called it. Said he’d seen similar stuff in Korea; he was a POW for fourteen months.”

  “That makes him more credible than most. Your opinion of the secretary?”

  “Definitely not secretarial. She’s one of us, I’d guess, maybe even Harry’s number two.”

  “Is the embassy pressing the Yugos for the body?”

  “More like going through the motions. Harry was CIA, so they’re being circumspect. If Harry died in the line of duty they’ll leave that determination to the investigating officer.”

  “He’s here?”

  “Got here fast and he’s very uptight.”

  “Did he know about us?”

  “I told him I was here on a special assignment outside Harry’s purview. He told me to seek guidance through my chain of command. No, I didn’t contact Arizona,” she added quickly, anticipating Valentine’s next question.

  “Did the officer ask about me?”

  She shook her head. “I let him believe I’m alone.”

  “Where does that leave us?”

  “Given the circumstances, I think that Arizona would have told the investigator we were here, if for no other reason than to avoid crossing wires during the investigation.”

  “Maybe there wasn’t time.”

  “You don’t believe that,” she said, her voice tired.

  “No. I assume Arizona knows Harry’s dead and that he chose not to reveal our presence. Which means we’re further into the black than we thought, and that makes my skin crawl.” Then, “The deaths weren’t reported in the Yugoslavian newspapers?”

  “Nothing. The Yugos are holding back, either because they don’t want any interference with their investigation—”

  Valentine interrupted. “Or because they already know what happened.”

  “We have to assume that Peresic’s husband was involved and that the Yugos know about us.

  “So how do we get them off our backs?”

  “We don’t,” she said. “First thing tomorrow we get the hell out of the country.”

  In the middle of the night he heard water running. “You all right?” he asked through the door.

  “No,” she said softly, “but thanks for asking.”

  “You want company?”

  “You think that would make me feel better?”

  “It would me,” he said.

  “I’m not sleeping with you.”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  “Good.” He heard her slosh water over the side of the tub.

  “But I thought about it,” he added.

  “You’re hopeless,” she said.

  He suspected that she was right.

  57 TUESDAY, MARCH 21, 1961, 8:40 A.M.Segue River, Montana

  The investigation was like a board game that kept sending Venema back to the starting line. He had spent considerable time following leads on a man named R. R. Jeruby, who had been listed by Frash as a personal reference from something called Brampton Academy, but the man had died in a one-car accident in 1957 in northern Maine. The Massachusetts State Board of Education provided a short list of faculty names, which was all they had; Brampton had closed in 1950 and the state building containing most of its records and those of the state’s other private institutions had been destroyed in a fire classified as probable arson. The school itself was gone as well; it had become a thirty-six-hole golf course and retreat for the faculty of Boston College. The list of former faculty members led nowhere; the nine men on the list had all died in automobile accidents between 1957 and 1959, which was counter to all actuarial probabilities, and put him on edge. In one sense it was an impressive set of findings, but it led nowhere. What he needed was a live body to tell him about Albert Frash.

  The break came when he discovered that the village near the old Brampton site had once had its own newspaper for a three-year period in the late forties. The former publisher-editor now lived in Champlain, New York, where he ran a French-English weekly that listed boats for sale. The man turned out to be the anal-retentive type, with a full file of every issue of the defunct newspaper, each of which carried a weekly but scanty roundup from the school. From these Venema gleaned a list of names which the IRS and Social Security then processed for the Company; all but one of the names were in the deceased file, but one was all he needed.

  Now Venema was standing on a granite outcropping watching an old man fish in the middle of a gray river while snow cascaded from dark clouds rolling in from British Columbia. The man wore a battered green crusher over a black stocking cap, a black mackinaw and green waders. Venema watched him rollcast a red streamer into an eddy along a snow-covered bank, then methodically strip away line on the retrieve.

  By the time he got down to the riverbank, the old man had crawled ashore and pulled his waders down to his waist, leaving the suspenders flopping while steam rolled off him. “You’re not much on wood lore,” the old man called out. He had dazzling white hair. “Heard you comin’ a half mile off. Indians used sound as an early warning system, except against each other, which is ironic. Could hear just about anything except each other.” The man grinned.

  “Dr. Frederick Missias?”

  “Just plain Fred nowadays,” the man said as he wiped sweat off his face with a blue bandanna. “Title’s retired.” Fish flopped in a hickory creel at his side.

  “I’m trying to find out something about a former student of yours,” Venema said, flashing the credentials of an Office of Special Investigations agent. The CIA often used OSI cover for domestic investigations.

  Missias sat down, kicked off his patched green waders, peeled off two pairs of gray wool socks and studied his toes, “Goddamned water’s cold as Kelvin till July and then the trout stop biting. You want trout you gotta pay the price,” he said. “This a joke or a screwup?”

  “No joke,” Venema said. “It’s a federal security check, deep but routine, part of the drill. Walk, talk and verify.”

  “You’ve come a long way for a drill.” This part of the river was a good six miles from the nearest macadam.

  “Routine doesn’t mean unimportant. Vetting is the heart of security. You’re not the easiest man to find.”

  “Didn’t stop you.” Missias had good-natured eyes and a half-smile that always seemed on the verge of spreading.

  “My job.”

  “Good at it, are you?”

  “Found you.”

  Missias chuckled. “Important for a man to know he’s
good at his job. Work is culture’s glue; it gives man his identity. Then one day you hit the magic birthday and it’s revoked. Now I fish. They can’t take that away. Not that I’d go back anyhow,” he added. Missias seemed mildly bitter but his tone made it seem a joke.

  “Can I ask you a few questions about R. R. Jeruby?”

  “You want coffee? My place is a short hike upriver.”

  It was also uphill. Venema followed the old man along a narrow track to a log cabin built on a bluff fifteen meters above a bend in the river. “Belonged to my wife’s grandfather, but she’s dead and him too. We had no kids and now there’s just me, which is how I like it. More time to think, though mostly I think about fat rainbows.”

  Missias made coffee in a battered pot on a wood stove. On one wall of the room there were several bamboo fly rods and a lethal-looking high-powered rifle with a scope. “Varmints,” Missias said, reading Venema’s eyes. “Lots of beauty out here, but where there’s beauty there’s usually ugliness too. Fact of life, no matter where you are or how you cut it.”

  “About Jeruby?” Venema wanted his questions answered and to get on with his work. “You were together at Brampton?”

  “Yep.”

  A decision needed. The focus of his investigation was Frash. Jeruby was only a reference and Brampton Academy was not part of Frash’s background. But Jeruby was dead and there was no way to tell what his connection was to Frash. When in doubt, go direct. “You ever hear of an Albert Frash?”

  Missias gave him a hard look and took a long time before answering. “I remember him, if that’s your question.”

  “Good student?”

  “Wouldn’t know.”

  Venema didn’t understand. “But you were headmaster.”

  Missias grinned. “What’s this nonsense about being headmaster?” “Brampton Academy.”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  It had been a hard assignment; everything about Albert Frash seemed to float just out of reach in a mist. You could sense the outline of a picture but there were no details except the easy ones that seemed to corroborate Frash’s background. Yet Venema had a strong feeling that he was seeing only what he was supposed to see, that everything had somehow been masterfully arranged for his benefit. What didn’t jibe was that Brampton Academy—if the small-town editor could be believed—was some kind of junior West Point for brats in custom-made khakis. Sorry little bastards, the man had said. Missias was described in newspaper accounts as the school’s headmaster; IRS and Social Security records showed that he had been employed for six years by the Boston-based Brampton Foundation, which had been founded in 1934 by an industrialist of the same name. A retired official of the state department of education had described Brampton as an experimental program but knew nothing more about it. Venema had traced Social Security checks to Missias at his postal box in Segue River and learned that the man picked up his mail only once a month. That left him no choice but to hike out to the cabin through crusted, ankle-deep snow. “Read it in the newspaper; we located you through Social Security.”