The Domino Conspiracy

by Joseph Heywood

  66SUNDAY, MARCH 26, 1961, 7:25 P.M.Moscow

  Trubkin’s flat was in a dilapidated building in an industrial district in the city’s northwest suburbs. A factory across the street belched black smoke that rained particles and covered the area with black dust. Ezdovo and Melko made their way up a dark stairwell past a young man who was asleep on a landing; on the next level they stepped around a young couple so engrossed in their embrace that they hardly noticed the two strangers. The door to the flat was one of four on the fifth floor and marked with a police sign that forbade entry.

  “In my day such a sign would stop no one,” Melko scoffed as he picked the padlock with a small steel awl. “Of course, if the police have already been here we can be sure that anything of value is long gone.”

  As the lock popped open a shrill and elderly female voice assaulted them from behind. “You there! What do you think you’re doing?” She was short and fat, with white strawlike hair, a face covered with warts and a broom that she brandished like a cudgel. “Can’t you read? The police put up that sign.”

  “We can read, Baba,” Melko said pleasantly. “You can put away your weapon.”

  “I’ll do no such thing,” the woman said. “You think I don’t know what you are?”

  “Appearances can be deceiving,” Ezdovo said softly. He was beginning to lose his patience. “Leave us to our business, granny.”

  “You don’t frighten me,” the woman shot back. “I lived through the Germans, and Stalin too. There’s a militia station just up the street,” she added. “They know me by name down there. One call and there will be policemen all over this place.”

  Ezdovo waved her away. “Then call them, Baba. Perhaps we’ll have them haul you off to Lubyanka and tear out your interfering tongue.”

  The woman sucked in her breath, retreated and slammed her door.

  Trubkin’s one-room flat was surprisingly clean. There was an icon on the wall, a bureau with some socks and shirts in the drawers, a battered leather jacket on a hook on the wall, a pair of rubber boots piled in a corner and an empty refrigerator. “That’s the first thing the cops steal,” Melko said. A small cupboard held an assortment of dishes and teacups that didn’t match. Several knives had keen edges. Against a window was a small wooden desk with a piece of cardboard for a pad and a small lamp with a burned-out bulb. A double bed was unmade in the corner, the blankets wadded on one side. One of the desk drawers contained more than a hundred black-and-white snapshots of Trubkin in various uniforms; another held two new light bulbs, several medals with faded ribbons and a set of pilot wings.

  “Tin baubles,” Melko said, fingering the medals. “Not much to show for risking your life.”

  “Pay attention,” Ezdovo said. “He was working for Khrushchev, so he wouldn’t operate without having taken notes. Also he was a pilot, and they believe in records. Names, addresses—something—but the cache won’t jump out at us. We have to use our brains and think like him.” Somebody had killed Trubkin; did he suspect that it was coming? Probably not, but he would have been cautious and left a second record. This sort of business made everyone paranoid. Ezdovo tried to concentrate. What in the room was out of place? Or did everything fit too well? Let your mind be a camera; record everything, then analyze it. Overlook nothing. There were three clocks, all showing different times; he examined each of them, checking for scratch marks, but found none. The bed had one leg shorter than the other three. “Turn the bed over,” he told Melko, who only grinned and folded his arms.

  “Why? Look, we can tear the place apart or we can do it the easy way,” he said. “Remember, finding things that people don’t want found is my specialty.”

  Ezdovo sat on the edge of the bed and gestured with his hand. “Show me.”

  “First of all, this fellow may have been a hotshot pilot, but in more unsavory matters we can assume he was an amateur. Only a professional thief is clever enough to conceal something safely. An amateur thinks, Out of sight, out of mind, whereas a professional puts things in plain sight. The amateur sticks things in his shoes, or in folded socks in a drawer, behind a book, on a string down a drain pipe, or”—Melko sat down at the desk, took hold of the light bulb in the lamp and began to unscrew it—“in a burned-out light bulb.” The bottom twisted off easily, and when he tapped the bulb against his hand a small roll of paper slipped out.

  At that moment a militiaman burst into the flat, followed by three other uniformed men. The man’s face was flushed, his tunic unbuttoned. “What have we here? Two illiterates who can’t read a simple sign? Or is it a political protest?”

  “They’re the ones,” the old woman said as she pushed between the police. “I warned them, but they refused to listen and now they’ll pay! Now do you believe me?” she cackled at Melko.

  The sight of so many police at such close quarters put Melko on edge, but Ezdovo stepped forward.

  The militia leader looked surprised as he wiped his face with his sleeve. “This is a posted area and you two are violating an ordinance of the criminal code. There’s no admittance here without a pass issued by central headquarters.”

  Ezdovo smiled benignly. “You want to see our pass, is that it?”

  “I’ve already radioed to headquarters,” the man said smugly. “No passes have been issued.”

  “Haul them off,” the old woman cried. “Teach them proper respect for authority.”

  When Ezdovo reached into his coat pocket two of the militiamen suddenly produced revolvers and he held up his hands. Melko backed out of the line of fire waiting to see what would happen next. The door was the only way out and it was blocked, but his companion seemed relaxed.

  “Have the police taken to idly threatening citizens?” Ezdovo asked. “I only want to show you my pass.”

  “Easy,” the leader cautioned his men; then to Ezdovo, “All right, comrade. I would advise you to give great thought to what you do next.”

  Ezdovo flashed a moronic grin, reached into his pocket, extracted the leather case, held it out and let it fall open in front of the leader’s face.

  “Christ,” the man squawked as he took a step backward into one of his officers. “Please stay as long as you like. We had no intent of intruding, but how could we know? If you had called—no, what am I saying? You have the right to be here, of course.” He was nearly babbling. When one of his officers questioned what was happening, he backhanded the man and set off a chain reaction, knocking him against another man who stumbled and inadvertently grabbed the old woman, who began to shriek as the leader herded all of them into the hall and slammed the door, leaving Melko and Ezdovo alone. “It’s the Red Badge!” they heard the militia leader shout at his people.

  Melko looked dumbfounded.

  “What was in the light bulb?” Ezdovo asked.

  Melko unclenched his fist and unfolded the piece of paper. “A telephone number. No name.”

  They searched Trubkin’s flat further, but found nothing else. On their way out the old woman peeked at them from her door but slammed it when Melko dangled his Red Badge in her direction. When they reached the street he was almost giddy. This Red Badge was the ultimate license.

  “You’re impressed with the power of the badge?” Ezdovo asked.

  “They nearly clawed each other’s eyes out getting away from us.”

  “The badge confers absolute authority. No one may refuse you anything.”

  “And all I have to do is show it?”

  “That’s all.”

  “Only a Russian could conceive of such a thing.”

  Or need to, Ezdovo thought.

  67MONDAY, MARCH 27, 1961, 11:45 A.M.Pacific Trail, California

  The cottage was small and tidy, with stucco walls painted blue, green shutters, a blue-tiled roof and a white wooden veranda on three sides. There were clusters of browned palms and cacti with small purple flowers along a narrow gravel two-track that led in from the road. Circling the house at a distance Venema saw a wooden walk built through a V in the
dunes. Beyond the mounds of white sand he could hear the surf; seabirds called softly to one another but he couldn’t see them.

  Carla Foli Calvin had not been easy to find. A source at Boston College said she had been an acquaintance of Frash. Married and divorced five times, she had moved frequently since leaving Boston. Her latest IRS statement showed her to be a composer-in-residence at San Diego State, but the dean of faculty affairs told Venema that she had resigned months before and left only this address. A dented red Cadillac convertible was parked near the house and a broken surfboard stuck in the sand like a grave marker. When he got no response to the doorbell he peeked through the windows and saw that the house was sparsely furnished.

  At the end of the wooden walk there was a cove of translucent green water whose mouth was blocked with a steel-mesh shark net attached to pylons anchored by cement in the dunes. At the water’s edge was a white canvas cabana. He approached cautiously and saw that someone was sitting in the shadows, Venema watched for a while but saw no movement. In the distance incoming waves broke against the top of the shark net, spewing a fine froth into a soft wind. He took off his shoes and socks and rolled up his trousers. “Mrs. Calvin?” He repeated the name several times as he approached the shadow like a supplicant, shoes in hand, the hot sand cooking his feet.

  “What is it?” a voice asked in a low monotone.

  Not who, but what? “Carla Foli Calvin?”

  An oversized black-and-white silk scarf was draped loosely around her body, another scarf covered her head, and she wore huge sunglasses with mirror lenses. “A previous life,” she said. “Foli before, Foli after, Stieglitz, Corhartly, White, Lantana and Calvin, the latest incarnation.”

  Venema had never heard a voice so bereft of emotion. Her whole presence was eerie—a dark figure hidden in the shade. Foli before, Foli after; what the hell did that mean? “I just flew in from the East Coast.” She drew back at this. Damaged goods, he told himself. After a lifetime with such people he had an instinct about how to handle them. At least before Frash. But then Frash was still a question mark, at least technically. In this instance the symptoms were apparent.

  “We die a little each day,” she said, “or so I’ve heard, but you can’t put much stock in the news.”

  “I want to talk to you about Albert Frash.”

  She cringed at the name. “No V’s today,” she said, scanning the sky. “Consider it an omen.”

  The letter V? “Of what?”

  “To be a man is enough,” she droned. “V’s can fly away,” she added. “Without tickets or reservations. The rest of us are less fortunate.”

  “I see,” Venema said in an effort to be both ambiguous and supportive. She was in her own world. He knew he would have to be careful not to push her into even darker recesses, but there was no doubt she had reacted to Frash’s name. He guessed the V’s referred to geese or seagulls. What was she trying to say?

  “What are you?” she suddenly asked, her eyes locking into his.

  Again, not who, but what, an abnormal point of reference. “You mean age, religion, political leanings, profession?”

  “It’s not important what I mean,” she answered. “The question focuses on you.”

  He held out his ID, but she didn’t seem to notice. “I’m looking for information about Albert Frash, a.k.a. Ali Frascetti.”

  This time her recoil was accompanied by a long, distinct hiss. “Refer all calls,” she said. “Nobody home. There may be a rip in the shark net,” she added. “I knew it wouldn’t hold forever. There’s safety only in movement. You must dance out of harm’s way constantly.”

  “This will require only a few minutes,” Venema said, trying to reassure her.

  “The dead should stay where we put them,” she said. “Coming back is extremely unsanitary. And it’s rude after flowers and all the costs.”

  “You knew him in Boston,” he said, hoping to prompt her.

  “The girls in the dormer slept with their nipples pointed north,” Carla Foli Calvin said. “Multiply times two to get the sum. For a woman there’s something soothing about so many bare breasts. Safety among your own kind is one possibility, but there are other schools of thought. I turned to music after that. Sound affords the best peace of mind. Did I already tell you that?” she asked as she got up and shed her black scarf, which floated like a parachute to reveal a nude chalk-white body, spectacular in its lines and angles. She loomed like an Amazon above the squatting Venema.

  “Count my V’s,” she ordered, her brown eyes staring down at him.

  “Maybe I should come back another time,” he said, but suddenly there was a nickel-plated, snub-nosed pistol barrel against his head. It felt icy cold.

  “Start at the bottom,” she said. “Marksmanship is not an issue at this range.”

  Venema stared at her feet. After a while he saw that where her toes joined there was a sort of V made by her flesh. “Eight on the bottom,” he reported, and thought, What the hell. I’ve played even crazier games with other nut cases.

  “Excellent,” she said. “An auspicious debut,” she added in a tone he took to be encouragement. “I can circle my wagon if memory fails you.”

  She paraded slowly around him; small grains of sand sparkled where sweat adhered them to her skin. Now and then she stopped to strike an exaggerated pose, but she did not speak.

  “Twenty-seven,” Venema announced after a while.

  “Are you certain?”

  “You want me to count again?”

  “Not that,” she snapped. “About Ali. I don’t want him coming back from the dead. He was the first to count twenty-seven,” she added.

  “He’s not dead.”

  She tapped her cheekbone with the pistol barrel. “He’s in here. For me. Death has only partly to do with biology.”

  It struck him that her eyes didn’t track properly.

  “Glass,” she said, interpreting his silence. “Except for size they’re identical to the marbles children play with. They turn cold in northern climates and create unbearable headaches. This forces me to be a creature of the sun.”

  She waded ankle-deep into the ocean and pivoted to face him. “One should never swim beyond the barrier,” she told him. “Sharks are as indiscriminate as they are omnivorous, but their god is efficiency, not malice. They view the world as food to support them. It’s an egocentric existence, don’t you think?”

  Looney Tunes, her connections askew, yet even among the balmiest there was logic. “Frash is a shark?”

  She grinned. “Less noble. We were political then, but the movement rejected him, so he took me instead. Too much a loner, a nontalker, adjudged unreliable, but very good in bed, especially for a first lover. I saw him as heroic, the lone figure against the world and fearless in the face of rejection. I couldn’t have taken it, but he seemed to thrive.”

  “What sort of political movement?”

  “Free the Eagles,” she said. “A sham, but I was taken in on all counts. I admit to naïveté, but I was barely eighteen. At first I thought we were trying to save the habitat of eagles in the Balkans, but I was wrong. He raised money to buy weapons for Albania, fifty thousand dollars at one point, but the movement refused it when he tried to give it to them. They said he was too unstable.”

  “Was he?”

  “It was never a healthy relationship. I gave, he took, and the longer it went on the more miserable I was, but when misery is all you have, you think of it as normal. I finally told him, No more. He never said a word, just grabbed me and pushed his thumbs into my eyes. I could feel his fingers in my brain, and then I was in the hospital with my parents, police, everybody wanting to know what had happened. He came to see me in the middle of the night and said if I told anybody the truth he’d kill me. I knew he meant it.”

  She related all this without emotion. Venema was nauseated. “So you left Boston?”

  “Back to Indiana and good old Goshen College, got a degree in music, which created a stir because of
my eyes, but I made a career out of that and husbands. You don’t need eyes for music or fornication. Where is he now?”

  “Out of the country,” Venema answered evasively. “A long way from here.”

  “Too close,” she muttered. “Much too close.”

  She strode back to the cabana, dropped gracefully to her knees and began pawing for her scarves. He retrieved them for her and touched her arm gently. “He’s no threat to you,” he said.

  “Leave your card,” she said. “There can be no further discussion until science confirms the finality of death.”

  Venema left the card beside her right foot. “You can reach me night or day.”

  “Sharks have the same power,” she said. “I told the police nothing. Make sure he knows that. Principles are meaningless when survival is at issue. An altered state is still a state.”

  When Venema left she was sitting on the sand, her legs stretched stiffly in front of her, her expressionless face lifted to the sun. By the time he reached his car he had made several decisions. First, it was imperative, for his reputation as much as for the agency’s security, that the use of his vetting instruments be suspended. If someone like Frash could slip through the net, the mesh was much too coarse. Second, the doctor in Montana had called Frash a paranoid schizophrenic, but based on what he had heard from Carla Foli he suspected that the man was a sociopath and would do whatever pleased or moved him without remorse. A value system would be in play, but it would be one understood only by Frash. Third, Arizona had to find Frash; a thwarted sociopath was a bomb, and it was virtually impossible to predict the behavior of such people. Fourth, even if the Company found Frash alive, Venema wanted nothing more to do with him. He was too dangerous to deal with, and if Arizona was smart he would see to it that Frash remained among the missing. He was a terrible mistake that neither of them could afford ever to have come to light.