The Domino Conspiracy

by Joseph Heywood

  Frash saw people near the fires and heard female voices, loud and contentious. The language was Romany, which he had often heard in Boston; an argument was under way. He squatted in the high grass and made sure he was alone. So far Kenya had proven trustworthy but with Gypsies you had to be alert at all times. She had assured him she could get him across the border if he took her with him. “Why should I take you?” he had asked.

  Her eyes flashed as her hand closed on his neck. “I like taking care of you,” she said with a little squeeze.

  The discussion in the Gypsy camp was animated and continued for nearly an hour. Eventually Kenya returned, fumbling to light a cigarette. When the match illuminated her face he saw that she was anxious. “There are several wagons,” she said, pointing back at the camp. “We get into the one on the far right. Get in, sit down and keep still. No talking. When we leave here, follow me and keep your eyes down. Watch the backs of my legs and look at no one, understand?”

  He tried to embrace her, but she pulled away roughly and struck his chest with a fist. “This is no game, gadjo!” she hissed.

  Frash followed closely behind her as she led him through the field. Several horses in rope hobbles nickered softly as they passed. When they reached the wagon, she swung open the bottom half of a Dutch door, crawled up a small ladder and disappeared inside. “Hurry,” she said. Frash started in behind her, glanced back and saw a man in a green tunic glowering at him. The man had long hair, a heavy mustache and an eye that seemed to be all white.

  “Shit,” Kenya said as she reached out, pulled him inside and slammed the door. “Fool!” she cursed as she began pounding him. Her voice was angry and desperate. “Idiot,” she said over and over.

  The wagon lurched awkwardly throughout the night. Several times Frash thought it would topple onto its side, but each time it righted itself and continued on. He sat in the darkness, bracing himself. “This is crazy,” he told Kenya at one point. She answered by pressing a finger to his lips. When Ali tried to put his hand under her blouse she pushed him away. “Later,” she said. “If we live.”

  When the light began to seep through the cracks in the shuttered windows, the wagon slowed on a steep incline. Kenya crawled past him and tried the door, but it wouldn’t budge. She moved back toward a small window but the wagon lurched suddenly and knocked her down.

  “What?” Frash asked, crawling toward her.

  “Locked in,” she said. The wagon seemed to be speeding up, the ground leveling.

  Frash tried the rear door with the same result. “Kick it out,” Kenya said. She sounded frantic.

  It took several blows but the wood around the latch finally gave way and the upper door popped open. Kenya climbed over, stood on the small ladder and leaped, rolling to her left. Frash followed. “Quick,” she urged as he hit the ground. They crawled into the trees, then got to their feet and ran. He heard the wagon still moving and the horses snorting. Moving through the pines like a deer, Kenya led him down a rocky slope to a trail. They ran for a long time. By the time they finally stopped, they were soaked with sweat and dew, their chests heaving from exertion and altitude.

  Frash unbuttoned his shirt to let air circulate. “What the hell’s going on?”

  “You saw his face.”

  “Meaning?”

  “They would have killed us.”

  “Seems extreme.” He was more interested than anxious.

  “They’re a crossover clan. They carry people across, but gadji may not see their faces. For security.”

  “Which explains the unscheduled exit.”

  “Better than the alternative,” she said grimly.

  When they regained their breath, Kenya led him along a narrow canyon with a silver creek far below. A flock of white birds glided below them and the rising sun cast a yellowish glow on the snow-covered peaks all around them.

  “Are we in Austria?” Frash asked from behind her. She was moving at a steady pace.

  “We were almost at the border when we started last night.”

  “Then let’s rest here.” Kennedy was close now; he could feel his presence.

  “Better keep going.”

  “There’s always time for life’s sweetest diversion.”

  She cocked her head and studied him. “Not here,” she said. “Patience is a virtue.”

  “Now and here,” he repeated. His voice froze her in place.

  They were on the lip of a nearly vertical rock wall. When she looked down she instinctively pulled away. “Down the trail. There will be better places farther on.” She didn’t care if it sounded like pleading; this was too dangerous.

  “Here,” he insisted.

  She undid the red scarf from her waist and dropped it. The white silk blouse and lavender skirt followed, forming a pool of cloth at her feet. “You always have to have everything your own way, don’t you, gadjo?”

  Ali smiled and lay down on his back. The earth felt cool and moist. She lowered herself onto him, but made love tentatively. “Don’t hold back,” he growled. Their bodies quickened.

  When she threw her head back and arched her spine, Ali grabbed her right arm just above the elbow and pulled it down and to his left as he simultaneously drove his right leg up and vaulted her over his head. She fell silently, turning end over end and ricocheted off two rock outcroppings before crashing into a grove of aspens.

  Albert wanted to bury her clothes, but Ali wouldn’t allow it. “We have to hurry,” he reminded his brother.

  149SATURDAY, MAY 6, 1961, 8:50 P.M.Moscow

  Marshal Malinovsky’s wife shopped every other Saturday night at Yeliseyev’s on Gorky Street. Yeliseyev had once run a popular Moscow restaurant, but he had disappeared in the wake of the Revolution; now the former restaurant was a food shop officially known as Gastronom No. 1, but such was the former proprietor’s reputation that his name endured. When he could, Malinovsky accompanied his wife, in part to restrain her spending, but also because it was good for other privileged people to see that the minister of defense took his domestic duties seriously. Left to her own devices, she would shop every day among the treasures of Yeliseyev’s.

  While his wife stood in line for English biscuits, sweet spongy crumpets and jellied fruits, Malinovsky moved on to find Colonel General Gubin.

  Yeliseyev’s was always crowded at night when privileged clientele could use darkness and plain packaging to mask its greed. One needed rank to have access here; the shelves were packed with goods from throughout the world and resold at sums only the elite could pay, but they were cheap compared with Western prices. People here even looked different. The women wore foreign dresses and high-heeled shoes. The men’s haircuts were always fresh and their suits fit. Colognes and perfumes permeated the air. The ceilings and walls were covered with off-white plaster and ornate designs in bas-relief, everything gaudily accented in gold leaf; light beamed down from three chandeliers resembling fiery clusters of grapes with golden stems. Here, more than anywhere else in Russia, Malinovsky sensed what an aristocrat’s life had been like during czarist times. As a peasant’s son he had dreamed of such luxury, but he had never in his wildest dreams imagined that one day he would be entitled to such privileges.

  It was an appropriate place to meet Gubin. Legend had it that Rasputin had sometimes used the room at the back of Yeliseyev’s to deflower young nuns taken from the city’s numerous convents. His henchmen brought the little sisters here and tied them to his bed. Rasputin labored all night on his victims, then threw them naked into the street in the morning. Rasputin, the outsider, had gained control over Czar Nicholas II. In the end there was only one way to stop him. Some St. Petersburg noblemen had poisoned the Antichrist, then shot and castrated him, and thrown his body into a hole cut in the ice of the Neva River. Which was a reminder that difficult men were not easy to kill; Malinovsky knew that the removal of Nikita Sergeievich would be no less difficult.

  Gubin was hovering near the meat counter; he had selected two large lamb chops, wh
ich an elderly clerk was wrapping in brown paper. Malinovsky knew immediately what his friend was up to. Andrei Semenovich was no longer married. His wife had been an unpleasant actress named Angelique, who got fat soon after their marriage. Gubin was a handsome and vain man; going out in public with a fat woman was impossible for him to accept, so he had divorced her (rumor said with her father’s assistance), and now moved from girlfriend to girlfriend. Judging by the lamb chops, he was on his way to another rendezvous.

  “Dinner for two?”

  Gubin shrugged. “She adores lamb.”

  “Perevertkin is dead,” Malinovsky whispered.

  “We were lucky.” The general had already heard the news from his own sources.

  “Pessimist,” the defense minister said. “Luck is a natural force. It was supposed to look like an accident.”

  Gubin studied Malinovsky’s bulldog face. It had been an accident, but not precisely what had been planned. The explosion was supposed to take place after the SAM test, but Perevertkin had somehow botched it and paid with his own life. They had designed everything to point toward Babadzhanyan; instead it had ended up pointing to Perevertkin, which might well bring the trail back to Moscow.

  “It’s just as well,” Malinovsky went on. “He was weak. Eventually we would have been forced to do to him what he did to himself; he saved us the trouble.”

  Malinovsky was so matter-of-fact about the death of the deputy director of the KGB that Gubin wondered if Perevertkin’s death had not been the stupid accident it seemed. The thought made him light-headed. Had Malinovsky planned accidents for others as well? “All the KGB needs is a name. They can build palaces out of air.”

  “Not when one of their own is in question. Nobody dares look left or right inside the KGB. Khrushchev installed Shelepin as a way to return control of it to the Party. Shelepin is not one of them, and because he’s an outsider the rest of them must act in their own self-interest. It ends with Perevertkin because it’s in the KGB’s interest for it to end there.”

  The colonel general accepted his package of lamb chops and a receipt. To pay he had to take the paper to another line where a cashier was waiting with an abacus.

  The marshal’s wife bulled her way through the crowd to the two men and held up a bulging shopping bag. “It’s like a treasure hunt,” she said greedily. Twenty-five years younger than her husband, she was not quite forty, but was beginning to thicken in the waist; even so, she still had luxuriant golden hair and strong legs that tapered to delicate ankles.

  “Andrei Semenovich,” she greeted her husband’s colleague, who smiled and bowed. She rolled her eyes and elbowed her husband. “You’d better watch this one, Rodion. Such eyes are meant for the bedroom. No woman but me can resist them.”

  As the three of them merged with other shoppers carrying armloads of packages and inched their way forward in a queue that snaked its way toward a fat cashier with blue hair, Gubin watched Malinovsky’s passive face and wondered if the defense minister was feeling as secure as he appeared. If so, was his calm due to events yet to unfold? All of the plan’s contingencies up to now had been hastily constructed and sloppily executed. The Albanians were supposed to strike against Khrushchev, but so far had shown unexpected patience.

  When Gubin reached the cash register he put down the lamb chops and receipt, told the cashier he had changed his mind and hastily departed. The latest developments had dampened his desire for a night of lovemaking. Malinovsky watched him go and wondered if he was losing his nerve. Perhaps the exercise in damage control was not yet complete.

  150MONDAY, MAY 8, 1961, 10:30 A.M.Tösens, Austria

  Frash was tired, dirty and hungry, but he was determined to get out of the area before indulging his needs. It had been more than twenty-four hours since he had eliminated the Gypsy; without her he had become disoriented and found his way out of the mountains only by shadowing a group of hikers who had led him to a village, which he had skirted. Since yesterday he estimated that he had walked thirty kilometers. His feet were blistered and his leg muscles afire, but he made up his mind not to try for a ride until the situation felt right.

  When he saw the red Mercedes truck, he made his move and stepped onto the shoulder, waving his arms. The truck’s brakes squealed as it stopped, so that he could smell the rubber. The vehicle had Italian plates and an oversized bed, with its cargo secured under a black canvas.

  “Have a problem?” the driver asked in Italian, his eyes scanning the tree line behind Frash.

  The dialect was from somewhere in the south—Naples, Frash thought. “My girlfriend brought me up to her chalet, her husband showed up unexpectedly, and I had to make a run for it.”

  The Italian smiled and motioned for Frash to climb in. “At least you got away with your trousers,” he said with a laugh as he worked through the gears.

  “I would have gladly given up the trousers to keep what I carry in them,” Frash answered.

  The driver laughed again. “One time I got caught by a husband in Livorno. He was a stevedore with a nasty temper. He walked in just as his wife had her legs wrapped around me. We never heard him. First thing I knew, the bastard was bashing me in the head with a coal shovel. I was lucky he didn’t break me in half.” The man lifted a forelock of hair to show off a wicked scar. “I couldn’t work for three months.”

  “Did you swear off married women after that?”

  “Only my own,” the driver said.

  “Was the woman worth it?”

  The driver snapped his right hand several times. “What’s a little pain for the sweets of an eager woman?”

  Before entering the village of Tösens, Frash asked the Italian to pull over. “I have to piss.”

  “There’s a village just ahead. We can get some coffee and you can go there. Piss it out, put it back.”

  “Can’t wait,” Frash said.

  The Italian grunted, checked his rearview and side mirrors and steered the rig onto the shoulder of the road.

  They got out on opposite sides. While the Italian stood next to a set of wheels behind the cab, Frash circled around the long side and charged him, driving his head against the door. The man managed to get in a weak punch as they fell, but he was off balance and Ali was too strong; when they hit the pavement the driver was underneath. Ali grabbed the man by the hair and pounded his head against the pavement until he was unconscious.

  The body was heavy, but Frash managed to drag it through the woods to where they opened onto a steep boulder field. He shot the man once, emptied his pockets and rolled him into a crevice in the rocks below. “Too much pasta,” he complained to the corpse, then ran for the truck, released the parking brake, shifted into low gear and drove off.

  In Landeck he stopped and bought a newspaper, then turned east toward Vienna. Let them try to track him this time.

  151MONDAY, MAY 8, 1961, 3:00 P.M.Rome

  Valentine was tired of reading police reports. Publishing Frash’s photograph in the newspapers had sparked an endless stream of sightings, most of which the police rejected out of hand and only a few of which they followed up. The likelihood of such reports producing a capture seemed remote at best, but a courier delivered a batch of reports twice a day and he went through them diligently. Frash was reported as far south as Brindisi and as far north as Turin, where he reportedly asked a priest about a private viewing of the church’s famous shroud. One report had him trying to get work as a gondolier in Venice; in another a woman from Pisa had called to say that her sister had spent the night with a man answering Frash’s description. She wanted her sister arrested for adultery, assuring the authorities that she had a long history of such encounters and deserved to be punished.

  Sylvia found Valentine on the balcony. He had used stones as paperweights to hold down the stacks of reports. She dropped her purse and leaned against the wrought-iron railing. “I talked to Arizona.” Valentine perked up. “The Russians want another meeting, and this time they’ve picked the site.”

&
nbsp; “I hope it’s someplace where people wear clothes in public.”

  152MONDAY, MAY 8, 1961, 4:00 P.M.Innsbruck, Austria

  When Frash pulled into a truck stop west of Innsbruck, he checked the cargo in back and found eight ornate wooden coffins. The vehicle was registered to a Naples company and the load was assigned to a mortuary in Vienna. He was tempted to keep the truck, but the information in the paperwork was scant and, given the Italian propensity for paying little attention to clocks or calendars, there was a good possibility that the delivery was overdue. It was safer to dump the vehicle, he decided, but not until he had gotten some rest. There was no sleeping compartment attached to the cab, but the driver had built himself a nest between the two rows of coffins.

  It was dark when he awoke. The temperature had dropped and he stepped out into a light mist, climbed to a path above the parking area and started walking toward the faint glow of Innsbruck in the sky. A whiff of garlic reminded him of how long it had been since he had last eaten. He went into the first place he came to, ordered a dish of noodles, ate quickly and left. The town was empty; the skiers had cleared out and the summer gentry would not arrive until late June. He went to several bars, bought a beer in each, but left them untouched and saw little to interest him. The sight of the Gypsy woman spinning silently end over end played over and over in his mind, but Ali was satiated for the moment and Albert was determined to keep the upper hand now. Be smart, he cautioned himself. Khrushchev’s photograph was on the front page of a paper he bought after changing a small amount of money.

  At a tavern in the center of a village there was a crowded dance floor with a loud, slightly off-key rock ’n’ roll band with too much percussion. He slithered his way between women jitterbugging together and couples clinging to each other under the spell of the beat. The light was poor and the air heavy with the scent of sweating bodies and cheap perfume. A red-haired girl ran her hand across the front of his trousers and smiled in encouragement, but when he kept moving she glowered at him and raised her fist in anger. A local, he guessed, which was not what he had in mind, at least not yet.