The Domino Conspiracy
Page 71
Vision failing, Petrov saw the truth in the old general’s eyes. “The old cavalryman longs for the clatter of his troops on the march,” he said. “Old-fashioned honor. There’s no honor in a missile dropping silently from the sky if the cost is tradition. I understand, Comrade Marshal. Sad to say, I too live by old principles.”
“To do what must be done,” Malinovsky said, “what others fear to do. Not all men are capable of that.”
“Fetch me a glass,” Petrov said, his voice barely a whisper, blood now issuing from his mouth. “A glass of Borodino. I long for a taste of history.”
Malinovsky approached carefully and held the glass out to the man, who at close range seemed even smaller than from behind the desk.
Petrov took the glass with his left hand, which shook with small tremors; the hand with the revolver remained steady. When he began to laugh, Malinovsky took a step backward. “Nikita Sergeievich is right,” Petrov said. “The past has been wasted, comrade.”
“You’re insane.”
“No argument,” Petrov said. “We’re all insane to someone. That’s exactly the point, but I’m impressed that you see it now.”
“I see nothing except you.”
“The Chinese built a wall around themselves,” Petrov said. Malinovsky did not react. “Do you understand the purpose of a wall?”
“To keep people in.”
Petrov sighed. “You don’t see. A wall is most useful for keeping the unwanted out. The missiles make no difference either way.”
“Enough nonsense,” Malinovsky said with a growl and turned, but the sound of the revolver hammer being cocked froze him in place.
“Old armies, new missiles, neither of them matter,” Petrov said. “They never did. I see that now. The wall is down forever. Others will be built, but down they’ll come until there are no rubles left to build them. Guns and butter, my dear Malinovsky, guns and butter, with all men equal by economic principle. Now do you see it?”
“Yes,” the Defense Minister said in an attempt to shut him up. Could he roll behind the cover of the desk, bolt to the door, call for help?
“No, you don’t. If you had to pick a single weapon to win the next war, what would it be?” Petrov asked. “Just one, mind you.”
Malinovsky heard the pain in the voice behind him, heard the death rattle in the man’s chest and turned to face him. “Tanks.”
Petrov shook his head. “You have no sense of history. What single factor won the Great Patriotic War?”
“Our gallant and heroic people and the leadership of the Red Army.”
“Capitalism,” Petrov whispered. “Without Western production there would be no statues today, and when the war ended they switched to making toasters and tanks. Now is it clear? They grow while we tread water. Ten years, twenty, thirty, pick a time; they will have toasters and tanks and missiles, and we will have only tanks and missiles and no way to feed or clothe our people. We’re open to the world now, all of us, open for all of them to see and understand that Lenin was wrong. I saw it during the war. I realized it then; I knew. Khrushchev’s missiles are not the problem. It’s the toasters that our people want, and the Ukrainian has opened a door that can never be closed again. The end has begun, comrade, and there is no way you can stop it.”
“How did you find me?” the Defense Minister asked.
“Does it matter? What one can do, another can duplicate. You had best dwell on that.”
“Khrushchev will fall,” Malinovsky insisted.
“Eventually,” Petrov said, “but who has won?” He gulped the Armagnac, stared at the glass, smiled and dropped the pistol, his head tipping forward.
Malinovsky remained still for a long time, then kicked the pistol away, placed his fingers on the man’s throat and felt no life.
Epilogue
229 MONDAY, JUNE 13, 1961, 8:45 A.M. Moscow
The birches were covered with leaves the color of ripe limes and drooped under the weight of an early morning drizzle. Six Spetsnaz soldiers in black uniforms carried the unadorned open pine coffin down a narrow gravel path in Novodevichy Cemetery, the final resting place for the Soviet Union’s elite. Talia wore a black cape, which flapped in the breeze; she held Ezdovo’s arm tightly, using him to shield her from the wind. Bailov wore his dress uniform and pushed a wheelchair holding Raya Orlava, who snuggled under a dark raincoat. Melko wore a baggy brown suit with no tie and walked slowly beside Gnedin, who had his hands clasped behind him. The women had black scarves tied over their heads.
Two more Spetsnaz walked behind the mourners carrying the coffin lid, which was draped in red crepe that rustled in the breeze.
The procession passed slowly through the crowded graveyard, past red enamel stars, bronze busts and life-sized marble statues. It struck Talia that only in death did her countrymen get the recognition they had craved in life. One grave was topped by a full-sized propeller hub from a Stuka; it was painted with a swirl of red and yellow lines, and the nubs of what had been propeller blades were adorned with dozens of black swastikas in small white circles. The grave of an Arctic explorer was marked by a marble snowshoe on a white pedestal; a small bronze submarine seemed to surface from another stone.
When they reached the grave, the soldiers set the casket on the ground beside the trench and backed away as the others formed a circle. Talia placed her hands on Ezdovo’s shoulders and felt one of his hands cover hers. Petrov looked tiny in the wooden box, the Red Badge on his chest gleaming in the morning light.
They were not sure what had happened. No one had seen him slip away from the hospital. City sanitation workers had found the body the next morning sitting open-eyed on a bench, staring out at the Moscow River, close to the place where Talia had first met the leader of the Special Operations Group more than sixteen years before. He had been as enigmatic then as he looked now, his hands clasped across his tiny stomach. The autopsy had attributed the cause of death to stomach cancer. “Filled with it,” the pathologist told them.
Why had he left the hospital? Talia wondered, knowing they would never know.
She placed her own Red Badge on Petrov’s chest and leaned down to kiss his cold flesh. Ezdovo, Gnedin, Bailov and Melko followed; then Bailov placed the lid on the coffin and nailed it down. When he had finished, the soldiers lowered the box into the grave and each member of the Special Operations Group threw a handful of black dirt onto the red crepe in the darkness below.
230 FRIDAY, JUNE 21, 1961, 1:10 P.M.Galveston, Texas
It was a scorcher, the air thick, the white sand searing, a violet wall of heat shimmering menacingly on the muddy green horizon of the Gulf of Mexico.
Sylvia took off her sunglasses, closed her eyes and tilted her face up at the sun, which glared red through her eyelids.
Four surf rods, upright in the sand, stood at the water’s edge like black antennae; Valentine squatted between them cutting pieces of squid for bait. They had been in the sun constantly since returning from Europe. He wore a sweat-stained Stetson with the front bent up and saggy jockey shorts.
They had not talked about Vienna and had not discussed their own situation. She had gone to the airport with him in Vienna, watched him buy two tickets, taken the one he held out to her, and asked what the weather would be like on the Gulf. “So hot it makes the lizards sweat,” he answered.
Sylvia rolled off the blanket and walked down to the surf. He was reeling in one of the baits and standing knee-deep in the rolling surf.
“What are we fishing for?” she asked.
“Whatever Neptune sends.”
“He hasn’t sent much.” She smiled.
When Valentine had replaced the bait, he waded over to her and handed the ten-foot-long rod to her. “Your throw.” The glare made him squint. His tan was more red than brown.
She looked at the rod, then at him. “Meaning?”
“Time we made a decision.”
“I thought we were here to fish.”
“I hate fishing.”
“If that’s what you want.”
“And we ride off into the sunset together? Is that how you see it?”
“Pretty much,” he said. Two pelicans skimmed the water twenty yards away and splashed to a landing.
“Man and wife. That sort of thing?”
“I reckon.”
“We just forget about Vienna and get on with our lives?”
“That’s about the size of it.”
The pelicans were joined by a third that landed between them, but they flapped their wings furiously and drove it away. “We’re gonna wake up one morning and find Arizona in our faces,” Sylvia said.
Valentine grinned. “You ever hear about the two armadillos that met up with a mountain lion on the trail and one of them up and spit in the cat’s eye?”
She raised her eyebrows and looped her arms around his neck. “No.”
“ ‘Why did you do that?’ the second armadillo asked. ‘Well,’ said the first one, ‘I figured that I’d get his attention while you slipped around and jumped him from behind.’ ‘Hell,’ said the second one, ‘don’t you know two armadillos can’t lick a mountain lion?’ ‘You know and I know,’ said the first one, ‘but does the lion?’ ”
231 SUNDAY, AUGUST 13, 1961, 1:25 A.M. West Berlin
Arizona stared down at Potsdamer Platz, where searchlights knifed the night mist as thousands of East Germans worked shoulder to shoulder along the square. The air was filled with the faint reverberations of jackhammers and picks, the roar of bulldozers pushing huge rolls of barbed wire down cobbled streets, and the unmuffled growl of tanks. After watching for several minutes he let his binoculars hang around his neck as he lit a cigarette, hiding the light of the flame in a cupped hand. Less than an hour ago he had been asleep in his hotel, secure in the knowledge that nothing was brewing in Berlin other than the usual minor one-on-one provocations and surveillance schemes. Now, from a suite of offices on the ninth story of a building owned by a West German bank, he had an excellent view of the frantic activity below.
Curtis, the chief of station, was using a Leica with a telephoto lens and fast film to snap photographs of the German work details building the wall. He was the sort of careerist who usually hid his intensity under a mask of affability, but tonight he made no effort to disguise his concern. “What the hell are they up to?” he asked as he wound in a new roll of film.
“Mitosis,” Arizona said. “Two cells from one.” What they were really doing was measuring the size of Kennedy’s balls. Khrushchev had gotten a look at them in Vienna and now it was squeeze time. The unofficial word was that the Soviet leader had talked exceptionally tough at the summit and that Kennedy had flinched. Which might be a plausible explanation for all this, but wasn’t the only one. Valentine and Charles were now watching sunsets on Galveston Island like two lovebirds. According to his informants they had shown up in Texas a week after the summit and had made no effort to contact him.
Valentine said Frash was dead, and he’d had that look which Arizona had seen many times before. If Valentine said Frash was dead, then it was true, which meant that he could relax. The Company was going to be house-cleaned soon, but he would be able to stay clear of the worst of it. Even so, he was still curious. He had even considered going to Galveston to confront the lovebirds, but had decided against it. Valentine and Sylvia were too wed to pedestrian moral principles to see the bigger picture, so they could stay where they were and good riddance. She had submitted her resignation but he had not processed it; her pay would keep going to a bank, and Valentine would move to a list called “inactive but available.”
Maybe he would never need them again and maybe he would. Never say never in this business, he reminded himself.
“Do the Russians think they can get away with this shit?” Curtis asked, snapping Arizona back to the present.
“Looks like they already have,” he answered.
“I can’t believe that Khrushchev would risk a war over Berlin,” Curtis said.
A long line of tanks was setting up along a boulevard below as foot soldiers scrambled to pile sandbags around them. The question is, Arizona thought, Will Kennedy?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JOSEPH HEYWOOD is the author of The Snowfly, Covered Waters, The Berkut, Taxi Dancer, the nine Grady Service (Woods Cop) Mysteries, Hard Ground: Woods Cop Stories, Harder Ground: More Woods Cop Stories, and the Lute Bapcat Mysteries Red Jacket and Mountains of the Misbegotten. Featuring Grady Service, a contemporary detective in the Upper Peninsula for Michigan’s Department of Natural Resources, and Lute Bapcat, a Rough Rider turned Michigan game warden in the 1910s, Heywood’s mystery series have earned the author cult status among lovers of the outdoors, law enforcement officials, and mystery devotees. Heywood lives in Portage, Michigan. Visit him at JosephHeywood.com.
ABOUT THE TYPE
This book was set in Sabon, a typeface designed by the well-known German typographer, Jan Tschichold (1902–74). Sabon’s design is based upon the original letter forms of Claude Garamond, and was created specifically to be used for three sources: foundry type for hand composition, Linotype, and Monotype. Tschichold named his typeface for the famous Frankfurt typefounder Jacques Sabon, who died in 1580.