The Domino Conspiracy Page 5

  It was his weakness for women that had brought him down. During a break-in he had unexpectedly encountered a young woman, nineteen-year-old Annochka. Her father was a member of the Central Committee and a candidate member of the Politburo, a specialist in industrial production. Annochka was typical of the children of senior Soviet officials: spoiled and protected, accustomed to having what she wanted because of her father’s position, but at the same time fiercely resentful of the closed system that provided for her. Headstrong, daring and sexually assertive, she had nearly raped Melko, or so he claimed, then shown him her father’s safe and given him the combination. When he left, she went with him and for several months lived with him, helping him to plan other thefts. Annochka knew the Soviet elite as he never could, and steered him to one lucrative haul after another. For Melko it was an arrangement beyond his wildest fantasy.

  But as much as Annochka loathed her father, she adored her mother, and in a moment of weakness she called home and arranged a visit. When the girl arrived, she was arrested; her mother prized her husband’s position, and no stupid daughter was going to jeopardize what they had worked so hard to attain. In her day the mother had also been headstrong and had her flings, but no matter how great the fire, one needed to exercise judgment. After a single night in Lubyanka Prison Annochka broke down and admitted her connection with Melko. A deal was struck by her father; in return for revealing the location of Melko and his safe house, she would be released, her record purged. Melko was arrested within hours, and since 1955 had moved down step by step in the gulag, finally arriving at Special Regime Camp Nine.

  Camp Nine was a terminal camp, the end of the line. Built in a small canyon sixty kilometers east of Ubinskoe and four hundred kilometers north of Novosibirsk, it was the frigid repository for the worst of the worst, most of them under life sentences and all judged too dangerous to be held elsewhere. Unlike most camps where there was a mixture of professional criminals and politicals, Camp Nine had only one political, he who now sat quietly beside Melko coughing lightly.

  “My brothers,” Melko said, “we have trouble in our family; therefore I have convened the court. At our feet is the dog Pavel Cyzalopovich. I accuse him of violating the code by which we’ve all sworn to live. A thief’s word is his bond; we have all sworn to this. I accuse Pavel Cyzalopovich of having voluntarily performed manual labor on behalf of the state. Six days ago he helped the lagershchiki unload provisions. I don’t care why he chose to do this. The lyudi recognize no authority other than our own and we shed no sweat for the state. By our code one man must be right and one man must be wrong. I ask for judgment against him, but as his accuser it’s not proper for me to oversee this process. Therefore I choose Petrov to sit in judgment.” He glanced at the small, dark man who sat beside him.

  “He’s not one of us,” one of the men immediately protested.

  “Petrov is here. He lives as we live, and that’s enough for me,” Melko countered. “In here we are all the same.”

  “But he has not taken the oath,” the man complained, looking for support. “Our brother Pavel Cyzalopovich deserves to be judged by one of his own kind. This, too, is the law.”

  Melko knew better than to retreat from his position, which he had earned not by election but by virtue of his skill as a thief and held through intelligence and, when necessary, brutal action. Among this group—indeed, among all thieves in the Soviet Union—he was judged to be without equal, and his status enabled him to hold power. To show weakness now would begin an inexorable erosion of his authority. “As your leader, Melko decides such matters,” he reminded the group. “This is not a normal camp. All of us will die here, which means that Petrov’s fate is our fate, and ours his. We don’t know why Petrov is here, and Comrade Petrov does not say, which is his right. But for a political to be among our lot signifies great power on his part and great fear on the part of the state. Therefore, he is like us in their eyes. We all know him to be a man who has great knowledge and who always speaks the truth, so I say let Petrov judge.”

  Most of the men in the room nodded agreement.

  “But he has not taken the oath,” the dissenter persisted.

  Melko did not look at the man again; instead, he addressed the group, gesturing with his hands, his eyes darkening. “It is said that Petrov was close to Stalin. When Stalin died, Petrov was sent into the system and they sent him here first” Melko had heard this from a sergeant of the guard but did not reveal his source. “There is a connection. I don’t know what it is, but I know that Stalin was a man to be admired; he crushed the Germans like insects and gave no quarter to his enemies. I say that if Stalin accepted Petrov, that’s enough for me.” It was ironic that the urki, while feeling no allegiance to the Soviet bureaucracy, nevertheless considered themselves to be loyal and patriotic citizens, especially when it came to hating Germans. They lived outside the Soviet mainstream and by their own rules, but in their minds and by their peculiar values they were still Soviets and especially loyal to Stalin’s way of harsh, direct action. After all, it had been Stalin who had turned back Hitler. Those politicals who had come into the camps under Stalin’s regime were, in the eyes of the urki, guilty of whatever they were accused of, but politicals who came into the system after Stalin’s death might not be guilty of anything. And one who came into the system apparently because he served Stalin was surely worthy of their trust. Such was Melko’s reasoning, and the brotherhood accepted it.

  Petrov stood and clasped his small hands in front of him. At sixty-three he was bent and frail-looking, but this was his eighth year in Camp Nine and he had survived the system longer than most. Like many of them, his teeth were rotten, most of his hair had fallen out and his dark eyes were sunk deep in his bony skull.

  “I speak for myself,” Petrov said with an even voice. He put his hand on his stomach and leaned forward for a moment, then straightened up. In the past year the pain had become constant.

  Melko looked around the room for objections, but there were none.

  “It is true I have not taken your oath and I will not do so,” Petrov continued. “But I live among you and I respect your ways. In life, there must be rules or there will be chaos. Your rules are as good as any. Melko asks me to judge because I have my own views on the implications of the alleged crime. Pavel Cyzalopovich has been accused of a transgression against the lyudi. I don’t know if he is guilty; I’ve heard no evidence, but Comrade Melko has asked me to hear the case. What I do know is this: if he is guilty and if you wish to preserve your brotherhood, you must take action against him. Stalin is gone, Beria is dead, Bulganin, Malenkov, Molotov and Kaganovich have all been consigned to oblivion. Khrushchev has the power now. He makes speeches about morality. Managers of state farms and industrial plants are being accused of cheating the system. Khrushchev intends to eliminate corruption from society. All corruption.”

  Petrov paused to let his words sink in. “The authorities have plans for you. They will try to take you one at a time; the idea is to corrupt your code so that you will tacitly accept theirs. They do this by finding one of you who is weak, and enticing him to work. This man then feels alienated, threatened by his failure, so he works to bring others over, to compromise them so that he is not alone. It’s a natural reaction; few men can stand alone; this is the essence of lyudi, the reason you declare yourself brothers. Those who adhere to the code then make war on those who do not. In the end two forces are created from one, and inevitably these forces destroy each other so that eventually there is no brotherhood. By crushing the lyudi the state demonstrates its power over you and therefore any group, and it starts with one man and his capitulation.”

  His speech finished, Petrov sat down. Pavel Cyzalopovich rolled around wildly, banging his heels on the floor in an attempt to get attention. The others ignored him.

  “Fuck it,” said the man who had complained initially. “Let him judge.”

  Petrov remained seated and surveyed the men. “Are there any witnesses?”


  A man in the back stepped forward. “I saw our brother unloading the crates.”

  Two other men immediately corroborated this testimony.

  “These crates were the property of the state?” Petrov asked, his voice nearly a whisper. His pain was extreme.

  “Salted meat and tins from the main camp in Raisino,” the first witness told the group. “They had official markings.”

  “Might it have been attempted theft?” a man asked.

  “That’s irrelevant,” Melko answered. “Our code requires that he steal directly from the truck or from the store room. He may not unload cargo in order to steal it later. The means are not justified by the end.”

  “How many crates did he unload?” Petrov asked, ignoring Melko’s outburst.

  “I didn’t count them,” the witness snarled. “I saw only that he was there for a long time. Many trips.”

  Silence. “Does anybody have anything to add?” There was no response. “Guilty,” Petrov said. “Because Pavel Cyzalopovich has stolen nothing from the family, there is no restitution that can be made. Because he has violated the code and threatened the existence of our society, there can only be one sentence: death.”

  The pronouncement was met with silence.

  Melko rose slowly, then pushed forward the stump he had been sitting on. One of the men brought him a hatchet while others pulled the condemned man to his knees and pressed his head against the block. Melko’s first blow drove into the back of the man’s skull, killing him. Then he hacked off the head, held it in front of him, walked the length of the room and through the door into the snow, across the poorly lighted yard to the four-meter-high fence, threw Pavel Cyzalopovich’s head over the wire, shouted to get the attention of the guards in the towers and returned to the barracks past the headless body, which had been dumped into the snow. Petrov knew there would be no retaliation by the guards; this was the first skirmish. The authorities had begun a process, and time was on their side. That Pavel Cyzalopovich was dead was unimportant. The state had found a man who was weak; now it knew that eventually it would find others, even here. The state’s greatest allies were time and human frailty.

  When the barracks doors were closed, spirt was poured from earthenware crocks, and when everyone was served Melko lifted his tin cup. “Happy New Year,” he declared.

  Later, when the lyudi were drunk and gambling with dice made from bones, Melko came over to Petrov’s sleeping platform and sat beside him. “In the old days they left us alone,” he said. “This is shitty business; in the end we will be erased.”

  “You are a threat to their order,” Petrov said.

  “As you are?” Melko asked quietly.

  No, Petrov thought. It is not the same. The lyudi are parasites; they could never have value to the state. His own circumstances were far different; had the state meant to rid itself of him, it would have done so eight years ago. Someone who followed Stalin knew Petrov had been close to him; his time in the gulag was penance, no more. It was true that the eight years had been difficult ones, and that he had nearly died several times, but they had kept him out of the uranium mines and other camps where death was a certainty. This alone told him that he had a future. There was only one mystery: who was his mysterious protector?

  Petrov knew that there had been political upheaval west of the Urals. Khrushchev had gained power, but those who fell, even those who had tried to oust the crude Ukrainian in 1957, still lived. There had been no mass liquidations and few bloody reprisals. From this Petrov guessed that Khrushchev ruled by balancing power, by creating and manipulating factions in the Politburo in order to maintain equilibrium. The army’s power had been reduced. Even life in the gulag had changed subtly: fewer work hours, reduced rules, better food—not nearly enough, but better. Petrov was certain that the absolute power held by Stalin was now sundered; Khrushchev had to rely on guile, not terror, and his primary weapons were his own enthusiasm and the ability to bluff in the face of insurmountable odds.

  It was impossible to know precisely what was going on outside, but certain things seemed clear to Petrov. The people called the General Secretary Kukuruznik, the Corn Man. He was a dreamer, the architect of grandiose schemes that promised great returns but seldom delivered. He was of a type, naturally intelligent, but with neither education nor patience, a man with more velocity than direction, a child reaching forever for new confections; nye kulturny, a man without culture, a peasant, an accident of Party history whose reach would eventually outstrip his grasp, and this would eventually bring him down. Khrushchev was a dinosaur, the last of his kind, and in this Petrov felt a vague kinship for the fat little Ukrainian.

  10 SATURDAY, JANUARY 7, 1961, 10:30 A.M.Tanga, Buryat Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic

  It had taken two days to ride north from the hunting camp to Tanga. Pyotr Ezdovo could have made the journey faster by guiding his horse up the frozen Ingoda River, but river ice never froze uniformly and the Ingoda often had soft spots and holes camouflaged by slush. The decision was not a matter of fear but of prudence. No matter where a man lived or what he undertook, there were risks, though most people did not recognize them, much less calculate them. For those who understood risk and respected danger, life could be productive and full; those who didn’t understand perished; those who survived didn’t mourn them. This was the Russian way.

  It had been a month since Ezdovo had been home to hold his wife and hear her laugh. Now, as he walked his shaggy brown gelding over the final saddleback, his heart was pounding with anticipation. Talia, his amazing, wonderful Talia! Whenever he thought of her, which was often during his days in the taiga, he reminded himself how lucky he had been to find and marry her. Their only disappointment was that they had never had children. Still, they had the boys, Sergei and Aleksei, by her first marriage, and what marvelous young men they had become! “Without you, my love, they would not be such fine men,” Talia often told him, and always it made him proud. It was not entirely true; Talia’s influence on her sons was immense, but it was her way to praise Ezdovo, taking no credit even when it was due. In return, he treated her as an equal, and in this way they both knew that it was their partnership that had served the boys and their marriage well.

  At a pass above Tanga, their village, Ezdovo halted the horse to let him rest, and stiffened his legs in the stirrups to stretch his back. He patted the horse’s neck gently. “Four hours more and you’ll have fresh hay.” A home-cooked meal would be welcomed by him as well, after he and Talia had held each other close. Their lovemaking was as passionate now as the first time they had held each other sixteen years before. Talia, ever calm, was anything but calm when he was inside her.

  “You two are too old to carry on so,” Sergei had teased before he left their camp. “You should leave such activity to the young.” The elder at twenty-two, he was tall like his mother, with black hair, dark eyes, an excellent mind and an easy way with people. Everyone liked Sergei.

  “Love is too important to be wasted on the young,” Ezdovo answered as he tightened the cinch of his saddle.

  “Everyone in the village gossips about you two. They make jokes and say you should act more respectably.” This was Aleksei, the younger, now twenty-one, built low and wide like a small bear. Of the two of them, Aleksei was more determined, more accustomed to doing than talking. In the village he was recognized as second only to his stepfather in his ability to hunt and fish in the dangerous, hostile Yablonovy Mountains. In this instance, Aleksei’s allusion was to an afternoon the previous summer when several villagers had seen Ezdovo and Talia making love in broad daylight on a flat boulder beside the Ingoda. Their sons had been embarrassed by this event, but the principals thought it funny and laughed it off, while the elders of the village welcomed it as a gift, a juicy morsel to whisper and cluck about during the hard winters.

  “What’s between husband and wife is their own business,” Ezdovo told his sons. Then he held out his arms and the three embraced.


  “Tell Mother we’re taking good care of you,” Aleksei said as Ezdovo swung into the saddle.

  “Don’t burn down the camp while I’m gone,” he warned them. The log storehouse, which stood five meters aboveground, was jammed with fine pelts; it had been a severe winter, which was exactly what hunters hoped for. The snowfall had been about normal, but it had been the coldest winter in thirty years, reaching down to sixty below for a solid week in January. The conditions were ideal; such weather created thicker, richer furs on the animals, and with a normal snowfall the horses could get around with only minimal difficulty. Most hunters worked in pairs, but Ezdovo liked being with both of his sons; because of this they had developed a routine that gave them time to work together and still provided that Talia would have either her husband or a son with her for eleven days each winter month. When the boys went home they stayed three days, whereas Ezdovo stayed five. When it was time to return to the taiga, it was always difficult because as much as he loved his time in the forest, Ezdovo’s time with his wife was the most important part of his life. He always returned to camp with bite marks on his neck and shoulders.

  “Don’t forget more ammunition,” Sergei yelled at him.