Declare (44 page)

Philby folded his arm back and clasped his hands in his lap. They
could
kill him, if they worked at it. In English he said, softly, “Oh, it’s
richtig
, all r-right.”

I have got to jump
somewhere
, he thought—and damned soon. The British SIS is being very slow in responding to old Flora Solomon’s kind and timely betrayal of my past to MI5—don’t they
want
the confession of their most damaging spy?—and Angleton’s CIA wouldn’t trust me to give them a recipe for
Borscht
, and Indian citizenship isn’t possible. And Theodora’s old SOE deal was for me to go on working for Moscow! But somebody’s got to take me out of Burgess’s control, out of
Moscow’s
control—I will kill myself before I’ll go up onto Ararat, alone as I am now. Our Hajji which art in Hell, now.

The driver steered the taxi up the Rue Kantari on the way to
Hamra Street, and Philby leaned forward to hide his bandaged head well under the taxi’s roof, in case his wife might be looking out from their fifth-floor balcony. I’ll tell you about it if it works out, Eleanor my love, he thought. I won’t trouble you with advance notice—and you’d enjoy living in France.

At last they had doglegged south on Chouran Street and were driving along the cliff road, past Lord’s Hotel and the Yildizlar Restaurant, with the dark-indigo Mediterranean on their right. Philby could see the two enormous rocks out in St. George’s Bay— traditionally the site where England’s patron saint had killed the dragon. The weary St. Kim, he thought, will settle for just hiding from the dragon.

A crowd of Arab and European tourists was waiting at a taxi rank by the Pigeon Grotto pavilion on the cliff, and after Philby and Elena had got out of the taxi he took her bare elbow and led her south along the railed cliff-top sidewalk. To their left, under the modern white façade of the Carlton Hotel, Rolls-Royces and Volk-swagens slowed as an Arab on a donkey plodded away across the lanes. Only a few of the cars had turned on their headlamps, and the clean smell of surf spray in the air was still faintly perfumed with the afternoon aroma of suntan oil.

Seagulls spun in the darkening blue sky overhead, but their shrill cries were muffled by the gauze taped over Philby’s ears.

He turned toward the sea, where a quarter of a mile out across the water a motorboat had just shot through the tunnel at the base of the bigger rock, with a water skier just visible bouncing along in the spreading white fan of the wake. The four-hundred-foot-tall rock was flat on top, a remote backlit meadow furred with wild grasses, and he wondered forlornly if anyone had ever climbed up there.

“I’ll m-miss Beirut,” he said in English. “I’ve b-been here six years.”

“You’ll like France,” Elena told him. The red sun was low over the horizon beyond the rocks, and she fished a pair of sunglasses out of her purse and slipped them on. “Why do you want to leave the Soviet ser vice? I gather you’re still an active player, not just selling your memoirs.”

“My f-father is d-d-dead.” Our Hajji which art in Hell, now, he thought again. “He died here t-two years ago, and he was my … recruiter, in a, in an unspecific but v-very real sense, into the G-Great Game. He wasn’t a t-
traitor
—in spite of being j-jailed during the war for making pro-Hitler talk, ‘activities prejudicial to the safety of the Realm’!—and he never p-pushed me toward the S-S-Soviet services
per se
, but in the twenties and thirties he was studying under one of the S-Soviet illegals who were all eventually p-purged by Stalin in ’37 and ’38—a p-para-do-
dox
ical old Soviet Moslem called Hassim Hakimoff Khan, in J-Jidda, which is the port city for Mecca.”

“I—I met one of the great old illegals,” said Elena quietly. “In France, when I was quite young. What was your father studying?”

Philby barked out one syllable of a mirthless laugh. “Oh—what was he not. Did you know that a g-god called al-Lah was worshipped in the Ka’bah in Mecca a thousand years before Mohammed? According to the Koran, the Thamud tribes refused to w-worship him, and were annihilated by something remembered as both a thu-thunderbolt and an earthquake. My father f-found and deciphered more than ten thousand Thamudic inscriptions, and he didn’t t-turn over all of them to the scholars. And he studied the Gilgamesh v-version of the Biblical flood story in the Chaldean cuneiform tablets at the B-British Museum, supplemented by others that he had f-found for h-himself in Baghdad.” More slowly, he went on, “In 1921 he was appointed Chief B-British Representative in Jordan, ruh-ruh-replacing T. E. Lawrence, who w-was being p-posted to Iraq; my father—s-s-s-
stole
Lawrence’s old files, and from reading them c-carefully one c-could deduce quite a lot about the files that were m-missing, the ones Lawrence had apparently dd
destroyed:
the tr-translations of some ancient d-documents he had found in one of the Qumran Wadi caves by the Dead Sea in 1918.”

Elena yawned, clearly from tension rather than tiredness. “You’re talking about the Dead Sea Scrolls, right?—that were found—found again—in 1947! Do you know what the documents were?”

“Yes, I—I read the L-Lawrence files myself in 1934.” After breaking into my father’s safe, he thought, and photographing his
papers. “According to h-his inventory files, there were a n-number of Semitic j-jars in the cave, but he took away an anomalous one that h-had an ankh-type c-cross for a h-h-
handle.
In it were s-several brittle old Hebrew scr-scrolls—apparently one was what is c-called a
brontologion
, which means ‘what the thunder said’; these were usually di-di-divination and astrological t-texts, derived from 1-listening to thu-thunder; but Lawrence’s references to it s-seemed to indicate a—more specific and deliberate m-message from the thunder. Another of the s-s-s-scrolls seems to have been a variant v-version of either the Book of Genesis or the apocryphal Book of Enoch—the story of Noah and the great f-flood, in any case. My f-father never obtained the ack-ack-actual transcriptions Lawrence made of these, so I n-never saw them either. Lawrence became unreliable, after he t-translated them.” Philby yawned too, creaking his jaw, and he clenched his hands into fists to stop them trembling. “I photographed what there was, and gave the foe-foe-photographs to Guy Burgess, who was always my m-main Soviet handler in those d-days.”

“And Lawrence died in a motorcycle crash the following year. How does all this relate to your decision to—quit the ‘Great Game,’ leave the Soviet service, and seek the protection of the SDECE?”

“My f-f-
father
—initiated, t-tried to initiate me—into—” He let the sentence trail away.

Elena clicked her tongue impatiently. “If you’re going to be evasive about the supernatural element of your story, the SDECE is not buying.”

“Evasive.” Philby laughed shortly, aware of the weight of chunky steel on his ankle and wondering if he might ever be faced with the necessity—and have the courage—to turn the gun on himself. “It is v-vaguely
shameful
, though, isn’t it? Didn’t you feel that, in B-Berlin?”

“And if you’re not willing to face
shame
, we’re not going to get anywhere.”

“ ‘O valiant wheel! O most courageous heaven!’ You g-give me back the s-same reproach I gave you, in T-Turkey. Yes, very well.” For several seconds he just blinked out at the shadowed, eroded
faces of the two giant monoliths standing in the bay, and at a flock of seagulls flying in a ring just to this side of the rocks. A new identity in France, he told himself. You cannot go up onto Mount Ararat.

Still, his voice shook when he finally spoke: “My father was b-baptized, but renounced Kruh-Christianity and converted to Islam in 1930, and took the name Hajji Abdullah, ‘One Who Has Made the Pilgrimage, Slave of God’—and I never was b-b-baptized at all, he saw to that. He had been born on Good F-Friday in 1885, in Ceylon, and a c-comet was clearly v-visible in the sky on that day— once when he was a baby he was accidentally left behind at a government rest stop during a journey, and the s-servants rushed back and found him being n-nursed by a
djjj
—by a ‘gypsy’ woman.” Philby glanced at Elena, but her blue eyes were hidden behind the sunglasses, and he looked back out at the rocks. “In fact she was n-nursing two identical infants, b-both dressed in my father’s B-British baby clothes. Later one of the infants was apparently 1-lost—in any case, when they got home again, there was only one.”

“They were both him,” said Elena, “right? Don’t hint, say.”

Philby bared his teeth in a difficult smile. “My motto has always been ‘know, not think it, and learn, not speak.’ The short course for spies. But yes,” he agreed wearily, “they were b-both him. At around the age of s-seven he lost that ability to be in two p-p-places at one time. I was born in Ambala, in the Punjab in India, and I s-spoke Hindi before I s-spoke English. I used to d-dream—”

With an emotion no stronger than perplexity, he discovered that he was unable to tell her about the year’s-end dreams that had blighted his boyhood in India and England: dreams of a bearded bronze man as tall as the rotating night sky, holding an upraised scythe that glittered like a constellation; or of the whole world turning ponderously on the celestial potter’s wheel; or of an
Arabian Nights
magician whirling a flaming fishing net right into his scorching eyes—from his own studies in the Old Testament’s First Book of Kings he knew that the Hebrew words for
burn, excommunicate, magician, potter
, and
blasphemy
, as well as
sword
, all began with the Hebrew letters
cheth
and
resh
—and the dreams always ended
with his head being forcibly split in two, so that before he awoke he imagined that he had been broken into two personalities. In adult-hood he had come to suspect that the dreams expressed dim memories of some anti-baptism to which he had been subjected as an infant.

“Well,” he said, covering his hesitation by jumping back to the last topic, “I didn’t just
dream
it—I
was
able to be in t-two p-places at once myself, as a b-boy. One of me could be in studying, while the other was out h-hiking in the woods. My p-parents had always been aware of it, and simply t-told me to be d-d-discreet, circumspect. I wasn’t b-baptized, and so I didn’t lose that ability until … until precisely on my t-t-tenth birthday.”

“When is your birthday?”

Never, he thought. It is never, and I will never tell you. “New Year’s Day,” he said lightly. “My f-father had been g-grooming me, he wanted his s-son to become—what his b-baptism had barred h-h-
him
from becoming. Until he was f-forced to resign in 1924, he was a m-major in the Raj, with the Political and Secret Department of the Indian government—the MI-1C, actually, f-forerunner of the present-day SIS. He became great p-pals with Ibn Saud, then king of the Najd r-region in central Arabia, eventually to become eponymous king of all S-S-Saudi Arabia, and when Ibn Saud’s son Feisal p-paid a state visit to England in 1919, the Foreign Office appointed my f-father as the boy’s escort. I was s-s-seven years old at the time, going to a Westminster-prep school in Eastbourne, and they v-visited me there. Feisal presented me with a t-twenty-carat d-diamond. The Russians have always wanted to g-get it away from me—not to be v-v-
vulgar
, but I had to
swallow
it, during the episode in Turkey in ’48—and I’ll wager Feisal h-himself would like to have it b-back now, now that air travel is so c-common.”

“What has the jewel got to do with air travel?”

“I’m not going to g-give it to you people either. B-but what it d-does is—it constitutes a
rafiq
, it makes the bearer an emissary, with d-diplomatic immunity to any r-r-
wrath
from the powers that prevail… up high, from roughly a thousand feet above sea-level on up… to the m-moon, I suppose.”

“Why did your ability cease on your tenth birthday?”

“I—don’t know. My f-father was alarmed, dismayed; he was in Amman, in Jordan, but my m-m-mother must have written to him about my sudden
singularity.
He ordered me to m-meet him in Amman in the s-summer of my eleventh year, and though it was ostensibly a holiday, for a couple of months he… tt
tested
me, and the jewel. We traveled to Damascus, and Baalbek, and Nazareth, always hiking among the oldest t-tombs and watching the w-weather. We fl-flew over Lake Tiberias in a De Havilland biplane and saw a waterspout that he said was Sakhr al-Jinni, a djinn that had been c-confined to the lake by King S-S-Solomon, but it didn’t approach us… and we went to the J-J-
Jordan River
near Jericho, and he collected samples of the river w-water.” Philby shivered, recalling even now his father’s frustrated rage as he had corked the dripping bottles. “He wanted to send the samples to the B-British Museum, to see if the water really d-d-did have any measurable special p-properties. I think he was worried about s-s-someone, some infant, who had been b-baptized there—not long before.”

“He was
testing
you?”

“Yes, and I f-failed. When I lost the ability to be two b-boys, I apparently also lost the ability to… conjure, or c-control, the old entities. I became ill—shakes and fever—with what he elected to d-d-diagnose as malaria, though I’ve never had the usual r-relapses. And I was sent home to Ig-England. A year later I went off to West-minster school, and my f-f-father made it clear that I was to go on to T-Trinity College, Cambridge, as he had done, and which I d-did. But I had a—a n-nervous b-b-
breakdown
, at Westminster! Do y-you know why?”

Elena looked away from the circling gulls to face him, and she laughed in surprise. “No,” she said. “Why?”