Declare (46 page)

Sweat rolled down his forehead from the bandage, and he blinked it away. They’ll have heard I was shot, I’m conspicuous in this bloody bandage.

When they had crossed the street to the landward sidewalk, he took Elena’s shoulders and faced her, so that she was blocking their view of him; and quickly he hiked his ankle up and snagged the revolver out of the elastic holster and dropped it into his coat pocket.

Elena had raised one eyebrow at the momentary glimpse of the gun, but now she fell into step beside him as he began walking south along the sidewalk below the amber-lit lobby of the Carlton Hotel.

“I suppose
they
suspect your
KGB
complicity,” she said. Her emphasis confirmed that she was well aware of his work for the deeper, older, vastly more secret agency.

“Suspect, yes—they’ve s-s-
suspected
me ever since Burgess
d-defected to Moscow eleven years ago. Listen,” he said, speaking quickly, “I won’t let them arrest me. The deal I’m offering your people is jjj-genuine, damn it, it’s
richtig
, understand? This isn’t a Soviet t-trick, I swear by—by the heart that is still beating beneath your b-breast. My father was my protector, my
shield
, in this business, and he’s gone now, and I can’t do what the Rab—what the Soviets—well, what the
Rabkrin
wants me to do now. I cannot go up the mountain.” In spite of his frantic unhappiness, he found that there was something distinctly
sexy
about exposing his momentous secrets to her; and even though his cold fingers were clamped on the grip of the revolver, he found himself thinking about their unsatisfactory kiss in the bar. “Have you g-got SDECE w-watching us now? Exfiltrate m-me right now, this nin-nin-instant.”

She shook her head. “We can exfiltrate you from Beirut as soon as I am convinced that you’ll tell us everything. I need to know—” She didn’t go on, and he glanced at her. For a moment her face was blank, neither young nor old but as cold as a statue’s. “—I need to know what happened on Mount Ararat in May of 1948.”

“I can tell you all of th-that. If we get so-so-separated tonight, I’m meeting the S-Soviet team tomorrow m-morning at eleven—I’ve toe-told them to meet me on the t-terrace at the St. Georges Hotel. After that I sh-should be mom-mom-
unobserved
—follow me from there.”

“I’ll get in touch with you again, no fear. I’ll decide when and where.”

“You think I have no capacity for loyalty,” he said hoarsely, “but I will be honest with your people. I was l-loyal to the rrr
Russians
for decades, for far longer than anyone would be who was not genuinely in l-love with the Communist ideal. I was a p-protégé of Maly’s, and they feared he had told me the s-secret of the
amomon
rhythms, so in the great purr-purr—
purge
season they tried to kill me too—on my b-birthday in 1937—”

Instantly he glanced to the left, past her shoulder, and said, “Let’s get off the street. A drink in the Carlton, what do you say?”—but he
was horrified to realize that in his besotted confessional passion he had nearly betrayed his real birthday. I’m falling apart, he thought remotely. Breaking in two, at least; who
was
that, talking about djinn on the
hatif
telephone?

As he led Elena through the glass doors and across the carpeted lobby toward the bar—a good deal dressier than the Normandy’s, with wood paneling and upholstered booths—he was remembering that frosty
last day of 1937
, when he had been out driving from Saragossa toward Tereuel, in Spain, under cover as a war correspondent for the London
Times;
an artillery shell had landed squarely on the car he and three other correspondents had been driving in, and his three companions had been blown to pieces, while Philby himself had suffered only a couple of cuts. The shell had been a Russian 12.40-centimeter round, certainly deliberately aimed, even deliberately scheduled—but, because it
was
his true birthday, Philby had taken the precaution of wearing the bright green, fox-fur lined Arab coat his father had given him, and so he had survived the explosion with only scratches. He had received a telegram the next day from his father in Alexandria—the old man had abruptly fainted the day before, bleeding from the nose and ears, at the very hour when Philby’s car had been hit, and the elder Philby had been anxious now to know if his son had been hurt.

“Your birthday in ’37?” prompted Elena when Philby had walked her to a booth against the doorway wall. She was looking at him as she sat down.

“Maly g-gave me a simple code with which to write hopefully innocent-looking l-letters to a cover address in Paris, a safe house where s-some NKVD courier would p-pick up the mail,” Philby said, sitting down across from her and waving to the waiter. “You know the kind of code: ‘Six
couches
arrived yesterday, but
the midwife
says they’re not the
edible
kind—the
dog
needs more
tooth-brushes.’
Not that bad, I suppose, but definitely d-disjointed; one hoped that the censors saw a lot of mail from genuine chatty l-l-lunatics.” He was beginning to relax—this story was verifiably true, and Maly
had
given him the code sometime very early in ’37, and it might even
have been
on his ostensible New Year’s Day birthday.
“I only found out in 1945, when I was Head of Section Nine and v-visiting the liberated c-capitals of Europe, that the address I had been writing to on the rue de Grenelle eight years earlier
had been the Soviet Embassy!
There was n-no safe house at all, n-no s-security measures—any censor who might have gone to the t-trouble of checking the address I was writing to would have r-reported me as a Soviet agent in an instant!”

Elena had fished matches and a pack of Gauloises from her purse, and she looked at him through narrowed eyes as she lit a cigarette. “Careless and negligent, surely—contemptuous, even—but I’d hardly call that an attempt to
purge
you,
kill
you.”

She was not deflected. “Well,” he said with affected mildness, “to
me
it seemed as if they had g-given me a ticking time bomb to hold. Two G-Gordon’s gins, please, neat,” he said then to the waiter who had finally come to the table. “Those are for me,” he added, giving Elena his most charming grin. “What will you have? I believe you were drinking b-brandy, in Berlin.”

“Can the bartender make a
Berliner Weisse mit Schuss?”
Elena asked the waiter. “That’s beer with raspberry syrup,” she added.

The waiter concealed any repugnance and simply said,
“Mais oui, madame,”
and bowed and stepped away.

Philby remembered the mug of odd pink beer that had been on the table in Berlin. “That was
your
drink, that night?”

“Do you disapprove? As I recall,
you
were drinking
insecticide.”

Philby nodded glumly. “Djinn repellent, the old Cairo hands used to call it. If my f-father had thought to give me a glass of insecticide before we flew over Lake Tiberias, I would not have c-contracted ‘malaria.’ They… bud off, like cactus, in periods of activity, and the l-little… djinnlings!… can be attracted to and c-
cling
to someone who has—someone who bears the m-mark of previous djinn-recognition. They get in through your m-mouth, and they interfere with your thoughts, and exorcising them later is a tiresome bother. My father t-told me that some of the old lads in the Arab Bureau in Cairo would even rinse their m-mouths with a shot of petrol, if they were going out to some place where the m-monsters were likely to be. Volatile smells repel them, the
y-young ones, at least, and a couple of shots of warm jjj-
gin
here ought to drive off any who came up over the cliff just now with the b-birds.”

Elena was blushing, and Philby remembered asking her if she had not found this business vaguely shameful. “That was a, a female one, in Berlin,” she said.

Philby could feel the hairs standing up on his arms, even at this late and cynical date, as he said softly, “That was Russia’s very g-guardian angel, my dear—Machikha Nash, Our Stepmother— inspecting the n-new boundaries of her k-kingdom in person, in stormy person. I was there to monitor the installation of her bound-ary stone, and I watched it all from a parked car in the Charlotten-burg Chaussee on the western side. She was…
splendid
, wasn’t she? I remember thinking of Byron’s line,
‘She walks in Beauty, like the night/Of cloudless climes and starry skies.’
What w-were you doing there?”

Philby didn’t look away from her, but he was aware of the two men who walked into the bar, and he simply shrugged and gave her a frail smile when they stopped in front of his table.

One of the men seemed to say, “Allah, beastly ass,” but a moment later Philby realized that he had said, in an American accent,
I’ll obviously ask;
and the man went on, “Who’s your girlfriend, Kim?”

Philby looked up at his CIA inquisitors. Both were sandy-haired Americans in gray suits with wide lapels, and they both seemed offensively fit and young.

“Miss Weiss is a French m-magazine editor,” Philby said. “I’m t-trying to sell her s-some non-fiction work.”

“We’d
love to read some of your non-fiction work, Kim,” said the taller of the two. “Scoot over, Miss Weiss.” When Elena shifted away across the booth seat, the man sat down beside her.

His companion folded himself into the booth beside Philby, so that Philby and Elena were both blocked in. “I’m Dr. Tarr,” said the man beside Philby, “and my colleague there is Professor Feather. Our boss across the water is very curious about this
gathering of the old hands
that’s going on here in Beirut.”

“I’m not aware of it,” said Philby carefully. He wanted to pant
with relief, for clearly this was not to be a kidnap. With some confidence he went on, “Are you g-going to have the
sûreté
h-h-haul me in to their p-p-
police
station one more time, just so I can s-say the same th-thing there for a few hours?”

“More like watch-and-wait,” said the man identified as Professor Feather. “You still do odd jobs for your old firm, don’t you, Kim? Peter Lunn gives you off-paper travel assignments?”

Lunn was the SIS Head of Station in Beirut now, and in fact he had not had any professional conversation with Philby at all. But until three months ago the Head of Station had been Nicholas Elliott, an old friend of Philby’s and one of his loyal defenders in the Burgess defection scandal that had cost Philby his SIS job in 1951. And in these last two years Elliott had indeed given Philby all kinds of off-paper assignments—to Riyadh, and Cairo, and Baghdad, and a dozen other Middle East cities—to mingle with the Arabs who had known Philby’s father, and gauge the extent and purpose of the huge increase in the number of Soviet military advisors throughout the Arab nations.

Philby had been in a quandary: it had been starkly clear that Burgess at the Rabkrin headquarters in Moscow, as well as Petrukhov, Philby’s more pedestrian KGB handler in Beirut, both required him to pass on immediately any information he might learn about the SIS response to the Soviet escalation—but Philby had been aware too that the SIS chiefs in London who believed him guilty of espionage would see to it that he was given “barium meal” information, custom-scripted false data that might later be detected in monitored Moscow traffic. If that were to happen, Philby would logically be isolated as the only possible source of the information, and the SIS could then arrest him for treason; and until this last September, when Philby’s pet fox had been intolerably killed and further work with the Rabkrin had become unthinkable, Philby had not wanted the SIS to arrest him. Even now, he wanted to surrender only on specific terms, what he thought of as his three non-negotiable “itties”: immunity, a new identity, and a comfortable annuity. Definitely
not
the deal Theodora’s old fugitive SOE had offered him in ’52.

“Or isn’t it for Lunn?” went on Professor Feather. “Are you still
running errands for—” He looked across the table at Dr. Tarr. “What was his name?”

“Petrukhov,” said Dr. Tarr. “Of the Soviet trade mission in Lebanon. He’s the local handler, runner.”

“Any t-traveling I do,” Philby said mildly, “has b-been for the stories I write.”

“That’s odd, you know,” said Dr. Tarr. “You always charge your airline tickets on your IATA card, don’t you? Well, we’ve clocked your stories in
The Observer
and
The Economist
, and compared them to the records from the International Air Transport Association in Montreal, and we find that your travel grossly outweighs your journalistic output. Could I have a bourbon-and-water, please,” he said to the waiter, who had just then walked up with the two gins and the pink beer on a tray.

“Same here,” said Dr. Tarr.

The waiter set the drinks on the table, nodded and strode back toward the bar.

Ignoring her ludicrous drink, Elena picked up her purse from beside her and said, “The dealings of the American Internal Revenue Service do not interest me. Mr. Philby, I’ll be in touch—”

Professor Feather didn’t budge. “Stay, Miss Weiss,” he said coldly. “You play a musical instrument, don’t you? Something about the size of a saxophone?”

“The U.S. government will pick up the drinks tab,” added Dr. Tarr cheerfully, “though not precisely in its IRS capacity.”

Philby thought the saxophone remark had seemed to jar her; but now she just sighed and said, “No, I don’t play any instrument. But—I suppose I can’t resist the opportunity to deplete the American treasury.” She put her purse back down.