Declare (47 page)

“And we even took your pseudonyms into account,” said Professor Feather to Philby. “Charles Garner and all. It still doesn’t add up.”

Philby had already begun shaking his head dismissively, and he didn’t stop now—but he was chilled by this new factor. The CIA knew that Charles Garner was one of his pseudonyms!—and Mammalian’s new agent was to be using that identity as cover!
Philby wondered if he should warn Mammalian, or let the CIA discover the Garner impostor; if Elena’s SDECE people could “exfiltrate” him very soon, it wouldn’t matter.

“You obviously know n-nothing about j-journalistic work,” said Philby, picking up one of his glasses of gin. “Some of the seeds fall upon st-stony places, and w-wither in the sun because they have no root. For every story I file, a d-dozen prove to be false alarms.” He lifted the glass to his lips and swirled the warm liquor over his tongue.

“That’s from the thirteenth chapter of Matthew,” said Dr. Tarr, “your seed analogy is. It properly refers to people, of course—and do remember the next verse:
‘And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprang up, and choked them.’
”

And to Philby’s embarrassment, a trickle of the gin slipped down his windpipe, and he coughed gin out through his nostrils; the stinging liquor burned in his nose and brought tears to his eyes, and the CIA men laughed as he continued coughing.

“Oh, a palpable hit!” said Dr. Tarr. “You like to act as if you’re out of play these days, Kim—the retired cold warrior—but lately Moscow is scrambling to make the Red Sea a Red Army sea, and make the Persian Gulf a…”

“Potemkin bluff?” suggested Elena. She was staring at Philby with distaste.

“Too reached-for,” said Professor Feather, shaking his head.

“Anyway,” Dr. Tarr went on, “they were ready to make the Caribbean a Soviet pond too, until Kennedy made them back down two months ago. Now the last time the Soviets tried a big grab like this was in ’48, when they blockaded Berlin and incidentally annexed Czechoslovakia and got a Communist Party member in as president of Hungary.
Less overtly
, there was also some action at that time around the Aras River, between Turkey and Soviet Armenia—specifically in the Ahora Gorge on Mount Ararat. And there are a lot of people in Beirut right now who were there then; including Miss Elena Teresa Ceniza-Bendiga herself.”

Elena lifted her glass of pink beer in a tired salute and took a gulp of it.

“A couple of the old cast are
not
here, though,” said Professor
Feather, “or not obviously or not yet. Your old house-mate Burgess is unlikely to show up, I suppose, Kim; our Brit colleagues would arrest him if he strayed out of the Soviet Union. But Andrew Hale fled England on Wednesday, the second, and the SIS managed to track him to Kuwait, but lost him the next day. It seems timely. Have you heard anything about him?”

“N-no,” said Philby, “I s-scarcely remember the boy.” But his mind was whirling, trying to figure out how this new piece on the chessboard might change the lines of consequence. Hale was Theodora’s star protégé, Philby thought, and he
appeared
to be fired after his failure on Ararat; was that a feint? God help me if Theodora is still
in
this in any way. Surely that old ultimatum with the SOE no longer applies! He remembered Theodora’s words at the Turkish–Soviet border in 1952:
Report to us any contact from the Soviets; and participate in any action they order you into; and report it all to us; or die.

Elena took another sip of her polluted beer. “ ‘Fled En gland,’ ” she said; “ ‘lost him the next day.’ Is he a fugitive?” And with a chill Philby remembered that Hale had been bitterly in love with her, in ’48, and he remembered the high-low seven-card stud game he had played with Hale in the Anderson bomb shelter on that last terrible night:
Low hand wins Maly’s
amomon
instructions.

“The news is five days old, even at newspaper-level,” said Professor Feather; “I’m surprised the SDECE hasn’t relayed it to you. Hale was to be arrested for old embezzlements committed during his residency in Kuwait right after the war—on Wednesday MI5 sent an agent to negotiate a possible immunity deal with him, contingent on doing some work for the SIS, and Hale killed the agent and fled. He killed a cop too.”

“Claude Cassagnac,” said Dr. Tarr.

“What about Claude Cassagnac?” asked Elena quickly.

Philby recalled that she had mentioned the name Cassagnac earlier this evening:
Maly did talk to me about this! I will have to tell old Cassagnac that my answer in 1941 was not accurate.

“That was the MI5 agent Hale killed,” said Dr. Tarr. “I gather he was more a consultant than an agent, actually.”

“What proof is this?” demanded Elena, quaintly using in English what Philby recognized as an old bit of Spanish Civil War slang.

“This is two hundred proof, ma’am, solid spirit right over the top of the still,” said Professor Feather, staring curiously at her. “Like I said, it’s even newspaper-level.” He stood up out of the booth, unblocking her way. “If you’re through with your drink, you can leave.”

“I’m not through with my drink,” she said.

“Kim’s not really for sale right now, Miss Ceniza-Bendiga.” Professor Feather looked across the table to where Philby sat hemmed in by Dr. Tarr.
“We
intend to read your non-fiction, Kim. And not as…
excerpts
, in a French
translation.”

Right, you haven’t got a “special relationship” with the SDECE, thought Philby, the way you have with the SIS. But neither you fellows nor, apparently, my disappointing old SIS colleagues, are offering me any itties.
Tout au contraire
, in fact.

The prolonged nervous strain of this evening, along with the cumulative effects of drink and his throbbing, wounded head, was goading Philby toward something like hysteria. I’ve got to end this, he thought.

“Oh well,” he said with desperately affected breeziness, “Miss Weiss is only interested in—d-d-domestic reminiscences, human-interest m-material. Travels with my f-father, the traumas of a raw-raw-
religious
education, the d-death of my pet fff
fox
—upon my honor, nothing that would attain to your ‘n-newspaper level.’ ” He finished his first gin and picked up the second. “And now if you’ll both excuse us…”

Dr. Tarr stood up from beside Philby and leaned down over Philby’s bandaged head. “Applewhite doesn’t think you were ever a spy for the Soviets,” he said; Applewhite was the CIA station chief in Beirut. “The Philbys and the Applewhites go out together for picnics in the mountains by Ajaltoun. Applewhite thinks we’re scound rels for hassling you and rousting you all the time.”

Cautiously, Philby allowed himself an indulgent laugh, and it came out convincingly enough; but when he tried to speak he found that he was babbling nervously: “Oh, th-that successive—that’s
excessive, surely—you s-seem like a couple of clean-cut Woodminster—I mean, Midwestern—”

“But
we’re
not
under
Applewhite,” Dr. Tarr went on almost in a snarl. “We work directly for the Office of Special Operations in Washington. And
our
boss”—he pressed his lips together—
“our
boss is very aware of your father, your pet fox.”

Philby felt as though the man had punched him in the stomach. The
CIA
knows that my father’s ghost was
inhabiting
that fox? But they
can’t
know much
more
than that, they can’t even
know that
, not with any certainty.

He had raised his eyebrows, and now he tensely opened his mouth to try to express… weary puzzlement, impatience, mounting irritability…

But Professor Feather stepped well back from Elena and delivered another punch: “While you’re dickering with the SDECE, ask Miss Ceniza-Bendiga to show you where she lay prone on the roof of a Rue Kantari office building Tuesday night, across the street from your place. She brought the rifle in a saxophone case, and I guess she must have joggled the telescopic sight a little during the taxi ride.”

“You two have a pleasant evening now, hear?” said Dr. Tarr cheerfully, and the two CIA men strode out of the bar.

Philby had snatched the revolver out of his coat pocket and was now pointing it under the table directly at Elena’s abdomen. “Dum-dums,” he said evenly, though he was breathing hard. “Paralysis, peritonitis—those would be
good
news.”

He was remembering last Tuesday night—the stunning blow to the head while he stood in front of the toilet in his bathroom, and then his own drunken, confused effort to bash his head
again
, against the radiator, to conceal from his wife the fact that he had been shot—his wife dragging him half-conscious to the bedroom, with blood jetting from his scalp and spattering the wall and ruining the pillows—and then the Lebanese doctor that poor Eleanor had somehow got to come over to the apartment, and Philby’s inarticulate reluctance to be taken away to a hospital while an assassin might be waiting outside for a second shot—

Elena smiled at him coldly and slowly lifted the palms of both hands from the table. “I don’t have the rifle now. And that was just… personal regards, Tuesday night, disobedience—not my orders. France
is
willing to buy you—even if France’s temperamental emissary would rather have seen you dead, that night—and you do still need a nation that will give you protection and immunity. You don’t dare go up the mountain with the Russian expedition, do you, now that your protector and shield is
all the way
gone? You told me that your father’s
body
died two years ago—when did the
fox
die?”

“September,” whispered Philby, lowering the barrel of the gun. “Somebody p-pushed him over the railing of our apartment. Pushed
her
, if you like—the f-fox was a female. Fifth floor.”

“I’ll deny having shot at you,” she said. She took a deep breath, and then, her eyes bright with tears as she stared straight at him, she added with clear deliberateness, “And what would have been the point of trying to kill you last Tuesday, in any case?—since”—she visibly braced herself—“since during our talk tonight I’ve gathered that January first isn’t your true birthday after all? Your real birthday, the real day on which you’re mortally vulnerable, is the date when something happened to nearly kill you in ’37, right?”

The barrel was up again, leveled at her, but he made himself lift his finger out of the trigger guard. No, he thought, she’s only giving you the truth: you will not be permitted to keep any part of you opaque; in the end you will be left with no secrets at all. “You— nearly got it, just then,” he said, his whisper very shaky now. “Did you—
know
you were attempting suicide, by saying that to me?”

“I—I know you’re solicitous of suicidal women.” She exhaled on a downward whistling note, and her shoulders sagged. “And so you leave me with a
different
person to try to kill.”

Philby nodded slowly, comprehending. “Andrew Hale,” he said.

Beirut, 1963/Wabar, 1948

The child turned on the cushion of the huge corded arms and looked at Kim through heavy eyelids. “And was it all worthless?” Kim asked, with easy interest.

“All worthless—all worthless,” said the child, lips cracking with fever.

—Rudyard Kipling,
Kim

Earlier in the evening, when the sky had still been gold beyond the blowing gauze curtains, Hale had reluctantly pulled up a chair at one side of his hotel room desk.

He stared without enthusiasm at the glasses of arak that Mammalian had poured before sitting down in the chair opposite him; and as Hale watched, Mammalian topped up each glass from the water pitcher on the desk, and the clear liquor was abruptly streaked with milky cloudiness. Hale had never been seasick or airsick, but he was sweating and nauseated right now with a profounder sort of deficiency in traction. The Mezon wire recorder at Mammalian’s elbow hissed faintly as its spools turned.

“You are ill at ease,” said Mammalian quietly, stroking his black beard as he looked out the window at the purple Mediterranean sea. “You are like a man nerving himself to climb a steep mountain, anticipating all sorts of chasms, hard challenges, muscles flexed to cramping. But it is not a mountain—it is a flat beach, and you are only going to walk into the surf.” He shrugged and rocked his head. “It will be cold, and the breath will perhaps seem to stop in
your throat at times, but you will get through it by
relaxing
. All your adult life you have kept up a tense guard, a tight, clinging posture—your task tonight is simply to lower the guard, let your fists unclench.” He turned away from the window to look at Hale, and he laughed softly. “Drink, my friend.”