Declare (85 page)

For more than twenty years she had occupied Hale’s thoughts and brightened or tormented his dreams, but the only period in which the two of them had known each other, lived and worked and eaten and joked together, had been the three months in Nazi-occupied Paris, at the end of 1941, more than twenty-two years ago.

During his years as a lecturer at the University College of Weybridge, he had imagined one day meeting her again, and courting her, and marrying her; but under the gaze of the police in this cold Moscow church, those daydreams seemed all-of-a-piece with the bright, naïve ambitions of his Cotswolds boyhood, and he didn’t dare to hope for anything at all now, not even continued liberty.

He stirred himself and walked forward, digging into the pocket of his corduroy trousers for Philby’s two kopeks. The women were kneeling on a black leather kneeler in front of the candles, and Hale lowered himself down onto the yard of it to Elena’s right, so that she was between him and the nearest policeman; and Hale reached out to drop the two coins into the slot in the iron money box.

They fell to the floor of the box with a noise that seemed as loud as a couple of .22 shots.

From the corner of his left eye he could see that she was looking at him, and he was resentful that he dared not meet her gaze.

He saw her right hand move—she had made the sign of the cross. He crossed himself in turn, and he was genuinely praying to God too when he said softly,
“Segne mich.”

The words were German for
Bless me.

It was the old GRU Rote Kapelle code phrase:
Things are not what they seem—trust me.
Though he had spoken in a near-whisper, the words echoed back down at him from the remote arched ceiling.

He forced his hand not to tremble as he reached out and picked up
one of the matchboxes on the iron table, and he managed to light one of the matches on the first strike. He held it to the curled black wick of one of the candles that had been extinguished, and shook it out when the wick flared in a tall yellow flame.

He made the sign of the cross again and stood up, staring at the candle flame and trying to see Elena as clearly as he could in his peripheral vision. Her white hair was conspicuous under the black hood, and he could make out her big Castilian eyes and the smooth, graceful sweep of her jaw.

God knew what she made of him, with his graying hair and strange, blood-spotted clothing.

He turned away and began walking toward the south entrance, where the tall doors stood open and he could see a segment of distant gray overcast indented by the Moscow skyline south of the river.

No one stopped him as he scuffed across the stone floor past the massive pillars. He stepped out between the open doors into the cold breeze, and walked down the first couple of steps, and then he heard someone’s footsteps behind him.

Two or three of the uniformed men stood at the foot of the stairs, but Hale slowed and let the person behind him gradually catch up. It was Elena, heartbreakingly slim and straight in a long black dress. He let himself look into her face finally, and though there were new lines under her eyes and down her cheeks, her blue eyes were still youthful, and vulnerable.

He let his left eyelid flutter in a faint wink, and then he had stepped ahead and was leading the way left, toward the sidewalk on the eastern side of the cathedral island. He could hear the tap of her shoe-soles on the cement behind him, and he didn’t look around to see if the policemen were watching them.

When they had reached the sidewalk, where the wind was swirled into eddies by the curtained black ZIL limousines that swept past, one of them possibly transporting Brezhnev himself from some meeting of the Communist Party Presidium at the Kremlin Palace, Hale whispered back over his shoulder, “I’m Varnum Leonard, journalist for the London
Evening Standard
. Solid cover until this
morning, but now Philby’s talked to me, I’m compromised.” He was dizzy, and he took a deep breath. “I did not kill Cassagnac.”

From behind him she said softly, “Gitana Sandoval, Spanish movie producer, location-scouting via Intourist.”

And both of us, Hale thought, are in the old GRU records, and certainly in the more recent KGB records too—not to mention Rabkrin—if anybody should be interested in checking.

He could hear clocking footsteps approaching from some distance behind, and he shuffled for two paces and nearly tripped, for he had instinctively begun to tap out the old
clochard
nothing-right-here rhythm—but in nearly the same instant he had remembered the uses those rhythms had been put to in the Ahora Gorge fifteen years ago, and he had awkwardly tried to resume his former pace.

Elena’s shoes had scuffled on the pavement too, for a moment; and now she was again walking normally. Ultimately, Hale thought with a sort of solemn pleasure, we both know which way to declare.

The footsteps behind were closer, and sounded like boots. Elena was walking beside Hale on his right now, and she took hold of his hand, and squeezed. “I knew, after a while, that you had not,” she said quietly. “I knew when I ordered the helicopter to veer east.”

She was holding his hand so tightly that he could feel the fast beat of her pulse; and a moment later he realized that it was precisely matching his own, as if they were one person on the sidewalk.

With her free hand she fetched up from her coat pocket a little mirror—apparently the same old tortoise-backed one she had had in Paris—and when she held it out in front of them, Hale could see her face and his, half-overlapped in the cracked glass.

The footsteps from behind faltered, and then broke from a concerted group into unmatched individuals—and then the policemen had passed them and were craning their necks to peer up and down the lanes of this south end of Red Square, as if, Hale thought giddily, they were watching for a taxi.

“Grace,” said Elena. “Not magic.”

“I have airline tickets,” said Hale, “but I can’t fly and I can’t go back to England. I’m more or less going to have to
walk
out, and God knows across which border.”

“You remembered my birthday,” she said, still holding his hand tightly, though she was staring past him at the cathedral. “Did—did Philby?”

“Yes. We played a game of cards, to decide which of us would come to meet you in the cathedral. The loser to win three of the inhabited
amomon
roots.”

“Immortality!” she said. “He was happy to lose.”

“Not
happy
—resigned. I was happy to win. I would have come even if I had not won.”

She laughed, and it was the first time he had heard her laugh since Berlin in 1945, nearly twenty years ago. “Walking out,” she said, “would be easier for a couple than for one person alone.”

They were a peculiar-looking couple—the man in the clownish overcoat, who had fired the shot that would one day topple the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and the woman dressed in black like a Spanish
duena
, who would at long last become his wife—but they attracted no attention at all as they strolled away hand-in-hand past the southernmost corner of the Kremlin Wall and on to the embankments of the Moskva River.

AFTERWORD

Kim Philby died in the early morning of May 11, 1988, of arrhythmia of the heart, at the KGB clinic in Moscow. His last words were in reply to a telephoned congratulations on the anniversary of the Soviet victory of 1945: “What victory?” Philby said.

He was buried in the Novodiverchy cemetery near Red Square.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics collapsed three and a half years later, in December of 1991; Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as Soviet President on Christmas Day.

In my experience stories never write themselves—but they do often
suggest
or even strongly
indicate
themselves. Being a John le Carré fan, I happened one day to read his introduction to
The Philby Conspiracy,
by Page, Leitch, and Knightley, and I was so struck by the mysteries surrounding Kim Philby and his father that I read that book, and then Boyle’s
The Fourth Man
—and it s oon became evident to me that a novel could be woven around these characters and events. Eventually I discovered that, in fact, novels such as Ted All-beury’s fine
The Other Side of Silence
had already been.

But as I went on to read Eleanor Philby’s
Kim Philby: The Spy I Married,
and Borovik’s and Modin’s books providing the KGB perspective, and Philby’s own
My Silent War,
I found that the incidents that intrigued me were the apparently peripheral ones. I kept being nagged by a feeling that the central element of the story had been almost completely omitted, to be derived now only by finding and tracing its fugitive outlines.

In a way, I arrived at the plot for this book by the same method that astronomers use in looking for a new planet—they look for “perturbations,” wobbles, in the orbits of the planets they’re aware of, and they calculate the mass and position of an unseen planet whose gravitational field could have caused the observed perturbations—and then they turn their telescopes on that part of the sky and search for a gleam. I looked at all the seemingly irrelevant “wobbles” in the lives of these people—Kim Philby, his father, T. E. Lawrence, Guy Burgess—and I made it an ironclad rule that I could not change or disregard any of the recorded facts, nor rearrange any
days of the calendar—and then I tried to figure out what momentous but unrecorded fact could explain them all.

After all, why
did
Philby spend two days in drunken grief when his pet fox fell to her death in Beirut, in September of 1962? In Nicholas Elliott’s autobiography we’re told that Philby and Eleanor brought the fox back “from a visit to Saudi Arabia,”
¹
and Philby himself, in an article published in
Country Life
in 1962, describes the fox as chewing pipe stems and licking up whisky; Eleanor notes that they “were all desolate”
²
at the fox’s death, but the only other time Philby gave in so to grief was at the death of his father, precisely two years earlier.

The garment Philby was seen wearing in Spain on the evening of December 31, 1937, after the car he was in was struck by a Russian artillery round, has been described by both Anthony Cave Brown in
Treason in the Blood
and Phillip Knightley in
The Master Spy
as a woman’s moth-eaten coat; the implication being that some Good Samaritan had draped him in it. But Philby himself, quoted in Genrikh Borovik’s later and more authoritative
The Philby Files,
says, “I looked so picturesque that I later read somewhere that someone had put a woman’s fur coat on me after the explosion. In fact I was wearing the coat my father had given me, which he had received from one of his Arab princes. It was a very amusing piece of tailoring: bright green fabric on the outside and bright red fox fur on the inside.”
³

And at the end of the “Bitter Waters” chapter in St. John Philby’s
The Empty Quarter,
he describes being led by a fox to a meteorite in the Arabian desert. The elder Philby, in fact, devotes an appendix to “Meteorites and Fulgurites,” and in
Declare
I respectfully adhere to his description of the Wabar meteor-strike site (at least until the supernatural intervenes). In another appendix he notes that
Arabs believe that some stones in the desert walk about, leaving a track in the sand. They attribute this remarkable power to the work of spirits,”
⁴
though earlier in the book he says, “I reserved judgment on the ‘walking stones’ until they could be produced to perform in my presence.”
⁵
Also in
The Empty Quarter
is St. John’s description of his dreams in the Rub’ al-Khali desert: “My dreams these nights were nightmare vistas of long low barrack buildings whirling round on perpetually radiating gravel rays of a sandy desert, while I took rounds of angles on ever moving objects with a theodolite set on a revolving floor. It was the strangest experience of my life.”
⁶