“But they’re all dead. The angels.”
Hale stared at Theodora. “Jimmie. The ones on Ararat are all dead. With luck. But in Arabia, Egypt, India—no. China, even, probably.”
“Oh. No, of course not, I do see. China. Hmm.”
Watching the old man’s sagging gray face now in the morning sunlight, Hale thought that in fact Theodora had not known that Declare had killed only one major colony, albeit probably the biggest colony in the world, of djinn. And for several seconds Hale didn’t speak, but let Theodora arrive on his own at the conclusion that the destruction of the Soviet Union must stand as the major accomplishment of the old man’s career. And don’t forget the risk of cremation if you wait, Jimmie, Hale thought.
“I came across the Channel on a French cattle boat,” Hale added finally, with some tension, “because I can’t fly in an airplane over about ten thousand feet anymore. I learned that bit of data on an Air Liban flight out of Kuwait a month ago—the plane had to land in the gulf, off Bahrain, with half the fuselage ripped off. The spirits of the upper air are still up there in the Heaviside Layer, and they’re aware of me when I get up that close to them; and they’re—angry at me, still.”
“Really.” The old man was staring off across the lawns, nodding slowly. “That must have been exciting. You’ll have to travel by boat, then, and overland by rail—but that will look good, actually, not at all the behavior of a modern spy.”
He sighed heavily. “Yes, very well, I’ll get you reactivated and assigned to Moscow, under journalistic cover, with orders to investigate the Burobin employment agency. Human interest angle, ostensibly, focus on the little people who keep the show rolling, as it were; hobbies, filthy ethnic foods, framed pictures of the old Bolshevik parents on the shabby apartment walls. There are still newspapers that will let us force a foreign correspondent on them. And then—I’ll be as shocked as anyone else, if you do something crazy while you’re in Moscow.”
“And of course in the meantime,” said Hale gently, “you’ll make sure that any old verification orders concerning me are switched off.”
“Oh, my dear, I’m sure there never was anything like that!” Was there an ironic glint in the old man’s eye? “You insult me. But of course I will get on the telephone and explain your status. It might be best for you to stay here tonight, not try to go into the city. Right? We should certainly have you in Moscow by the middle of April, even at your slow rate of travel.”
That will do, thought Hale. He allowed himself to sit down on the damp green grass.
He recalled a story in the Thousand Nights and One Night, in which a poor traveler had been hired by a jewel merchant to allow himself to be sewn into the skin of a freshly killed mule. When it had been done, an enormous eagle snatched up the dead mule with the traveler hidden inside and flew to an otherwise inaccessible mountain peak, and the bird flew away in surprise when the man climbed out of the carcass. He found that the mountain-top was littered with human and mule bones, but also that the stones lying about were all jewels; and, from the valley below, the jewel merchant was calling up to him to throw down as many of the gems as he could lift. The traveler obediently flung down more than two hundred fabulously valuable stones, but eventually he paused to rest and called down a question about the route he would have to take to get back down—and at that point the jewel merchant gathered the jewels scattered in the valley, packed up his own mule and departed without a backward look. The abandoned traveler had pressed onward up the mountain and eventually after many hardships found a green valley, where he met and fell in love with a daughter of the djinn. She had loved him too, and had taken him down the mountain and dwelt with him as a human woman for a year. At the end of the year she had flown away—and the grief-stricken traveler had found his way back to the city where he had started; the jewel merchant did not recognize him, and hired him again to be sewn into a fresh mule skin. And this time, after the eagle had carried the carcass to the mountain-top and taken flight after a living man crawled out of it, the traveler ignored the jewel merchant’s cries from the valley and threw down no jewels, but set off at once for the remembered valley where he might once again find the daughter of the djinn.
“I’ll impose on your hospitality for a bath,” he said, “and some food and drink—and sleep.”
And then, he thought, you can sew me up, Jimmie.
Theodora drove Hale to London two days later in his old Continental Bentley, but instead of crossing the river to Century House he proceeded to Artillery Mansions near Westminster Hall. London Station ran a department from Artillery Mansions known as DP4, which was in the business of inserting SIS agents into eastern Europe and Russia—students, businessmen, journalists; as a lowly DP4 operative, Hale would be beneath the notice of Dick White, who was still C.
Theodora’s proposal was approved without objection by Dickie Franks, the DP4 chief, with routine authorization from the Foreign Office, and at the end of the week Andrew Hale boarded the Polish liner Topolewski. After three days at sea, with stops at Rotterdam and Copenhagen, Hale arrived at the Baltic Sea port of Danzig in northern Poland. His British passport identified him as Varnum Leonard, a non-staff foreign correspondent for the Evening Standard, and its pages were stamped with many visas from Eastern Bloc countries such as Czechoslovakia and the German Democratic Republic; and in the Brest railway station on April 8, the passport’s last empty page was stamped with the red star of the U.S.S.R. visa.
Across the Soviet border now, he boarded a crowded train that took him over the course of several days through Minsk and Smolensk, and finally on the evening of Sunday the twelfth he watched through his sleeping compartment window as the outlying villages of Moscow, quaint snow-covered log cabins and narrow lanes animated with horse-drawn sleds, gave way to paved streets and new apartment buildings with television antennas on the roofs. It was full dark by the time his train squealed to a steaming halt in the Belorussia Station on the Leningrad Prospect, only a short Metro ride from the apartment which Intourist had assigned to him on the Sadovaya Samotechnaya ring road.
His apartment building proved to be an elegant Stalinist-baroque ghetto for Western journalists, insulated from surrounding buildings by high cement walls and a sentry box manned by KGB agents in police uniforms. During his first days there, he picked up from the other foreign correspondents the habit of referring to the broad avenue on which they lived as “Sad Sam.” The term was just a two-syllable abbreviation to the Burobin Russian interpreters who generally accompanied the journalists out into the city, but for other Westerners it carried a flavor of good-humored desperation. The other correspondents always spoke of coming “into” or going “out of” the Soviet Union, never saying simply “to” or “from,” and even the ones who were most at-home in Moscow, speaking the language and knowing where the bars were, were careful to schedule frequent trips back out to London, or New York, or Rome, or any other place where the standard drink was not “a hundred grams” of vodka, and where people didn’t select a wine by its alcohol content, as in “give me something at 19 percent.”