Hale quickly learned enough phrases in the Russian language to apologize and ask directions, and he began exploring the city without an interpreter—the Intourist and Novosti Press Agency authorities permitted this, since all press releases were censored and no photographers could be obtained except from Novosti.
Moscow within the Sadovaya ring was physically daunting—the streets and squares were vast, though automobile traffic was sparse, and it seemed to Hale in his first days that the industrial-Gothic architecture of the Stalinist skyscrapers, crowned with giant red stars that lit the night sky like the Devil’s own landing-lights, were contrasted only by the medieval bastions and towers of the Kremlin wall and the new blocks of modernist pre-fabricated apartment buildings, which appeared to have been assembled with rust streaks and pock-marks already applied. Later he found the Bolshoi Theatre with its ornate Corinthian pillars, and the wrought-iron balconies and bridges and hanging lanterns of the vast GUM department store on Red Square, but these were forlorn remnants of the tsarist nineteenth century—like the palatial Gastronom 1 on Gorky Street, where grim-faced shoppers now waited in long lines to buy turnips and bottles of cheap red and blue syrups under the old gilt cherubs and chandeliers.
On the Moskva River embankment he stared at the twelve-foot-by-thirty-foot movie posters, trying to puzzle out the names of the stars, whose faces he didn’t recognize; farther up the embankment, outside the Kremlin wall by the Taynitskaya Tower, he could sometimes hear the scuffle-and-thump of a volleyball game, presumably among the guards, on the other side of the high wall; and for half an hour one day he watched a flock of crows busily dropping chestnuts down the top of a drainpipe on the tower and flying down to the pavement to retrieve the nuts when they rolled out at the bottom, and then flying up to do it again.
He felt like one of the birds. He had two things to do—and now that he was so close to defining the course of the rest of his life, he was postponing considering either of them.
When he had gone to the GUM department store he had seen the colorful spires and onion domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral, standing like some fantastic Walt Disney island hundreds of yards away at the south end of Red Square, and he had stared at its crimson walls and gold-and-blue spiraled domes. And when he realized that he was so anxious about his imminent intrusion there—on the twenty-second of April, forty years after 1924, only a week away now— that he was afraid to approach it, he made himself walk all the way across the plain of the cobblestoned square, past the ranked snow-plow trucks and the raised cement ring of the Lobinoye Mesto where criminals had been publicly beheaded in the tsarist days, to the cathedral’s rococo north arch. He walked up the stone stairs beyond and found that the tall doors stood open, with the cavernous aisles of the sixteenth-century church dimly visible inside.
With one finger he made a tiny, furtive sign of the cross on the front of his overcoat, and he stepped over the threshold onto the polished stone floor; and then—defensively, afraid to hope—he occupied himself with noting the placement of the doors in the far walls and the width and separation of the towering pillars, only peripherally aware of the chandeliers and the ranks of saints painted in luminous fresco on the high walls.
His heart was thudding alarmingly in his chest as he left the church and strode away across Red Square, and in his head he was telling himself, She may not be able to come, she may have forgotten, she may be dead, she certainly hates you.
But he had brought along a package from the remote Zagros mountain village of Siamand Barakat Khan, and he did need to find Kim Philby—though not in order to kill him: Hale also had two Scandinavian Airlines tickets that he had purchased with a casse gueule passport in Finland late in March. The names and passport numbers for the tickets had not yet been filled in.
Philby’s was of course a famous name in Moscow, especially among the Western journalists, some of whom had known him during his six years as a correspondent for The Economist and The Observer in Beirut. It had only been in July of last year that British Secretary of State Edward Heath confirmed that Philby had been the legendary “third man” in the Burgess and Maclean spy scandal of 1951, and Philby had arrived in Moscow in a season when spies were trendy—everyone was reading Vadim Kozhevnikov’s Shield and Sword, a novel about a brave Soviet spy in World War II, and the youth newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda was running a serial about the adventures of a beautiful KGB girl named Natasha—but Philby seemed to have become a recluse.
None of the journalists could tell Hale how to find Philby, and he didn’t dare to show more than casual, morbid interest. A New York Times man told Hale that he had seen Philby dining at the Aragvy Restaurant by the Bolshoi Theatre with two KGB men, who were distinguishable as such because they had been wearing the new pale-green fedoras available only in the privileged hard-currency stores; and a woman from The Saturday Evening Post told Hale that she had seen a man who looked like Kim Philby trying, speaking English, to order a new Pagoda brand washing machine in a parking-lot black market on the southern loop of the Sad Sam. The most recent Moscow telephone directory had been published in 1958, and the four-volume set had gone out of print immediately and had never been reprinted. Journalists and Muscovites amassed private telephone directories by writing down and sharing the names of all the parties they had got by wrong number connections—which were frequent—but none of these informal telephone books that Hale could get a look at had a listing for Philby.
Hale made no effort to live his journalistic cover story. He walked by the Aragvy Restaurant every day at noon and dusk, hoping to glimpse Philby, and in the evenings he nibbled cucumber-and-tomato zakusi in the bar of the Metropol, drank vodka at the Soviet-skaya and purple vermouth koktels at the Moskva—but he did not succeed in catching a glimpse of his half-brother.
When there were only three days left until the twenty-second of April, Hale reluctantly decided to look for Philby among the Gray People. This was the name given by the Sad Sam journalists to the Western expatriates who had defected and become Soviet citizens, and who all seemed to work for the Foreign Languages Publishing House, paid by the line for translating the speeches of Party members into English. They were said to be a furtive colony, inordinately proud of their various shabby treasons, and sure that the CIA or the SIS or the SDECE would pay dearly for the chance of arresting them. And all of them would reportedly turn pale with envy at the sight of a valid Western passport.
It was bad form to try to socialize with them, and Hale understood too that any such efforts were likely to draw the attention of the KGB, with the probable consequence of revocation of one’s visa, and speedy expulsion from the U.S.S.R.
Hale had considered simply going to St. Basil’s Cathedral on Wednesday the twenty-second of April, without visiting Philby first. But he did want to be able to fly out of the Soviet Union, afterward.
And Hale finally found the Gray People on the afternoon of Tuesday the twenty-first, in Khokhlovskaya Square on the eastern loop of the Sadovaya Samotechnaya ring road, at the black market for books. Here, unmolested even by the city police, the Moscow intellectuals in their shapeless clothes sorted through stacks of books in the watery sunlight, looking for Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care and illegal mimeographed copies of Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. The many mimeograph texts, stapled or sewn with yarn, were known as samizdat and were illegal, lacking the Glavlit stamp of approval; aside from the Pasternak, these blurry texts seemed to be mostly modern poetry, anti-government satire, crude witchcraft, and pornography.