The spring thaw had definitely arrived upon Moscow. Green buds and even tiny pink flowers dotted the black boughs of the apple trees; Patriarch’s Pond itself, which he could see through a gap between two houses, had thawed out in the middle, with broken ice clinging around the grassy shore.
At nine Hale saw two alert men emerge from the basement stairs at the foot of Philby’s building, and though they were wearing snap-brim felt hats, with the eccentricity of having no dents in the crowns, he guessed they were KGB; and it was confirmed when Philby himself came blinking up into the sunlight right behind them.
Hale realized that in spite of his pouchy face Philby had always been slim; he wasn’t any longer. It was a stocky, gray-haired figure that came lumbering across the pavement, and his features were coarser, blunter, now. Hale had been sitting on a bench, trying to puzzle out the Cyrillic syllables in the Tolstoi and taking an occasional mouthful of the chilly vodka, and now he stood up. He opened his book and folded it around with the pages on the outside, and then closed it again, to make a furtive white flash. It was a standard SIS sign.
And Philby saw it from thirty feet away. The man’s eyes lifted from the book to Hale’s face, and Hale caught a gleam of surprised recognition, quickly concealed. Kim Philby stopped walking and frowned up at the sky for a moment, then shrugged out of his heavy overcoat—and while he was getting his arm out of the sleeve, he gave Hale the old SIS hand-signal that meant Follow, at a distance.
Fair enough, thought Hale cautiously as he ambled across the cul-de-sac at an angle behind Philby. I’ve got three hours before high noon. As soon as he saw that Philby intended to walk down Spiridonovka Street, Hale hurried around a block to get in front of Philby and his KGB escorts. Now Philby could see him and cooperate in maintaining visual contact, and the KGB men, for all their deadpan vigilance, had apparently not considered that someone might be following Philby from in front.
This neighborhood, inside the Sadovaya ring and south of Patriarch’s Pond, was all foreign embassies—the American Embassy was only a block or two ahead—and Hale wondered if Philby intended to dart into one and ask for asylum. Hale could have told him that all the embassy chauffeurs and maids would be Burobin agents, KGB.
But Hale kept walking ahead, glancing into windows or up at the street-spanning rooftop banners in order to glance back peripherally and make sure that Philby was still behind him. He knew enough Russian to translate the text of only one of the huge red banners— GLORY TO WORK . It seemed a depressing thought.
When Hale had walked past the crenellated bell tower of a Russian Orthodox church, he glanced up at the clock and then let his gaze fall behind him—and he saw that Philby had stopped on the sidewalk by an arch that led into the church grounds.
Hale paused to lift his bagged bottle and take a sip, feeling safe in facing back along his track to do it, and two full seconds later Philby stepped through the arch. The two KGB men followed, though Hale thought he saw them exchange a glance before they too disappeared.
Hale quickly shuffled sidways into the recessed doorway of a restaurant on the other side of the street, and after putting down his bottle and tossing his leather hat and the blob of cotton, he shrugged out of his coat and pulled its sleeves inside-out before putting it back on; then, hatless, and with the coat’s pink-satin lining on the outside now so that he seemed to be wearing a decrepit Oriental smoking jacket, he retrieved his bottle and emerged from the door-way and strode purposefully across the street to the stone arch. He took a deep breath and stepped through.
The arch led into an old walled cemetery, and Hale walked forward out of the shadow of the wall into a patch of still sunlight. For a moment he smelled the grass and the tulips, but then he caught the familiar whiff of rancid oil. His eyes were watering in the sun glare.
He was suddenly dizzy, and after only a few more steps along the gravel walk he gripped a bronze double-barred cross on the nearest gravestone to keep from falling. A thought that was not his own echoed in his head: What brings thee in to me?
Hale glanced around for Philby—and he saw only the two KGB men, who were striding between the upright stones in evident alarm.
Philby had evaded them—but where was he? Hale took a deep breath and stepped away from the gravestone.
And he noticed with a sort of ringing tunnel vision that he was casting two shadows across the gravel—or, rather, that he stood between two shadows, with no evidence that his own body was stopping the sunlight at all. He raised his arm, and so did the shadow a foot away to his right. He looked up to his left, where the person casting the other shadow should be standing, and for a moment he saw the back of his own head, with the hair still standing up in spikes, and saw below it the shoulders of the crazy-looking quilted pink-satin coat.
A moment later the vision was gone, and aside from his two shadows he seemed to be alone on the gravel path.
His left leg flexed forward into an involuntary step, and in his left ear he heard a whisper: “Walk back out. Drink your vodka as you go.”
In his disorientation Hale would have gone along with almost any proposal, and he obediently lurched back toward the arch, tipping the bottle up for a slug of vodka.
He saw bubbles wobble up through the clear liquor, and heard them gurgling, but no liquid reached his mouth. Then his arm was pulled back down, and the whispering voice in his ear said, “Ahh,” and Hale could smell vodka fumes over the metallic oil reek. “Straight ahead, across the street,” the voice went on, “there’s a park where drunks sun themselves, two blocks away, just alleys to get there.”
Hale stumbled out through the arch and swayed and shuffled across the street like a man with a concussion. When he had stumbled up onto the far sidewalk his left leg flexed again, and he wobbled away in that direction. If the KGB men had observed him at all, they must have dismissed him as an unsignifying drunk.
Within a few steps Hale had turned right, off the Spiridonovka; and when he had walked one block down an alley that led away to the north, past windowsill flower boxes and the back doors of old wooden houses, he regained his balance. Out of the corner of his left eye he could see Philby walking along beside him now, and he could hear Philby’s boots crunching on the pavement; but Hale didn’t look directly at him for fear of overlapping him again. Hale did notice with relief that his own shadow stretched ahead properly from his own feet now, and that Philby’s was moving normally beside it, not alarmingly close to it.
As if this ordinary sight were a signal, Hale’s heartbeat was suddenly very fast in his chest, and he was panting. “What—” he said hoarsely, “—happened?”
“I often duck in there, or into any cemetery,” said Philby quietly, his own voice sounding a little strained, “when I want to lose my escorts. The guardian angel is present in such places, and when she is focusing on me, other people seem to have difficulty doing it.” He took a deep breath and sighed gustily. “I guess you’re my other half, right enough, my ten-years-delayed twin—today she obviously mistook you and I, authoritatively, for one person.” Hale saw the shadow of Philby’s head lift and turn in profile toward him. “Not very flattering to me, I must say,” Philby added. “What is that garment?”
“Overcoat,” said Hale shortly. “Inside-out.”
Neither of them said anything more until they had reached the park Philby had mentioned, a narrow grassy square with wooden benches around the periphery. And several of the old men on the benches were holding bottles.