Hale took a deep draw on his Russian cigarette, and a throat-full of hot air let him know that he had used up all the tobacco in it. He ground it out under his heel and began walking out across the pavement toward the apartment building.
Immediately two men in green fedoras had stepped up from a set of basement stairs, and they made straight for Hale. One of them asked a question in Russian.
“Dobriy vyechyir,” said Hale amiably. It meant Good evening. “Vi gavrarityeh pa angliski?” he went on. “Nyimyetski? Frantsuski?” Do you speak English? German? French?
In German the KGB officer said, “Let me see your passport. What are you doing here?” His companion had stepped to the side, probably to have a clear shot at Hale.
“I am an English journalist for the London Evening Standard,” replied Hale in German. With his right hand he pulled open his overcoat, and with two fingers of his left hand he slowly drew out his passport. “I wish to write an article about Pushkin Square and the picturesque old neighborhoods around it.”
“This is a restricted area,” the KGB agent said, handing the passport to his companion. “You are staying at the hotel on the Sadovaya Samotechnaya?”
“Var-noom Leeyonard,” said the agent with Hale’s passport, and it took Hale a moment to realize that the man was pronouncing the name on the passport, Varnum Leonard.
Hale nodded. “That’s right.”
“Joor-nalist,” the man added.
“Right again.”
“Do not come here again,” said the first man, waving Hale back the way he had come.
Hale retrieved his passport, nodded apologetically, and walked back toward the alley. The cul-de-sac was in deepening shadow, and he noticed that there were no streetlamps.
A committed parry, he thought with satisfaction. That’s the place. And probably there’ll be a new shift of guards tomorrow morning.
At the alley-mouth he glanced back, and he saw a pair of lighted windows on the eighth floor of the apartment building. Are you at home, Kim? he thought. I hope you’re an early riser-I need to be at St. Basil’s Cathedral at noon.
The prospect of his visit to the cathedral was much more troubling than the thought of cornering Kim Philby tomorrow morning.
That night Hale sat up drinking Glenlivet Scotch whiskey with the New York Times man, watching Russian television on the fourteen-inch black-and-white television set in the lobby of their Sad Sam hotel. One of the two available channels was airing a special on collective farms in the Ukraine, with lots of footage of modern harvest combines moving through fields of wheat; the other channel featured a show about steel-workers, and Hale and his companion stared befuddled at a view of white-hot steel ingots bumping down a ramp.
“I’ve got to get out again soon,” the New York Times man mumbled as he switched off the set and got up to stagger toward his room. “I’m starting to root for their Five-Year Plans.”
Hale nodded sympathetically, but sat for a while with his whiskey and stared at the dark television screen. From another room he could hear a radio playing some rock-and-roll-a song called “Sie Liebt Dich,” by a Hamburg group called, apparently, The Beetles.
She loves you, the lyrics meant. Ja, ja, ja.
Nein, nein, nein, he thought bleakly, refilling his glass. She loved me, she loves me not.
Entschuldig Dich, the lyrics advised. Apologize. But I didn’t do what she believes I did, he thought; and if I had done it, no apology would be possible.
Hale wondered if Theodora could have set it up that way deliberately: killing Claude Cassagnac and then blaming Hale for the death, just to preclude any renewal of intimacy between Hale and Elena in Beirut. Theodora would have wanted to minimize any involvement by the French SDECE-though in fact the SDECE did manage at least to blow the Black Ark site to smithereens, moments after Hale had delivered the death-blow to the djinn. Once again he wondered if Elena had been aboard that unmarked French Alouette III helicopter, and if she had been the pilot who had veered off or the machine-gunner who had nearly given Hale the last truth; and he wondered if she believed he died there. She must know Philby survived-anybody in the world who read newspapers knew that.
For the first time in many years, he let his mind dwell freely on his last night in Paris in ’41 and on his last night in Berlin in ’45.
I can’t not try, he thought, putting down his glass and struggling to his feet to climb the stairs to his room.
He wound his alarm clock, set the alarm hand at six o’clock and fell asleep in his clothes. In his dreams he took Elena’s hand and ran across the bumpy pavement of Red Square, fleeing from KGB agents in green hats, but when he paused by the river embankment and looked back at her, the creature he had by the hand was the dark-eyed Arabic woman with the wedding-ring necklace, and she lifted his hand to her lips and began to bite off his fingers.
At eight the next morning Hale stood in chilly sunlight over two old men playing dominoes on one of the cement tables near Philby’s apartment building. Hale had managed to nick his chin while shaving, and now a blob of white cotton was stuck below his lip; he consoled himself with the thought that it was a disguise of sorts-or at least a distraction. And his graying sandy hair had not cooperated with the comb, and now stood up in spikes in the back.
Hale had brought along a Russian-language edition of Tolstoi and a bottle of vodka in a paper bag; and he had borrowed a shapeless wool coat, a leather hat with ear-flaps, and an ill-fitting old pair of bell-bottom trousers. Altogether he felt that he looked like a native, not worth special scrutiny by the KGB.
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.