Hale must at least seem passionately to want the amomon, for the sake of letting Philby seem to have won something by taking all three of the roots; but of course in the end Hale would declare high. He had brought along the two other amomon roots simply because he’d had them, and they had value; and because it had seemed too high-handed for Hale to decide, for Elena, that she did not want to avail herself of the magical longevity the amomon offered.
But he was sure she would reject the option. She was, after all, a practicing Catholic, as Hale had been himself now for more than a year, and taking immortality from a fallen angel was hardly in accord with Catholic doctrine.
In fact, Elena would almost certainly reject Hale, if he approached her in the cathedral. And the djinn-thistle, supplemented with Maly’s instructions, would probably give him genuine immortality, if he won it.
Suddenly, sickeningly, Hale was very far from sure that he did not want to be the one to win the amomon.
“You want,” he said carefully, “to deal a hand of-”
“No, my boy, that would call for fresh rules, fresh definitions! Wild cards, cut-for-the-deal, dealer’s choice, no end of arguments! No, I simply want to finish the hand that was interrupted by the earthquake in 1948. Here are cards, here are the players-here’s the church and here’s the steeple, open the doors and see Elena! If you won’t play, if you forfeit the game, you lose-and I’ll at least be the one to go meet Elena in an hour, and I’ll have a good try too at getting the KGB to wring the dubok location out of you.”
Hale’s forehead was chilly with a dew of sweat. “But those cards were scattered.”
“I remember mine. And I remember what you were showing on the board-a three, seven, ten, and nine, of different suits. Do you remember?”
Actually, Hale did remember the hand, with hallucinatory clarity; he remembered too the rain drumming on the corrugated steel roof of the little war-surplus Anderson bomb shelter, and the tan woolen Army blankets, and the bottle of Macallan Scotch that they had rolled back and forth between them. “Yes. And you were showing an Ace, four, six, and eight; the six and the eight were diamonds. But are we to-trust each other, to choose the same hole cards we held then?”
“That’s an insulting remark from an Oxford man to a Cambridge man. And in any case it’s high-low-unless one of us declares both ways, each of us gets half the pot. The girl-or life everlasting.” Philby stretched, yawning. “I wonder if she’s kept her looks, our Elena? The white hair fetched me, I must say.” He smacked his lips and blinked at Hale. “You could probably kill me, right now-the old Fort Monkton skills-but of course then you’d never see Maly’s instructions. And I took the Fort Monkton course too, remember, and I do have my little knife.”
It was riskier than Philby had said. The ranks of the hands would be almost superfluous, since Philby would certainly choose new hole cards to maximally improve his own hand in one direction or the other, high or low, and he would assume that Hale would do the same-it would be more important here to guess which way the other man would declare.
Philby leaned back and spoke into the sky: “‘We have set the seal of Solomon on all things under sun,’” he said, reciting from Chesterton’s Lepanto now, “‘of knowledge and of sorrow and endurance of things done.’” He smiled at Hale. “That will have called witnesses, don’t you think? You spoke the name of Solomon in that bomb shelter, if you recall, and it did summon attention then.”
Hale could feel a pressure against his mind now-not the full, thought-scattering scrutiny of a corporeal djinn, but a quiver of alien attention, and he thought the grasses were moving more than the wind could explain. He exhaled to clear his nose of a new whiff of the metallic oil smell.
Philby had moved the vodka bottle and was sorting through the cards, now laying one face-up on the bench, now tucking one under his thigh. After a minute there were three cards under his thigh and the predetermined Ace, four, six, and eight lying face-up.
He held the remainder of the deck out toward Hale. “Now find yours.”
Hale’s scalp seemed to have stopped bleeding, and he shoved the handkerchief into his overcoat. He took the cards and stared at Philby’s exposed cards as he slowly shuffled through the deck. Philby could have selected a two, three, and five for his hole cards, giving him the perfect low hand, if he wanted to go that way. Hale couldn’t even construct a hand that would beat it. Or Philby could have chosen three Aces for his hole cards, which would give him four of them-a high hand Hale couldn’t possibly beat.
But Philby could not have assembled a hand that would assuredly win both ways. The best he could do for that would be the Ace-to-five straight, and Hale could have three more nines hidden, and the four-of-a-kind would beat the straight.
Hale began laying out the cards he had had showing in 1948: the three, the seven, the ten, the nine.
The declaration alone would be the verdict-if they both chose in the same direction, Philby would win.
Hale coughed to conceal an involuntary sigh. All delusions aside, he knew which way he had to declare.
Hale chose three cards at random for his hole cards and wedged them under his knee. Beyond Philby he saw that several of the old drunks had got up and were shambling away, doubtless troubled by the itchy resonance of the supernatural attention that Philby had summoned by speaking the name of Solomon.
Philby was digging in a pocket of his trousers. “I’ll fetch us six kopeks, for the declare,” he said breathlessly. When he had pulled out a handful of coins and begun fingering them, he squinted up at Hale. “Don’t you wish it were our birthday, today, instead of Elena’s, and we could read each other’s minds?”
“I think we can anyway,” said Hale.
Philby frowned, and suddenly Hale guessed that Philby had assembled the Ace-to-five straight, and arrogantly meant to declare both ways-confident that Hale would declare for low, that Hale would choose the good chance of immortality over the uncertainty of Elena’s dubious reception.
“She hates you, you know,” Philby said quickly. “In Beirut she learned that you had supposedly killed that Frenchman, that Cassagnac fellow. She told me-word of honor!-that she meant to kill you.”
“I don’t doubt it,” Hale said, reaching across to select three coins from Philby’s palm. He shook them inside his cupped hands like dice. “I’m willing to put it to the test.”
Philby forced a hearty laugh. “There spoke bluff! She’s forty-she hates you-and there is an infinity of other women in the world.” His gaze focused past Hale then, and he drew in a sharp breath. “Ach, and now the groundlings have arrived.”
Hale made himself look around slowly, and he was afraid he would see the peculiar hats of the KGB-but the figures that had shambled into the park were thin, pale-faced men and women in shabby overcoats. Hale saw tweeds, and tartans, and even an unmistakable Old Etonian tie. These were the Gray People, the ring-road birds. I could be a king among that sad population, Philby had said. They made no sounds, and almost seemed to ripple with the breeze.
For Philby to declare low here would be the equivalent, in the context of this crowd, of Arthur pulling the sword from the stone. It would be declaring, To hell with love, and eventual payment of the death I owe to God. I willingly choose this existence of bitterness, envy, and cherished lies, on the condition that I can be assured of it for eternity.
Hale was certain that it was what Philby would choose, would have to choose, now that Hale’s own decision had been made to seem problematical. If Philby were forced to choose between love and grubby security, the course of his life would have left him no alternative but to choose grubby security.