“I’m willing to put it to the test,” Hale said again. He slid two coins into his right fist and held it out.
Philby rubbed his hands together for nearly a full minute, baring his teeth in a grimace of indecision-and then at last he made a fist and struck it hard against his chest. “Mea culpa!” he whispered.
“Declare,” said Hale, opening his hand to show the two coins.
Philby lowered his hand pronated, and he opened his fingers and let the single kopek drop into the grass.
The air seemed to twang, a released tension felt in the abdomen rather than heard.
All Hale had won, after all this, had been the right to go meet Elena, as he had planned to do all along.
“The r-roots,” Philby was gabbling, “wh-wh-where are the roots?”
Hale stood up and looked at his watch-he had twenty minutes to get to St. Basil’s Cathedral on Red Square, a bit more than a mile away to the east. “Two are in a high cupboard in the kitchen at the journalists’ hotel on the Sadovaya Samotechnaya, behind an old wooden tray; the other is in the bookstore next door to the Ararat Restaurant, behind the red-leather collected works of Marx. You can unleash Machikha Nash on me if you don’t find them. Oh, and-” he held out his hand. “Here are your two kopeks back.”
“Keep them,” snarled Philby, “to be p-put on your eyes, after you’re d-d-dead! What can you h-have left, thirty summers, at the m-most? And the last duh-duh-dozen of them impotent, s-senile! How many is th-thirty? Three prints of your h-hands in mud!”
Hale had turned and was striding away across the grass, and behind him Philby raised his voice nearly in a scream: “While I’ll be y-you-youthful still, d-drinking claret, reading Shakespeare, f-f-fathering children! You l-lost here, today, Hale! Don’t doubt it! You l-lost!”
Hale paused at the alley and looked back. Kim Philby was sitting on the bench, still shouting, but he was surrounded now by the Gray People, and seemed as insubstantial as any of them.
Enjoy the illusion of immortality, thought Hale sadly, O my brother. The amomon djinn will die as soon as you digest it. If I’ve got thirty years left, you’ve got twenty. Two prints of your hands.
“You l-l-lost!” came Philby’s voice, sounding thin and birdlike at this distance.
Hale smiled tightly as he turned away.
No, he thought as he hurried down the sun-dappled cobblestone alley toward the lanes of Spiridonovka. Whatever the outcome, I declared high.
Hale made himself walk, rather than run or even jog, down the wide quarter mile of paving stones toward the fantastic spires of St. Basil’s Cathedral on the hazy middle-distance horizon. His watch showed only eight minutes to noon, but he was wary of the Soviet Army honor guards in their gray fur hats and gray uniforms with bright red collar tabs and epaulettes. Clusters of Army guards marched across various empty quadrants of the square, and individual guards stood like buoys at the widely separated corners of the line of Moscow citizens that stretched like a boundary fence across the square, enclosing the concrete bleachers and terminating at the temple-like mausoleum in which Lenin’s preserved corpse could be viewed. In the eleven days he had been in Moscow, Hale had twice seen these guards knock a person out of the line and pummel him to the stones for some apparently minor violation of security, and he didn’t want to attract their attention today at all.
It was far too late now to pull the long, quilted sleeves back through his overcoat and put it on correctly; it would take some minutes to walk all the way past the longest, bleacher-spanning segment of the mausoleum line, and he would have to march the whole distance with the pink-satin lining-side of the garment out, looking like a performer in some crude satire on Chinamen, or Tibetans. And it was the fashion among the stilyagi, the stylish young Moscow hooligans, to go about anarchistically hatless; but at least Hale’s graying hair and ludicrous coat would save him from being mistaken for one of them.
Hale had not eaten for more than twelve hours, and the vodka he had drunk with Philby was making him dizzy. A hundred yards away to his left rose the gray stone arches and towers of the GUM department store, as sternly grand as the Houses of Parliament; far off ahead of him to his right the Saviour’s Tower stood up from the brick-red Kremlin wall, incongruously crowned with a giant red star; and straight ahead, its bulbous blue-and-gold striped domes looking like bellied sails on a sultan’s ship of state, St. Basil’s Cathedral loomed on the broad, gently rippled sea of paving stones.
Hale was trying desperately to convince himself that Philby would not send KGB agents down here to arrest him and Elena. Hale knew that Philby had been a turned agent, working for the SOE against the Soviets, since 1951; and at a KGB trial he could testify that Philby had cooperated in the Declare sabotage of the Rabkrin expedition on Mount Ararat a year ago. Surely the mere accusations would be likely to get Philby into trouble!-and Theodora had said that Philby was not highly regarded by the Soviet authorities these days.
Like any competent agent, Hale had his passport and money in his pockets-along with the Scandinavian Air tickets, two seats booked on a flight leaving tomorrow morning from Vnukovo Airport, bound for Stockholm. He couldn’t use his-perhaps he could give one to Elena, if she needed it.
Then a thought occurred to him that almost brought him to a halt-what if Elena had also incurred the wrath of the Heaviside Layer angels by participating in the destruction of the Black Ark last January, and what if she had tried since to fly above 10,000 feet? Hale had only survived the djinn-attack on his Air Liban Caravelle turbojet in February because the crippled plane had been able to land in the Persian Gulf.
If she’s dead, he told himself steadily, then she won’t be here. She may not be here anyway. See to it that you’re in the church, at noon.
He pushed back the bunched pink sleeve of his coat to look at his watch-it was twelve right now. The cathedral was still a hundred yards away, and he broke into a jog; but after only a few paces he slowed back to a walk, his heart thudding and his face suddenly chilly.
A dozen men in dark brown uniforms stood in the shade around the cathedral’s north arch. Even from this distance Hale could see campaign ribbons on their chests, but their visored caps made them look more like policemen than soldiers. Hale had no idea what agency they might represent; and he wondered if they were on the watch for him.
Hale knew he cut a peculiar figure here; and after a moment he felt a hot trickle of blood run down behind his left ear, and he realized that his brief jog had opened the cut in his scalp.
I can’t go in to see if she’s there, he thought helplessly. Even if they’re not after me, I’d be drawing needless attention to her.
But what if they’re after her? If Elena is in the church, lighting the candle she promised to the Virgin Mary, unaware of this dragnet outside, I could at least provide a distraction.
His ribs tingled almost with vertigo at the thought, as if he had been standing on the narrowest, highest coping of the Saviour’s Tower, looking up.
He could probably walk past on the right, safely-and then just trudge all the way down to the foot of the Moskva River Bridge. And leave Elena to whatever action was going on at the cathedral. She wasn’t expecting Hale, after all, and probably wouldn’t welcome the sight of him.
In the end he simply couldn’t do it. You didn’t go to all the trouble to get yourself sewn up in a mule skin, he thought, and let yourself be carried by the eagle all the way up to the inaccessible peak, just to try to find a way to climb back down.
He walked straight ahead into the shadow of the bulging domes, and when the uniformed men saw that he was going to pass among them, he nodded politely to the ones who were staring coldly at him. Trying to look like a Russian, he stepped between two of them and tapped up the stone stairs as if he had every sort of legitimate reason to be visiting the cathedral. He didn’t look back, but only glanced at his watch as he gripped the vertical brass handles of the ten-foot-tall gold-paneled doors. He was only a minute and twenty seconds late.