...the king's men. They deserve our obedience.
...working for the Crown.
And too he felt again the vertiginous temptation he had felt in that Paris garret, the fascination that he imagined had led Adam and Eve to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.
...and I hid myself.
He walked around behind the serving table, and then sidestepped through the arch into the kitchen.
He hurried past the busy cooks and the flaring stoves to a door in the back, and when he had pushed it open and stepped out into the darkness, he was in the cold rain, on a porch railed with broken iron posts. He skipped down the steps to the lightless street pavement, and then sprinted away south, toward the lacy Reichstag dome that showed in lines of darker black against the black sky, and toward the Brandenburg Gate beyond.
It was a night for irrational speculation, and fleetingly he wondered if Elena had caught his image in her old broken pocket mirror, so that as he now ran away from her toward a bloody hole in the Berlin pavement, a semblance of himself might still be sitting at the table, laughing and looking into her eyes.
Chapter Ten
Berlin, 1945
A specter is haunting Europe -the specter of communism.
- Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
The Reichstag had been the German Parliament building until it burned in 1933-in Broadway Hale had been assured that Goebbels had organized the arson in order to blame it on Communists-and until recently its ruined profile must have been a grotesque flaw in the stately Berlin skyline. Now the rest of the city had caught up to it. And Hale, having walked away from Elena, running now across dark squares in the rain with a gun bouncing in his pocket, had the uneasy feeling that he was on his way to catching up to it as well.
Big trucks were moving in the rain on the east side of the towering Brandenburg Gate, their glaring headlamps throwing brief sequential flashes between the pillars to the western side, and in the darkness at the southwest corner of the square Hale could hear the thudding of a big piston engine. The expanse of pavement on this side of the pillars glittered with rain splashes in the sweeps of headlamp glow, and Hale could clearly see the patch of darkness out in the middle of it that was the crater where the man had been killed this afternoon.
He could also see, spaced around this western perimeter of the square, the hooded silhouettes of soldiers carrying rifles-he counted four such figures, then saw four more, and concluded nervously that there were simply very many of them.
With his collar up and his head down, Hale hurried diagonally away from the broad square. He strode south across the lanes of the Charlottenburg Chaussee to the curb a good hundred yards within the British Sector, and then he walked still further south, down the Siegesalle, the old Avenue of Victory, below the stone statues of long-dead German kings. Several times he doubled back briefly in his course, but he saw no figures behind him at all. His plan was to walk back up the western sidewalk of the Koniggratzer Strasse to the broken wall from which he had watched the man killed-from that point he should be able to get bearings on landmarks so as to fix the hole's precise location later.
The Bratwurst stand was closed now, the fringe of uncooked sausages taken down from the dripping wooden roof, but Hale saw the falling rain glitter in yellow electric light around a high scaffold on the western side of the Potsdamer Platz square, and when he walked out to the curb and looked back he saw that the British had erected a huge sign across which thousands of light bulbs spelled out current news headlines for the benefit of the Berliners in the darkness of the Soviet Sector; before striding north up the splashing sidewalk, away from the lights, Hale read that Australian troops had captured Brunei Bay in Borneo from the Japanese.>And troubled the gold gateways of the stars,
Fretted to dulcet jars
And silvern chatter the pale ports o' the moon...
Elena frowned deeply, but nodded, and in a whisper recited the next line-"I said to Dawn: be sudden-to Eve: be soon..."
"Finish your drink, young man," said Cassagnac, briskly tapping ash from his cigarette, "the hour grows late, and-"
A rich, plummy voice interrupted from behind Hale, in English: "Those sh-shoes I left out this afternoon weren't c-c-cleaned," said Kim Philby's well-remembered voice, "and yet I find you here d-drinking, Andrew?"
Hale was jolted by the bench being pulled out, and then Kim Philby had sat down heavily beside him, smelling of tobacco and whiskey and some British after-shave lotion, and crinkling his eyes and showing his teeth in a smile.
Philby's gaze fell on the mug of pink beer. "And what are you d-drinking, Andrew?" He picked it up in one brown hand and sniffed it. "Is this s-some boche digestive aid? Have you got an upset st-stomach, my boy?"
Cassagnac leaned forward and tossed his cigarette butt under Philby's nose into the pink beer. "It was someone else's," he said in a bored tone. The waiter had walked up at Philby's arrival, and now Cassagnac said to him in German, "Where is the brandy our friend ordered?" as he pointed at Hale. Turning to Philby, he added, "And for you, sir?"
"A brandy as well. N-no, two glasses of b-brandy for me." He squinted speculatively at Hale. "You can't have flown here," he said. "It was hard enough for me to get a f-flight into the Gatow airport, with our Soviet allies l-laying claim to all altitudes and all directions and all ow-hours for their own scanty flights. Did you d-drive down the hole? Is this more of J-Jimmie's n-n-nonsense?" Less jovially, he asked, "What is the name and number of your passport here?"
"The name on it?" asked Hale, certain that Theodora would not want Philby to know about the Conway identity. "My own name." He tried to return Philby's gaze as if he were expecting, instead of fearing, some further question.
"We have thought it best," said Cassagnac, "not to discuss our jobs."
Philby frowned at Hale for another moment, then turned to Cassagnac with a smile. "Oh, that's all right, Andrew here is just a j-junior f-fetch-and-c-c-errand-boy, in my firm. A c-custodian, actually." Then Philby glanced back at Hale with mock concern and smacked his forehead. "Oh, I say, I'm sorry-you've probably been h-hinting to your friends about b-big secret g-government work! I should have considered your-your fragile young man's pride."
Hale took a deep breath, then just leaned back and smiled tiredly at Philby. "I'll thank you to leave my fragile young man out of this."
Cassagnac laughed. "Doubtless he has no pride," he said.