"I suppose they suspect your KGB complicity," she said. Her emphasis confirmed that she was well aware of his work for the deeper, older, vastly more secret agency.
"Suspect, yes-they've s-s-suspected me ever since Burgess d-defected to Moscow eleven years ago. Listen," he said, speaking quickly, "I won't let them arrest me. The deal I'm offering your people is jjj-genuine, damn it, it's richtig, understand? This isn't a Soviet t-trick, I swear by-by the heart that is still beating beneath your b-breast. My father was my protector, my shield, in this business, and he's gone now, and I can't do what the Rab-what the Soviets-well, what the Rabkrin wants me to do now. I cannot go up the mountain." In spite of his frantic unhappiness, he found that there was something distinctly sexy about exposing his momentous secrets to her; and even though his cold fingers were clamped on the grip of the revolver, he found himself thinking about their unsatisfactory kiss in the bar. "Have you g-got SDECE w-watching us now? Exfiltrate mme right now, this nin-nin-instant."
She shook her head. "We can exfiltrate you from Beirut as soon as I am convinced that you'll tell us everything. I need to know-" She didn't go on, and he glanced at her. For a moment her face was blank, neither young nor old but as cold as a statue's. "-I need to know what happened on Mount Ararat in May of 1948."
"I can t-t-tell you all of th-that. If we get so-so-separated tonight, I'm meeting the S-Soviet team tomorrow m-morning at eleven-I've toe-told them to meet me on the t-terrace at the St. Georges Hotel. After that I sh-should be mom-mom-unobserved-follow me from there."
"I'll get in touch with you again, no fear. I'll decide when and where."
"You think I have no capacity for loyalty," he said hoarsely, "but I will be honest with your people. I was l-loyal to the rrrRussians for decades, for far longer than anyone would be who was not genuinely in l-love with the Communist ideal. I was a p-protege of Maly's, and they feared he had told me the s-secret of the amomon rhythms, so in the great purr-purr-purge season they tried to kill me too-on my b-birthday in 1937-"
Instantly he glanced to the left, past her shoulder, and said, "Let's get off the street. A drink in the Carlton, what do you say?"-but he was horrified to realize that in his besotted confessional passion he had nearly betrayed his real birthday. I'm falling apart, he thought remotely. Breaking in two, at least; who was that, talking about djinn on the hatif telephone?
As he led Elena through the glass doors and across the carpeted lobby toward the bar-a good deal dressier than the Normandy's, with wood paneling and upholstered booths-he was remembering that frosty last day of 1937, when he had been out driving from Saragossa toward Tereuel, in Spain, under cover as a war correspondent for the London Times; an artillery shell had landed squarely on the car he and three other correspondents had been driving in, and his three companions had been blown to pieces, while Philby himself had suffered only a couple of cuts. The shell had been a Russian 12.40-centimeter round, certainly deliberately aimed, even deliberately scheduled-but, because it was his true birthday, Philby had taken the precaution of wearing the bright green, fox-fur lined Arab coat his father had given him, and so he had survived the explosion with only scratches. He had received a telegram the next day from his father in Alexandria -the old man had abruptly fainted the day before, bleeding from the nose and ears, at the very hour when Philby's car had been hit, and the elder Philby had been anxious now to know if his son had been hurt.
"Your birthday in '37?" prompted Elena when Philby had walked her to a booth against the doorway wall. She was looking at him as she sat down.
"Maly g-gave me a simple code with which to write hopefully innocent-looking l-letters to a cover address in Paris, a safe house where s-some NKVD courier would p-pick up the mail," Philby said, sitting down across from her and waving to the waiter. "You know the kind of code: 'Six couches arrived yesterday, but the midwife says they're not the edible kind-the dog needs more toothbrushes.' Not that bad, I suppose, but definitely d-disjointed; one hoped that the censors saw a lot of mail from genuine chatty l-l-lunatics." He was beginning to relax-this story was verifiably true, and Maly had given him the code sometime very early in '37, and it might even have been on his ostensible New Year's Day birthday. "I only found out in 1945, when I was Head of Section Nine and v-visiting the liberated c-capitals of Europe, that the address I had been writing to on the rue de Grenelle eight years earlier had been the Soviet Embassy! There was n-no safe house at all, n-no s-security measures-any censor who might have gone to the t-trouble of checking the address I was writing to would have r-reported me as a Soviet agent in an instant!"
Elena had fished matches and a pack of Gauloises from her purse, and she looked at him through narrowed eyes as she lit a cigarette. "Careless and negligent, surely-contemptuous, even-but I'd hardly call that an attempt to purge you, kill you."
She was not deflected. "Well," he said with affected mildness, "to me it seemed as if they had g-given me a ticking time bomb to hold. Two G-Gordon's gins, please, neat," he said then to the waiter who had finally come to the table. "Those are for me," he added, giving Elena his most charming grin. "What will you have? I believe you were drinking b-brandy, in Berlin."
"Can the bartender make a Berliner Weisse mit Schuss?" Elena asked the waiter. "That's beer with raspberry syrup," she added.
The waiter concealed any repugnance and simply said, "Mais oui, madame," and bowed and stepped away.
Philby remembered the mug of odd pink beer that had been on the table in Berlin. "That was your drink, that night?"
"Do you disapprove? As I recall, you were drinking insecticide."
Philby nodded glumly. "Djinn repellent, the old Cairo hands used to call it. If my f-father had thought to give me a glass of insecticide before we flew over Lake Tiberias, I would not have c-contracted 'malaria.' They...bud off, like cactus, in periods of activity, and the l-little...djinnlings!...can be attracted to and c-cling to someone who has-someone who bears the m-mark of previous djinn-recognition. They get in through your m-mouth, and they interfere with your thoughts, and exorcising them later is a tiresome bother. My father t-told me that some of the old lads in the Arab Bureau in Cairo would even rinse their m-mouths with a shot of petrol, if they were going out to some place where the m-monsters were likely to be. Volatile smells repel them, the y-young ones, at least, and a couple of shots of warm jjj-gin here ought to drive off any who came up over the cliff just now with the b-birds."
Elena was blushing, and Philby remembered asking her if she had not found this business vaguely shameful. "That was a, a female one, in Berlin," she said.
Philby could feel the hairs standing up on his arms, even at this late and cynical date, as he said softly, "That was Russia's very g-guardian angel, my dear-Machikha Nash, Our Stepmother-inspecting the n-new boundaries of her k-kingdom in person, in stormy person. I was there to monitor the installation of her boundary stone, and I watched it all from a parked car in the Charlottenburg Chaussee on the western side. She was...splendid, wasn't she? I remember thinking of Byron's line, 'She walks in Beauty, like the night/Of cloudless climes and starry skies.' What w-were you doing there?"
Philby didn't look away from her, but he was aware of the two men who walked into the bar, and he simply shrugged and gave her a frail smile when they stopped in front of his table.
One of the men seemed to say, "Allah, beastly ass," but a moment later Philby realized that he had said, in an American accent, I'll obviously ask; and the man went on, "Who's your girlfriend, Kim?"
Philby looked up at his CIA inquisitors. Both were sandy-haired Americans in gray suits with wide lapels, and they both seemed offensively fit and young.
"Miss Weiss is a French m-magazine editor," Philby said. "I'm t-trying to sell her s-some non-fiction work."
"We'd love to read some of your non-fiction work, Kim," said the taller of the two. "Scoot over, Miss Weiss." When Elena shifted away across the booth seat, the man sat down beside her.
His companion folded himself into the booth beside Philby, so that Philby and Elena were both blocked in. "I'm Dr. Tarr," said the man beside Philby, "and my colleague there is Professor Feather. Our boss across the water is very curious about this gathering of the old hands that's going on here in Beirut."
"I'm not aware of it," said Philby carefully. He wanted to pant with relief, for clearly this was not to be a kidnap. With some confidence he went on, "Are you g-going to have the surete h-h-haul me in to their p-p-police station one more time, just so I can s-say the same th-thing there for a few hours?"
"More like watch-and-wait," said the man identified as Professor Feather. "You still do odd jobs for your old firm, don't you, Kim? Peter Lunn gives you off-paper travel assignments?"
Lunn was the SIS Head of Station in Beirut now, and in fact he had not had any professional conversation with Philby at all. But until three months ago the Head of Station had been Nicholas Elliott, an old friend of Philby's and one of his loyal defenders in the Burgess defection scandal that had cost Philby his SIS job in 1951. And in these last two years Elliott had indeed given Philby all kinds of off-paper assignments-to Riyadh, and Cairo, and Baghdad, and a dozen other Middle East cities-to mingle with the Arabs who had known Philby's father, and gauge the extent and purpose of the huge increase in the number of Soviet military advisors throughout the Arab nations.
Philby had been in a quandary: it had been starkly clear that Burgess at the Rabkrin headquarters in Moscow, as well as Petrukhov, Philby's more pedestrian KGB handler in Beirut, both required him to pass on immediately any information he might learn about the SIS response to the Soviet escalation-but Philby had been aware too that the SIS chiefs in London who believed him guilty of espionage would see to it that he was given "barium meal" information, custom-scripted false data that might later be detected in monitored Moscow traffic. If that were to happen, Philby would logically be isolated as the only possible source of the information, and the SIS could then arrest him for treason; and until this last September, when Philby's pet fox had been intolerably killed and further work with the Rabkrin had become unthinkable, Philby had not wanted the SIS to arrest him. Even now, he wanted to surrender only on specific terms, what he thought of as his three nonnegotiable "itties": immunity, a new identity, and a comfortable annuity. Definitely not the deal Theodora's old fugitive SOE had offered him in '52.
"Or isn't it for Lunn?" went on Professor Feather. "Are you still running errands for-" He looked across the table at Dr. Tarr. "What was his name?"