Declare (65 page)

Now, nearly eighteen years later, Elena crushed out a cigarette in an ashtray piled with cigarette butts, and she crossed again to the window of her room at the St. Georges Hotel. The sun from over the Jebel Liban mountains east of Beirut made the sails and the seagulls glow white against the dark blue Mediterranean, and she knew that the tables on the terrace below her door would be crowded with hotel guests having breakfast. She glanced at her radiumdial wrist-watch—but Philby would not be arriving there with his Soviet handlers for hours yet.

She walked barefoot across the carpet to the bathroom, and she began brushing her long white hair without turning on the light or glancing into the mirror.

Do you want to see a monkey?

Andrew Hale had been in Berlin in 1945, doing Declare work for the looking-glass SOE; her hair had been as white then as it was now, having grown in that way right after her… three days? her week?… in the Lubyanka cellars.

She didn’t want to think of Andrew Hale, nor of what she would have to do if she met him—
wasting what’s left of your baptized sanctity, and this one would surely spend any last whiff of it that might still remain
—and so she thought instead of her other one, the third man in her life after Hale and Cassagnac, whom she would apparently not be permitted to kill: Kim Philby.

But her time with Philby had been in Turkey, in May of 1948, and of course Andrew Hale had been there too.

Cannibale
, she had called Hale.
Nous cannibales
would have been fairer. We cannibals.

In the Ahora Gorge on that terrible night she too had quickly figured out that using the old Parisian
clochard
rhythms was the only gambit that would save her from the supernatural death that leaned hugely down out of the turning sky. The other members of her French SDECE team were either killed in the Soviet ambush or, worse, were pulled away into the sky by the ravenous djinn that had somehow been summoned down from their mountain-peak fastnesses—and because she had aligned her mental rhythms, the rhythms of her very identity, to those of the inhuman djinn, she had found herself intolerably
participating
in the aerial dismemberment and devouring of her fellows.

—And she had not, she admitted, been helpless in that participation. Like Andrew Hale, she
could
have stopped drumming and breathing and pulsing the rhythm, could have stepped out of the dance—but then she would have been just another human figure on the ground, prey for the djinn.

She had told herself that she was not responsible for the deaths of the SDECE men—that they were being killed in any case, and that she herself would have been killed if she had not… psychically
flown along
with the creatures that were tearing the men apart in the sky and eating them—but on that dawn, when she had at last ridden the horse all the way back across the muddy Aras plain to the clapboard Ararat Hotel in Dogubayezit, she had been convinced that she was a murderess.

She curtly told the base team at the hotel that the other operatives had all been killed and that this operation too had been a failure, and she made them pack up their radios and drive back to the pickup site in Erzurum—but she had stayed on at the hotel, alone, lying in her muddy clothes on the bed in her room, drinking cognac and watching the slow ceiling fan and desperately hoping that Andrew Hale would come to her there. She had not locked the door. She wanted to beg his forgiveness for what she had called to him last night on
the mountain; and she thought that if they were together, talking, the enormity of what they had done might diminish. In Paris he had told her that he had been raised as a Catholic—perhaps he might find some way for her to assimilate what she had done: some way to take hold of the sin, voluntarily bear the weight of it, and then lay it before an outraged God in gross presumption on His mercy.

Later in the morning she had heard the motor of a jeep grind past on the dirt street under her window, but it had not stopped, and by the time she had blundered to the window and clawed the curtains away from the frame, the vehicle had driven on out of sight.

She threw herself back down across the bed, sobbing. Hale would not be coming. There was no way to diminish the magnitude of what she’d done. Man had been created in the image of God, and probably cannibalism was the “sin against the Holy Ghost,” for which there was no forgiveness in this world or the next.

She slept heavily, and when she awoke with a start in darkness she thought for several seconds that she was lying in the Lubyanka basement, shot through the head.

That nameless Moscow girl had been killed on Elena’s account. Utechin had killed the wrong girl. If Elena had died there, she might have died in sanctifying grace, not in certain mortal sin, as she was now.

All she could do to put an end to her restless self-loathing was to finish the job Utechin had mismanaged six years ago. She had neglected to cork the cognac bottle, and it had soaked the mattress, but she was able to get several more swallows out of it.

At last she sat up and fumbled around among the litter on the bedside table until she had found a box of matches. When she had lit the lamp on the table, she shook out the match and drew her gun from the holster under her mud-stiffened jacket.

It was a semi-automatic Swiss SIG, standard issue for the SDECE, chambered for the French 7.65-millimeter cartridge. She popped out the magazine that she had emptied on the mountain and dug a heavy magazine from her jacket pocket and slid it up into the grip until it clicked.

Belatedly she realized that it had been the sound of a jeep motor
that had awakened her—but it didn’t matter. It would not be Andrew Hale, for he would certainly be on his way back to London by now, or to wherever it might be that he was stationed—and if it were members of her SDECE base team that had missed the pickup and come back here in the jeep, they could not stop her.

She pulled the slide back against the resistance of the recoil-spring, paused, and then let it snap forward. A cartridge was in the chamber now, and of course the safety was off. Her nostrils twitched at the smell of gun oil over the cognac fumes.

She could hear footsteps in the corridor outside her room door.

She hefted the pistol and held it up to her forehead, butt out, with her right thumb inside the trigger guard. Straight through the center of the forehead was how the Moscow girl had been shot. This gun had been tucked under Elena’s arm while she slept, and the muzzle ring was warm. Aunt Dolores, she thought, give me strength.

She heard the squeak of the doorknob and let her eyes focus past her thumb to the door. The knob was turning—and she waited, curious in spite of herself, as the door creaked open.

But the man who stepped into the room’s dim lamplight was not Andrew Hale. It was the unpleasant stuttering Britisher from Berlin, the onetime chief of Section Nine, now SIS Head of Station in Turkey—Kim Philby.

He stared past the gun butt at her left eye. “Am I interrupting?” he said.

He had spoken in English, and she forced herself to frame an answer in that language. “I’ll only be a moment,” she told him.

He smiled and slowly closed the door at his back. “I say, could this wait—half an hour? I won you in a card game last night—well, it was interrupted, but the other fellow is long gone, and I believe I did have the high hand—and—well, damn it—it does just seem too
bad
of you to
kill
yourself the moment I arrive! What do you say? Twenty minutes!—for a spot of fornication? You and I halfway did it on New Year’s Eve in 1941, proxy or vicarious or something. Hey? There’s a good girl!”

She reversed the gun in her right hand and lowered it, pointing it at him. For a moment neither of them spoke, and she was trying to
figure out if this was a humanitarian gambit on his part—distract her with insult so as to have a chance to talk her out of it—or if he really had meant what he had said.

“That would be a mortal sin,” she said carefully. “Adultery, even—I happen to know you’re married, Mr. Philby.” She had also read that he suffered from a terrible stammer; but he seemed to be talking smoothly enough right now.

“Ceniza-Bendiga,” he said. He waved at the wooden chair against the plaster wall. “Do you mind if I sit? Thank you. Spanish, that is. Mortal sin! Are you a Catholic?”

“Devout,” she said with a nod.

“Ah! I’m an atheist myself, sorry. I thought you lot were down on suicide.”

“Will you do me a favor, Mr. Philby?”

“If you’ll do me one.” He smiled and held up his hands, palms out.

“
Will
you? This is a—” She shifted on the mattress. “A deathbed request.”

“I will,” he said levelly. “If you will.” Clearly he had meant what he had said a few moments ago.

She was sick at the idea, and at the abrupt immediacy of it. The fumy brandy surged up into the back of her throat.

But what if it’s all you can do? she thought. It is all you can do. And who are you now to treasure scruples, souvenirs? You have abdicated yourself.

She waited several seconds, but there was no providential inter-ruption. “Very well,” she whispered. She took a deep breath and went on, “So listen. I will be missing an appointment I made six years ago—breaking a promise I made. It can’t be helped, but— when I was in the Lubyanka, and it seemed that they were going to kill me, I made a promise to the Virgin Mary—she doesn’t like communism, you know. I made a vow. Will you swear to keep it for me?”

Philby shifted uneasily in his chair. “Why were you in the Lubyanka?”

“I was being trained as an agent. I was an atheist then—my
mother and father were shot down in a Madrid street by the right-wing Catholic monarchists in 1931, right in front of me; and when I was twelve years old I was a wireless telegrapher with Andre Marty. But in Moscow I saw the true face of communism. Will you swear on your own mother and father to keep my vow for me?”

Philby puffed out his cheeks. “Well, that’s not really
my
line of
territory.
What was the vow?”

“I told the Virgin: ‘If you will intercede with your Son to get me out of Russia alive, I vow that on my—’ ” Elena frowned. “I wanted to give it time, selfishly wait until my youth was safely gone, I think—I said, ‘I vow that on my fortieth birthday at high noon I will light a candle for you right here in Moscow, at St. Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square, in the heart of your enemy’s kingdom, the way you put your heel on the serpent’s head.’ And I promised her that I would—”

After several seconds Philby shook his head and raised his eyebrows. “What’s the harm of being honest now, here? On your deathbed?”

“Oh God,” Elena sighed. “I promised her that I would be a chaste wife from then on. I didn’t want to embark on it too soon, there was a young man—gone now—”

“Chaste,” said Philby impatiently, “do go on. I don’t need to hear about your tiresome
young men
. Whom were you going to be married to, in your old age?” Philby himself was then thirty-six.

“I vowed that I would not marry
until
then, and that—that I would consider marrying—I was delirious—that I would take whomsoever she might elect to show me, after I had lit the candle. You see? I was humbly placing the selection in her hands. I think I imagined Prince Myshkin.” The gun was wobbling in her grip, and she told herself that she must soon return it to its position against her forehead. “If there is a man there, in the cathedral when you light the candle… give him my regrets.”

Philby nodded. “I can do that much—no prayers. When would be your fortieth birthday?”

“April the twenty-second—in 1964.”

“My calendar is free on that day, as it happens.” Philby stared at
her in evident perplexity. “You’re about to—
kill
yourself, but you still believe all this business?”

“I wouldn’t kill myself if I
didn’t
believe this business.” She shivered. “Sin has real weight.”

“What, your men dying on Mount Ararat last night?” When she didn’t answer he shook his head and laughed, clearly not yet satisfied with her situation. “You know, I’ve never understood…
faith
. ‘Do the stars answer? in the night have ye found comfort? or by day have ye seen gods? What hope, what light, falls from the farthest starriest way on you that pray?’ ” She had realized that he was quoting something, and now he waved deprecatingly and said, “Swinburne.”

“Yes,” she said. When he raised his eyebrows, she went on, miserably, “Yes, the stars answer. God answers.”

Philby opened his mouth, then frowned and closed it; he appeared to shiver, and when he finally spoke, it was more quietly. “What d-does H-H-He say, ch-child?”

Elena blinked tears out of her eyes. “He says, ‘Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee, save Me, save only Me?’ ” She sniffed. “Francis Thompson.”

“I n-know it,” he said. “ ‘Yet I was sore adread lest, having Him, I must have naught beside.’ ” Philby seemed agitated. “Tell mmmm—tell me!—when you g-go to your s-sacrament, of C-C-Confession!—do you really have a f-firm purpose of am-amendment?”

“Yes. It might not seem possible later, but—yes. ‘To sin no more.’ ”

“And in b-baptism you were freed of the—w-weight of s-s-sin? The b-black drop in the h-human heart?”

“Yes, I was.”

“I—” He sighed and shook his head. “But for m-me that would be g-going b-back to point zz-zero! At my age—at m-my age! It’s not for m-me, my dear. Too much tie-time invested.” He slapped his open palms on the thighs of his trousers and stood up. “But
sss
— suicide is n-not for you—‘the Everlasting hath fix’d his canon ’gainst self-slaughter,’ you n-know. Is this
doubt
, do you d-doubt that your
ggg
—your
God
, will f-forgive you, as p-promised? Or is it
p-plain shame? ‘I was afraid because I was naked, and I hid myself.’
O santisima Elena!
—are you s-simply
ashamed
to approach H-H-Him as… just one m-more sinner, as b-bad as the rest of us? You w-w-won’t
play
, if you c-can’t wear the
halo?”
He laughed gently. “You’re n-not the-that egotistical, surely?” He took a step toward her across the threadbare carpet. “Test your m-monstrous villainy, my dear. Either sh-shoot
me
, or give me the g-gun.” He walked toward her with his palm out.