Tim Powers - Declare

And when consciousness, but not light, returned to her, along with the sensation of lying on a cold stone floor, the voice in her head resumed where it had left off, simply because she had no thoughts of her own: -ruega por nosotros, pecadores, ahora en esta hora de nuestra muerte.

Pray for us, sinners, now in this hour of our death. Because there were no thoughts in her head, her concussed memory simply repeated the prayer over and over again.

Another voice was saying similar words in the dark, in insistent Spanish and Russian, and she tried to attend to the other voice’s sentences too.

Then she was alone, lying in darkness for some period she could not estimate, without food or drink. She was able to move, and feel with her palms the texture of the stone floor and walls, and she could remember being hypnotized and told to identify herself with the girl who had been shot, but she was not at all certain that she was not in fact herself dead. And after the lights were turned on at last, and Utechin unlocked a barred door to run to where she lay and tip a glass of cold clear water to her cracked lips, she explained that the string she had tugged from her smock and tied into a series of knots had been her attempt to number the days of her confinement.

Her identity came back to her slowly. She pretended to have become the cold, truncated Party operative that they had worked so hard to make of her; and she kept deep within herself the memory that the string had been a makeshift rosary, and that in the long darkness she had made a binding vow to the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God. In the years to come, she was to tell only two people of that vow-Andrew Hale, and Kim Philby.

For two weeks she was allowed to rest in a yellow-brick dacha in the village of Zhukovka, on the Moskva River outside of the city. When she wasn’t sleeping she went for long walks in the green pine woods, never forgetting that she was being observed, careful not to move her lips or make the sign of the cross as she prayed.

And the day came when she saw the trim figure of Utechin striding up the path from the direction of the Moscow road, stepping around the laborers who were digging trenches to stop the Germans if they should get this far east.

In the kitchen of the dacha, over glasses of Caucusus tea-she was no longer required to drink vodka, which was fortunate since she could no longer bear the medicinal smell of it-Utechin told her, “You will now be called on to commit your second killing, the first real murder of your life. Is Elena Ceniza-Bendiga willing to spend her soul for the Party in this way?”

She smiled at him. “Elena Ceniza-Bendiga is dead-she was shot in the face in the Lubyanka basement. I will be happy to give the Party anything I have that was hers.”

She thought she caught a fleeting wince of sadness in Utechin’s face; but then he went on in a businesslike tone, “You and I will travel to Cairo. The German General Erwin Rommel has driven the British Eighth Army to a point west of Tobruk, in Libya, and we believe that Rommel is being assisted by the efforts of a very elderly scholar operating from a residence in the City of the Dead below Cairo, the ancient cemetery. You will kill that old scholar.”

Elena spread her hands. “Show me the way.”

That evening at dusk they boarded an Aeroflot Tupelov ANT-35, and took off on the first leg of the journey that would take them to Baghdad, Tel Aviv, and ultimately to Cairo.

Elena had seen photographs of the Pyramids of Giza and the Sphinx, and so when the two-engine Tupelov had at last flown west over the straight silver blade of the Suez Canal and banked south over the Nile Delta in its descent toward the Heliopolis airfield, she gasped at her first sight of the Sphinx through the airplane window.

“He has moved!” she exclaimed to Utechin, who was sitting in the seat beside her. “The Sphinx is on top of one of the pyramids!”

This seemed to alarm Utechin, who leaned over her to look down.

“Ah!” he said in evident relief as he slumped back into his seat. “No, child. That ‘pyramid’ under her chin is a support made of sandbags, thousands of them stacked up-to keep her head from falling off, if German bombs strike nearby. The three pyramids are still where they belong, west of her.”

Elena leaned forward to peer back, and now she could see that the triangular slope under the scarred stone face was of a different tan color and texture than the three ancient stone monuments that dented the blue sky farther away. Elena knew that the Sphinx was a portrait of the Pharaoh Chephren, a man; evidently Utechin had confused it with the murderous female Sphinx of Greek mythology.

“Keep faith,” muttered Utechin, apparently to himself, “and so will we.” When Elena raised her eyebrows, he said, “The scholar in the City of the Dead knows of me; but, since he does not know I am coming to him, there can be no- truth to be established-for me in Cairo, on this trip.”

But when they had landed and carried their valises out to the sidewalk to flag down a taxicab, Utechin was sweating through his sport coat, in spite of the cool breeze that rattled in the palm fronds overhead; and as he climbed into the back seat of the battered cab, he handed Elena a book-sized zippered leather case.

It was so heavy that she guessed it contained a handgun.

“American.45 automatic,” he whispered to her in French as she hitched up her skirt and climbed in beside him with the case in her lap like a purse. “1911 Army Colt. You must be familiar with it from Spain. If we are cut off, cornered by anyone-use it on them.”

Elena laughed easily, for she had long since decided to walk away from the Rabkrin in Cairo. “And promiscuously use up one of my sacramental bloody murders?”

Utechin’s sweating face clenched in a frown that made him look ill. “Do as I say,” he said softly. He tapped his lapel. “I am prepared too-and if you should fail to come to my assistance, you will not have any more heartbeats than I.”

She stared at him curiously as the cab accelerated away from the curb. “But if we have killed our consciences,” Elena said, speaking more loudly to be heard over the roaring automobile engine, “surely it was because there is no God?-and if there is no God, what is to be feared in dying?”

“No God,” said Utechin, nodding rapidly as he stared out through the taxicab window at the narrow-windowed white houses. “Marx said that, but Marx was no Russian. The NKVD says that, but the NKVD is an army of witless thugs. We have never said that. We work to circumvent Him.”

“Like a bull in the arena,” said Elena, forcing herself not to smile. “Ah, you will divert Him with your capework, and leave Him blinking stupidly at empty sand while you steal around behind Him.”

“This… merriment of yours may be an appropriate posture,” Utechin said irritably; then he gave her a weak smile. “But it is certainly a trying one. Could you please put on a becoming solemnity, at least until after I’ve been able to catch up on my drinking schedule?”

Elena nodded obediently, and didn’t speak until the taxicab had squeaked to a halt at the curb in front of Shepherd’s Hotel on Port Said Street.

“Let us walk around a few blocks and view the layout of the streets before we go in,” Utechin said as he climbed out. Elena had seen the United States star emblem on B-25 bombers at the Heliopolis airfield, and now she was staring at an American jeep swerving through the traffic of trolley cars and donkey carts on the broad boulevard; and Utechin added, “It will not be American soldiers, repellent though I grant you they are, who might assail us. Watch for…Egyptians, Arabs.”