Tim Powers - Declare

“How?” Hale waved at the lead balls on the table. “Shoot them with these?”

“Yes-a lot of them, cast in a much smaller scale. Birdshot caliber. Several shops in Beirut are now manned with clerks who will sell you prepared shot shells and an American derringer, chambered for the American.410 shell and rifled to the right so that the pellets will emerge in a pattern that’s turning clockwise as it expands, to match the spinning of the djinn if you fire upward. The djinn will assimilate the shot pellets-which is to say, assimilate the experience of death. Dying, they will no doubt throw spontaneous egg-shapes of their own, made of mountain stone or whatever is at hand, and ideally a chain-reaction will ensue. You will buy several boxes of shells-but you must save one shell for Philby.”

Theodora had mentioned this, but Hale had not known then that Philby was his half-brother. “What about his protections?” Hale asked, mainly just to slow this discussion. “His Achilles-heel date isn’t due to come round again for nearly another year.”

“The protections aren’t against self-injury. You are virtually him, in this context; that will be especially true on Mount Ararat.”

The other half of me, Hale thought. The hearth-and-home half of me. “Very well,” he said unsteadily, “I’ll shoot him.” He may be my brother, he told himself, but Philby is still the man who betrayed my men in the gorge. I can shoot him for that.

“You are not to kill him. Do please pay attention. You are not on any account to kill Philby, even to save yourself. You are to shoot him in the back, from a sufficient distance so that the shot will penetrate widely around his spine but not be focused in any kind of tight pattern. We certainly don’t want the ‘rat-hole’ effect! The goal is to leave him able to walk away, to Moscow, with at least one pellet in his flesh that cannot be removed surgically.”

Hale’s arms were suddenly cold. “She’s a ghul,” he whispered, using the Arabic word for djinn who haunt graveyards and eat the dead in their graves, extracting up through the soil as souvenirs any bits of metal-rings, gold teeth-that the cadavers might have contained. “A ghulah,” he corrected himself, using the feminine form.

“Very good, Mr. Hale! Yes, she is. And when-”

Hale remembered Mammalian’s question this morning. “And she sometimes appears as an Arabic woman with a string of gold rings around her neck, right? I’ve met her. And since 1883 she has been the guardian angel of Russia.”

“Machikha Nash, the Rabkrin call her. Yes. And-”

“And!” interrupted Hale, “if Philby goes to Moscow, after this-and I presume he’ll be given no choice-he’ll eventually die there. He’ll be buried in a Moscow cemetery.”

Hartsik’s eyes narrowed in a smile. “Ex-act-ly. And the guardian angel will not neglect to devour him, and to draw up, in her spiral way, the metal that is in him, including at least one of these shot pellets. And she will thus assimilate into herself the shape of djinn death.” He sat back. “And she will die, and the Soviet Union will lose its guardian angel. I can’t imagine the U.S.S.R. surviving Philby by more than three or four years.”

Hale recalled what Prime Minister Macmillan had said six days ago: I suppose we can’t simply shoot spies, as we did in the war-but they should be discovered and then played back in the old double-cross way, with or without their knowledge-never arrested. And Hale thought that Macmillan would be pleased with the way Theodora had orchestrated this use of Kim Philby.

It seemed to call for a drink. Hale picked up the Laphroaig bottle and took another aromatic mouthful from the neck of it. “In London,” he said hoarsely, “I was told that Philby does not want to participate in this expedition to Ararat; that I’ll have to threaten him to get him to go along. What’s the basis for his reluctance?”

“That’s right. His father-your father-died, here in Beirut, a little more than two years ago. I’m, uh, sorry.”

“Stop it.” Hale could hardly remember the text of The Empty Quarter, which his father had written; and that book was his only link to the old man. Any feeling of… loss, here, he reminded himself, would be sheer affectation. But he did remember standing on the steep escarpment at the windy Edge-of-the-Wold when he had been a boy, looking down at the roofs of Evesham and the River Isbourne on the plain below the Cotswolds highlands, and speculating that his father was a missionary priest “somewhere east o’ Suez,” and imagining how the two of them might one day meet. And then he remembered walking across the grassy quad at the University College of Weybridge on many late afternoons in the 1950s, picturing an eventual reunion with Elena. How shabbily these fond dreams work out, he thought-and he was glad that Farid had hit him again, for he was afraid that some of the tears leaking from his swollen left eye were tears of purest self-pity.

“What did Philby’s father have to do with it?” he asked harshly.

Hartsik took Hale’s cue. “Philby’s father was always very protective of Kim; clearly he blamed himself-altogether justly-for having crippled the boy’s standing in the supernatural world by indulging his own-his-”

“Lust for my mother.”

“Well, not to put too fine a point on it. Now old St. John saved the life of a fox in ’32, in the Empty Quarter desert, the Rub’ al-Khali-his Bedouins were going to kill it, but St. John intervened and set it free. He may have been able to tell somehow that this particular fox contained a djinn, who had been abridged down into this form-in any case, it did, and in gratitude the djinn gave St. John certain powers over foxes-even over fox furs. Several times St. John used this power to protect Kim. When Kim was a war correspondent in Spain in 1936, St. John gave him a mad-looking Arab coat with a fox-fur collar, and he told Kim to wear it whenever he was in peril, especially on his birthday. Kim still has certain magical protections, as you may too, but they become transparent on his birthday- vos anniversaire. And sure enough, on December thirty-first of 1937, Kim was in a car that was hit with an artillery shell; Kim was wearing the fox-fur coat, and he came through with a scratch, though the men with him were all killed-and St. John, who was in Alexandria at the time, was knocked down, bleeding from the ears. Neither of them was seriously hurt, you see-the fox-fur magic dissipated the blow.”

“I assume that protection has been gone since 1960, when the old man died.”

“Well, it’s gone now. But Philby didn’t really lose it until three months ago, in late September of last year. On Easter of ’62, he got hold of a fox cub-he named it Jackie, and kept it in his apartment in the Rue Kantari here. The animal reportedly liked whiskey, and would sometimes suck on the stem of a pipe. And Philby was still gung-ho to go along on the Rabkrin expedition to Ararat, to become at last the full-fledged rafiq to the djinn. And then, on September twenty-eighth, precisely on the second anniversary of his father’s original death, someone pushed the fox off the balcony of Philby’s apartment while he wasn’t home. The animal died, and Philby spent two days weeping drunk, and then he began surreptitiously trying to get out of the expedition; he wrote to The Observer, the paper he writes articles for, asking for London leave-and he’s been trying to defect to France-and if the SIS offers him any kind of immunity deal, he will want to leap at it.”

Defect to France, thought Hale; that must be why Elena is in Beirut. But why did she try to kill Philby?

Don’t even think about her, he told himself. “Easter of last year, Philby got the fox?” he said, forcing himself to concentrate on what Hartsik had said. “A good day for rising from the dead, I suppose. Where had the old man’s ghost been, in the intervening year and a half?”