Tim Powers - Declare

“Haunting the Bashura cemetery, where he was buried-only about three blocks south of here on the Rue de Basta. St. John was a convert to Islam, you know-what the Turks call a ‘ Burma,’ which is to say a turncoat, not someone to be trusted. According to Arab folklore, two angels, Munkir and Nakir, visit a man in his grave right after his burial and quiz him on his faith-if he acknowledges Allah, they let him rest in peace; but if he believes another faith to be true, they thrash him with iron maces until his cries are heard ‘from east to west, except by men and djinn.’”

Hale smiled. “Did a lot of dogs howl, locally, after St. John was buried?”

“We didn’t notice. But the SIS Beirut station picked up a heavy traffic on the service bandwidth; it was en clair, but they thought it must be code because it was all nursery rhymes-‘the man in the moon came down too soon,’ ‘but when she got there the cupboard was bare,’ ‘how many miles to Babylon’-that kind of thing. The SIS triangulated the signal and found that it seemed to originate in the Bashura cemetery, but they could never find a transmitter, and the signal faded after a month, and they blamed the vagaries of the Heaviside Layer; but we in Declare knew that it was St. John’s ghost, catching hell from the Moslem angels.”

“I wonder what faith he believed was the true one.”

“Maybe your mother is laughing in her grave,” Hartsik agreed magnanimously.

“So what would the fox have provided, in this Rabkrin expedition, that Philby cannot do without?”

“The same thing as always-dissipation of a blow, sharing an injury, taking the brunt of it, even; and old St. John’s guilt was so strong that he never refused. Kim loved his father, which is to say that he needed him; needed him to take Kim’s punishments, mainly. You see, becoming the rafiq to the djinn will be an ordeal. Kim is not properly split, because of your divisive birth, and in the ceremony on the mountain he will be called on to face one of the djinn, eye to eye, be recognized by it. The old sacrament. He didn’t fear this in ’48, because he was wearing his fox-fur and his father was in Riyadh. Even four months ago he was eager to try Ararat again, because he could bring along the live fox that contained his father’s identity-if anyone’s mind was to be broken, it would be good old long-suffering St. John’s. But now Philby is alone-and he’s afraid that the sacrament, undiluted, will leave him half-witted, or insane.”

“Did Declare kill the fox?”

“No. Guy Burgess did, acting for the Rabkrin. The Rabkrin would prefer that their rafiq to the djinn be a little simpleminded; and Philby is too sneaky and ambitious by half. Burgess has always been Philby’s handler for the Rabkrin-he understands him, having known Philby since they were schoolmates at Cambridge; Philby used to call him ‘your Demoncy,’ because his full name is Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess. And Burgess has undergone the djinn sacrament too.”

“He has? I had the idea he grew up in England.”

“That’s right, in Hampshire. But his father was born in Aden and was on the staff of the rear admiral in Egypt during the First World War. And apparently his father was ‘embraced by a piece of tender air’ at some point in those eastern lands-he requested early retirement in ’22 and returned to his family in Hampshire, but two years later young Guy was awakened in the middle of the night by his mother’s screams, and he got up and burst into his parents’ bedroom.” Hartsik pursed his lips. “The house was dark. He was thirteen years old. His father had expired in the midst of sexual intercourse with his mother-Guy’s mother was pinned beneath the corpse, and it may have been simply that that had set her screaming-but young Guy could see over her head, out the window his father must have been facing, and the boy found himself eye to eye, exchanging recognition, with the far-traveling ‘piece of empty air’ that had followed Guy’s father all the way from Egypt to Hampshire: a djinn, perhaps not bothering to assume a completely human aspect.” Hartsik shrugged. “Burgess is now a hopeless alcoholic, and a flagrant homosexual.”

Hale’s eyebrows were raised, and he was remembering, with some sympathy now, the rude drunk he had met at the Turkish-Soviet border in 1948. “Hard to blame him.”

“Well, really. Burgess apparently derived no pleasure from being able to be in two places at once-he seems not to have had much control of his double, which probably embodied his Eton-and-England loyalties. The double nearly took over after the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact in ’39. Finally Burgess simply ran over his double, in Dublin, during the war-drove a car over the thing. After that, there was nothing left of Burgess but alcoholism, homosexuality, and petulance.” Hartsik shrugged. “Many have prospered in the espionage trade with no more.”

Hale opened his mouth to say something, but was stopped by a knock on the office door; and even with his aching, swollen eye, he managed to give Hartsik a ferocious scowl as the man got up from the desk again.

It was Farid, this time carefully carrying a steaming cup. “Now they have thrown coffee onto the fellow’s shirt,” Farid explained.

Hale thought of his hours-long confession last night to Mammalian. For your penance, he told himself bleakly, take two blows to the face and a cup of coffee down your shirt. And I’ll be lucky if that’s the extent of it, here or on Ararat.

“Tell them I said to take it easy, for God’s sake,” said Hartsik shrilly. “Mr. Hale, I feel terrible about this-”

Hale just hiked his chair around to face Farid. “Get it right,” he said through clenched teeth.

The Arab bent over and carefully splashed gouts of the hot coffee onto several areas of Hale’s white shirt. Hale breathed deeply through flared nostrils and made no sound as the hot coffee scalded his stomach. At last Farid stood up, frowning and swirling the coffee that was left in the cup. Hale restrained himself from stretching out his leg and kicking the cup up into the man’s face.

“An artist should know when to walk away,” said Hartsik tightly. “Go.”

After Farid had bobbed back out into the hall and pulled the door closed, Hartsik did not sit down again. “I’ll tell you the rest briefly, before those sûreté decide to break that poor man’s legs. If your threat to Philby is effective, and he agrees to continue with the Rabkrin operation to Ararat, you will keep your wristwatch set to the correct local time; if Philby refuses, or if three days go by without a clear decision from him, you will set your watch six hours off-and then Kim Philby will find that his next glass of gin has been flavored with a poison that will get past any magical protections, birthday or no birthday. Holy water and-well, you’re Catholic, aren’t you?-you don’t want to know. At any rate, the old Rabkrin recognition phrase is: ‘O Fish, are you constant to the old covenant?’” and the answer is-”

“‘Return, and we return,’” said Hale. “‘Keep faith, and so will we.’” He stared bleakly up at Hartsik. “Philby must have known that since he was a child-because I have.”

Hale was hurriedly shown photographs of the room in which his double was being interrogated, and then photographs of the officers who were asking the questions-a cup had been drawn in over the hand of the one who had thrown coffee on the prisoner. After that Hale was given a scrawled transcript of the questioning session and was made to read it several times. He had to admire the way “Andrew Hale” had stuck to his cover story-and the script was good, with the sûreté gradually becoming convinced that this really was just some British journalist named Charles Garner. To judge from the transcript, the sûreté officers had even been gruffly apologetic at the end.