Tim Powers - Declare

Bin Jalawi nodded, still grinning. “Allah is all-beneficent!” he said. It was one of the standard lines Arabs gave to importunate beggars, meaning Look to God, not to me -the equivalent of the British Tell your troubles to Jesus, mate -and Hale couldn’t tell if the man meant it coldly or jokingly. “Many Arabs trusted Creepo,” bin Jalawi went on in a jovial tone, “until they learned that the Israelis invaded Nasser’s Suez with Creepo help, based on betrayed Arab confidences.”

Nasser’s Suez , thought Hale bitterly. As if the Arabs could have built the canal, or could even keep it dredged!

“I’m a landless man now,” said Hale; “but you know that the British declared Kuwait to be a sovereign nation, more than a year ago.” The remark was in character-to be too anti-British here would be to overplay his hand.

“ Kuwait was never a long-term commitment, to England,” said bin Jalawi. “Your policy here, and in all the Arab states, has been to get out as much oil as you could, before the indigenous peoples looked around and noticed that they were living in the twentieth century.”

Hale supposed that was true. But he let his face stiffen as he said, “My policy?”

Bin Jalawi plucked several times lightly at the neck of his robe, then lowered his hands, palm down-an Arab gesture conveying something like, You and I have nothing to do with these villains . “I apologize, bin Sikkah,” he said quietly, using Hale’s Bedu nickname. “You were always a generous friend to the Bedu. ‘Honor him who has been great and is fallen, and him who has been rich and now is poor.’”

The radio cabinet had been producing muted conversation for these twenty minutes, but now music started, some Islamic-style single-line melody, and the Arab got up from his couch, crossed to the radio and turned up the volume. The stylized, quavering singing of an Arab woman rang out of the speakers.

“Do you know her?” he asked.

Hale blinked. “Who, the singer? No. I suppose I might have heard her before.”

“She is Um Kalthum,” said bin Jalawi in a tone of reproof. “Every Thursday evening she is on Radio Cairo. In Cairo you don’t even need a radio to hear her, because every set in the city is tuned to her, and her voice seems to emanate from the stones and the sky.”

“Do you visit Cairo often?” Hale asked.

“Dogs can hear things that people cannot,” said bin Jalawi, staring down at the radio console, “and so they know when to be vigilant, and which way to look, which way to run to safety. So can the Bedu perhaps hear things that Westerners cannot, singing out of the sky.” He turned to give Hale a blank look. “You are maybe Bedu enough to hear also, if you clean out your ears. ‘When thine enemy extends his hand to thee, cut it off if thou canst, else kiss it.’ You in the old days cut off some metaphorical hands; now, my friend, is time to kiss the hand.”

Hale smiled cautiously. He had often had to use the word metaphorical in dealing with bin Jalawi and the tribes, and the Arab had here pronounced the word in English, in imitation of him.

“I visit Cairo often,” bin Jalawi went on. “You will be able to as well, I think, if you have invested the money you were paid by the American Standard Oil. Of what tribe were the Bedu guides you killed?”

Hale raised his eyebrows at the other man. “ Saar,” he answered. The Saar roved far to the south, above the Hadhramaut, and were feared by most of the other tribes. “It was self-defense.”

This was of course his cover story, which hadn’t been activated by Whitehall until late yesterday, according to Theodora. Perhaps to his credit, Salim bin Jalawi was not bothering with pretense, but Hale wondered sourly if the man had been taking Soviet pay in the ’40s too; perhaps Hale would have been told, in the aborted briefing. Certainly the Soviet forces at Ararat had been able to prevent Hale from using the meteorite that he and bin Jalawi had found at the Wabar ruins in the Rub’ al-Khali desert…

But…Hale’s math had been bad. Apparently the meteorite had not been the Seal.

Still, if bin Jalawi had tipped the Soviets to Hale’s activities then, he had no doubt helped the Russians kill Hale’s men; those men who had been shot, at any rate, if not those who had been pulled screaming up into the sky…

Before speaking again, Hale carefully smothered the sick, remorseful anger this thought raised in him. You can’t be sure bin Jalawi was doubling then, he told himself; and even if you could be, what would you do differently here?

“At Wabar,” Hale said lightly, “you and I met a man who had long ago killed half of himself, to hide from the wrath of God. Is that a good way to live?”

“ Half of you, you think it would be?” said bin Jalawi cheerfully. “Cut your hair, cut your toenails, and you’ll have dispensed with more.”

Hale knew that his companion-his oldest friend in the Middle East!-was referring to Hale’s patriotism, his sense of duty to the Crown. In fact Hale suspected that it was more than half of himself, but his cover story required him to pretend far otherwise. Again he reminded himself not to get angry at bin Jalawi-the man simply believed the Whitehall-scripted cover story, which presented Hale as having been a crook for years, and which Hale had not denied here.

“More than that,” Hale said. “A hand.”

“A finger. A left-hand finger.”

Hale fumbled a pack of Player’s cigarettes out of his coat pocket. “Ramadan’s fast ended two days ago,” he said hoarsely. He could safely let his agitation show, as it would be interpreted as anxiety at the prospect of doubling, changing sides. “Do you have any old Ikhwan prejudices against your guests smoking?”

“Allah knows that djinn and ghosts without number clustered around our fires when you and I perfumed the desert with tobacco smoke,” bin Jalawi protested. “Smoke like a refinery, if you like. The Russian we are to go to meet now, he smokes.”

Hale was aware of his own knocking heartbeat. “You called him right after I called you?”

“That trouble was not required. His people placed a bug in my hatif last night. It is working as a microphone even now.”

The Russian’s house was in an old neighborhood in Al-Jahrah, twenty miles west of Al-Kuwait. It was a one-story coral-rock house with a tall square wind tower standing over the roof. The enormous front doors, visible in the headlights of bin Jalawi’s Chevrolet, were of carved teak, studded with big iron nails in serpentine patterns, and a conventional-sized door had been cut and hinged into the right portal. When they had climbed out of the car and walked up to the small door, Salim bin Jalawi turned a wooden key in the wooden lock, and when the door had squeaked open, he stepped back and waved Hale toward the lamplit courtyard dimly visible within.

A drop of cold sweat rolled down Hale’s ribs under his shirt, and he remembered the cheery greeting of the American OSS men in London during the war: Is anything okay?

As he trudged toward the flagstone threshold, he was rapidly, uselessly, trying to calculate the cui bono of his position. Who would benefit from having him killed here? Theodora would hardly have bothered to send him to Kuwait just for that; and the Soviet Rabkrin service was supposed to want his seemingly freelance expertise for the new Ararat operation, and even if they had found out that Philby had been doubled back, it was unlikely that they could know that Hale too was a Trojan horse.

I think this is okay, he told himself with frail confidence as he stepped through the low doorway.

A voice from a chair under the branches of a pomegranate tree said, in unaccented English, “You can have a drink, if you like, Mr. Hale. Scotch or vodka?”