Tim Powers - Declare

“Can the bartender make a Berliner Weisse mit Schuss?” Elena asked the waiter. “That’s beer with raspberry syrup,” she added.

The waiter concealed any repugnance and simply said, “Mais oui, madame,” and bowed and stepped away.

Philby remembered the mug of odd pink beer that had been on the table in Berlin. “That was your drink, that night?”

“Do you disapprove? As I recall, you were drinking insecticide.”

Philby nodded glumly. “Djinn repellent, the old Cairo hands used to call it. If my f-father had thought to give me a glass of insecticide before we flew over Lake Tiberias, I would not have c-contracted ‘malaria.’ They…bud off, like cactus, in periods of activity, and the l-little…djinnlings!…can be attracted to and c- cling to someone who has-someone who bears the m-mark of previous djinn-recognition. They get in through your m-mouth, and they interfere with your thoughts, and exorcising them later is a tiresome bother. My father t-told me that some of the old lads in the Arab Bureau in Cairo would even rinse their m-mouths with a shot of petrol, if they were going out to some place where the m-monsters were likely to be. Volatile smells repel them, the y-young ones, at least, and a couple of shots of warm jjj- gin here ought to drive off any who came up over the cliff just now with the b-birds.”

Elena was blushing, and Philby remembered asking her if she had not found this business vaguely shameful. “That was a, a female one, in Berlin,” she said.

Philby could feel the hairs standing up on his arms, even at this late and cynical date, as he said softly, “That was Russia’s very g-guardian angel, my dear-Machikha Nash, Our Stepmother-inspecting the n-new boundaries of her k-kingdom in person, in stormy person. I was there to monitor the installation of her boundary stone, and I watched it all from a parked car in the Charlottenburg Chaussee on the western side. She was… splendid, wasn’t she? I remember thinking of Byron’s line, ‘She walks in Beauty, like the night/Of cloudless climes and starry skies.’ What w-were you doing there?”

Philby didn’t look away from her, but he was aware of the two men who walked into the bar, and he simply shrugged and gave her a frail smile when they stopped in front of his table.

One of the men seemed to say, “Allah, beastly ass,” but a moment later Philby realized that he had said, in an American accent, I’ll obviously ask; and the man went on, “Who’s your girlfriend, Kim?”

Philby looked up at his CIA inquisitors. Both were sandy-haired Americans in gray suits with wide lapels, and they both seemed offensively fit and young.

“Miss Weiss is a French m-magazine editor,” Philby said. “I’m t-trying to sell her s-some non-fiction work.”

“We’d love to read some of your non-fiction work, Kim,” said the taller of the two. “Scoot over, Miss Weiss.” When Elena shifted away across the booth seat, the man sat down beside her.

His companion folded himself into the booth beside Philby, so that Philby and Elena were both blocked in. “I’m Dr. Tarr,” said the man beside Philby, “and my colleague there is Professor Feather. Our boss across the water is very curious about this gathering of the old hands that’s going on here in Beirut.”

“I’m not aware of it,” said Philby carefully. He wanted to pant with relief, for clearly this was not to be a kidnap. With some confidence he went on, “Are you g-going to have the sûreté h-h-haul me in to their p-p- police station one more time, just so I can s-say the same th-thing there for a few hours?”

“More like watch-and-wait,” said the man identified as Professor Feather. “You still do odd jobs for your old firm, don’t you, Kim? Peter Lunn gives you off-paper travel assignments?”

Lunn was the SIS Head of Station in Beirut now, and in fact he had not had any professional conversation with Philby at all. But until three months ago the Head of Station had been Nicholas Elliott, an old friend of Philby’s and one of his loyal defenders in the Burgess defection scandal that had cost Philby his SIS job in 1951. And in these last two years Elliott had indeed given Philby all kinds of off-paper assignments-to Riyadh, and Cairo, and Baghdad, and a dozen other Middle East cities-to mingle with the Arabs who had known Philby’s father, and gauge the extent and purpose of the huge increase in the number of Soviet military advisors throughout the Arab nations.

Philby had been in a quandary: it had been starkly clear that Burgess at the Rabkrin headquarters in Moscow, as well as Petrukhov, Philby’s more pedestrian KGB handler in Beirut, both required him to pass on immediately any information he might learn about the SIS response to the Soviet escalation-but Philby had been aware too that the SIS chiefs in London who believed him guilty of espionage would see to it that he was given “barium meal” information, custom-scripted false data that might later be detected in monitored Moscow traffic. If that were to happen, Philby would logically be isolated as the only possible source of the information, and the SIS could then arrest him for treason; and until this last September, when Philby’s pet fox had been intolerably killed and further work with the Rabkrin had become unthinkable, Philby had not wanted the SIS to arrest him. Even now, he wanted to surrender only on specific terms, what he thought of as his three nonnegotiable “itties”: immunity, a new identity, and a comfortable annuity. Definitely not the deal Theodora’s old fugitive SOE had offered him in ’52.

“Or isn’t it for Lunn?” went on Professor Feather. “Are you still running errands for-” He looked across the table at Dr. Tarr. “What was his name?”

“Petrukhov,” said Dr. Tarr. “Of the Soviet trade mission in Lebanon. He’s the local handler, runner.”

“Any t-traveling I do,” Philby said mildly, “has b-been for the stories I write.”

“That’s odd, you know,” said Dr. Tarr. “You always charge your airline tickets on your IATA card, don’t you? Well, we’ve clocked your stories in The Observer and The Economist, and compared them to the records from the International Air Transport Association in Montreal, and we find that your travel grossly outweighs your journalistic output. Could I have a bourbon-and-water, please,” he said to the waiter, who had just then walked up with the two gins and the pink beer on a tray.

“Same here,” said Dr. Tarr.

The waiter set the drinks on the table, nodded and strode back toward the bar.

Ignoring her ludicrous drink, Elena picked up her purse from beside her and said, “The dealings of the American Internal Revenue Service do not interest me. Mr. Philby, I’ll be in touch-”

Professor Feather didn’t budge. “Stay, Miss Weiss,” he said coldly. “You play a musical instrument, don’t you? Something about the size of a saxophone?”

“The U.S. government will pick up the drinks tab,” added Dr. Tarr cheerfully, “though not precisely in its IRS capacity.”

Philby thought the saxophone remark had seemed to jar her; but now she just sighed and said, “No, I don’t play any instrument. But-I suppose I can’t resist the opportunity to deplete the American treasury.” She put her purse back down.

“And we even took your pseudonyms into account,” said Professor Feather to Philby. “Charles Garner and all. It still doesn’t add up.”

Philby had already begun shaking his head dismissively, and he didn’t stop now-but he was chilled by this new factor. The CIA knew that Charles Garner was one of his pseudonyms!-and Mammalian’s new agent was to be using that identity as cover! Philby wondered if he should warn Mammalian, or let the CIA discover the Garner impostor; if Elena’s SDECE people could “exfiltrate” him very soon, it wouldn’t matter.