But the man with her was Kim Philby. At least from across the dim room he looked no older now than he had when he had been the SIS Head of Station in Turkey in 1948-secretly in the pay of Moscow even then, it had turned out, and responsible for the betrayal of Declare. But Hale's instant memory was of his first encounter with Philby, in early 1942, when Hale had been a prisoner at the MI5 compound at Ham Common in Richmond and Philby had been trying to get custody of him, very likely in order to kill him.
Three nights ago Ishmael had asked Hale where Elena was-and she was here, with Philby, who evidently didn't know she was the one who had shot him in the head. Did Philby know the Rabkrin was looking for her? Was Mammalian aware of her, and who did he think she was? Again Hale wondered what he would have been told at the canceled briefing in Kuwait.
Now Philby raised his bandaged head and glanced around the bar-his gaze didn't pause on this hollow-cheeked, dark-haired figure silhouetted in the doorway-and he leaned over the table to kiss Elena on the lips. She might or might not have responded-in any case she did not push him away.
Hale let the beaded curtain swing across his view of the bar as he took a step back into the hotel lobby, bumping into Mammalian.
"I'm...too filthy," he said hoarsely, "for..."
"Well," said Mammalian in a judicious tone, "it's true, you are. You smell like an Iraqi Bedouin, my friend. I will take you to your room."
Hale let himself be led away past the couches and the registration desk toward the stairs; he didn't look back, but he felt as though this were a ghost that the Armenian was leading away, and that the real, physical Andrew Hale was still standing back there, transfixed with dismay, staring in through the bar archway.
Chapter Nine
Berlin, 1945
It was said once to me that it is inexpedient to write the names of strangers concerned in any matter, because by the naming of names many good plans are brought to confusion.
- Rudyard Kipling, Kim
Hale's second encounter with Kim Philby had been in February of 1942, a month after their brief and hostile first meeting in the Latchmere House dining room at Ham Common.
Hale had been working at the SIS headquarters in Broadway Buildings in London for only three days, and he was startled to see striding toward him down the linoleum hallway the same stuttering man who had berated him on that well-remembered occasion. Philby was wearing the brown wool tunic of an Army uniform now, but without any badges of rank on the epaulettes, and he was deep in conversation with an older man in shirtsleeves.
But the intelligent eyes in the blunt face lit up on seeing Hale. "Why it's J-Jimmie's boy!" Philby drawled; and then in an affected, whining voice he quoted what Hale had told the interrogation panel a month earlier: "'But I wasn't doing anything the Theodora person had told me to do!'" In his normal Oxbridge accent he went on, "And yet I d-discover that you are somehow working in S-Section One, on loan from Juh-Jimmie's det-te-test-able SOE!" He turned toward the older man beside him, whom Hale belatedly recognized as his own boss, David Footman, the head of SIS Section One. "What work is our dishonest boy here d-d-doing for you, David?"
Footman peered uncertainly at Hale. "It's 1-K, isn't it?" he said.
"Yes, sir," said Hale. 1-K was the code designation of the misplaced person whose job Hale had taken over.
"What are you working on, 1-K?" asked Footman.
Hale swallowed, but said levelly, "At the moment, statistics on infant death and insanity, sir, in the Kirov and Arbat districts of Moscow...uh, in the period from 1884 through 1890."
"Oh no, d-don't t-tell me, 1-K!" Philby was laughing so hard that he could barely speak. "You never n-know, I might be a sp-spy! Loose lips-sink ships, b-boy! Insane Russian in-fin-fants in the 1880s! I trust the Church"-he had to draw a hitching breath to finish the sentence-"the Churchill g-government is being advised daily of your p-progress!"
Hale's face was hot, but he nodded civilly and stepped past the two men to push open the door to the electrically lit white-tiled stairway. And as he tapped down the steps toward the third floor, he heard Philby's echoing voice say to Footman, "Do you know why the st-stairs in this place look like a p-public lavatory? Because only sh-shits ever come in here!"
Philby's laughter rang on the tile until the door clanked shut.
In fact, it was not to be until the war had been over for six weeks, and he was sent to Berlin, that Hale himself took his SIS job seriously.
Broadway Buildings was a nine-story office building at 54 Broadway, two streets south of St. James's Park and just across the street from the St. James's Park tube station. A brass plaque by the front entrance read Minimax Fire Extinguisher Company, though the only such precautions Hale noticed in the dark corridors of the place were red-painted fire buckets filled with sand and hung on hooks beside each of the frosted-glass office doors.
On Hale's first morning at Broadway, Theodora had taken him in to Footman's fourth-floor office.
"David!" Theodora had said jovially. "What vacancies have you got on the Section One staff?"
Footman had looked at Theodora and Hale with caution. "Well, 1-K never responded to the Reserve call-up."
"Then here he is at last. This is Andrew Hale, and he's on loan from the Special Operations Executive. We'll see to his pay-all you need do is tell the War Office that 1-K is onboard and has been seconded to SOE for special duties."
And so Hale had been given the identity of the missing 1-K, complete with an in-house lapel badge that gave his birth-date as having been in 1870, which would make him seventy-two years old now. The twenty-year-old Hale supposed that the real 1-K had probably died of old age.
Immediately after his release from the Ham Common compound, Hale had given Theodora a long and nearly complete account of his three months in occupied Paris-though he had found himself unable to tell the older man about things like the scorched garret floor, the quasi-voices from the radio head-phones, and the way his ankh belt had appeared to carry him across the gap between the rooftops-and he was still far too Catholic and young to tell Theodora that he had gone to bed with a Red Army agent-and now he wondered if his reticences at that interview had been noticed and had somehow led to this dead-end position.
He often had to remind himself, We also serve who only stand and wait.