“Keep faith,” muttered Utechin, apparently to himself, “and so will we.” When Elena raised her eyebrows, he said, “The scholar in the City of the Dead knows of me; but, since he does not know I am coming to him, there can be no-truth to be established-for me in Cairo, on this trip.”
But when they had landed and carried their valises out to the sidewalk to flag down a taxicab, Utechin was sweating through his sport coat, in spite of the cool breeze that rattled in the palm fronds overhead; and as he climbed into the back seat of the battered cab, he handed Elena a book-sized zippered leather case.
It was so heavy that she guessed it contained a handgun.
“American.45 automatic,” he whispered to her in French as she hitched up her skirt and climbed in beside him with the case in her lap like a purse. “1911 Army Colt. You must be familiar with it from Spain. If we are cut off, cornered by anyone-use it on them.”
Elena laughed easily, for she had long since decided to walk away from the Rabkrin in Cairo. “And promiscuously use up one of my sacramental bloody murders?”
Utechin’s sweating face clenched in a frown that made him look ill. “Do as I say,” he said softly. He tapped his lapel. “I am prepared too-and if you should fail to come to my assistance, you will not have any more heartbeats than I.”
She stared at him curiously as the cab accelerated away from the curb. “But if we have killed our consciences,” Elena said, speaking more loudly to be heard over the roaring automobile engine, “surely it was because there is no God?-and if there is no God, what is to be feared in dying?”
“No God,” said Utechin, nodding rapidly as he stared out through the taxicab window at the narrow-windowed white houses. “Marx said that, but Marx was no Russian. The NKVD says that, but the NKVD is an army of witless thugs. We have never said that. We work to circumvent Him.”
“Like a bull in the arena,” said Elena, forcing herself not to smile. “Ah, you will divert Him with your capework, and leave Him blinking stupidly at empty sand while you steal around behind Him.”
“This…merriment of yours may be an appropriate posture,” Utechin said irritably; then he gave her a weak smile. “But it is certainly a trying one. Could you please put on a becoming solemnity, at least until after I’ve been able to catch up on my drinking schedule?”
Elena nodded obediently, and didn’t speak until the taxicab had squeaked to a halt at the curb in front of Shepherd’s Hotel on Port Said Street.
“Let us walk around a few blocks and view the layout of the streets before we go in,” Utechin said as he climbed out. Elena had seen the United States star emblem on B-25 bombers at the Heliopolis airfield, and now she was staring at an American jeep swerving through the traffic of trolley cars and donkey carts on the broad boulevard; and Utechin added, “It will not be American soldiers, repellent though I grant you they are, who might assail us. Watch for…Egyptians, Arabs.”
And in the crowded street Elena saw flashes of many Arabic faces-from the toothy grins of ragged brown boys crying for “Baksheesh!” to the white beards of Moslem elders, and she was nervous-even though she knew that Machikha Nash was confined within the borders of the Soviet Union-each time she met the eyes of an Arab woman staring at her from the slit above a black veil. It occurred to her that Utechin’s target might be forewarned, and that Utechin’s head and her own too might be centered in the sights of rifles in high windows even now. She hoped she might soon find a Coptic Catholic church-with luck, the priest wouldn’t even understand the language in which she would make her lengthy Confession.
…that I have sinned exceedingly, in what I have done, and in what I have failed to do…
The architecture of the city had been plaster-fronted white houses and domed mosques at the northern end, but on this street nineteenth-century European buildings had intruded among the older houses, making the traditional overhanging latticed balconies look frail.
“That is the French Embassy,” said Utechin, nodding toward the Romanesque doorway of an ornate stone building front, “covert headquarters of the French secret service. They are hand-in-glove with the British Special Operations Executive. So is the American OSS, in the American Embassy, another block down this street.”
Elena had gathered that the British SOE contained a secret core that was the Western equivalent of the Rabkrin. Among Andre Marty’s Communists there had been rumors of a vast old British operation known as Declare, and from the way Marty had especially devoted his energies to killing any British agents who seemed aware of a supernatural element in the war, Elena was confident that Declare, if it existed, was opposed to the secret Soviet cult of Machikha Nash.
They had stepped off the curb and were crossing Port Said Street, among a mixed crowd of Europeans, Egyptians, American soldiers, and half a dozen goats that were being herded by children in loincloths and baseball caps. Elena unzipped the leather case Utechin had handed her.
On the sidewalk she slipped her hand into the case, and her palm fit familiarly around the.45’s grip. The safety catch was up, engaged, cocked-and-locked-and she thumbed it down. Finally she took a deep breath and pointed the concealed gun at Utechin’s back. “Look,” she said.
Utechin’s face went blank when he turned around and saw her hand inside the case. He stopped walking, and leaned against a lamppost. “Explain this, please,” he said. The concealed muzzle was now pointed at his abdomen.
“We will walk into the French Embassy,” Elena said. There was a quaver in her voice, but her hand was steady. “We will surrender to their secret service. Defect.”
Utechin licked his lips. “And…why?” he asked hoarsely.
“Because we are in front of it. If we were another block down the street, we would surrender to the Americans.”
He shook his head slowly, an expression of both sadness and surprise on his damp face. “Ach, Elena, so soon! It is my fault, for not taking more time with you.” And then he said, in Russian, “Take the death now.”
A spot on her forehead stung with a sudden chill, and the breath stopped in her throat and her knees began to fold-and she realized that she must have been given a precautionary post-hypnotic order to die, as if of the gunshot that had killed her double in the Lubyanka cellar, upon hearing this Russian phrase a second time.
But though she fell hard to her knees on the pavement, she was able to raise the hidden.45 and keep it pointed at him; and the spot of chill on her forehead was now hot, as if a priest had marked the Ash Wednesday sign of the cross there with still-smoldering palm-frond ashes; and she realized that the words of the post-hypnotic order had got tangled with the words of the Ave Maria that had been droning in her head both before and after the shot had been fired-ruega por nosotros, pecadores, ahora en esta hora nuestra muerte-
Pray for us, sinners, now in the hour of our death.
Apparently the inadvertent parallel had disrupted the lethal grammar of the order, broken its imprinted lines like a double exposure.
Utechin hesitated, and then he abruptly crouched, falling backward as his right hand sprang up and under his lapel.
Elena hammered her gun hand downward to follow his sudden drop, and she twitched the trigger three times rapidly.
Only the first shot fired, for the recoiling slide snagged on the inside of the case-but when she brought her right hand back down into line after the recoil, she saw that Utechin was lying flat on his back, with a spreading spot of bright red blood on his white shirt over the solar plexus. His eyes blinked once, and then simply stared up at the cloudy sky.