Hale sighed deeply and turned toward Farid, bracing himself again. “If this becomes necessary one more time,” he told the Arab tightly, “I’ll smite you, I promise.”
“Has to be perfect!” protested Farid. “Hold still, please.”
Hale closed his eyes and gritted his teeth, and the fresh, hard blow on his already bruised cheekbone rocked his head and brought bile to the back of his throat; and he had to lower his head and breathe spittily through his mouth to keep the rainbow glitter of unconsciousness from filling his vision.
He didn’t see Farid leave, but over the ringing in his ears he heard the door click shut.
Hale took a deep breath and rocked his head back to blink at Hartsik out of his right eye. The man was relocking the door. “Does Philby know?” Hale asked thickly. “That he and I are half-brothers?”
“Not that we know of. He might well suspect that St. John had an illegitimate child, and that the birth ruined Kim’s prepared destiny; broke it in half.”
“Broke it. So Philby and I are two halves of one person.”
“Well, in a sense.” Hartsik walked back to his chair behind the desk and sat down. “We suspect that you’ve been able to hear each other’s thoughts, in the season when the sky has assumed the definition of you; and probably you dream each other’s dreams then. And you do appear to-” Hartsik paused, awkwardly.
“Don’t hesitate,” Hale said, “to add insult to injury.”
“Well, Philby appears to have got-this is imprecise, you understand, armchair speculation-he appears to have got all the family feeling, the-practically obsession, in his case-with hearth-and-home, parents and wife and children. He’s been married three times, and he’s got five children. He has, though, no comprehension of loyalty, duty. Those qualities all seem to have flowed your way.”
“And the Russians want-because the djinn require-the entire rafiq to be present.”
“That’s it. You were both there in the gorge in ’48, but not working together. They couldn’t see you properly. This time they will open their gates to the two of you-and you will kill them.”
“How?” Hale waved at the lead balls on the table. “Shoot them with these?”
“Yes-a lot of them, cast in a much smaller scale. Birdshot caliber. Several shops in Beirut are now manned with clerks who will sell you prepared shot shells and an American derringer, chambered for the American.410 shell and rifled to the right so that the pellets will emerge in a pattern that’s turning clockwise as it expands, to match the spinning of the djinn if you fire upward. The djinn will assimilate the shot pellets-which is to say, assimilate the experience of death. Dying, they will no doubt throw spontaneous egg-shapes of their own, made of mountain stone or whatever is at hand, and ideally a chain-reaction will ensue. You will buy several boxes of shells-but you must save one shell for Philby.”
Theodora had mentioned this, but Hale had not known then that Philby was his half-brother. “What about his protections?” Hale asked, mainly just to slow this discussion. “His Achilles-heel date isn’t due to come round again for nearly another year.”
“The protections aren’t against self-injury. You are virtually him, in this context; that will be especially true on Mount Ararat.”
The other half of me, Hale thought. The hearth-and-home half of me. “Very well,” he said unsteadily, “I’ll shoot him.” He may be my brother, he told himself, but Philby is still the man who betrayed my men in the gorge. I can shoot him for that.
“You are not to kill him. Do please pay attention. You are not on any account to kill Philby, even to save yourself. You are to shoot him in the back, from a sufficient distance so that the shot will penetrate widely around his spine but not be focused in any kind of tight pattern. We certainly don’t want the ‘rat-hole’ effect! The goal is to leave him able to walk away, to Moscow, with at least one pellet in his flesh that cannot be removed surgically.”
Hale’s arms were suddenly cold. “She’s a ghul,” he whispered, using the Arabic word for djinn who haunt graveyards and eat the dead in their graves, extracting up through the soil as souvenirs any bits of metal-rings, gold teeth-that the cadavers might have contained. “A ghulah,” he corrected himself, using the feminine form.
“Very good, Mr. Hale! Yes, she is. And when-”
Hale remembered Mammalian’s question this morning. “And she sometimes appears as an Arabic woman with a string of gold rings around her neck, right? I’ve met her. And since 1883 she has been the guardian angel of Russia.”
“Machikha Nash, the Rabkrin call her. Yes. And-”
“And!” interrupted Hale, “if Philby goes to Moscow, after this-and I presume he’ll be given no choice-he’ll eventually die there. He’ll be buried in a Moscow cemetery.”
Hartsik’s eyes narrowed in a smile. “Ex-act-ly. And the guardian angel will not neglect to devour him, and to draw up, in her spiral way, the metal that is in him, including at least one of these shot pellets. And she will thus assimilate into herself the shape of djinn death.” He sat back. “And she will die, and the Soviet Union will lose its guardian angel. I can’t imagine the U.S.S.R. surviving Philby by more than three or four years.”
Hale recalled what Prime Minister Macmillan had said six days ago: I suppose we can’t simply shoot spies, as we did in the war-but they should be discovered and then played back in the old double-cross way, with or without their knowledge-never arrested. And Hale thought that Macmillan would be pleased with the way Theodora had orchestrated this use of Kim Philby.
It seemed to call for a drink. Hale picked up the Laphroaig bottle and took another aromatic mouthful from the neck of it. “In London,” he said hoarsely, “I was told that Philby does not want to participate in this expedition to Ararat; that I’ll have to threaten him to get him to go along. What’s the basis for his reluctance?”
“That’s right. His father-your father-died, here in Beirut, a little more than two years ago. I’m, uh, sorry.”
“Stop it.” Hale could hardly remember the text of The Empty Quarter, which his father had written; and that book was his only link to the old man. Any feeling of…loss, here, he reminded himself, would be sheer affectation. But he did remember standing on the steep escarpment at the windy Edge-of-the-Wold when he had been a boy, looking down at the roofs of Evesham and the River Isbourne on the plain below the Cotswolds highlands, and speculating that his father was a missionary priest “somewhere east o’ Suez,” and imagining how the two of them might one day meet. And then he remembered walking across the grassy quad at the University College of Weybridge on many late afternoons in the 1950s, picturing an eventual reunion with Elena. How shabbily these fond dreams work out, he thought-and he was glad that Farid had hit him again, for he was afraid that some of the tears leaking from his swollen left eye were tears of purest self-pity.
“What did Philby’s father have to do with it?” he asked harshly.
Hartsik took Hale’s cue. “Philby’s father was always very protective of Kim; clearly he blamed himself-altogether justly-for having crippled the boy’s standing in the supernatural world by indulging his own-his-”
“Lust for my mother.”
“Well, not to put too fine a point on it. Now old St. John saved the life of a fox in ’32, in the Empty Quarter desert, the Rub’ al-Khali-his Bedouins were going to kill it, but St. John intervened and set it free. He may have been able to tell somehow that this particular fox contained a djinn, who had been abridged down into this form-in any case, it did, and in gratitude the djinn gave St. John certain powers over foxes-even over fox furs. Several times St. John used this power to protect Kim. When Kim was a war correspondent in Spain in 1936, St. John gave him a mad-looking Arab coat with a fox-fur collar, and he told Kim to wear it whenever he was in peril, especially on his birthday. Kim still has certain magical protections, as you may too, but they become transparent on his birthday-vos anniversaire. And sure enough, on December thirty-first of 1937, Kim was in a car that was hit with an artillery shell; Kim was wearing the fox-fur coat, and he came through with a scratch, though the men with him were all killed-and St. John, who was in Alexandria at the time, was knocked down, bleeding from the ears. Neither of them was seriously hurt, you see-the fox-fur magic dissipated the blow.”