“I’ll m-miss Beirut,” he said in English. “I’ve b-been here six years.”
“You’ll like France,” Elena told him. The red sun was low over the horizon beyond the rocks, and she fished a pair of sunglasses out of her purse and slipped them on. “Why do you want to leave the Soviet service? I gather you’re still an active player, not just selling your memoirs.”
“My f-father is d-d-dead.” Our Hajji which art in Hell, now, he thought again. “He died here t-two years ago, and he was my…recruiter, in a, in an unspecific but v-very real sense, into the G-Great Game. He wasn’t a t-traitor-in spite of being j-jailed during the war for making pro-Hitler talk, ‘activities prejudicial to the safety of the Realm’!-and he never p-pushed me toward the S-S-Soviet services per se, but in the twenties and thirties he was studying under one of the S-Soviet illegals who were all eventually p-purged by Stalin in ’37 and ’38-a p-para-do-doxical old Soviet Moslem called Hassim Hakimoff Khan, in J-Jidda, which is the port city for Mecca.”
“I-I met one of the great old illegals,” said Elena quietly. “In France, when I was quite young. What was your father studying?”
Philby barked out one syllable of a mirthless laugh. “Oh-what was he not. Did you know that a g-god called al-Lah was worshipped in the Ka’bah in Mecca a thousand years before Mohammed? According to the Koran, the Thamud tribes refused to w-worship him, and were annihilated by something remembered as both a thu-thunderbolt and an earthquake. My father f-found and deciphered more than ten thousand Thamudic inscriptions, and he didn’t t-turn over all of them to the scholars. And he studied the Gilgamesh v-version of the Biblical flood story in the Chaldean cuneiform tablets at the B-British Museum, supplemented by others that he had f-found for h-himself in Baghdad.” More slowly, he went on, “In 1921 he was appointed Chief B-British Representative in Jordan, ruh-ruh-replacing T. E. Lawrence, who w-was being p-posted to Iraq; my father-s-s-s-stole Lawrence’s old files, and from reading them c-carefully one c-could deduce quite a lot about the files that were m-missing, the ones Lawrence had apparently dddestroyed: the tr-translations of some ancient d-documents he had found in one of the Qumran Wadi caves by the Dead Sea in 1918.”
Elena yawned, clearly from tension rather than tiredness. “You’re talking about the Dead Sea Scrolls, right?-that were found-found again-in 1947! Do you know what the documents were?”
“Yes, I-I read the L-Lawrence files myself in 1934.” After breaking into my father’s safe, he thought, and photographing his papers. “According to h-his inventory files, there were a n-number of Semitic j-jars in the cave, but he took away an anomalous one that h-had an ankh-type c-cross for a h-h-handle. In it were s-several brittle old Hebrew scr-scrolls-apparently one was what is c-called a brontologion, which means ‘what the thunder said’; these were usually di-di-divination and astrological t-texts, derived from 1-listening to thu-thunder; but Lawrence’s references to it s-seemed to indicate a-more specific and deliberate m-message from the thunder. Another of the s-ss-scrolls seems to have been a variant v-version of either the Book of Genesis or the apocryphal Book of Enoch-the story of Noah and the great f-flood, in any case. My f-father never obtained the ack-ack-actual transcriptions Lawrence made of these, so I n-never saw them either. Lawrence became unreliable, after he t-translated them.” Philby yawned too, creaking his jaw, and he clenched his hands into fists to stop them trembling. “I photographed what there was, and gave the foe-foe-photographs to Guy Burgess, who was always my m-main Soviet handler in those d-days.”
“And Lawrence died in a motorcycle crash the following year. How does all this relate to your decision to-quit the ‘Great Game,’ leave the Soviet service, and seek the protection of the SDECE?”
“My f-f-father-initiated, t-tried to initiate me-into-” He let the sentence trail away.
Elena clicked her tongue impatiently. “If you’re going to be evasive about the supernatural element of your story, the SDECE is not buying.”
“Evasive.” Philby laughed shortly, aware of the weight of chunky steel on his ankle and wondering if he might ever be faced with the necessity-and have the courage-to turn the gun on himself. “It is v-vaguely shameful, though, isn’t it? Didn’t you feel that, in B-Berlin?”
“And if you’re not willing to face shame, we’re not going to get anywhere.”
“‘O valiant wheel! O most courageous heaven!’ You g-give me back the s-same reproach I gave you, in T-Turkey. Yes, very well.” For several seconds he just blinked out at the shadowed, eroded faces of the two giant monoliths standing in the bay, and at a flock of seagulls flying in a ring just to this side of the rocks. A new identity in France, he told himself. You cannot go up onto Mount Ararat.
Still, his voice shook when he finally spoke: “My father was b-baptized, but renounced Kruh-Christianity and converted to Islam in 1930, and took the name Hajji Abdullah, ‘One Who Has Made the Pilgrimage, Slave of God’-and I never was b-b-baptized at all, he saw to that. He had been born on Good F-Friday in 1885, in Ceylon, and a c-comet was clearly v-visible in the sky on that day-once when he was a baby he was accidentally left behind at a government rest stop during a journey, and the s-servants rushed back and found him being n-nursed by a djjj-by a ‘gypsy’ woman.” Philby glanced at Elena, but her blue eyes were hidden behind the sunglasses, and he looked back out at the rocks. “In fact she was n-nursing two identical infants, b-both dressed in my father’s B-British baby clothes. Later one of the infants was apparently 1-lost-in any case, when they got home again, there was only one.”
“They were both him,” said Elena, “right? Don’t hint, say.”
Philby bared his teeth in a difficult smile. “My motto has always been ‘know, not think it, and learn, not speak.’ The short course for spies. But yes,” he agreed wearily, “they were b-both him. At around the age of s-seven he lost that ability to be in two p-p-places at one time. I was born in Ambala, in the Punjab in India, and I s-spoke Hindi before I s-spoke English. I used to d-dream-”
With an emotion no stronger than perplexity, he discovered that he was unable to tell her about the year’s-end dreams that had blighted his boyhood in India and England: dreams of a bearded bronze man as tall as the rotating night sky, holding an upraised scythe that glittered like a constellation; or of the whole world turning ponderously on the celestial potter’s wheel; or of an Arabian Nights magician whirling a flaming fishing net right into his scorching eyes-from his own studies in the Old Testament’s First Book of Kings he knew that the Hebrew words for burn, excommunicate, magician, potter, and blasphemy, as well as sword, all began with the Hebrew letters cheth and resh-and the dreams always ended with his head being forcibly split in two, so that before he awoke he imagined that he had been broken into two personalities. In adulthood he had come to suspect that the dreams expressed dim memories of some anti-baptism to which he had been subjected as an infant.
“Well,” he said, covering his hesitation by jumping back to the last topic, “I didn’t just dream it-I was able to be in t-two p-places at once myself, as a b-boy. One of me could be in studying, while the other was out h-hiking in the woods. My p-parents had always been aware of it, and simply t-told me to be d-d-discreet, circumspect. I wasn’t b-baptized, and so I didn’t lose that ability until…until precisely on my t-t-tenth birthday.”
“When is your birthday?”
Never, he thought. It is never, and I will never tell you. “New Year’s Day,” he said lightly. “My f-father had been g-grooming me, he wanted his s-son to become-what his b-baptism had barred h-h-him from becoming. Until he was f-forced to resign in 1924, he was a m-major in the Raj, with the Political and Secret Department of the Indian government-the MI-lC, actually, f-forerunner of the present-day SIS. He became great p-pals with Ibn Saud, then king of the Najd r-region in central Arabia, eventually to become eponymous king of all S-S-Saudi Arabia, and when Ibn Saud’s son Feisal p-paid a state visit to England in 1919, the Foreign Office appointed my f-father as the boy’s escort. I was s-s-seven years old at the time, going to a Westminster-prep school in Eastbourne, and they v-visited me there. Feisal presented me with a t-twenty-carat d-diamond. The Russians have always wanted to g-get it away from me-not to be v-v-vulgar, but I had to swallow it, during the episode in Turkey in ’48-and I’ll wager Feisal h-himself would like to have it b-back now, now that air travel is so c-common.”