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.
“You obviously know n-nothing about j-journalistic work,” said Philby, picking up one of his glasses of gin. “Some of the seeds fall upon st-stony places, and w-wither in the sun because they have no root. For every story I file, a d-dozen prove to be false alarms.” He lifted the glass to his lips and swirled the warm liquor over his tongue.
“That’s from the thirteenth chapter of Matthew,” said Dr. Tarr, “your seed analogy is. It properly refers to people, of course-and do remember the next verse: ‘And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprang up, and choked them.’”
And to Philby’s embarrassment, a trickle of the gin slipped down his windpipe, and he coughed gin out through his nostrils; the stinging liquor burned in his nose and brought tears to his eyes, and the CIA men laughed as he continued coughing.
“Oh, a palpable hit!” said Dr. Tarr. “You like to act as if you’re out of play these days, Kim-the retired cold warrior-but lately Moscow is scrambling to make the Red Sea a Red Army sea, and make the Persian Gulf a…”
“Potemkin bluff?” suggested Elena. She was staring at Philby with distaste.
“Too reached-for,” said Professor Feather, shaking his head.
“Anyway,” Dr. Tarr went on, “they were ready to make the Caribbean a Soviet pond too, until Kennedy made them back down two months ago. Now the last time the Soviets tried a big grab like this was in ’48, when they blockaded Berlin and incidentally annexed Czechoslovakia and got a Communist Party member in as president of Hungary. Less overtly, there was also some action at that time around the Aras River, between Turkey and Soviet Armenia-specifically in the Ahora Gorge on Mount Ararat. And there are a lot of people in Beirut right now who were there then; including Miss Elena Teresa Ceniza-Bendiga herself.”