Elena lifted her glass of pink beer in a tired salute and took a gulp of it.

“A couple of the old cast are not here, though,” said Professor Feather, “or not obviously or not yet. Your old housemate Burgess is unlikely to show up, I suppose, Kim; our Brit colleagues would arrest him if he strayed out of the Soviet Union. But Andrew Hale fled England on Wednesday, the second, and the SIS managed to track him to Kuwait, but lost him the next day. It seems timely. Have you heard anything about him?”

“N-no,” said Philby, “I s-scarcely remember the boy.” But his mind was whirling, trying to figure out how this new piece on the chessboard might change the lines of consequence. Hale was Theodora’s star protégé, Philby thought, and he appeared to be fired after his failure on Ararat; was that a feint? God help me if Theodora is still in this in any way. Surely that old ultimatum with the SOE no longer applies! He remembered Theodora’s words at the Turkish-Soviet border in 1952: Report to us any contact from the Soviets; and participate in any action they order you into; and report it all to us; or die.

Elena took another sip of her polluted beer. “‘Fled England,’” she said; “‘lost him the next day.’ Is he a fugitive?” And with a chill Philby remembered that Hale had been bitterly in love with her, in ’48, and he remembered the high-low seven-card stud game he had played with Hale in the Anderson bomb shelter on that last terrible night: Low hand wins Maly’s amomon instructions.

“The news is five days old, even at newspaper-level,” said Professor Feather; “I’m surprised the SDECE hasn’t relayed it to you. Hale was to be arrested for old embezzlements committed during his residency in Kuwait right after the war-on Wednesday MI5 sent an agent to negotiate a possible immunity deal with him, contingent on doing some work for the SIS, and Hale killed the agent and fled. He killed a cop too.”

“Claude Cassagnac,” said Dr. Tarr.

“What about Claude Cassagnac?” asked Elena quickly.

Philby recalled that she had mentioned the name Cassagnac earlier this evening: Maly did talk to me about this! I will have to tell old Cassagnac that my answer in 1941 was not accurate.

“That was the MI5 agent Hale killed,” said Dr. Tarr. “I gather he was more a consultant than an agent, actually.”

“What proof is this?” demanded Elena, quaintly using in English what Philby recognized as an old bit of Spanish Civil War slang.

“This is two hundred proof, ma’am, solid spirit right over the top of the still,” said Professor Feather, staring curiously at her. “Like I said, it’s even newspaper-level.” He stood up out of the booth, unblocking her way. “If you’re through with your drink, you can leave.”

“I’m not through with my drink,” she said.

“Kim’s not really for sale right now, Miss Ceniza-Bendiga.” Professor Feather looked across the table to where Philby sat hemmed in by Dr. Tarr. “We intend to read your non-fiction, Kim. And not as…excerpts, in a French translation.”

Right, you haven’t got a “special relationship” with the SDECE, thought Philby, the way you have with the SIS. But neither you fellows nor, apparently, my disappointing old SIS colleagues, are offering me any itties. Tout au contraire, in fact.

The prolonged nervous strain of this evening, along with the cumulative effects of drink and his throbbing, wounded head, was goading Philby toward something like hysteria. I’ve got to end this, he thought.

“Oh well,” he said with desperately affected breeziness, “Miss Weiss is only interested in-d-d-domestic reminiscences, human-interest m-material. Travels with my f-father, the traumas of a raw-raw-religious education, the d-death of my pet ffffox-upon my honor, nothing that would attain to your ‘n-newspaper level.’” He finished his first gin and picked up the second. “And now if you’ll both excuse us…”

Dr. Tarr stood up from beside Philby and leaned down over Philby’s bandaged head. “Applewhite doesn’t think you were ever a spy for the Soviets,” he said; Applewhite was the CIA station chief in Beirut. “The Philbys and the Applewhites go out together for picnics in the mountains by Ajaltoun. Applewhite thinks we’re scoundrels for hassling you and rousting you all the time.”

Cautiously, Philby allowed himself an indulgent laugh, and it came out convincingly enough; but when he tried to speak he found that he was babbling nervously: “Oh, th-that successive-that’s excessive, surely-you s-seem like a couple of clean-cut Woodminster-I mean, Midwestern-”

“But we’re not under Applewhite,” Dr. Tarr went on almost in a snarl. “We work directly for the Office of Special Operations in Washington. And our boss”-he pressed his lips together-“our boss is very aware of your father, your pet fox.”

Philby felt as though the man had punched him in the stomach. The CIA knows that my father’s ghost was inhabiting that fox? But they can’t know much more than that, they can’t even know that, not with any certainty.

He had raised his eyebrows, and now he tensely opened his mouth to try to express…weary puzzlement, impatience, mounting irritability…

But Professor Feather stepped well back from Elena and delivered another punch: “While you’re dickering with the SDECE, ask Miss Ceniza-Bendiga to show you where she lay prone on the roof of a Rue Kantari office building Tuesday night, across the street from your place. She brought the rifle in a saxophone case, and I guess she must have joggled the telescopic sight a little during the taxi ride.”

“You two have a pleasant evening now, hear?” said Dr. Tarr cheerfully, and the two CIA men strode out of the bar.

Philby had snatched the revolver out of his coat pocket and was now pointing it under the table directly at Elena’s abdomen. “Dum-dums,” he said evenly, though he was breathing hard. “Paralysis, peritonitis-those would be good news.”

He was remembering last Tuesday night-the stunning blow to the head while he stood in front of the toilet in his bathroom, and then his own drunken, confused effort to bash his head again, against the radiator, to conceal from his wife the fact that he had been shot-his wife dragging him half-conscious to the bedroom, with blood jetting from his scalp and spattering the wall and ruining the pillows-and then the Lebanese doctor that poor Eleanor had somehow got to come over to the apartment, and Philby’s inarticulate reluctance to be taken away to a hospital while an assassin might be waiting outside for a second shot-

Elena smiled at him coldly and slowly lifted the palms of both hands from the table. “I don’t have the rifle now. And that was just…personal regards, Tuesday night, disobedience-not my orders. France is willing to buy you-even if France ’s temperamental emissary would rather have seen you dead, that night-and you do still need a nation that will give you protection and immunity. You don’t dare go up the mountain with the Russian expedition, do you, now that your protector and shield is all the way gone? You told me that your father’s body died two years ago-when did the fox die?”

“September,” whispered Philby, lowering the barrel of the gun. “Somebody p-pushed him over the railing of our apartment. Pushed her, if you like-the f-fox was a female. Fifth floor.”

“I’ll deny having shot at you,” she said. She took a deep breath, and then, her eyes bright with tears as she stared straight at him, she added with clear deliberateness, “And what would have been the point of trying to kill you last Tuesday, in any case?-since”-she visibly braced herself-“since during our talk tonight I’ve gathered that January first isn’t your true birthday after all? Your real birthday, the real day on which you’re mortally vulnerable, is the date when something happened to nearly kill you in ’37, right?”