Declare

said Hale. 1-K was the code designation of the misplaced person whose job Hale had taken over.
    “What are you working on, 1-K?” asked Footman.
    Hale swallowed, but said levelly, “At the moment, statistics on infant death and insanity, sir, in the Kirov and Arbat districts of Moscow… uh, in the period from 1884 through 1890.”
    “Oh no, d-don’t t-tell me, 1-K!” Philby was laughing so hard that he could barely speak. “You never n-know, I might be a sp-spy! Loose lips—sink ships, b-boy! Insane Russian in-fin-fants in the 1880s! I trust the Church”—he had to draw a hitching breath to finish the sentence—“the Churchill g-government is being advised daily of your p-progress!”
    Hale’s face was hot, but he nodded civilly and stepped past the two men to push open the door to the electrically lit white-tiled stairway. And as he tapped down the steps toward the third floor, he heard Philby’s echoing voice say to Footman, “Do you know why the st-stairs in this place look like a p-public lavatory? Because only sh-shits ever come in here!”
    Philby’s laughter rang on the tile until the door clanked shut.
    In fact, it was not to be until the war had been over for six weeks, and he was sent to Berlin, that Hale himself took his SIS job seriously.
    Broadway Buildings was a nine-story office building at 54 Broadway, two streets south of St. James’s Park and just across the street from the St. James’s Park tube station. A brass plaque by the front entrance read Minimax Fire Extinguisher Company, though the only such precautions Hale noticed in the dark corridors of the place were red-painted fire buckets filled with sand and hung on hooks beside each of the frosted-glass office doors.
    On Hale’s first morning at Broadway, Theodora had taken him in to Footman’s fourth-floor office.
    “David!” Theodora had said jovially. “What vacancies have you got on the Section One staff?”
    Footman had looked at Theodora and Hale with caution. “Well, 1-K never responded to the Reserve call-up.”
    “Then here he is at last. This is Andrew Hale, and he’s on loan from the Special Operations Executive. We’ll see to his pay—all you need do is tell the War Office that 1-K is onboard and has been seconded to SOE for special duties.”
    And so Hale had been given the identity of the missing 1-K, complete with an in-house lapel badge that gave his birth-date as having been in 1870, which would make him seventy-two years old now. The twenty-year-old Hale supposed that the real 1-K had probably died of old age.
    Immediately after his release from the Ham Common compound, Hale had given Theodora a long and nearly complete account of his three months in occupied Paris—though he had found himself unable to tell the older man about things like the scorched garret floor, the quasi-voices from the radio head-phones, and the way his ankh belt had appeared to carry him across the gap between the rooftops—and he was still far too Catholic and young to tell Theodora that he had gone to bed with a Red Army agent—and now he wondered if his reticences at that interview had been noticed and had somehow led to this dead-end position.
    He often had to remind himself, We also serve who only stand and wait.
    Out in the world, the German Panzers fought their way east toward Stalingrad and the British Eighth Army defeated Rommel at El Alamein, but through some apparently random bureaucratic fiat Hale’s time was spent in becoming an expert on obscure facets of late-nineteenth-century Moscow. The SIS mathematicians at Bletchley Park were rumored to have cracked a high-level German code, and the SOE cowboys were reportedly blowing up bridges in North Africa and parachuting agents into the Balkans, but the files routed to Hale’s desk were all… treatises like “Evidences of Secret Construction in the Basement of the Anchor Insurance Company in Moscow in 1884” and “Coriolis Force Singularities: Incidence of Anomalous Rotational Meteorological Phenomena in Moscow, 1910–1930” and “Metallic Debris in Moscow Rainstorms (Spec.: Wedding Rings and Tooth-Fillings).”
    Many of these files were addenda to older investigations, and in order to sign them off in good conscience Hale frequently had to locate and read as much as he could of the primary work. The SIS registry was a chaotic mess, with operational and personnel files just stacked in boxes along the corridors, so he often took a car from the motor-pool