Declare

squinted at the trucks on the east side of the pillars, something tall and blurry was moving now in the air over the boat, where the balloon had been—it was a whirlwind, a glittering black funnel of rain-haze that swayed and flexed like a reared cobra. And with a sinking heart he remembered one of the reports he had read in Broadway, “Coriolis Force Singularities: Incidence of Anomalous Rotational Meteorological Phenomena in Moscow, 1910–1930.”
    It’s over there — The thought was a panicky wail in his head. I’ve got to go over there.
    Before he could think about it, before he might remember the terror of his New Year’s dreams, he pushed away from the wall and ran heavily against the battering warm wind that flipped his coattails up behind him, across the four broad, empty lanes to the Soviet side of the boulevard.
    In a shadowy doorway he leaned against a wall and tugged the pistol out of his pocket. Theodora had said it was a captured German gun, a Walther P-38, with eight 9-millimeter rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber. Hale had read the circulars on it, and knew that the first shot would be a long double-action pull on the trigger, lifting and dropping the hammer, but the remaining eight shots would be single-action, with each brief trigger-pull simply dropping the recoil-cocked hammer.
    He shoved it back into his soggy pocket, numbly wondering if he would be able to fire a quarter-ounce leaden slug, moving at the speed of 1150 feet per second, into a living man’s body. Perhaps soon he would know—to his cost, surely, either way.
    The two figures he had glimpsed on this side of the road a minute ago had seemed to move with furtive assurance, so when he stepped out of the doorway he strode to the lot they had crossed.
    In moving north after them he imitated their approach and darted from one patch of masonry shadow to the next, pausing before each new shift of position to glance behind him and to the sides—as well as straight ahead, where a couple of hundred feet away the tall whirlwind still spun and glittered in the refracting headlamp beams. As he watched, the boat’s long yardarm broke free of the mast and cartwheeled away into the darkness.
    Perhaps the Russians had big radio speakers up there on the Unter den Linden pavement—for even above the whistle-chorus of the wind he could hear the pounding chant of les parasites. He did at least feel anonymous out here in the rubbled, gravelly dark—there was no sensation of big attention being paid to him.
    He hurried to a fallen pillar, and peered over it—and then didn’t move, for the two figures he had been following were crouched behind a broken wall just twenty feet in front of him. Keeping his white face down in the shadows, he looked left and right, and to his left he saw the tall crane swaying against the dark sky as its platform rolled slowly northeast, toward the gate from the western side. The warm rain tasted oily and salty in Hale’s open, panting mouth.
    Hale was having trouble focusing his eyes on the twisting rain funnel over the boat. The space it occupied in the perceived land-scape didn’t change, but at one moment it seemed to be rushing directly away from him and increasing in size, and at the next seemed to be shrinking rapidly and flying straight into his eyes.
    And the inorganic articulated roaring was clearly coming from it. Its sinuous form curled in the rainy air, and he found himself momentarily seeing vast shoulders, or an outcropping hip, or long flowing hair, in its contours. The noise it made was like the throbbing of a bomber’s engines now, but Hale was unhappily sure that it was forming the syllables of some language—and though it was made of nothing but wind and water and smoke, he was sure it was female.
    You were born to this , Elena had told him in Paris.
    The truck carrying the boat shuddered visibly as it was shifted into gear, and then it was rolling slowly west toward the Brandenburg Gate as if to meet the crane there, and the ever-more-solid-looking whirlwind moved with it like a living tower; another flatbed lorry accelerated up from the south to pace it, and on the bed of this one Hale could see a gray rectangle with a bump on the top that might have been a loop.
    The parasites roar was recognizably musical now, though conforming to no human scale, and Hale’s first thought was a para-phrase from the King James Book of Job: When the midnight comets sang together.
    The clouds