Declare

simpering moustached Anwar. “I do remember.”
    They walked out the back door and down the alley behind the Normandy Hotel, past the fire escapes and the hot-air fan vents, and when they emerged into the early twilight on the main street side-walk Philby waved at a passing Service taxi and called “Serveece!” The taxi pulled in to the curb, and for once there were no other passengers already inside. Philby opened the back door for Elena, then went around to the street side and climbed in himself. He gave the driver 125 piastres, and said, in quick French, “I’m paying for all five spaces, right? No other passengers, right? Take us to Chouran Street, by the Pigeon Rock.” He beamed at Elena and draped his right arm over the seat back behind her. In German, he said, “I’m fascinated that the”—the French SDECE, he thought, Pompidou’s secret service; but the driver might speak German—“that they chose to send you.”
    She answered in the same language. “The thinking was that since I have known you in the past, I would be best able to gauge whether your offer is genuine or not. And I’m an off-paper operative—if your offer is a trap, if I am arrested, then I am disownable, not traceably in their employ. But if I judge that it is genuine”—the German word she used was richtig —“my employers will exfiltrate you from here immediately, and give you a new identity and much money in my country. If you renege in any way, we will… give you the truth , as your people say.”
    Philby folded his arm back and clasped his hands in his lap. They could kill him, if they worked at it. In English he said, softly, “Oh, it’s richtig , all r-right.”
    I have got to jump somewhere , he thought—and damned soon. The British SIS is being very slow in responding to old Flora Solomon’s kind and timely betrayal of my past to MI5—don’t they want the confession of their most damaging spy?—and Angleton’s CIA wouldn’t trust me to give them a recipe for Borscht , and Indian citizenship isn’t possible. And Theodora’s old SOE deal was for me to go on working for Moscow! But somebody’s got to take me out of Burgess’s control, out of Moscow’s control—I will kill myself before I’ll go up onto Ararat, alone as I am now. Our Hajji which art in Hell, now.
    The driver steered the taxi up the Rue Kantari on the way to Hamra Street, and Philby leaned forward to hide his bandaged head well under the taxi’s roof, in case his wife might be looking out from their fifth-floor balcony. I’ll tell you about it if it works out, Eleanor my love, he thought. I won’t trouble you with advance notice—and you’d enjoy living in France.
    At last they had doglegged south on Chouran Street and were driving along the cliff road, past Lord’s Hotel and the Yildizlar Restaurant, with the dark-indigo Mediterranean on their right. Philby could see the two enormous rocks out in St. George’s Bay— traditionally the site where England’s patron saint had killed the dragon. The weary St. Kim, he thought, will settle for just hiding from the dragon.
    A crowd of Arab and European tourists was waiting at a taxi rank by the Pigeon Grotto pavilion on the cliff, and after Philby and Elena had got out of the taxi he took her bare elbow and led her south along the railed cliff-top sidewalk. To their left, under the modern white façade of the Carlton Hotel, Rolls-Royces and Volk-swagens slowed as an Arab on a donkey plodded away across the lanes. Only a few of the cars had turned on their headlamps, and the clean smell of surf spray in the air was still faintly perfumed with the afternoon aroma of suntan oil.
    Seagulls spun in the darkening blue sky overhead, but their shrill cries were muffled by the gauze taped over Philby’s ears.
    He turned toward the sea, where a quarter of a mile out across the water a motorboat had just shot through the tunnel at the base of the bigger rock, with a water skier just visible bouncing along in the spreading white fan of the wake. The four-hundred-foot-tall rock was flat on top, a remote backlit meadow furred with wild grasses, and he wondered forlornly if anyone had ever climbed up there.
    “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