Declare

the autumn of ’33, when I was twenty-one years old; and with my B-British p-passport—and Cambridge accent!—I was able to be a useful network courier, c-carrying p-packages from Vienna to Prague and Budapest. In ’34 I was s-sent back to work in England by one of the great old European illegals—he was a dedicated Communist and a Cheka officer, but he had been a C-C-Catholic p-priest before the horrors of the first war made him lose his f-faith, and when he was d-drunk he used to weep about the Cheka work he’d done, imposing collectivization on the Russian f-farms—”
    “ ‘I could not bear the women wailing, when we lined the villagers up to be shot,’ ” said Elena in a quiet voice, clearly quoting. “ ‘I simply could not bear it.’ ”
    And Philby was suddenly nauseated. He leaned on the cliff railing and stared at the circling birds in the gathering twilight. “You— knew Theo Maly?” he croaked.
    “I met him in Paris, in 1937.” Philby could barely hear her voice through the gauze over his ears. Her shoes shifted audibly on the pavement, and when she went on it was in a stronger voice, and she again seemed to be quoting someone: “Thistles, weeds—plants. Did Maly ever talk about such things with you, my dear?”
    “Jesus!” burst out Philby, so loudly that a European tourist couple stared at him as they wheeled a perambulator along the sidewalk. “Yes, my dear,” he went on more quietly. “Yes, he did m-mention the amomon root to me—right at the end, when he had received his s-summons to Moscow and he knew he was g-going there to be g-given the, the schuss. And in fact he did tell me he was going by way of Paris.”
    “The Stirnschuss,” said Elena. “The bullet in the forehead.”
    Philby shifted to look around at her, and she was touching her own forehead, under the white bangs.
    “Yes,” Philby said, “th-that was the word he used. We were drinking in a London p-pub in early ’37, and he t-told me, ‘They will kill me if I go to Moscow—Stalin won’t any longer continue to employ an ex-priest. But if I don’t go, they will simply send someone to kill me here; and I don’t want to give them the vindication of any disobedience on my part.’ And then he—he said that, as a p-parting gift, he could offer me… eternal life. When I asked him what he m-meant, he explained that a C-C-Catholic p-priest can n-never abdicate his sacramental powers, and he offered to b-baptize me right there at the table, and then—he was drunk—to hear my c-c- confession , absolve me of my s- sins , if I would repent and have a f-firm purpose of amending them, and finally to order some bread and wine so that he could consecrate them and give me the”—he paused, and spoke carefully—“the Communion, the Eucharist.”
    “Ah, God,” said Elena softly, taking off her sunglasses.
    “Pitiful to see him b-break down so, at the end,” agreed Philby. “I told him, ‘No, th-thank you’—civilly enough, for he was an old f-friend, and drunk—and then he sighed, and said he could in that case offer me a more p-p- profane sort of eternal life.”
    The seagulls had been joined by pigeons from the cliffs, and the two sorts of birds were flying together in a wheel against the sky, which had lost its gold now and showed only the colors of blood and steel. Philby touched his chest, where Feisal’s diamond hung on a chain under his shirt.
    “There is apparently a k-kind of plant,” he said slowly, “like a thistle, that g-grows at remote spots in the Holy Land. And you and I, my dear, have each seen enough of the sh-shameful supernatural to be at l-l-least ho-ho- open-minded to the idea that some specimens of this plant are inhabited , by the old entities. Maly said that when the r-rebel angels f-fell at the beginning of the w-world, some weren’t quite bad enough to rate Hell , perhaps weren’t developed or c-complete enough to have fully assented to the rebellion. In any case, they were truncated, compressed, c-condemned to live forever unconsciously as a k-kind of thistle—immortal still, in the a-a- aggregate at least, but on a sub-sentient level. They can be awakened, b-briefly, by a certain p-primordial, antediluvian rhythm, something s-similar to what the old illegals and the Rote Kapelle called les parasites.”
    The wheeling seagulls had disappeared in the darkness below the cliff at his feet. Low tide, he thought vaguely. They’ll be feeding.
    “And if a p-person awakens