Declare

literal. What the djinn imagine is done: for them to imagine it is to have done it, and for them to be reminded of it is for them to do it again. Their thoughts are things, things in motion, and their memories are literal things too, preserved for potential reference—wedding rings and gold teeth looted from graves, and bones in the sand, and scorch-marks on floors, all ready to spring into renewed activity again at a reminder. To impose—”
    The woman whose child the telephone belonged to had for several seconds now been yelling something from several yards away. “Shut her up!” yelled Philby now to Elena.
    The voice in the toy had paused, as if it had heard him; then it went on, “To impose a memory-shape onto their physical makeup is to forcibly impose an experience—which, in the case of a Shihab meteorite’s imprint, is death.”
    The speaker had not raised his voice, but at the word death the volume had increased, and Philby dropped the toy telephone when the abruptly loud word impacted his eardrum.
    And the birds scattered away into the darkening sky, as if all released at once from invisible tethers. Philby turned awkwardly from the waist to watch as many of them as he could—he had no peripheral vision—and when he saw a Chevrolet sedan swerving in toward this cliff-side curb he whispered, “Fuck.”
    But perhaps they were simply stopping because of the birds and the panicky tourists.
    He was shaking from the enigmatic encounter with the animated birds and the figure on the rock and the hatif call, and from the ordeal of having begun at long last to confess his real career before that; he had been living on nerves and gin ever since passing his proposal to the SDECE five days ago—and he was fifty years old now and felt every conflicted day of it.
    He took Elena’s elbow and led her away, toward the nearest crosswalk. “Don’t look b-back,” he said. “That’s r-rogue CIA in the Chevrolet behind us, n-not working through CIA Beirut, but sent independently by the head of their Office of Special Operations in Washington.”
    Could they be here for me? he wondered tensely; could they be planning finally to grab me, kidnap me out of Beirut? Why?—why now , after three years of simply harassing me, and putting surveil-lance on me, and bribing the Lebanese sûreté to detain me from time to time for fruitless interrogation? Have they now learned about Mammalian, and the imminent Ararat expedition? Is this a pre-emptive detainment, meant to frustrate the operation I’ve for-Christ’s-sake already decided I cannot perform? If the Americans arrest me, with the intention of flying me back to Washington and publicly trying me for espionage against their government back in ’49 and ’50, the French will surely withdraw their offer. The SDECE might even have told Elena to kill me, if I look like getting out of the French net. She might be able to do it too. And even if she did not, I’d spend all the rest of my birthdays in an American prison. The CIA, and Hoover at the FBI, will never agree to any immunity deal. And if my Soviet handlers thought I was about to be arrested by any Western government, they would surely kill me. I am being torn to pieces by East and West. I am being torn to pieces between East and West.
    Sweat rolled down his forehead from the bandage, and he blinked it away. They’ll have heard I was shot, I’m conspicuous in this bloody bandage.
    When they had crossed the street to the landward sidewalk, he took Elena’s shoulders and faced her, so that she was blocking their view of him; and quickly he hiked his ankle up and snagged the revolver out of the elastic holster and dropped it into his coat pocket.
    Elena had raised one eyebrow at the momentary glimpse of the gun, but now she fell into step beside him as he began walking south along the sidewalk below the amber-lit lobby of the Carlton Hotel.
    “I suppose they suspect your KGB complicity,” she said. Her emphasis confirmed that she was well aware of his work for the deeper, older, vastly more secret agency.
    “Suspect, yes—they’ve s-s- suspected me ever since Burgess d-defected to Moscow eleven years ago. Listen,” he said, speaking quickly, “I won’t let them arrest me. The deal I’m offering your people is jjj-genuine, damn it, it’s richtig , understand? This isn’t a Soviet t-trick, I swear by—by the heart that is still beating beneath your b-breast. My father was my protector, my shield , in this