Declare

have r-reported me as a Soviet agent in an instant!”
    Elena had fished matches and a pack of Gauloises from her purse, and she looked at him through narrowed eyes as she lit a cigarette. “Careless and negligent, surely—contemptuous, even—but I’d hardly call that an attempt to purge you, kill you.”
    She was not deflected. “Well,” he said with affected mildness, “to me it seemed as if they had g-given me a ticking time bomb to hold. Two G-Gordon’s gins, please, neat,” he said then to the waiter who had finally come to the table. “Those are for me,” he added, giving Elena his most charming grin. “What will you have? I believe you were drinking b-brandy, in Berlin.”
    “Can the bartender make a Berliner Weisse mit Schuss?” Elena asked the waiter. “That’s beer with raspberry syrup,” she added.
    The waiter concealed any repugnance and simply said, “Mais oui, madame,” and bowed and stepped away.
    Philby remembered the mug of odd pink beer that had been on the table in Berlin. “That was your drink, that night?”
    “Do you disapprove? As I recall, you were drinking insecticide.”
    Philby nodded glumly. “Djinn repellent, the old Cairo hands used to call it. If my f-father had thought to give me a glass of insecticide before we flew over Lake Tiberias, I would not have c-contracted ‘malaria.’ They… bud off, like cactus, in periods of activity, and the l-little… djinnlings!… can be attracted to and c- cling to someone who has—someone who bears the m-mark of previous djinn-recognition. They get in through your m-mouth, and they interfere with your thoughts, and exorcising them later is a tiresome bother. My father t-told me that some of the old lads in the Arab Bureau in Cairo would even rinse their m-mouths with a shot of petrol, if they were going out to some place where the m-monsters were likely to be. Volatile smells repel them, the y-young ones, at least, and a couple of shots of warm jjj- gin here ought to drive off any who came up over the cliff just now with the b-birds.”
    Elena was blushing, and Philby remembered asking her if she had not found this business vaguely shameful. “That was a, a female one, in Berlin,” she said.
    Philby could feel the hairs standing up on his arms, even at this late and cynical date, as he said softly, “That was Russia’s very g-guardian angel, my dear—Machikha Nash, Our Stepmother— inspecting the n-new boundaries of her k-kingdom in person, in stormy person. I was there to monitor the installation of her bound-ary stone, and I watched it all from a parked car in the Charlotten-burg Chaussee on the western side. She was… splendid , wasn’t she? I remember thinking of Byron’s line, ‘She walks in Beauty, like the night/Of cloudless climes and starry skies.’ What w-were you doing there?”
    Philby didn’t look away from her, but he was aware of the two men who walked into the bar, and he simply shrugged and gave her a frail smile when they stopped in front of his table.
    One of the men seemed to say, “Allah, beastly ass,” but a moment later Philby realized that he had said, in an American accent, I’ll obviously ask; and the man went on, “Who’s your girlfriend, Kim?”
    Philby looked up at his CIA inquisitors. Both were sandy-haired Americans in gray suits with wide lapels, and they both seemed offensively fit and young.
    “Miss Weiss is a French m-magazine editor,” Philby said. “I’m t-trying to sell her s-some non-fiction work.”
    “We’d love to read some of your non-fiction work, Kim,” said the taller of the two. “Scoot over, Miss Weiss.” When Elena shifted away across the booth seat, the man sat down beside her.
    His companion folded himself into the booth beside Philby, so that Philby and Elena were both blocked in. “I’m Dr. Tarr,” said the man beside Philby, “and my colleague there is Professor Feather. Our boss across the water is very curious about this gathering of the old hands that’s going on here in Beirut.”
    “I’m not aware of it,” said Philby carefully. He wanted to pant with relief, for clearly this was not to be a kidnap. With some confidence he went on, “Are you g-going to have the sûreté h-h-haul me in to their p-p- police station one more time, just so I can s-say the same th-thing there for a few hours?”
    “More like watch-and-wait,” said the man identified as Professor Feather. “You still do odd jobs for your old firm, don’t you, Kim?