Declare

Kurds, and he was sure that Theodora did not want him telling this Rabkrin agent anything at all about the amomon.
    “First I went to the train crossing at the border. Let me tell it in order. Guy Burgess was there, with Philby.”
    “Ah! I was there too, but hidden in the undercarriage of the baggage car.” Mammalian topped up their glasses with the clear liquor and clouded it with splashes of water.
    The railway line that crossed the border by Kizilçakçak had been the only train crossing along the entire eastern Soviet border; the rails had been laid for the old Russian five-foot gauge, and the nineteenth-century locomotive that traversed it twice a week ran from Kars to a station only three miles into the Soviet territory, after which it retraced the route in reverse, with the locomotive pushing from behind.
    The train had come chuffing up from the west on that chilly spring Wednesday morning, white smoke billowing up out of its Victorian smokestack and trailing away over the three cars it pulled, and it screeched to a steaming halt on the Turkish side of the iron bridge that marked the frontier—the tall barbed-wire fence stretched away to north and south on either side, strung down the center of a broad strip of dirt that was kept plowed to show the foot-prints of anyone who might cross.
    Khaki-clad Turk askers stood with rifles beside the weathered sign that announced KARS– SOVIYET SINIRI , the border between the Soviet Union and the Kars district of Turkey, and four Russian soldiers in green uniforms marched across the bridge from a black Czech Tatra sedan parked on the eastern side; two of the Russians were clearly officers, with blue bands around the visors of their caps and gold epaulettes on their shoulders, while the other two were plain pogranichniki , border guards carrying rifles with bayonets. The Russians and the Turks saluted one another, and the Turk soldiers handed over a sheaf that presumably was the train crew’s passports and any bills of lading.
    Hale was standing beside Philby and the stocky, red-faced Burgess in the shadow of a guard shack a hundred feet away from the tracks on the western side, and all three watched the two pogranichniki walk around the train cars, poking their bayonet blades into the spaces under the carriages.
    “I h-hope your Armenians are s-s- stoical about a blade or two up their arses,” said Philby softly to Hale. They were dressed in anonymous khaki for this dawn outing, and they were being careful not to be heard speaking English. “Though some m-might like it, I sup-s-suppose. Do you f-fancy any of those pogranichniki , G-Guy?”
    Hale was making a modest show of glancing covertly at the train, and he wished the other two Englishmen had not come along to observe. Philby had insisted on driving them all out here in an embassy-pool jeep, and he was the Head of Station.
    “Pooh!” said Burgess, pouting his full lips toward the Russian soldiers. “Slavs have shovel faces. Slav probably means shovel in some Balkan language.”
    “Be quiet,” whispered Hale.
    Burgess turned from Philby to give Hale a pop-eyed stare. Perceiving that Hale was annoyed, he went on in a mock-reasonable tone. “It’s true. Look—you or I, if we were starving and saw a potato growing in the dirt, we’d dig it out and cook it.” His breath was sharp with vodka, though the sun was hardly above the eastern hills. “But Slavic facial features are clearly evolved for diving right into the dirt to eat the potato, dirt and all, not bothering with the hands: the teeth slant out, there’s no chin to get in the way, the cheekbones make fenders, and the eyes slant back and up, and the ears are set back to keep the dirt out.”
    Philby was laughing softly.
    The Russian soldiers a hundred feet away had stepped back from the train cars, and on the locomotive’s black flank the long connecting rods rose and shifted forward as the steel driving wheels began to roll and the train surged ahead, onto the bridge.
    “Intermission,” said Philby as the train picked up speed and the first of the cars rattled up the metal bridge. “Half an hour from now it will return, backward. We can check then for blood on the brake riggings and the axle-boxes.”
    Which there will of course not be, Hale thought, unless by co-incidence someone really did sneak across this morning—and who would want to sneak into the Soviet Union?
    “No,” he said, nodding toward a watchtower that stood only a