Declare

quietly. “What d-does H-H-He say, ch-child?”
    Elena blinked tears out of her eyes. “He says, ‘Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee, save Me, save only Me?’ ” She sniffed. “Francis Thompson.”
    “I n-know it,” he said. “ ‘Yet I was sore adread lest, having Him, I must have naught beside.’ ” Philby seemed agitated. “Tell mmmm—tell me!—when you g-go to your s-sacrament, of C-C-Confession!—do you really have a f-firm purpose of am-amendment?”
    “Yes. It might not seem possible later, but—yes. ‘To sin no more.’ ”
    “And in b-baptism you were freed of the—w-weight of s-s-sin? The b-black drop in the h-human heart?”
    “Yes, I was.”
    “I—” He sighed and shook his head. “But for m-me that would be g-going b-back to point zz-zero! At my age—at m-my age! It’s not for m-me, my dear. Too much tie-time invested.” He slapped his open palms on the thighs of his trousers and stood up. “But sss — suicide is n-not for you—‘the Everlasting hath fix’d his canon ’gainst self-slaughter,’ you n-know. Is this doubt , do you d-doubt that your ggg —your God , will f-forgive you, as p-promised? Or is it p-plain shame? ‘I was afraid because I was naked, and I hid myself.’ O santisima Elena! —are you s-simply ashamed to approach H-H-Him as… just one m-more sinner, as b-bad as the rest of us? You w-w-won’t play , if you c-can’t wear the halo?” He laughed gently. “You’re n-not the-that egotistical, surely?” He took a step toward her across the threadbare carpet. “Test your m-monstrous villainy, my dear. Either sh-shoot me , or give me the g-gun.” He walked toward her with his palm out.
    Elena’s hand twitched, as if to fire the gun at him or turn it on herself while she still could, but when his palm was below hers she opened her trembling fingers and let the gun fall.
    Quickly he popped out the magazine, and he tugged the slide back and forth several times, ejecting the round that had been in the chamber. Finally he dry-fired the gun at the ceiling, and when it had clicked harmlessly he tossed it clattering onto the floor.
    In her suddenly renewed drunkenness it seemed echoingly loud.
    Elena covered her face with her hands, and all at once she was sobbing at the appalling prospect of living until tomorrow, and the day after that—and she only realized that he had sat down beside her when the mattress tilted under her.
    In the morning he had been gone, but he had left a note on the bedside table under her retrieved gun, signed with a hasty pendrawing of three interlocked, leaping fish. The note had been brief: On second thought, I don’t think He’ll forgive you. I’ve reloaded your SIG. (Through the roof of the mouth is better, by the bye.)
    She could tell by the weight of the gun that the full magazine had been replaced, but she had truly not believed that he would actually have chambered a live round, until she roused all the chickens and dogs of Dogubayezit by blowing out the hotel window with a tentative pull of the trigger.
    Yesterday evening, in the Normandy Hotel bar, Philby had said to her, I have a fucking bullet hole in my head; do take note of the fact that you have not got one in yours.
    That had been before he had learned that Elena had been the one who had shot him.
    She remembered lying prone in the darkness on the office building roof, seeing that familiar pouchy face in the yellow square of the bathroom window across the street, divided into fleshy quadrants by the cross-hairs of the telescopic sight. He had turned away, toward the mirror, and she had centered the cross-hairs on the back of his head, and squeezed the trigger.
    Even with the silencer the shot had sounded like a hammer-blow on a door, and she had hurried away to the fire escape, mentally preparing the report she would encode and radio to the SDECE headquarters in Paris— OFFER WAS A TRAP, DISCRETIONARY VERIFICATION OF THE DECOY BECAME NECESSARY —but later when she listened to the police band to confirm the kill, she learned instead that Philby had been taken, alive, to the American University Hospital.
    She should have known that his birthday-of-record would not be his real one. And she could not deny now that his offer to defect was clearly genuine; the SDECE team would exfiltrate him, and soon the service would learn that she had slept with a Soviet agent directly after the infamous 1948 catastrophe in the Ahora Gorge.
    Trying to kill Philby had