Declare

protective of Kim; clearly he blamed himself—altogether justly—for having crippled the boy’s standing in the supernatural world by indulging his own—his—”
    “Lust for my mother.”
    “Well, not to put too fine a point on it. Now old St. John saved the life of a fox in ’32, in the Empty Quarter desert, the Rub’ al-Khali—his Bedouins were going to kill it, but St. John intervened and set it free. He may have been able to tell somehow that this particular fox contained a djinn, who had been abridged down into this form—in any case, it did, and in gratitude the djinn gave St. John certain powers over foxes—even over fox furs. Several times St. John used this power to protect Kim. When Kim was a war correspondent in Spain in 1936, St. John gave him a mad-looking Arab coat with a fox-fur collar, and he told Kim to wear it whenever he was in peril, especially on his birthday. Kim still has certain magical protections, as you may too, but they become transparent on his birthday— vos anniversaire. And sure enough, on December thirty-first of 1937, Kim was in a car that was hit with an artillery shell; Kim was wearing the fox-fur coat, and he came through with a scratch, though the men with him were all killed—and St. John, who was in Alexandria at the time, was knocked down, bleeding from the ears. Neither of them was seriously hurt, you see—the fox-fur magic dissipated the blow.”
    “I assume that protection has been gone since 1960, when the old man died.”
    “Well, it’s gone now. But Philby didn’t really lose it until three months ago, in late September of last year. On Easter of ’62, he got hold of a fox cub—he named it Jackie, and kept it in his apartment in the Rue Kantari here. The animal reportedly liked whiskey, and would sometimes suck on the stem of a pipe. And Philby was still gung-ho to go along on the Rabkrin expedition to Ararat, to become at last the full-fledged rafiq to the djinn. And then, on September twenty-eighth, precisely on the second anniversary of his father’s original death, someone pushed the fox off the balcony of Philby’s apartment while he wasn’t home. The animal died, and Philby spent two days weeping drunk, and then he began surreptitiously trying to get out of the expedition; he wrote to The Observer , the paper he writes articles for, asking for London leave—and he’s been trying to defect to France—and if the SIS offers him any kind of immunity deal, he will want to leap at it.”
    Defect to France, thought Hale; that must be why Elena is in Beirut. But why did she try to kill Philby?
    Don’t even think about her, he told himself. “Easter of last year, Philby got the fox?” he said, forcing himself to concentrate on what Hartsik had said. “A good day for rising from the dead, I suppose. Where had the old man’s ghost been, in the intervening year and a half?”
    “Haunting the Bashura cemetery, where he was buried—only about three blocks south of here on the Rue de Basta. St. John was a convert to Islam, you know—what the Turks call a ‘Burma,’ which is to say a turncoat, not someone to be trusted. According to Arab folklore, two angels, Munkir and Nakir, visit a man in his grave right after his burial and quiz him on his faith—if he acknowledges Allah, they let him rest in peace; but if he believes another faith to be true, they thrash him with iron maces until his cries are heard ‘from east to west, except by men and djinn.’ ”
    Hale smiled. “Did a lot of dogs howl, locally, after St. John was buried?”
    “We didn’t notice. But the SIS Beirut station picked up a heavy traffic on the service bandwidth; it was en clair , but they thought it must be code because it was all nursery rhymes—‘the man in the moon came down too soon,’ ‘but when she got there the cupboard was bare,’ ‘how many miles to Babylon’—that kind of thing. The SIS triangulated the signal and found that it seemed to originate in the Bashura cemetery, but they could never find a transmitter, and the signal faded after a month, and they blamed the vagaries of the Heaviside Layer; but we in Declare knew that it was St. John’s ghost, catching hell from the Moslem angels.”
    “I wonder what faith he believed was the true one.”
    “Maybe your mother is laughing in her grave,” Hartsik agreed magnanimously.
    “So what would the fox have provided, in this Rabkrin expedition, that Philby cannot do without?”
    “The same thing as