Declare

language to apologize and ask directions, and he began exploring the city without an interpreter—the Intourist and Novosti Press Agency authorities permitted this, since all press releases were censored and no photographers could be obtained except from Novosti.
    Moscow within the Sadovaya ring was physically daunting—the streets and squares were vast, though automobile traffic was sparse, and it seemed to Hale in his first days that the industrial-Gothic architecture of the Stalinist skyscrapers, crowned with giant red stars that lit the night sky like the Devil’s own landing-lights, were contrasted only by the medieval bastions and towers of the Kremlin wall and the new blocks of modernist pre-fabricated apartment buildings, which appeared to have been assembled with rust streaks and pock-marks already applied. Later he found the Bolshoi Theatre with its ornate Corinthian pillars, and the wrought-iron balconies and bridges and hanging lanterns of the vast GUM department store on Red Square, but these were forlorn remnants of the tsarist nineteenth century—like the palatial Gastronom 1 on Gorky Street, where grim-faced shoppers now waited in long lines to buy turnips and bottles of cheap red and blue syrups under the old gilt cherubs and chandeliers.
    On the Moskva River embankment he stared at the twelve-foot-by-thirty-foot movie posters, trying to puzzle out the names of the stars, whose faces he didn’t recognize; farther up the embankment, outside the Kremlin wall by the Taynitskaya Tower, he could sometimes hear the scuffle-and-thump of a volleyball game, presumably among the guards, on the other side of the high wall; and for half an hour one day he watched a flock of crows busily dropping chestnuts down the top of a drainpipe on the tower and flying down to the pavement to retrieve the nuts when they rolled out at the bottom, and then flying up to do it again.
    He felt like one of the birds. He had two things to do—and now that he was so close to defining the course of the rest of his life, he was postponing considering either of them.
    When he had gone to the GUM department store he had seen the colorful spires and onion domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral, standing like some fantastic Walt Disney island hundreds of yards away at the south end of Red Square, and he had stared at its crimson walls and gold-and-blue spiraled domes. And when he realized that he was so anxious about his imminent intrusion there—on the twenty-second of April, forty years after 1924, only a week away now— that he was afraid to approach it, he made himself walk all the way across the plain of the cobblestoned square, past the ranked snow-plow trucks and the raised cement ring of the Lobinoye Mesto where criminals had been publicly beheaded in the tsarist days, to the cathedral’s rococo north arch. He walked up the stone stairs beyond and found that the tall doors stood open, with the cavernous aisles of the sixteenth-century church dimly visible inside.
    With one finger he made a tiny, furtive sign of the cross on the front of his overcoat, and he stepped over the threshold onto the polished stone floor; and then—defensively, afraid to hope—he occupied himself with noting the placement of the doors in the far walls and the width and separation of the towering pillars, only peripherally aware of the chandeliers and the ranks of saints painted in luminous fresco on the high walls.
    His heart was thudding alarmingly in his chest as he left the church and strode away across Red Square, and in his head he was telling himself, She may not be able to come, she may have forgotten, she may be dead, she certainly hates you.
    But he had brought along a package from the remote Zagros mountain village of Siamand Barakat Khan, and he did need to find Kim Philby—though not in order to kill him: Hale also had two Scandinavian Airlines tickets that he had purchased with a casse gueule passport in Finland late in March. The names and passport numbers for the tickets had not yet been filled in.
    Philby’s was of course a famous name in Moscow, especially among the Western journalists, some of whom had known him during his six years as a correspondent for The Economist and The Observer in Beirut. It had only been in July of last year that British Secretary of State Edward Heath confirmed that Philby had been the legendary “third man” in the Burgess and Maclean spy scandal of 1951, and Philby had arrived in Moscow in a season