Declare

well?”
    The man had flinched at the English sentences, but his eyes were caught by the banknote—Hale had been in Moscow long enough to know that this hard currency, unlike the flimsy rubles, would be honored in the elite Ber ioska stores in the downtown hotels, where it would buy fabulous items like American cigarettes and Scotch whiskey.
    “Where did you want to go?” the man asked finally, in a south-of-the-Thames British accent. His face was pale, and he didn’t look around. On the broad lanes of the Sadovaya ring road to Hale’s right, a few drab Moskvich and Zhiguli-Fiat sedans roared past, but no pedestrians were nearby.
    “I need to find an old pal of mine—his name is Kim Philby. I can’t seem to get his phone number from Information.”
    “I—don’t know him.”
    “Well, you don’t need to know him to have heard where he lives, right? This tenner is yours if you can tell me.”
    The man sighed, blowing stale vodka fumes at Hale. “I know who he is, of course. I suppose you’re a journalist—or an SIS assassin. It’s as much as my life is worth to tell you where he lives.”
    “No doubt. But it’s also worth a British ten-pound note. Which would you rather be sure of having?”
    The man licked his lips nervously, his fingers flexing on the paper-wrapped book he carried.
    Hale was watching his eyes, and from long practice saw the flicker that meant he would lie. “ ‘O fish,’ ” said Hale then, impulsively, “ ‘are you constant to the old covenant?’ ”
    The man blushed deeply. “I was never—out there I was never— damn you! No, I don’t mean that, it’s only—” His hairline was suddenly beaded with sweat, and he appeared to be blinking away tears. “I was a clerk in the Admiralty Military Branch, and I only photographed documents having to do with NATO naval policy. I thought I was doing it for the WPO, the World Peace Organization, in Austria! NATO is just a tool of American imperialism …” He had been looking at the pavement, but now he met Hale’s gaze, sickly. He sighed, and then in a hoarse voice said, “ ‘Return, and we return. Keep faith, and so will we.’ ”
    Hale spoke gently. “Where does Philby live?”
    “Is this a test? You must know.” He shrugged. “I don’t know the address. At Patriarch’s Pond, they say.” He yawned, and Hale recognized it as a reflex of tension, not boredom.
    Hale knew he should leave now, but he was shaken at how well his gambit had worked. “You weren’t working for the WPO,” he said. “When did you learn who you were really working for?”
    “Even when I defected,” the man said in an injured tone, “I thought I was working for the KGB. All of us did, or for the GRU, or the Comintern, or something. Something rational . It’s only when we’ve surrendered our passports and we’re here , for life , that we learn we work for…”
    “For… ?” pressed Hale, impatient now to get away from this doomed specimen.
    The man looked up at Hale with a bent smile. “You know who she is.”
    Hale nodded reluctantly. “Machikha Nash,” he said.
    The pale man gave a whinnying cry, and he glanced anxiously past Hale at the lanes of the ring road; and almost immediately his face blanched as white as bone, and the eyes rolled up in his head a moment before his knees, his book, and then his forehead smacked the sidewalk pavement.
    The chilly spring breeze was suddenly rancid in Hale’s nostrils with the smell of metallic oil.
    As the man’s still-shivering body toppled over onto one hip, Hale stepped away from him and glanced over his shoulder at the street.
    Sunlight glittered on the teeth of the robed, dark-eyed woman on the far pavement—but Hale could see the individual gold rings and teeth strung around her neck, so she must actually have been much closer than that; and then it seemed that the ring road was rotating on the axis of the Kremlin, in fact on the axis of the tomb in which Lenin’s preserved body defied decomposition—the image had sprung into his head—and although the woman’s black, hungry eyes held his gaze, he was aware that the white sun was moving around the horizon.
    He opened his mouth to speak the first words of the Our Father , but realized that he had forgotten them; and so he quoted the words he remembered Elena saying, on the deck of the Arab boat on the east side of the Brandenburg Gate, in Berlin in 1945: “Santa Maria, Madre de Dios, ruega por nosotros pecadores—”
    The dark