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"Y-you were in Berlin thruh-three years ago, and n-now here you are at rahrah-Arararah-Agri Dag, damn it." He raised his eyebrows. "Do you have queer d-dreams on New Year's Eve?"
Hale forced down his alarm and made himself smile quizzically. "I suppose so. And then wake up with a hangover."
Philby nodded. "Let's pass the t-time with a game of c-cards," he said. He tipped the bottle up for another mouthful and set it down carefully, and then dug a pack of playing cards out from under his blue Kurdish robe. Hale noticed for the first time that the man's robe was nearly as soaked as Hale's vest. "Poker," Philby said as he opened the box and spilled the red-backed cards into his hand.
Hale laughed mechanically. "With promissory notes?" he said. "I'm afraid I left my notecase at the hotel in Kars."
"And I b-brought a j-jewel, but I'm afraid I s-s-swallowed it. D-Did you know that poker d-derives from an old purr-Persian card game, known as As-Nas? It was an ancestor of the F-F-French Ambigu as well. We can play for her."
Hale could feel the Scotch beginning to do its good work. He blinked at Philby in the lamplight. "Her? Who, this Ambigu?"
Philby pouted his lips and shook his head. "You know who I m-mean. She appears to f-fancy b-both of us, so the l-loser of this hand will agree to stay-stay out of the other mman's way, fair enough? Elena Ceniza-Bendiga."
Hale's face burned with suddenly renewed humiliation-Cannibale!-and he wished the bottle was up at his end. "I won't play," he muttered. He recalled Elena's headlong gallop down the lightless mountain path. "She may be dead, in any case."
"Then it's p-probably academic, isn't it?" Philby's face was heavy and expressionless, his lower lip hanging away from his teeth; Hale was reminded of the gargoyles on Notre-Dame. "We can play for her," Philby repeated, in a voice that made Hale think of heavy clay.
Dimly Hale realized that this was a moral choice, possibly an important one. But there was no God, and Elena loathed him; and through his mind flickered a bit of Swinburne's verse: We thank, with brief thanksgiving, whatever gods may be, that no life lives for ever; that dead men rise up never; that even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea. No resurrection, no judgment. The bottle rolled across the blanket and rapped his knuckles, and he picked it up. "Very well," he said hoarsely. "Five-card draw?"
Philby's charm had returned in the crinkling of his eyes and the quirk of his lips. "She's not dead, by the way-she rode past here twenty minutes ago, on a horse. No, not five-draw. A different derivation of As-Nas, I think," he said as he began shuffling the cards in a lazy, overhand style. "Seven-card stud-high-low-declare, not cards-speak."
Again Hale made himself show no reaction to the word declare. "High-low?" he asked. "Low hand splits the pot? How can that work? We can't split her, the way...the way King Solomon offered to split the baby those women brought to him."
The thunder of rain on the roof was redoubled, and the ground under the steel floor shook with an aftershock of the earthquake, or perhaps at the impact of a close lightning strike. Fleetingly Hale thought of the rough glass fulgurites he had found in the Rub' al-Khali desert three months ago.
Philby had paused in his shuffling to stare speculatively at the curved, ribbed ceiling. "You're insane," he remarked in a conversational tone, "to invoke that name here, tonight. But you have, at least, summoned witnesses! No, we won't split her. High hand wins her, and the low hand wins this."
Holding the deck of cards in one hand, he reached with the other inside his robe, and then tossed out onto the blanket a thick roll of buff-colored paper.
Hale stared curiously at it-it appeared to be a manila envelope, tightly rolled up and tied with a ribbon. Red wax had been smeared across the ribbon and over an ink signature on the outside of the envelope, and the paper was speckled with half-dried red drops, blotted in spots with a dampness that must be recent rain.
From where he sat, Hale could read the signature's last name-Maly.
Hale widened his eyes at Philby.
"I was supposed to get that in '37, from an old friend, a Soviet agent I had...doubled, and was running in England. An inheritance, last-wishes type of thing. I only got it tonight, and even so I had to take it off of a dead man."
"And it is what?"
"It's the true Eucharist, the guide to it, anyway; it's the reason Stalin purged the GRU in '37-what you'd have called the Razvedupr, during your Paris days. Did you know that even the GRU cooks and lavatory attendants were killed, in that purge? The illegals in Europe had stumbled on a discovery, learned it from the Communist Polish Jews who had fled to Palestine, in the 1920s, and run the undercover Unity network there. At first it was just a-well, you must have stumbled across it-a sort of beat, or cadence, used in telegraphy, to project signals better. But the illegals eventually discovered that this sort of cadence could evoke peculiar aid in all sorts of situations. Eventually this man"-he reached forward to tap the rolled envelope-"discovered how it could be used to-if used in a certain symbiosis-prevent death."
At the word death the shelter shook with a hard gust of shotgunning rain.
"Yes!" Philby shouted at the roof. To Hale, he went on, "You know the amomon plant-your Kurds must have told you about it."
Hale turned up one palm. "Remind me."
"It's what my father searched for in the Rub' al-Khali desert, what Lawrence found and chose to die rather than use; it's-well, it's the way to avoid the 'truth to be found on the unknown shore,' be sure that you won't 'without seeking find.' Stop anyone from establishing the truth about you, hmm? Evade the"-the corners of his lips turned down ironically-"'the wrath of God.'"
"Not die, you mean," said Hale. "Directions are in that envelope."
"Your position is gone, you do know that, don't you? You're out of a job, old son; so why bother acting skeptical now? Yes, in this envelope! It's...it's partly a crude musical score, I'm told, and partly a recipe, for the preparation and awakening of the angel that slumbers in the thistle." He smiled. "You were brought up a Catholic-evade the Last Judgment, husband your precious sins-live forever, without the necessity of a resurrection!"
"And you're willing to gamble that against"-Hale paused to gulp some more of the Scotch-"just for an unobstructed way with Elena."
Philby opened his mouth as if in a laugh, but if there was any sound it was too soft for Hale to hear over the drumming of the rain. "I'm confident I'll get this again," Philby said, "if not entry to immortality on a higher level of access. You'll never see it again, that's certain."
And no djinn died on the mountain tonight, Hale thought dully. There will be no poisoned honey for the Kurds next spring, and I won't be bringing Elena to the village of Siamand Barakat Khan. But I might be able, back in the Nafud or Summan regions of the desert outside Kuwait, to find and kill a djinn; and then the following spring take a party of the Mutair out to look for blooming thistles...
