AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She curtly told the base team at the hotel that the other operatives had all been killed and that this operation too had been a failure, and she made them pack up their radios and drive back to the pickup site in Erzurum-but she had stayed on at the hotel, alone, lying in her muddy clothes on the bed in her room, drinking cognac and watching the slow ceiling fan and desperately hoping that Andrew Hale would come to her there. She had not locked the door. She wanted to beg his forgiveness for what she had called to him last night on the mountain; and she thought that if they were together, talking, the enormity of what they had done might diminish. In Paris he had told her that he had been raised as a Catholic-perhaps he might find some way for her to assimilate what she had done: some way to take hold of the sin, voluntarily bear the weight of it, and then lay it before an outraged God in gross presumption on His mercy.
Later in the morning she had heard the motor of a jeep grind past on the dirt street under her window, but it had not stopped, and by the time she had blundered to the window and clawed the curtains away from the frame, the vehicle had driven on out of sight.
She threw herself back down across the bed, sobbing. Hale would not be coming. There was no way to diminish the magnitude of what she'd done. Man had been created in the image of God, and probably cannibalism was the "sin against the Holy Ghost," for which there was no forgiveness in this world or the next.
She slept heavily, and when she awoke with a start in darkness she thought for several seconds that she was lying in the Lubyanka basement, shot through the head.
That nameless Moscow girl had been killed on Elena's account. Utechin had killed the wrong girl. If Elena had died there, she might have died in sanctifying grace, not in certain mortal sin, as she was now.
All she could do to put an end to her restless self-loathing was to finish the job Utechin had mismanaged six years ago. She had neglected to cork the cognac bottle, and it had soaked the mattress, but she was able to get several more swallows out of it.
At last she sat up and fumbled around among the litter on the bedside table until she had found a box of matches. When she had lit the lamp on the table, she shook out the match and drew her gun from the holster under her mud-stiffened jacket.
It was a semi-automatic Swiss SIG, standard issue for the SDECE, chambered for the French 7.65-millimeter cartridge. She popped out the magazine that she had emptied on the mountain and dug a heavy magazine from her jacket pocket and slid it up into the grip until it clicked.
Belatedly she realized that it had been the sound of a jeep motor that had awakened her-but it didn't matter. It would not be Andrew Hale, for he would certainly be on his way back to London by now, or to wherever it might be that he was stationed-and if it were members of her SDECE base team that had missed the pickup and come back here in the jeep, they could not stop her.
She pulled the slide back against the resistance of the recoil-spring, paused, and then let it snap forward. A cartridge was in the chamber now, and of course the safety was off. Her nostrils twitched at the smell of gun oil over the cognac fumes.
She could hear footsteps in the corridor outside her room door.
She hefted the pistol and held it up to her forehead, butt out, with her right thumb inside the trigger guard. Straight through the center of the forehead was how the Moscow girl had been shot. This gun had been tucked under Elena's arm while she slept, and the muzzle ring was warm. Aunt Dolores, she thought, give me strength.
She heard the squeak of the doorknob and let her eyes focus past her thumb to the door. The knob was turning-and she waited, curious in spite of herself, as the door creaked open.
But the man who stepped into the room's dim lamplight was not Andrew Hale. It was the unpleasant stuttering Britisher from Berlin, the onetime chief of Section Nine, now SIS Head of Station in Turkey-Kim Philby.
He stared past the gun butt at her left eye. "Am I interrupting?" he said.
He had spoken in English, and she forced herself to frame an answer in that language. "I'll only be a moment," she told him.
He smiled and slowly closed the door at his back. "I say, could this wait-half an hour? I won you in a card game last night-well, it was interrupted, but the other fellow is long gone, and I believe I did have the high hand-and-well, damn it-it does just seem too bad of you to kill yourself the moment I arrive! What do you say? Twenty minutes!-for a spot of fornication? You and I halfway did it on New Year's Eve in 1941, proxy or vicarious or something. Hey? There's a good girl!"
She reversed the gun in her right hand and lowered it, pointing it at him. For a moment neither of them spoke, and she was trying to figure out if this was a humanitarian gambit on his part-distract her with insult so as to have a chance to talk her out of it-or if he really had meant what he had said.
"That would be a mortal sin," she said carefully. "Adultery, even-I happen to know you're married, Mr. Philby." She had also read that he suffered from a terrible stammer; but he seemed to be talking smoothly enough right now.
"Ceniza-Bendiga," he said. He waved at the wooden chair against the plaster wall. "Do you mind if I sit? Thank you. Spanish, that is. Mortal sin! Are you a Catholic?"
"Devout," she said with a nod.
"Ah! I'm an atheist myself, sorry. I thought you lot were down on suicide."
"Will you do me a favor, Mr. Philby?"
"If you'll do me one." He smiled and held up his hands, palms out.
"Will you? This is a-" She shifted on the mattress. "A deathbed request."
"I will," he said levelly. "If you will." Clearly he had meant what he had said a few moments ago.
She was sick at the idea, and at the abrupt immediacy of it. The fumy brandy surged up into the back of her throat.
But what if it's all you can do? she thought. It is all you can do. And who are you now to treasure scruples, souvenirs? You have abdicated yourself.
She waited several seconds, but there was no providential interruption. "Very well," she whispered. She took a deep breath and went on, "So listen. I will be missing an appointment I made six years ago-breaking a promise I made. It can't be helped, but-when I was in the Lubyanka, and it seemed that they were going to kill me, I made a promise to the Virgin Mary-she doesn't like communism, you know. I made a vow. Will you swear to keep it for me?"
Philby shifted uneasily in his chair. "Why were you in the Lubyanka?"
