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"I was being trained as an agent. I was an atheist then-my mother and father were shot down in a Madrid street by the right-wing Catholic monarchists in 1931, right in front of me; and when I was twelve years old I was a wireless telegrapher with Andre Marty. But in Moscow I saw the true face of communism. Will you swear on your own mother and father to keep my vow for me?"
Philby puffed out his cheeks. "Well, that's not really my line of territory. What was the vow?"
"I told the Virgin: 'If you will intercede with your Son to get me out of Russia alive, I vow that on my-'" Elena frowned. "I wanted to give it time, selfishly wait until my youth was safely gone, I think-I said, 'I vow that on my fortieth birthday at high noon I will light a candle for you right here in Moscow, at St. Basil's Cathedral in Red Square, in the heart of your enemy's kingdom, the way you put your heel on the serpent's head.' And I promised her that I would-"
After several seconds Philby shook his head and raised his eyebrows. "What's the harm of being honest now, here? On your deathbed?"
"Oh God," Elena sighed. "I promised her that I would be a chaste wife from then on. I didn't want to embark on it too soon, there was a young man-gone now-"
"Chaste," said Philby impatiently, "do go on. I don't need to hear about your tiresome young men. Whom were you going to be married to, in your old age?" Philby himself was then thirty-six.
"I vowed that I would not marry until then, and that-that I would consider marrying-I was delirious-that I would take whomsoever she might elect to show me, after I had lit the candle. You see? I was humbly placing the selection in her hands. I think I imagined Prince Myshkin." The gun was wobbling in her grip, and she told herself that she must soon return it to its position against her forehead. "If there is a man there, in the cathedral when you light the candle...give him my regrets."
Philby nodded. "I can do that much-no prayers. When would be your fortieth birthday?"
"April the twenty-second-in 1964."
"My calendar is free on that day, as it happens." Philby stared at her in evident perplexity. "You're about to-kill yourself, but you still believe all this business?"
"I wouldn't kill myself if I didn't believe this business." She shivered. "Sin has real weight."
"What, your men dying on Mount Ararat last night?" When she didn't answer he shook his head and laughed, clearly not yet satisfied with her situation. "You know, I've never understood...faith. 'Do the stars answer? in the night have ye found comfort? or by day have ye seen gods? What hope, what light, falls from the farthest starriest way on you that pray?'" She had realized that he was quoting something, and now he waved deprecatingly and said, "Swinburne."
"Yes," she said. When he raised his eyebrows, she went on, miserably, "Yes, the stars answer. God answers."
Philby opened his mouth, then frowned and closed it; he appeared to shiver, and when he finally spoke, it was more quietly. "What d-does H-H-He say, ch-child?"
Elena blinked tears out of her eyes. "He says, 'Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee, save Me, save only Me?'" She sniffed. "Francis Thompson."
"I n-know it," he said. "'Yet I was sore adread lest, having Him, I must have naught beside.'" Philby seemed agitated. "Tell mmmm-tell me!-when you g-go to your s-sacrament, of C-C-Confession!-do you really have a f-firm purpose of am-amendment?"
"Yes. It might not seem possible later, but-yes. 'To sin no more.'"
"And in b-baptism you were freed of the-w-weight of ss-sin? The b-black drop in the h-human heart?"
"Yes, I was."
"I-" He sighed and shook his head. "But for m-me that would be g-going b-back to point zz-zero! At my age-at m-my age! It's not for m-me, my dear. Too much tie-time invested." He slapped his open palms on the thighs of his trousers and stood up. "But sss-suicide is n-not for you-'the Everlasting hath fix'd his canon 'gainst self-slaughter,' you n-know. Is this doubt, do you d-doubt that your ggg-your God, will f-forgive you, as p-promised? Or is it p-plain shame? 'I was afraid because I was naked, and I hid myself.' O santisima Elena!-are you s-simply ashamed to approach H-H-Him as...just one m-more sinner, as b-bad as the rest of us? You w-w-won't play, if you c-can't wear the halo?" He laughed gently. "You're n-not the-that egotistical, surely?" He took a step toward her across the threadbare carpet. "Test your m-monstrous villainy, my dear. Either sh-shoot me, or give me the g-gun." He walked toward her with his palm out.
Elena's hand twitched, as if to fire the gun at him or turn it on herself while she still could, but when his palm was below hers she opened her trembling fingers and let the gun fall.
Quickly he popped out the magazine, and he tugged the slide back and forth several times, ejecting the round that had been in the chamber. Finally he dry-fired the gun at the ceiling, and when it had clicked harmlessly he tossed it clattering onto the floor.
In her suddenly renewed drunkenness it seemed echoingly loud.
Elena covered her face with her hands, and all at once she was sobbing at the appalling prospect of living until tomorrow, and the day after that-and she only realized that he had sat down beside her when the mattress tilted under her.
In the morning he had been gone, but he had left a note on the bedside table under her retrieved gun, signed with a hasty pen-drawing of three interlocked, leaping fish. The note had been brief: On second thought, I don't think He'll forgive you. I've reloaded your SIG. (Through the roof of the mouth is better, by the bye.)
She could tell by the weight of the gun that the full magazine had been replaced, but she had truly not believed that he would actually have chambered a live round, until she roused all the chickens and dogs of Dogubayezit by blowing out the hotel window with a tentative pull of the trigger.
Yesterday evening, in the Normandy Hotel bar, Philby had said to her, I have a fucking bullet hole in my head; do take note of the fact that you have not got one in yours.
That had been before he had learned that Elena had been the one who had shot him.
She remembered lying prone in the darkness on the office building roof, seeing that familiar pouchy face in the yellow square of the bathroom window across the street, divided into fleshy quadrants by the cross-hairs of the telescopic sight. He had turned away, toward the mirror, and she had centered the cross-hairs on the back of his head, and squeezed the trigger.
Even with the silencer the shot had sounded like a hammer-blow on a door, and she had hurried away to the fire escape, mentally preparing the report she would encode and radio to the SDECE headquarters in Paris-OFFER WAS A TRAP, DISCRETIONARY VERIFICATION OF THE DECOY BECAME NECESSARY-but later when she listened to the police band to confirm the kill, she learned instead that Philby had been taken, alive, to the American University Hospital.
