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"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 woman was more clearly on the far side of the lanes now; and her teeth were bared in a snarl. The street had stopped seeming to spin. Hale was able to break his gaze free from hers, and he walked away heavily, as clumsy as if his legs had gone to sleep.
The first time he looked back she seemed to be closer, seemed to be standing between him and the body of the unfortunate Admiralty clerk; and Hale tried to make his numb legs work faster. But when he peered over his shoulder again, a few seconds later, she was nowhere to be seen-the sidewalk was empty except for the tumbled body a hundred feet back, and no figures at all stood between him and the bleak windows of the office buildings on the far side of the street.
He walked until he saw a northbound bus unloading passengers, and he hastily climbed aboard, paid his five kopeks, and then during the course of an hour rode the bus for one and a half circuits of the Sadovaya ring, counterclockwise.
He climbed down from the bus by the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall at the Gorky Street intersection. He recognized the nineteenth-century stone steeples and office buildings, for he was only eight blocks northwest of the Aragvy Restaurant; and the old residential neighborhood known as Patriarch's Pond was two blocks further south on the Sad Sam ring, in a warren of narrow lanes around the pond that was filled every winter to provide a rink for skating.
The sun was already sinking behind the tall pines of the zoo park, and the sky had begun to take on the soft silvery glow of far-northern sunsets, with only the faintest tinges of pink.
As he began walking south along the sidewalk, Hale reached inside his overcoat to pat the pocket of his jacket, and he was reassured to feel his passport and press credentials; if he was stopped by the police or the KGB, his journalism cover would stand up here-Pushkin Square, the lovely old narrow lanes, the graybeards playing dominoes under the linden trees...
He turned right, into a cobbled street overhung by Muscovy plane trees, and he felt as though he were fencing. He knew that if Philby lived in this area every pedestrian would be watched, and he walked down the center of the cobblestone street for now, not making any feints toward the shingle-roofed stone houses on either side. Prewar apartment buildings were looming through the budding branches ahead, and it was likely that Philby would be put up in one of those places, where tighter security could be maintained.
The lane zigzagged past tiny parks with cement tables set out on the grass, though any dominoes players had by now retired for the evening. Hale could smell wood smoke from the old chimneys, and boiling cabbage, but he didn't see any pedestrians until he stepped into the littered entryway of one of the apartment buidings; as soon as he was in out of the wind, a man in a black overcoat strode down the sidewalk on the other side of the street, and Hale suppressed a smile at the sight of the green fedora on the man's head.
A twitch of the blade, Hale thought, but not a full parry. This isn't the building. He dug a pack of Trud cigarettes out of a pocket and shook one out and struck a match to it. Half the length of the black cigarette was an empty cardboard tube.
He stepped back out onto the sidewalk and resumed walking in the direction of the pond. Soon the street curved away to the west, and an alley was the only route by which to move farther south, but he didn't hesitate before stepping into the shadows between the high brick walls.
The windows he passed were painted over, though he heard voices behind a couple of them, and the vertical iron pipes radiated heat. Just as he came out the far end of the alley, he heard a soft scuff echo behind him.
Hale was in a cul-de-sac now, with flower gardens in the gaps between the old yellow-brick houses on his left. The view to his right was blocked by one of the prewar apartment buildings, an eight-story gray-faced stone edifice with butcher-paper packages and milk bottles visible in the windows, between the insulating double panes of glass.
Hale took a deep draw on his Russian cigarette, and a throat-full of hot air let him know that he had used up all the tobacco in it. He ground it out under his heel and began walking out across the pavement toward the apartment building.
Immediately two men in green fedoras had stepped up from a set of basement stairs, and they made straight for Hale. One of them asked a question in Russian.
"Dobriy vyechyir," said Hale amiably. It meant Good evening. "Vi gavrarityeh pa angliski?" he went on. "Nyimyetski? Frantsuski?" Do you speak English? German? French?
In German the KGB officer said, "Let me see your passport. What are you doing here?" His companion had stepped to the side, probably to have a clear shot at Hale.
"I am an English journalist for the London Evening Standard," replied Hale in German. With his right hand he pulled open his overcoat, and with two fingers of his left hand he slowly drew out his passport. "I wish to write an article about Pushkin Square and the picturesque old neighborhoods around it."
"This is a restricted area," the KGB agent said, handing the passport to his companion. "You are staying at the hotel on the Sadovaya Samotechnaya?"
"Var-noom Leeyonard," said the agent with Hale's passport, and it took Hale a moment to realize that the man was pronouncing the name on the passport, Varnum Leonard.
Hale nodded. "That's right."
"Joor-nalist," the man added.
