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"Grace," said Elena. "Not magic."
"I have airline tickets," said Hale, "but I can't fly and I can't go back to England. I'm more or less going to have to walk out, and God knows across which border."
"You remembered my birthday," she said, still holding his hand tightly, though she was staring past him at the cathedral. "Did-did Philby?"
"Yes. We played a game of cards, to decide which of us would come to meet you in the cathedral. The loser to win three of the inhabited amomon roots."
"Immortality!" she said. "He was happy to lose."
"Not happy-resigned. I was happy to win. I would have come even if I had not won."
She laughed, and it was the first time he had heard her laugh since Berlin in 1945, nearly twenty years ago. "Walking out," she said, "would be easier for a couple than for one person alone."
They were a peculiar-looking couple-the man in the clownish overcoat, who had fired the shot that would one day topple the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and the woman dressed in black like a Spanish duena, who would at long last become his wife-but they attracted no attention at all as they strolled away hand-in-hand past the southernmost corner of the Kremlin Wall and on to the embankments of the Moskva River.
AFTERWORD
Kim Philby died in the early morning of May 11, 1988, of arrhythmia of the heart, at the KGB clinic in Moscow. His last words were in reply to a telephoned congratulations on the anniversary of the Soviet victory of 1945: "What victory?" Philby said.
He was buried in the Novodiverchy cemetery near Red Square.
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics collapsed three and a half years later, in December of 1991; Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as Soviet President on Christmas Day.
