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The birds appeared to want to listen, and Ishmael had to summon the boy and make him beat the cages with a stick to get them all shouting and cawing again.
Chapter Eight
Ain al' Abd, 1963
...it was noticeable that whenever the Church of England dealt with a human problem she was likely to call in the Church of Rome.
- Rudyard Kipling, Kim
When the stars had begun to fade in the east, Hale and his host shared a breakfast of hot saffron rice with eggs beaten into it, accompanied by a choice of beer or camel's milk, of which Hale chose beer; and then Ishmael gave him a clearly secondhand set of Bedu clothes to change into: a patched cotton dishdasha smock with an aba robe to drape over it, and a once-white kaffiyeh head-cloth and an agal cord to tie it on with. Ishmael looked like a prosperous town Arab in his long white shirt and robe and white kaffiyeh, while Hale's smock had been patched with so many different fabrics that he sourly thought he looked like a dervish; and his bare feet were obscenely white, and soon achingly numb with cold from standing on the dewy flagstones.
In the frosty overcast dawn Salim bin Jalawi returned with the jaunty blue Chevrolet, and Hale and Ishmael climbed into the back as Ishmael gave bin Jalawi directions to a place off the highway south of Magwa.
Bin Jalawi was moody, and several times frowned at Hale in the rear-view mirror. Hale had gathered that they were to travel to some desert location to consult some very old person.
Hale thought about how to phrase a question. "Is it a place I know?" he asked finally, leaning forward over the seat back. They were driving down a big new divided highway under a clearing sky, and for nearly half a minute now had been gunning around the perimeter of a traffic circle almost wide enough to contain another airport; but the interior of the circle was just tractor-leveled sand, as were the expanses on either side of the highway, and the only other vehicles between the flat north and south horizons were a couple of miles-distant water tankers.
Bin Jalawi spat against the inside of the windscreen. "It is a place you have heard of. It is to the south, in 'Awazim country, and I am Mutair. We will meet guides at Magwa."
"Are the 'Awazim at war with the Mutair?" asked Hale. "Do we need a rafiq?" When trekking through hostile country, it was the Bedu custom to talk a member of the local tribe into coming along as a guarantor or peacemaker, known as a rafiq in these northern countries around the gulf.
"We wouldn't want a rafiq from the tribe of the one we go to see," said bin Jalawi in a tight voice.
"And the only tribe at war with us here is the KGB," said Ishmael, his watery old eyes blinking ahead. "Khrushchev is not hostile to my agency, but the Presidium is growing tired of Khrushchev, and Semichastny of the KGB is pursuing Stalin's old line toward us."
"Horror at the wrath of God," recalled Hale.
They had been speaking in English, but now bin Jalawi burst out, "Yahrak kiddisak man rabba-k!" It meant Burn the saint who brought thee up, and Hale, startled, met his eyes in the rear-view mirror. Bin Jalawi glowered back at him. Still in Arabic, he said to Hale, "Speak you of horror at the wrath of God?"
And Hale almost smiled, for he realized at last that bin Jalawi was, illogically, angry at Hale for giving in to his cut-off-the-hand-or-kiss-it argument and turning double for this Russian. I have disappointed you, Hale thought, haven't I, Salim? Were you dutifully waiting for me to condemn your duplicity?>"Hayhat!" said the parrot; the word was Arabic, meaning roughly alas, or far be it from you and me.
Ishmael frowned at the bird. "Revolutionary mobs," he continued, "broke into the Okhrana headquarters in 1917 and burned all the records there, but the soul of the Okhrana had moved on, and the head of the Cheka was Feliks Dzerzhinsky-a man who, in his youth, had aspired to be a Catholic priest; a certain spiritual perspective had by this time proved to be necessary in the highest levels of state security and espionage. It was Dzerzhinsky who convinced Lenin to switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar in 1918, adding thirteen days, so that the previous year's October Revolution was retroactively made to have happened in November; Dzerzhinsky knew the value of concealing true birthdays, though Lenin later became overconfident of it." Ishmael stared at Hale. "Mr. Hale, when is your birthday?"
"January sixth. I'll turn forty-one in three days."
The old man nodded thoughtfully, apparently weighing Hale's answer-though he must have known it. And Hale remembered that Philby had appeared to question his birthday, at the Ham Common camp in '42.
Ishmael went on, "Lenin himself instituted the autonomous Rabkrin directorate, with provisions to keep it independent of, and even secret from, the other services; he did not trust Stalin, who in fact later purged the services unmercifully in an unsuccessful effort to eliminate the Rabkrin element. Stalin had a horror of spiritual warfare, the possible wrath of God. Since then we have at different times been known as the OMS, which was the International Liaison Department of the Comintern, and as Smersh and Smernesh even under Stalin's very nose during the war, and at other times as flickering sub-directorates in the KGB; but since 1917 it has always been Rabkrin, under the shifting titles. Why didn't you accept Whitehall 's offer of 'at least partial immunity from prosecution'?"
"I don't know that it was Whitehall 's offer," Hale said over the noisy bickering of the birds. "In any case, I'm convinced that it was an offer of immunity from prosecution on account of death. Other agents who have got too informed about this operation have had a way of dying prematurely."
The old man nodded tiredly. "T. E. Lawrence was bludgeoned off of his motor-bicycle; the code-breaker Alan Turing was fed a poisoned apple. You were probably right. This MI5 advisor you killed yesterday, this Cassagnac-he was one of ours, once, and I am grateful that you succeeded in killing him at last-what did he tell you about our current operation? What does Whitehall know?"
This was moving very fast-everything since his arrival in Kuwait had been fast-and Hale felt badly uninformed, and he wasn't happy that this man had told him so much about the Rabkrin. "Am I working for your people now?" he asked nervously. "Does the Rabkrin offer me immunity from prosecution?"
"You think we'll resolve your status, as your service jargon has it? Establish the truth about you? No, I can demonstrate, to your most exacting satisfaction, that it would be against our interests to kill you afterward. As you proposed to Salim bin Jalawi, Tommo Burks can begin a new life in the Arab states-a very comfortable one at that, more privileged than you can now imagine. What did Jimmie Theodora talk to you about?"
"When?"
"When you last spoke with him. When was that, to the best of your vain, ill-considered memory?" He shifted in his chair. "Any further lies will seriously impair the note of mutual respect you and I have established here."
Hale had to assume that the Rabkrin was unaware of his summons to London yesterday. "It was just before Ararat in '48," he said evenly. "We discussed...that operation, damn it. And I didn't ever see him again, after that."
"It was Cassagnac alone, then, who came to your house yesterday morning, with the news of your imminent detainment and possible immunity?"
"He was alone, yes."
"Incautious of him-but then you and he had been friends, I believe." Ishmael smiled. "In the old days."
