Declare

staring at Hale. “ ‘What brings thee in to me,’ ” he said, “ ‘seeing that thou art not of my kind and canst not therefore be assured of safety from violence or ill-usage?’ ”
    “The way in which I am of your kind outweighs all the rest,” Hale told him, his voice still shaky. “I’ve come to propose a trade.” His heartbeat was slowing down, and at least he was able to speak without gasping. “Do you still have Theo Maly’s instructions for preparation of the amomon root? Specifically a copy of those instructions?”
    Philby stared at him blankly. “Yes.”
    “Well, I want a copy. In exchange for that, and for one other thing, I will give you directions to a dead-letter box, a dubok, that I’ve found here in the city. In the dubok is an inhabited amomon root, wrapped up in waxed paper and rubber bands. It’s my suspicion that the Soviet authorities will not have seen fit to provide you with one.”
    Philby shifted on the bench, then held out his hand for the bottle, which Hale passed to him. “Where,” Philby whispered after he had taken a swallow, “did you get a live amomon root?” “In the Zagros mountains, last spring. The djinn-kill on Ararat was massive—there were whole hillsides of blooming amomon thistles.”
    “Ah,” Philby said. “Yes, there would have been.”
    Hale took the bottle back and lifted it for another sip. He had to keep reminding himself that Philby had cold-bloodedly betrayed Hale’s men in the Ahora Gorge in 1948, for what Hale was proposing here was a cruel fraud: even if Philby should correctly ingest an inhabited amomon root, his bloodstream would spin the primitive djinn past the Shihab shot pellets that were probably still imbedded in his back, and the amomon djinn would be killed instantly, uselessly. There could be no amomon immortality for Philby, though Hale needed him to believe that it was possible.
    “What is the ‘one other thing’ you want, in exchange?” asked Philby.
    “The diamond that Prince Feisal gave you in 1919,” said Hale, making himself speak without emphasis. “The rafiq stone.”
    Philby was laughing softly, his puffy face gray in the cold sunlight. “Oh, Andrew! And here you are, devoted boy, in Moscow, on her fortieth birthday! Like Gershwin’s Porgy, looking for Bess! I daresay you’ve got airline tickets, and so you need the rafiq diamond in order to fly out of the Soviet Union with her, unmolested by the angry angels at cruising altitudes! To where, boy? Back to your Bedouins?”
    Hale’s whole body had gone cold. “She—t-told you?” he said— and remotely it occurred to him that Philby had lost his own stammer. “You?”
    “I’ve always been good about remembering birthdays,” Philby said placidly. “Yes, in Dogubayezit she told me about her vow, on the day after nobody succeeded in the Ahora Gorge. 1948, you must remember it. She made a prayer to the Blessed Virgin, right?— when she was imprisoned in the Lubyanka here, during the war: ‘I vow that on my fortieth birthday at high noon I will light a candle for you right here in Moscow’—O Mother of God!—‘at St. Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square.’ Very devout young lady, I gathered, though she and I—” He chuckled and shook his head, then said, clearly reciting, “ ‘Blue the sky from east to west arches, and the world is wide, though the girl he loves the best rouses from another’s side.’ ” He glanced at Hale. “That’s—”
    “Housman, I know.” Hale ignored the implication. He hadn’t allowed for Philby knowing that Elena was supposed to be at the cathedral on this day, and he reconsidered the lines-of-compulsion in his proposed deal with him. “I will give you directions to the dubok that contains the inhabited thistle root—it should be testably genuine, able to animate cigarette ashes placed near it, or to wiggle the legs of freshly killed flies, for example, small agitations—and as soon as I have Maly’s directions and the rafiq diamond—”
    “My wife Eleanor is living with me here in Moscow,” Philby interrupted. “I don’t think you met her, back in Beirut, did you? Lovely woman, but her passport expires in July, three months from now, and she’s determined to be back in the United States by then. She’s got a daughter there, by a previous marriage. She loves me, you understand, but she doesn’t want to become just one more of the ring-road birds.”
    Hale decided to let Philby ramble—it was dangerous