Declare

to let him control the conversation this way, but Hale might learn something that could be useful as leverage. “Ring-road birds?” he said.
    “ ‘Dust is their food and clay is their meat, and they are clothed like birds in garments of feathers,’ ” Philby said. “Have you met them, the expatriates who’ve defected, given up their old citizenships—in the service, as they come unhappily to learn, of her? I swear their breath doesn’t steam, on winter days!—as if they have no more body heat than trees, or lichens. When it was clear that Eleanor couldn’t be dissuaded from catching an Aeroflot flight here to join me, my old pal Nicholas bloody Elliott took her to a London cinema and made her watch The Birds, that new Alfred Hitchcock movie. Have you seen it? Attractive, independent-minded young lady undertakes troublesome travel to be with the fascinating man, but brings down on herself the injurious wrath of the ordinarily timid fowls, and ends up in shock, mute and infirm. I could be a, a king, among that sad population… if I was willing to let go of what shreds of humanity I still possess.”
    “I met one of them yesterday,” Hale said. “He—pitched over dead of fright, while I was talking to him.”
    Philby laughed and shook his head. “They’re frail,” he agreed, “individually. In a group, though, they have a certain spiteful power. And their eyes just glitter with sick envy when they learn that Eleanor still has a valid passport! Even Donald Maclean simply shivers when she speaks of flying back to—New York, London. And she is resolved to fly out, in June. And so”—he shrugged and smiled—“I will be without a wife, my boy! I think it was Heming-way who said that the state of being married is unimaginable until you’ve entered it, and then once you’ve been married you can’t ever imagine not being. I’ve had three wives, and I’m vigorous enough for at least one more.”
    “What if,” said Hale unsteadily, “Elena doesn’t… want you?”
    “Do you think that will matter? Here? Droit de komissar, my boy!” Philby reached out one blunt-fingered hand to tousle Hale’s hair affectionately, but Hale flinched back when he felt a blade cut his scalp. Philby was unfolding a handkerchief now and scraping onto the monogrammed silk the shred of bloody hair he had cut off with a tiny folding knife.
    “There,” Philby said with satisfaction as he refolded the handkerchief and tucked it away. “Cheat me now, and I’ll have the Mother of Catastrophes on you like a bloodhound, long before you can walk to the nearest border crossing. I don’t relish the idea of summoning her and conversing, but I would make a point of it, in this case.”
    Hale’s left hand was pressing his scalp above his ear, and he could feel hot blood matting his hair. He was nervously aware that he had lost control of this meeting. “I’m not going to cheat you. The terms I propose—”
    “Are irrelevant, Andrew!” Philby slapped his palms on his knees and stood up. “Excuse me for a moment, would you? while I talk to these good comrades.”
    Then Philby had strolled away across the grass toward the old men on the benches, and he had pulled a wad of banknotes from his pocket.
    Hale set the vodka bottle down on the bench beside him to grope for a handkerchief in the breast pocket of his inside-out overcoat— his scalp was still bleeding, and his left palm was red with blood. This was not going well at all. But surely Philby wanted the amomon root!
    And Hale needed the rafiq diamond. He did not want to have to try to take trains and boats out of the Soviet Union—and he certainly didn’t want to walk out.
    Philby was striding back to the bench now, with a cigarette-pack-sized cardboard box in his hand instead of the bills.
    “How could there not be a gambler,” said Philby cheerfully as he sat down on the other side of the bottle, “among a crowd of Russian alcoholics? You recall Dostoyevsky!” The box he was holding was, Hale saw, a red pack of playing cards. “No, Andrew, the terms of our deal were defined fifteen years ago! The rafiq diamond resided in my guts then, and it stays with me now, though not so intimately; I was on Ararat too, a year ago, I too incurred the wrath of the stratospheric angels just as much as you did, and I might want to travel by air myself one day.” When Hale just stared at him, Philby explained patiently, “The thing is, we never finished our card game.