Declare

life would have left him no alternative but to choose grubby security.
    “I’m willing to put it to the test,” Hale said again. He slid two coins into his right fist and held it out.
    Philby rubbed his hands together for nearly a full minute, baring his teeth in a grimace of indecision—and then at last he made a fist and struck it hard against his chest. “Mea culpa!” he whispered.
    “Declare,” said Hale, opening his hand to show the two coins.
    Philby lowered his hand pronated, and he opened his fingers and let the single kopek drop into the grass.
    The air seemed to twang, a released tension felt in the abdomen rather than heard.
    All Hale had won, after all this, had been the right to go meet Elena, as he had planned to do all along.
    “The r-roots,” Philby was gabbling, “wh-wh-where are the roots?”
    Hale stood up and looked at his watch—he had twenty minutes to get to St. Basil’s Cathedral on Red Square, a bit more than a mile away to the east. “Two are in a high cupboard in the kitchen at the journalists’ hotel on the Sadovaya Samotechnaya, behind an old wooden tray; the other is in the bookstore next door to the Ararat Restaurant, behind the red-leather collected works of Marx. You can unleash Machikha Nash on me if you don’t find them. Oh, and—” he held out his hand. “Here are your two kopeks back.”
    “Keep them,” snarled Philby, “to be p-put on your eyes, after you’re d-d- dead! What can you h-have left, thirty summers, at the m-most? And the last duh-duh- dozen of them impotent, s-senile! How many is th-thirty? Three prints of your h-hands in mud!”
    Hale had turned and was striding away across the grass, and behind him Philby raised his voice nearly in a scream: “While I’ll be y-you- youthful still, d-drinking claret, reading Shakespeare, f-f-fathering children! You l- lost here, today, Hale! Don’t doubt it! You l-lost!”
    Hale paused at the alley and looked back. Kim Philby was sitting on the bench, still shouting, but he was surrounded now by the Gray People, and seemed as insubstantial as any of them.
    Enjoy the illusion of immortality, thought Hale sadly, O my brother. The amomon djinn will die as soon as you digest it. If I’ve got thirty years left, you’ve got twenty. Two prints of your hands.
    “You l-l-lost!” came Philby’s voice, sounding thin and birdlike at this distance.
    Hale smiled tightly as he turned away.
    No, he thought as he hurried down the sun-dappled cobblestone alley toward the lanes of Spiridonovka. Whatever the outcome, I declared high.
    Hale made himself walk, rather than run or even jog, down the wide quarter mile of paving stones toward the fantastic spires of St. Basil’s Cathedral on the hazy middle-distance horizon. His watch showed only eight minutes to noon, but he was wary of the Soviet Army honor guards in their gray fur hats and gray uniforms with bright red collar tabs and epaulettes. Clusters of Army guards marched across various empty quadrants of the square, and individual guards stood like buoys at the widely separated corners of the line of Moscow citizens that stretched like a boundary fence across the square, enclosing the concrete bleachers and terminating at the temple-like mausoleum in which Lenin’s preserved corpse could be viewed. In the eleven days he had been in Moscow, Hale had twice seen these guards knock a person out of the line and pummel him to the stones for some apparently minor violation of security, and he didn’t want to attract their attention today at all.
    It was far too late now to pull the long, quilted sleeves back through his overcoat and put it on correctly; it would take some minutes to walk all the way past the longest, bleacher-spanning segment of the mausoleum line, and he would have to march the whole distance with the pink-satin lining-side of the garment out, looking like a performer in some crude satire on Chinamen, or Tibetans. And it was the fashion among the stilyagi, the stylish young Moscow hooligans, to go about anarchistically hatless; but at least Hale’s graying hair and ludicrous coat would save him from being mistaken for one of them.
    Hale had not eaten for more than twelve hours, and the vodka he had drunk with Philby was making him dizzy. A hundred yards away to his left rose the gray stone arches and towers of the GUM department store, as sternly grand as the Houses of Parliament; far off ahead of him to his right the Saviour’s Tower stood up from the