Hale ignored the mention of the earthquake. “Twenty miles south?” He shook his head slowly. “But… what’s the thing Mammalian saw on Ararat?”
“Well—according to the old Arabic Kitab al-Unwan, at least— the Devil, or Iblis as the Arabs call him, survived the Flood because of clinging to the tail of the ass, who was in the Ark; and some rabbinical writers claimed that the giant Og, king of Bashan, saved himself by hanging onto the ship’s roof eaves. We think that when the Flood started”—Hartsik shrugged deprecatingly—“something malignant had a boat of its own, and hooked a tow-rope onto the Ark.”
“And ran aground on Ararat and cut the tow-line, while the real Ark went down with the floodwaters and landed farther south.”
“Exactly.”
Hale was glad that Noah, at least, was safely out of this. “But what am I in all this?” he asked. He remembered the djinn at Ain al’ Abd saying, This is the Nazrani son. “Who is my father?”
Hartsik sighed. “More relevant is who is your—” he began, but he was interrupted by a knock at the hallway door. “Excuse me.” He stood up and crossed to the door, his hand darting inside his tweed jacket. In Arabic he said, “Who is it?”
From the hallway a man’s voice replied, “Farid, Hartsik.”
Hartsik turned the key in the lock and stepped back, then relaxed and let his hand fall to the desktop when a short man in a blue Lebanese sûreté uniform stepped in and closed the door behind him. Hale saw that the Arab was holding a childish pencil drawing of a man’s face with a ring drawn below the left eye. The Arab’s eyes narrowed to slits as he gave Hale a grin that exposed many gold teeth. “Smite you now,” he said in English.
“Don’t put the whiskey away,” Hale told Hartsik. Then he turned around in his chair to face the Arab, and he closed his eyes. “Right,” he said through clenched teeth. “Go.”
For a full two seconds nothing happened, and Hale was about to open his eyes in a squint when the man’s bony fist abruptly crashed against his left cheekbone. Hale’s head snapped back, and for a moment his headache, and nausea induced by the metallic taste of the impact, made thought impossible; finally he took a deep breath, swallowed, and opened his eyes. His left eye was blinking rapidly and was too full of tears for him to see out of it.
The fist had been turning as it hit, and Hale could feel the sharp burn of a cut below his eye and a hot trickle of blood running down his cheek.
“Too hard,” said the Arab. “Other man not bleed.”
“Well then, go hit him again,” said Hartsik impatiently in Arabic. “Now get out of here.”
The Arab bowed and left the office, and Hartsik closed the door and turned the key. “Your double is being questioned,” he said as he crossed to the desk and resumed his seat opposite Hale. “You’ll get a transcript of the interrogation, but he’s been coached to say he’s Charles Garner, an expatriate British journalist, and to deny being in Beirut for any purposes other than business and dissipation. We happen to know that one of the clerks here is in the pay of the Soviets, and that clerk has been called in to work on his day off, so that Mammalian will be told by an eyewitness that you revealed nothing and were told nothing.”
Hartsik was holding the bottle over Hale’s coffee cup, but Hale twitched his fingers at it, and when the other man handed it to him he tipped the bottle up for a liberal mouthful. After he had swal-lowed it, he opened his mouth to inhale the warm fumes.
“Who is my father?” Hale said thickly.
“Harry St. John Philby,” said Hartsik. “Kim Philby is your half-brother.”
Hale’s breath had stopped—but a moment later he nodded slowly, remembering the times he had dreamed of Kim Philby, and had seemed to hear Philby’s voice in his head. Had Philby suspected this? Our Hajji which art in Amman… “He,” Hale said unsteadily, “the old man, he—raped my mother—” Tears were running down his cheek from his left eye.
“Apparently,” said Hartsik, “not. Old Philby was the British political agent in the court of King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan, in Amman, just on the other side of the Jordan River from Jerusalem, where your mother’s religious order was working in a British Army hospital; and by all reports he was, er, handsome and charming. Thirty-seven years old at the time, probably quite a—well. St. John seems to have been troubled by the fear that Christianity might be… real, the true story. Specifically he was afraid of Roman Catholicism, with all its… nasty old relics and sacraments and devotions, the whole distasteful Irish and Mediterranean air of it. He apparently thought that if he could persuade a so-called bride of Christ to forsake her vows—seduce her, I mean—”
Hale nodded impatiently. “I didn’t suppose he tried to force wealth on her.”
“Right. Well, he thought this would disprove the nun’s whole faith, you see, expose it as a morbid but harmless hypocrisy—like citing Popes who have had illegitimate children. I do wonder how Catholics justify—”
“Infallible, not impeccable,” snapped Hale; and he wondered why he was bothering to defend his forsaken old faith at all. “The Russians want both of St. John’s sons up on the mountain—working together this time. Why?”
“Because St. John’s dalliance with your mother was a very costly mistake for him—and for the Russians. Young Kim was supposed to be a human emissary to the djinn, taking the long-dormant job over from the Arab royalty—the son of King Saud relinquished an ancestral rafiq diamond to Kim, in 1919, when Kim was seven.”
“Rafiq?” said Hale, puzzled. “Do you mean in the Bedu sense? An introducer or guarantor?”
“Right, a member of the other tribe, who’ll vouch for you. Kim was supposed to be this person; and even now the diamond serves its rafiq purpose. Kim was given the djinn sacrament when he was an infant, deliberately, by his father. St. John received it by accident—he was born in Ceylon, and on that day a streak of light like a comet shot south over the Bay of Bengal and lit up several Ceylonese villages—but after that St. John was baptized, which blunted the non-human grace of it. St. John made sure that Kim was never baptized.”
“Uh,” said Hale, “djinn sacrament?”
“The splitting?” Hartsik raised his eyebrows, then shook his head in disappointment. “Huh. You remember the story in First Kings, about the two women who came before King Solomon? They had a live baby and a dead baby, and each woman claimed the live one was hers. According to the Bible, Solomon called for a sword and offered to cut the baby in half.”