Declare

“And of course in the meantime,” said Hale gently, “you’ll make sure that any old verification orders concerning me are switched off.”

“Oh, my dear, I’m sure there never was anything like that!” Was there an ironic glint in the old man’s eye? “You insult me. But of course I will get on the telephone and explain your status. It might be best for you to stay here tonight, not try to go into the city. Right? We should certainly have you in Moscow by the middle of April, even at your slow rate of travel.”

That will do, thought Hale. He allowed himself to sit down on the damp green grass.

He recalled a story in the Thousand Nights and One Night, in which a poor traveler had been hired by a jewel merchant to allow himself to be sewn into the skin of a freshly killed mule. When it had been done, an enormous eagle snatched up the dead mule with the traveler hidden inside and flew to an otherwise inaccessible mountain peak, and the bird flew away in surprise when the man climbed out of the carcass. He found that the mountain-top was littered with human and mule bones, but also that the stones lying about were all jewels; and, from the valley below, the jewel merchant was calling up to him to throw down as many of the gems as he could lift. The traveler obediently flung down more than two hundred fabulously valuable stones, but eventually he paused to rest and called down a question about the route he would have to take to get back down-and at that point the jewel merchant gathered the jewels scattered in the valley, packed up his own mule and departed without a backward look. The abandoned traveler had pressed onward up the mountain and eventually after many hardships found a green valley, where he met and fell in love with a daughter of the dji

“I’ll impose on your hospitality for a bath,” he said, “and some food and drink-and sleep.”

And then, he thought, you can sew me up, Jimmie.

Theodora drove Hale to London two days later in his old Continental Bentley, but instead of crossing the river to Century House he proceeded to Artillery Mansions near Westminster Hall. London Station ran a department from Artillery Mansions known as DP4, which was in the business of inserting SIS agents into eastern Europe and Russia -students, businessmen, journalists; as a lowly DP4 operative, Hale would be beneath the notice of Dick White, who was still C.

Theodora’s proposal was approved without objection by Dickie Franks, the DP4 chief, with routine authorization from the Foreign Office, and at the end of the week Andrew Hale boarded the Polish liner Topolewski. After three days at sea, with stops at Rotterdam and Copenhagen, Hale arrived at the Baltic Sea port of Danzig in northern Poland. His British passport identified him as Varnum Leonard, a non-staff foreign correspondent for the Evening Standard, and its pages were stamped with many visas from Eastern Bloc countries such as Czechoslovakia and the German Democratic Republic; and in the Brest railway station on April 8, the passport’s last empty page was stamped with the red star of the U.S.S.R. visa.

Across the Soviet border now, he boarded a crowded train that took him over the course of several days through Minsk and Smolensk, and finally on the evening of Sunday the twelfth he watched through his sleeping compartment window as the outlying villages of Moscow, quaint snow-covered log cabins and narrow lanes animated with horse-drawn sleds, gave way to paved streets and new apartment buildings with television ante

His apartment building proved to be an elegant Stalinist-baroque ghetto for Western journalists, insulated from surrounding buildings by high cement walls and a sentry box ma

Hale quickly learned enough phrases in the Russian language to apologize and ask directions, and he began exploring the city without an interpreter-the Intourist and Novosti Press Agency authorities permitted this, since all press releases were censored and no photographers could be obtained except from Novosti.

Moscow within the Sadovaya ring was physically daunting-the streets and squares were vast, though automobile traffic was sparse, and it seemed to Hale in his first days that the industrial-Gothic architecture of the Stalinist skyscrapers, crowned with giant red stars that lit the night sky like the Devil’s own landing-lights, were contrasted only by the medieval bastions and towers of the Kremlin wall and the new blocks of modernist pre-fabricated apartment buildings, which appeared to have been assembled with rust streaks and pock-marks already applied. Later he found the Bolshoi Theatre with its ornate Corinthian pillars, and the wrought-iron balconies and bridges and hanging lanterns of the vast GUM department store on Red Square, but these were forlorn remnants of the tsarist nineteenth century-like the palatial Gastronom 1 on Gorky Street, where grim-faced shoppers now waited in long lines to buy turnips and bottles of cheap red and blue syrups under the old gilt cherubs and chandeliers.

On the Moskva River embankment he stared at the twelve-foot-by-thirty-foot movie posters, trying to puzzle out the names of the stars, whose faces he didn’t recognize; farther up the embankment, outside the Kremlin wall by the Taynitskaya Tower, he could sometimes hear the scuffleand-thump of a volleyball game, presumably among the guards, on the other side of the high wall; and for half an hour one day he watched a flock of crows busily dropping chestnuts down the top of a drainpipe on the tower and flying down to the pavement to retreive the nuts when they rolled out at the bottom, and then flying up to do it again.

He felt like one of the birds. He had two things to do-and now that he was so close to defining the course of the rest of his life, he was postponing considering either of them.

When he had gone to the GUM department store he had seen the colorful spires and onion domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral, standing like some fantastic Walt Disney island hundreds of yards away at the south end of Red Square, and he had stared at its crimson walls and gold-and-blue spiraled domes. And when he realized that he was so anxious about his imminent intrusion there-on the twenty-second of April, forty years after 1924, only a week away now-that he was afraid to approach it, he made himself walk all the way across the plain of the cobblestoned square, past the ranked snow-plow trucks and the raised cement ring of the Lobinoye Mesto where criminals had been publicly beheaded in the tsarist days, to the the cathedral’s rococo north arch. He walked up the stone stairs beyond and found that the tall doors stood open, with the cavernous aisles of the sixteenth-century church dimly visible inside.