As they turned off the main Avenida, the taxi-driver let out a yelp and pointed ahead. ‘Vibora!’ he shouted with a wide grin. Philby looked ahead, and at first all he saw was the rear of a diesel-belching Army truck; then he noticed a silvery-grey coil spring from beneath the wheels and come rolling towards them. ‘Serpente!’ the driver laughed.
Philby didn’t ask what kind of snake it had been. Despite his love of animals he’d always had a peculiar horror of snakes. He hoped there were none at the Hotel Polana.
He was relieved to find that he had been given an air-conditioned room with sealed windows, overlooking the lawn and the ocean. He still had more than two hours before he was due to meet Pol. He gave the African porter five escudos and told him to bring him a large whisky sour. It arrived before he had time to undress and shower.
Later he wandered downstairs, into a lounge full of pink-faced men in shorts and long socks, drinking tea with their dowdy wives. The African waiters moved among them on slippered feet, while piped music played and a stock-exchange telex chattered in a back room. The receptionist was pure Portuguese, with a soft ingratiating manner, and Philby resisted the temptation to ask if M. Cassis had checked in yet, for he was still wary of being associated too openly with Pol.
As it was, at the precise moment that Philby was walking out of the hotel, Pol lay naked on the bed of his room — only two doors along from Philby’s — talking on the telephone. He spoke in French, in slow, deliberate sentences, often repeating a phrase several times, or pausing to explain the meaning of some word. It was a conversation that would have meant little to anyone eavesdropping — even supposing the new Portuguese régime bothered to maintain their police surveillance. Nor was the number he had called of any significance; it belonged to an obscure international organization devoted to cultural welfare, and was situated in a Black African capital to the north of Mozambique.
Pol was still talking, when the taxi dropped Philby at a newsagent’s on the Avenida de Liberdade, where he bought that day’s South African English-language newspapers. He then chose one of the less crowded cafés and sat inside under a clanking fan, ordered a beer, lit his pipe and began to read.
The papers were full of a fresh terrorist attack in Rhodesia, in which a car-load of South African tourists, driving to the Rhodes Inyanga National Park on the Mozambique border, had been blown up by a land-mine, killing all six passengers. Despite a massive security operation, no arrests had been made. It was the second outrage in three weeks that had yielded no result, and the Rhodesian authorities were clearly getting jumpy.
Philby chewed his pipe and tacitly acknowledged Pol’s expertise. He could even imagine the former Captain Peters — equipped with forged Rhodesian papers — volunteering as a reservist to help hunt down the killers.
At 6.30, as the street-lamps came on, he strolled back down the Avenida and stopped for a drink at the ‘Girasol’ — a circular penthouse restaurant-bar on the top of one of the city’s tallest buildings. Its walls were of tinted glass and sloped out over the whole panorama of Lourenço Marques, past the domino patterns and necklaces of light, to the dark space of the ocean and the single red light marking the island of Inhaca.
It was the European cocktail hour and the place was crowded. Through the aquarium gloom Philby could just make out groups of smooth young men with lean bronzed girls — mostly English South Africans over for the weekend, he decided — and nut-brown Portuguese with fat wives hung with jewellery, sipping Martinis and whispering money; and a few grey-flannelled Rhodesians swilling beer and talking sport. A sad-eyed African waiter in a white smoking-jacket sat fingering the keys of a piano, tracing a Blues melody. His was the only black face there.
A Portuguese waiter had stopped Philby and was glancing round to find him an empty table, when Philby saw Pol. He was sitting with his back to the room, his head sunk into his great rounded shoulders, talking to a man who had his back to the window, almost looking at Philby.
It was eighteen years since Philby had last seen him, but he had changed little: thin, grey, self-effacing, in the sober three-piece uniform of the Civil Service. Roland Carter-Smythe, a permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, who had called several times on Philby during his dog-days in the mid-Fifties, when they’d discussed his ‘pension’ from the Service, following the Burgess-Maclean scandal.
The last time they’d met had been in a pub in Horseferry Road, just after the publication of the Government Paper which had formally cleared Philby of all allegations of his having been the ‘Third Man’. Carter-Smythe had been very pleasant and discreet, but Philby had known that he didn’t believe the official story. For Carter-Smythe was one of the hard-liners, and although Philby had never been able to prove it, he had been fairly certain that the man’s FO title was a cover for Intelligence activities.
Philby reacted without hesitation. He apologized to the waiter, and walked out, not hurrying, along to the lift and down to the street where he asked the doorman to call him a taxi. His mind was clear, his nerves firm. Yet he was experiencing a sensation that he’d known once before in his life, back in Istanbul in 1944 when the Soviet agent, Volkov, had defected, and Philby had come closer to being unmasked
