Declare by Tim Powers Read Free Book Online Page A

streets; but after dark, taxis still drove with their headlamps out and were hailed by pedestrians blinking electric torches at them. Hale managed to share a taxi with an elderly gentleman going to the Garrick Club, and when Hale asked to be let off at Number 16 King Street the driver embarrassed him by saying, as the cab slowed in front of the dark office block, “Communist Party Headquarters, sir.”
    “Thank you,” Hale mumbled, wincing under the clubman’s peripherally glimpsed glare as he counted out shillings in the spot-light of the driver’s cigarette lighter. He did recall that the St. Hilda’s girl had been pretty.
    Six or eight people were standing on the pavement in front of the tall entry arch, and as Hale stepped away from the departing cab and blinked around, trying to get back his night vision, a figure approached him out of the darkness and a man’s Cockney voice said, “And are you a Party member as well, sir?”
    “That’s right,” Andrew told him. “Student branch in Oxford. I’m here for the meeting. I’m to meet a young lady.”
    “Ah—well, I’m afraid our jail cells are segregated by gender, sir. Perhaps you’ll be able to write her a letter, if the censors have no objections.”
    Belatedly Hale noticed the shape of a City police helmet, and his ribs tingled and his face went cold several seconds before he realized that he was frightened—if only he had answered, Certainly not, isn’t this Garrick’s? a mere twenty seconds ago!
    “It’s not… against the law to belong to the Party,” he said, trying to speak in a reasonable tone. Three months earlier Germany had finally invaded Russia, violating their non-aggression pact and making the Soviet Union at least nominally a British ally.
    “Espionage and subversion still are, sir, very much so. There’s a document on our air strategy that’s been lifted from the Air Ministry’s files. Our men are inside, trying to stop you lot from incinerating papers.” Hale now saw that a dark van was parked farther up the street, with a dimly visible blur of smoke fluttering at the exhaust. “I’ll have to ask you to come with me,” the policeman said, taking Hale’s elbow.
    At last Hale realized what it was that he was afraid of: not the police, not jail, nor even possible expulsion from Magdalen College, but the man in the Haslemere railway station, or another of his sort, one Hale wouldn’t even recognize. Being here tonight suddenly looked a lot like disobeying orders during wartime.
    With a despairing moan, Hale yanked his arm free of the policeman’s grip and began running back the way his taxi had come, panting more from panic than from exertion as the hard soles of his shoes skidded noisily on the unseen pavement. Suddenly there were torch beams and tall-helmeted silhouettes everywhere in the darkness—what were City police doing out here in Covent Garden?— and after sprinting and dodging for two hundred yards, Hale was cornered on the moonlit steps of the little St. Paul’s church in the Piazza. He held up his hands palms-outward against the dazzling yellow lights until the pursuing figures had cautiously shuffled close enough to seize his arms and twist him around and yank down the shoulders of his jacket; he heard a seam rip, and the autumn evening breeze was chilly through his sweat-soaked dress shirt.
    The policeman who had grabbed him down the street came puffing up as others were snapping manacles onto Hale’s wrists and rifling his pockets. “If your name,” the man wheezed angrily, “isn’t—bloody Hale , I’m going to thrash you—right here on the church steps.”
    “The name’s—in my notecase,” panted Hale. He could hear the van accelerating in reverse, audibly weaving in the lane as it came fast the wrong way up King Street in the dark. Had there been nobody else to arrest? “Andrew Hale.”
    * * *
    Makes you wonder why we still bother.
    Hale had started to slant his stride to the right, away from