Young Philby by Robert Littell

he can legally have two more wives. Why not? Four seems quite a sensible number to me. Whilst my sainted father gallivants around the Middle East trying to reach horizons that elude him, Mother is at home in London, thank you, tending the tea roses in her gilded cage.”
    “Is that what brought you to Vienna, Kim? Trying to get to a horizon your father couldn’t reach?”
    While he was mulling this over I said, “Well, I don’t see our relationship as a cage, gilded or otherwise. I certainly don’t feel ambivalent about your erections. And you can look down Sonja’s blouse till you’re blue in the face.”
    *   *   *
    Every day brought its ration of rumors: a friend of Dietrich’s who worked at a frontier customs post reported that Hitler’s storm troopers had crossed the Bavarian Alps and were marching on Lintz (false), a woman who delivered eggs to the chef who cooked for Dollfuss heard he was counting on Italy’s Mussolini to prevent an eventual German annexation of Austria (true), my Soviet controller had it from an unimpeachable source that the Socialist workers’ militia had been secretly mobilized with orders to overthrow Dollfuss and create an Austrian Socialist Republic (false). “Keep your ear to the ground,” Arnold instructed me. “Let me know if you hear anything.”
    All I heard was the falling snow muting the sound of traffic below my window. If you concentrated hard enough on the flakes drifting through the yellow light of the new electric streetlamps, it looked as if you were rising through the snow into the night sky. And then, ominously, one evening in February, the tap water in the drinking glasses stopped trembling. Kim and I exchanged looks. (When we compared notes much later, we discovered both of us had thought the same thing: that the earth might have somehow stopped rotating on its axis.) About the time we noticed the stillness of the water in the glasses, all the lights in the apartment, along with the shortwave radio tuned to the BBC foreign service, went out. Kim padded over to the window and peered up and down the street. “There’s n-no electricity on the block,” he said quietly. “Even the streetlamps have g-gone out.”
    “What do you think it means?”
    “It m-means the generators have stopped generating electricity.”
    I should say here that electricity stoppages were the rule in Vienna, not the exception, and we had candles ready at hand. I lit several. When the telephone rang Kim said, “I’ll get it.” He put the receiver to his ear and listened. “Woher wissen Sie, dass?” he demanded.
    “How does who know what ?” I asked impatiently.
    “It’s Dietrich,” Kim told me. “He says the electricity has gone off in Karl-Marxhof. He says Dollfuss’s Heimwehr gangs are stringing barbed wire across the streets leading to workers’ tenements.”
    “The revolution has started,” I whispered breathlessly. “The workers will rise up and sweep away the capitalists and the Fascists. Vienna will become the second Paris Commune. It’s my rendezvous with history.”
    Kim, more levelheaded than me, said, “The Paris Commune was crushed in six weeks. If it’s really revolution, the workers in Vienna won’t last six d-days—the Heimwehr mob are armed to the teeth, our Schutzbund comrades will fall back into the tenement b-blocks but I don’t see how they can hold out for very long.”
    I called the telephone number my controller had obliged me to memorize. A woman answered and said, “If you’re calling for roses, we don’t deliver in winter.” I said, “But we’re already twelve February—the winter is almost over.” Having exchanged pass-phrases, my controller said: “Report.” I told her about the electricity going out, about the barbed wire.
    “Is that all?”
    “Isn’t that enough?” I demanded.
    The telephone line went dead in my ear.
    “What was that all about?” Kim asked.
    “I make reports,” I explained.
    “To whom?”
    “To a