Young Philby by Robert Littell Page A

woman with a man’s name who doesn’t deliver roses in winter.”
    Kim had the bright idea of telephoning Eric Gedye, the correspondent who covered Austria for the Daily Telegraph . He was a fixture at the Café Herenhoff, which is how we came to know him. “Electricity seems to have gone out in the city,” he told Gedye. “Any idea what’s up?”
    I could see Kim shut his eyes as he pressed the telephone to his ear. “So it’s b-begun,” he murmured. He listened for a moment. “Don’t know what we’ll do. I suppose we’ll wait for instructions.”
    He turned to me when he’d rung off. “The Dollfuss people are putting about that nonsense of an armed uprising by the Schutzbunders . Gedye says it’s a p-provocation—Dollfuss is using it the way Hitler used the Reichstag fire—to purge Socialists and Communists. Your short count has b-banned the Social Democratic Party and declared marshal law. His soldiers have occupied the Social Democrats’ headquarters in Lintz and started shooting up tenements in the city. The power plant workers here in Vienna have gone out on strike in p-protest. The army are bringing howitzers into Vienna to attack the tenement blocks.”
    The telephone rang again. Was it my imagination or had the ring become shriller, had the interval between rings grown shorter? I snatched the telephone off the hook before Kim could reach it. It was Dietrich. He was yelling in order to be heard over the bedlam in the background. “We’ll go immediately,” I yelled back, startled by my own voice, which seemed to reverberate through the apartment.
    “Why are you yelling?” Kim asked when I’d hung up.
    “Because Dietrich was yelling,” I said. In my excitement I remember thinking this was a perfectly rational explanation. “He says we are to meet him at the Herenhoff and wait for orders.”
    We pulled on galoshes and coats and hurried downstairs. I wanted us to use Kim’s motorcycle but he said it would attract too much attention, so we wound up going on foot. Walking through the falling snow, with the flakes melting on the skin of my face and muffling our footfalls on the sidewalk, it was hard to imagine that Vienna was on the brink of civil war. The Herenhoff was swarming with clients jammed onto benches reading newspapers by candlelight. Others were shouting at the top of their lungs to people who were immediately across the table from them. (I had always imagined people would whisper during a civil uprising. When I mentioned this to Kim, he actually burst out laughing. It was the last time he would laugh for weeks. Laughter, it seems, was the first victim of Dollfuss’s small war.) Waiters in black Spencers threaded between the tables, the trays filled with mugs of beer balanced on palms high over their heads. Dietrich had managed to save two seats at a miniscule table at the back near the toilets. “Where is Sonja?” I shouted.
    “She is helping to throw up barricades in the streets around the Karl-Marxhof tenements with her Social Democrat friends, who are having second thoughts about Stalin being a greater menace than Hitler, about Hitler being a greater menace than Dollfuss. Listen, Litzi, our cell leader has ordered us to set up a machine-gun post on a roof of the university off the Ringstrasse.” Dietrich looked at Kim. “You are welcome to join us, Philby.”
    My Englishman never hesitated. “Course I’ll join you,” he shouted. “P-puts me a game up on my sainted father. My first revolution and I’m only twenty-two. He didn’t get to chuck the Turks out of Mesopotamia until he was thirty.”
    “Sergius is coming by to give us the key to a coal bin with guns and ammunition hidden in it,” Dietrich said.
    “Right. Does either of you know how to work a machine gun?”
    Dietrich and me, we avoided each other’s eye. “It isn’t difficult,” Dietrich said. “One of us will feed in the belt of bullets. The second will pull the trigger. The third will wet the burlap