Declare (17 page)

“We—” Hale glanced around, trying to identify landmarks by the moonlight.

She was right. This was the spot where he had stood on a recent afternoon and imagined that this island was a ship pointed downriver, and that the island on which they lived was a barge being towed behind. Somehow the two of them must tonight have walked north instead of south from their house, and across the short metal bridge that connected the islands, and past Notre-Dame.

The wind from off the river suddenly felt chillier, and he found that he had sat down in the damp grass. What had happened to him, when his mind had seemed to split into two? There had been another voice in his head, he remembered that much—

“You are a trouble to me, Marcel,” Elena said remotely. “You make me unfaithful to my husband… for I believe I will not put this event into my report either.”

Paris, 1941

“How am I to fear the absolutely nonexistent?” said Hurree Babu, talking English to reassure himself. It is an awful thing still to dread the magic that you contemptuously investigate
—
to collect folklore for the Royal Society with a lively belief in all the Powers of Darkness.

—Rudyard Kipling,
Kim

They were alone in the windy moon-streaked darkness at the tip of the island—the furtive
clochards
must all have been clustered on the smaller island, or been frightened away by the approach of this particular semblance of
“nothing right here”
—and for a while during the hour or so before dawn Hale and Elena debated in whispers what to do with the radio.

Hale, still angry that Centre had broadcast their address to agents using duplicated one-time pads, was for throwing the machine into the river; Elena objected that it might be one of only a few sets in Paris available to the Party, perhaps in fact the only set, though she did think that carrying it through the city streets was unconscionably risky; it looked like a typewriter case as much as it looked like a valise, and even a typewriter was a suspicious thing to be carrying around in occupied Paris. In the end they groped among the leafy chestnut trees overhanging the river until they found a branch with a three-pronged crotch above eye level, and with Elena standing on tip-toe to help they wedged the case there, hoping that daylight wouldn’t make it conspicuous. Hale was glad to get rid of
it for now, and his step was a good deal springier as they walked away from the incriminating set.

When dawn had fully claimed the sky and the sparrows were a chattering noise in the leafy branches, Hale and Elena took one last anxious glance at the tree in which the radio was hidden—they could see nothing suspicious from up on the path, and Elena said they shouldn’t approach that tree now that they could be seen from the south bank—and then they dutifully assumed the cover of a pair of early-rising lovers and strolled arm-in-arm across the Pont-Neuf to the south side of the river.

“We need a fish,” she said when they had reached the broad pavement of the Quai de Conti on the southern shore. Seeing his blank look, she went on, “Anything obvious that one would call a fish—a real one, a toy, a
painting
of a fish.”

“A recognition signal,” hazarded Hale, and she nodded impatiently.

It took an hour. No shops were open yet, but after walking a hundred yards down the embankment, and approaching several of the old fishermen who looked as if they had been trailing their lines in the river all night, they at last found one old fellow who had actually caught something, and they bought a thoroughly dead trout from him. Elena slung it in a handkerchief and carried it with the fish’s silvery head and tail hanging out at either side.

Then at an aimless-seeming pace that led them several times back across their own trail, they walked through the drafty narrow streets of the St.-Germain district, and after an expensive but suspicion-deflecting
petit déjeuner
at Aux Deux Magots—rolls and ersatz tea served by waiters in black waistcoats and long white aprons—Elena led him south to the gray stone fountain in the square in front of the Church of St.-Sulpice, which she described as her place of conspiracy.

“Ideally,” she told him quietly as they leaned on the side of the coping that was not wet from wind-flung spray, “the place of conspiracy would be in a neighboring country—probably Belgium, if the Germans had not occupied it, or Switzerland, if the Germans had given Centre time to plan thoroughly.” She sighed and brushed
the disordered auburn hair back from her forehead, and Hale’s heart ached at how young she looked. “But this is probably secure enough. Someone is assigned to watch this fountain until noon every day, and when they see us, with the fish, they’ll refer the fact of us up the chain of command; we’ll get a room somewhere tonight, and then come back here again tomorrow. And then, or the day after, or the day after that, a return message will have been sent back down the chain, and someone will approach us with instructions.”

“Tomorrow’s the first of November. Can you still meet the courier who’ll have our pay?”

“Oh, certainly, that’s in the afternoon. And I have to, don’t I? Anyway, I don’t see any reason to think the courier would be compromised.”

Hale nodded and squinted curiously around at the Parisians who were beginning to populate the slantingly sunlit square. On the Îsle St.-Louis he had generally slept until noon, and made lunch of whatever bread and cheese and wine Elena had bought on the black market the day before; she would return from her clandestine meetings late in the afternoon, and after a shared glass or two of wine Hale would begin encoding the material she had brought home. Aside from their dinners at Quasimodo and occasional furtive walks to glance at the gargoyles and flying buttresses and ranked saints of Notre-Dame, he had not seen much of Paris at all.

And he was surprised now by all the bicycles. He had seen bicycles in the traffic jam at the Porte de Gentilly and on the island boulevards, but in this square and the adjoining streets of St.-Germain he saw people riding in the perambulator baskets of bicycle rickshaws, and groups of businessmen in suits and ties pedaling soberly across the cobblestones, and elegant ladies whose wide skirts were clearly designed to project out away from spokes and sprockets.

One man’s bicycle had a green kite or paper flag rattling on an upright pole behind the seat—and Hale realized that it was a paper fish, ribbed with wooden dowels. The man was just riding in a big circle around the fountain.

“There’s a fish,” Hale said softly to Elena.

“I see it,” she said—but she was looking back toward the pillars at the church entrance. Hale followed her gaze and saw on the steps a woman whose broad skirt had a big red-flannel sunfish stitched onto it.

They both saw the next one, a portly little man only a dozen steps away, carrying a dead trout like Elena’s slung in a newspaper.

“Is it a coincidence?” whispered Hale.

The little man halted to stare at the fish Elena was carrying, and then he looked up at her and Hale with an expression of alarm.

Elena slid her hand behind her and dropped the trout and handkerchief into the fountain water. She stood up away from the coping and said softly to Hale, “Bless me!”

Things are not what they seem—trust me.

He nodded and followed her as she stepped away from the fountain.

They walked away north up the Rue des Canettes, in the first block passing several more people carrying fish emblems, and Elena didn’t say anything until she paused below the Romanesque tower of a church on the north side of the Boulevard St.-Germain.

She turned an anxious glare on him then, but he knew she was thinking of all the fish in the square by St.-Sulpice. “Does Centre
want
their networks rolled up? They obviously gave the same place of conspiracy—even the same recognition sign!—to—it might be
dozens
of agents! Of what use is that? Is the watcher supposed to go down into the square with a notebook at noon, have them all line up and give their code names? It’s even worse than reusing the one-time pads, and that was blatantly bad security. How alert would a Gestapo officer need to be to wonder about the … this
fish
festival at St.-Sulpice?”

Hale pushed away the memory of a voice from his childhood nightmare:
O Fish, are you constant to the old covenant?
“Can it be normal,” he said, “for that many people to be at their place of conspiracy at the same time?”

In his head echoed the ritual answer to the dream’s challenge:
Return, and we return; keep faith, and so will we…

She blinked. “Good point. No. All those agents on the run at once! There must have been a big reverse, perhaps some centrally informed agent has joined sides with the Gestapo. There is not supposed to
be
any such agent, but after these last hours nothing would surprise me.” She shook her head and resumed walking north, toward the river. “We don’t dare try to get my automobile, but we’ve got to get our radio set back. This isn’t Centre’s fault, entirely.”

Hale trotted up beside her and matched her pace; and when she glanced at him he raised his eyebrows inquiringly.

“Hitler didn’t care about Spain,” Elena said. “The Spanish Civil War was just a practice ground for him. Among other things, he learned there how to do the
Blitzkrieg
, and thus he was able to sweep through France much faster than anyone had allowed for. The networks used to send information as microphotographs carried by couriers from Berlin here to Paris, where the Soviet attaché could send the information on to Moscow by the consulate wireless. But with the overnight fall of France that became impossible, and all the weight of intelligence-relaying fell onto the illegal networks. Arrangements had to be made in haste.”

“And agents are expendable.”

She nodded, apparently choosing to ignore his irony. “Individually; even networks, individually. But not—
everything!”

A Great Dane in a gated courtyard barked at them as they hurried along the sidewalk, and for a moment Hale was surprised that the dog was barking in the same dialect as English dogs.

“Perhaps,” Elena went on, nodding at her own thought, “Moscow has established a perfect hermetic network in Europe, with some
sanctum sanctorum
intelligence access, and can afford to let the Gestapo roll up all the others.”

“Can afford to deliberately betray all the others,” suggested Hale cautiously.

“It is
realpolitik
, Marcel,” she said in an almost pleading tone. “You are one of us, you know that the outcome is what matters. One day the peace of worldwide communism will be here, will be real. Until that day—”

“We are expendable,” he said again.

“Yes,” she said emptily.

They crossed the river by the Pont des Arts just downstream of the islands, and in the embankment street below the Louvre they bought roasted chestnuts wrapped in newspaper. Elena told Hale not to start eating them until they had crossed back to the Île de la Cité and were back in the Square du Vert-Galant. “It is cover,” she said. “Spies don’t generally bring treats along when they’re doing risky work.”

The sun was above the crenellations of the Louvre castle, and Hale no longer wished for a sweater. Scents of fresh-baked bread warmed the morning breeze, and he hoped they would get a more substantial breakfast, and some wine, before long.

“Where would you watch from, to catch anyone retrieving the radio?” asked Hale quietly as they approached the spot where they had waited for dawn. “If you were the Gestapo.”

“I would have a boat out in the river,” she said; and then she peered between the trees at the water. A rowboat floated out there, apparently at anchor, and the man in the boat wore a big straw hat, which would be very noticeable if he were to wave it. Thoughtfully she cracked a chestnut and chewed the hot nut. “And I’d,” she mumbled around it, “have men in ordinary clothes sitting close by.”

Two burly men were sitting on a low wall playing chess only a few yards ahead of them, and Hale glanced at the board as he and Elena strolled past. Both red bishops were on black squares. Three other men were squatting on the grass farther away, passing a bottle of white wine back and forth. All of them looked younger and healthier than the fishermen and
clochards
Hale had seen so far.

He turned to Elena and said, in a loud and irritated voice, “Very
well!
I
love
you! God!”