Declare (22 page)

He exhaled more air than he had thought was in his lungs.
The radio began roaring like a lion
, she had said. And something, some inertial force, had undeniably held him up and spun him around in his jump to the
pension
roof. He opened his mouth to tell her about it, but found that he could not; in this moment he was sure that she would believe it, but he was stopped by embarrassment, or shame, as if the gaudy, outré event was proof of some moral failing on his part. “So what do we do now?” he said instead, dully. “Find another machine?”

She was looking away, toward the street door.

“No,” she said, after a pause. “The last message I deciphered was an order, for both of us.” Very quietly, still without looking at him, she went on, “We are ordered to report in person to Moscow, using our old Vichy-issue St.-Simon passports—going by way of neutral Lisbon, via an Air France flight to Istanbul and then by railway to Samsun on the Black Sea coast; none of these trips is out of character for employees of Simex, but in Samsun there will be a
cigarette smuggler’s boat waiting to take us to Batumi in the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic. Russian Intourist railway tickets will be waiting for us in Tbilisi, two hundred miles east of Batumi.” Her voice was tense, even frightened, and she blinked rapidly. “They don’t like agents to travel by Intourist; the
in
is short for
inostranets
, which is Russian for foreign—it brands the holder of the passport as a foreigner in good favor with the Soviet state. Passports with Intourist visas in them can’t be used again. Delphine and Philippe St.-Simon will have to be retired.”

Hale’s heartbeat quickened. This was the opportunity for escape, for both of them, from the frightening mysteries, natural and unnatural, of wartime Paris.

He reached out and took hold of her cold hand on the tabletop. “We won’t go,” he said. She was frowning, clearly about to interrupt, so he went on in a fast whisper, “You know what a summons to Moscow means; you know what it meant for your friend Maly, in spite of his filthy
clochard
rhythms. ‘Retired’ is right. Listen, in the entire rest of your natural life you’ll surely be able to do
something
for the Communist cause, something you
wouldn’t
be able to do if you let them kill you now. Cassagnac said that this generation of the Soviet secret services will be killed in their own turn before long, and that the next lot is likely to be more reasonable. Wait for them, with me. I love you. Come to England with me.” His voice was shaking, and for the first time in three months he thought of her again as Lot’s wife. “Don’t look back.”

Now tears spilled down her cheeks; she cuffed them away. “ ‘Come to England’! You might find it difficult getting to England yourself, as Marcel Gruey the
embusqué
Swiss student. Answer me honestly, once and for all: will you come with me?”

“I won’t go to Moscow.” He tried to sound confident when he added, “I really think you won’t either.”

Tears still streaked her face, but her expression was blank. “I would sooner try to… live on the river bottom, and breathe water like the fishes, than disobey my masters. If it is their will that I be shot in the Lubyanka cellars in Moscow, then that is my will too. You and I will not see each other again, I think.”

“Elena,” he burst out, “the jump from the house to the
pension
roof was too far—I would have fallen into the alley, but”—he took a deep breath and looked away from her—“Cassagnac’s damned belt—
didn’t fall.
It kept moving in a straight line, like a gyroscope resisting a sideways pull. Your radio was going mad, right?” He was sweating. “Something was
paying attention
to us ten minutes ago, something like what burned the floor of the garret in the house by the Panthéon. If you go to Moscow, you’ll be getting more deeply involved in this, this
God-damned
stuff!”

She was pale, and her head swung back and forth wearily. “Moscow found it efficacious to ally herself with Germany,” she said, “for a while. If
realpolitik
requires that she ally herself with other abominable forces now, it is not my place to be… scrupulous, fastidious.”

Put it off, Hale thought. “Very well.” He sighed shakily. “But we can travel a little way together. To hell with Marcel Gruey—I can travel with you, as far as Lisbon, as Philippe St.-Simon the cork wholesaler. He’s an established business traveler, a collaborator, traveling with his sister—he’ll have no problems.”

Her momentary control broke, and now she was sobbing softly. “Oh, Marcel!—Lot—but you should have
lied
to me, pretended to be willing to obey the order, and then just run away from me in Lisbon. Now I cannot possibly give you the St.-Simon passport.”

He stared at her, his mouth open. Her determination was as obviously genuine as her distress. It didn’t even occur to him to be angry—he had known from the first that she was as deeply committed to communism as he was to England, as he had once been to Roman Catholicism.

“What chance,” he asked slowly, watching his pulse jog his relaxed hand on the brandy glass, “do you think Marcel Gruey has of getting a flight to Lisbon?”

The padded shoulders of her sweater jerked up and down in a shrug. “He’s a citizen of a neutral country, wanting to visit another. Buy a round-trip ticket, it will look better, if you are able to afford it. You’ve studied your Swiss cover well enough to get through any interrogation they’re likely to bother with. At worst, you’ll have to
stay in France—live with your
clochards
until Russia defeats the fascists.” She brushed splinters of roof shingle from her hair onto the tabletop, and her blue eyes stared at him miserably. “You’re a bad man, I think—no, a good man but a bad agent, a bad Communist—but nevertheless I hope you don’t hate me.”

He drained his glass, hoping that the alcohol would maintain a perspective that he feared he wouldn’t have when he was sober. “I love you, Elena,” he said hoarsely when he had clanked the glass back down. “And I’m—
glad
that I didn’t lie to you.” About that one thing, at least, he thought.

She nodded, and stirred herself to pull the old mirror out of her pocket. She turned it toward him and asked softly, “Do you want to see a monkey?” The glass had been cracked at some point since the last time, probably during her climb down the drainpipe, and Hale saw two reflections of himself. “We have not got to know each other, you and I,” she said. Then she sighed and blinked around at the corners of the high ceiling. “Centre did not allow for today’s intrusion by the Gestapo; the Lisbon tickets being held at the Orly Air France desk are for tomorrow. This is the very last day of the year—if we can find a room to rent somewhere, we can spend this very last night together.” She smiled sadly as she tucked the broken mirror away. “For once, we will not have to find an
arrondissement
that’s scheduled for round-the-clock electricity.”

Hale wondered if the Biblical Lot had paused to touch his crystalline wife before continuing on his way alone. “I won’t sleep,” he said unsteadily. “I’ll just… look at your face, for the hours we have left together.” He knew he was talking adolescent nonsense, but he was frightened by this sudden ending of the furtive life they’d had together in Paris and by the prospect of piloting the frail Gruey identity to Lisbon; and he simply wanted to cling to her for any period of time that could be had.

“Not if there’s no electricity,” she said, “for the light. And I think you will sleep.”

That night they found a room on the Île de la Cité, at the north-eastern corner above Notre-Dame Cathedral, in one of the narrow
old lanes of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century houses that had escaped Baron Haussmann’s demolitions and street-widenings a hundred years earlier. Since the German officers had apparently not discovered the place, they had dinner at La Colombe by the old pavement that was the remains of a Roman wall; abundant vases of fresh-cut wildflowers and cages of fluttering doves made the restaurant look like one of the lamplit nighttime street markets, and they sat under the low beamed ceiling at a window table overlooking the embankment and the dark river, eating rabbit in mushroom sauce and even sharing a bottle of the fabulous Château d’Yquem with the sentimental owner.

Back in their room, Elena lit the lamp and then began writing on a sheet of blank paper from her skirt pocket. Hale frowned, wishing espionage wouldn’t intrude now, but when he peered over her shoulder he saw that she had simply written
Bueno Año, Malo Año
, and
Medio Año
, and now she tore the sheet into three strips, with one of the phrases on each.

She looked up at him with a defensive smile in the flickering amber light. “It’s the only one of my mother’s superstitions I’ve kept.” She folded the paper strips, took off her sweater and then stood up and crossed to the bed. “Tonight is New Year’s Eve. I put these under the pillow, and then sleep on them; and in the morning I draw one out, and it is an omen for the coming year.” After having tucked the papers under the pillow nearest the window, she pulled back the bedspread and began unbuttoning her blouse, though the room was nearly cold enough for Hale to see her breath.

“Is it—ac-accurate?” he stammered. His hands lifted toward the buttons of his shirt, then fell away. He managed to kick off his shoes without too much trouble, and he slid the belt out of his trousers and tossed it to the farthest corner of the room.

“Would you call my mother a fool?” She dropped her blouse and, shivering, quickly began to unfasten her skirt.

Hale glanced at her pale breasts and then away; but he did dare to twist free his cuff and collar buttons. “You’ve f-found it reliable, then,” he said, dizzily wondering which augury she would find in the morning.

“To tell you the truth—” she began as she stepped out of her skirt and slid naked between the sheets. “Oh, it
is
cold! Take off your clothes and come here!” She pulled the blanket to her chin, visibly shivering. “To tell you the truth,” she went on when the bed at last shifted with Hale’s weight, “I have never dared to unfold the paper and look.”

Hale did eventually sleep, and it was the last night of the year.

In his dream the stars might have been spinning, but thick clouds masked the sky, and rain thrashed so heavily down onto the Île de la Cité that as it hit the pavement clouds of spray were thrown up to surge along the streets like waves.

His viewpoint floated away upward and hovered over the island, and the spires of Sainte-Chapelle stood above the waves like the fore castle of a ship; the river was flowing strongly backward tonight in his dream, and dark water crashed up on the embankment at the Square du Vert-Galant like a bow wave.

In the roaring downpour he could no longer see the city on either side of the island ship—a turbulent sea appeared to extend out past the limits of perception—but he could see a dark square shape wallowing astern, a bargelike vessel apparently being towed by the ship. He didn’t want to look at it, and so he looked ahead.

Dimly through the rain he could see the silhouette of a mountain rising above the sea, with vast columns or towers on the peak—and then he was reminded of the German plane that had flown low over his and Elena’s heads in the Rue de Savoie in the rain forty days ago, for he felt the wind of some massive shape rushing past under the clouds, toward the mountain, and he saw that some sort of aerial dogfight was going on over the dark mountain castle.

And after a moment his stomach went cold, for a gust in the veils of rain made him revise his perspective, and he realized that the murky mountain was miles farther away than he had at first thought, and the swooping and diving shapes were much bigger than any airplanes.

The combatants seemed not so much to fly through the air as to appear sequentially at a smoothly continuous number of points
across the sky—like the moving intersection of closing scissors blades, or the tip of a crack rushing through a pane of glass. In the dream he understood that the battle was fought every year, but that in a bigger sense it was the identically same event each time, since the position of the stars overhead was the same; in a sense the battle only seemed to occur again and again because the night sky kept rotating around to the same position every year.

Hale’s viewpoint was closer to the mountain now, and he could see a white dome amid the turrets at the top; the dome had not been there a few moments ago, and he understood that the dome was… the phrases came into his mind… “the Destroyer of Delights and the Sunderer of Companies,” which meant Death.

The sky and the mountain faded then, but the dome was now fully visible as an oval, and there were dozens or hundreds of similar vast eggs around it, light and dark and black, crowded and piled as if on an undulating plain. There must have been thousands of them, perhaps millions. Hale was trying to estimate the scale of them, and the height from which he must be looking down on the plain, when a foamy wave rushed forward from behind him and hid them under bubbles and foam.

The size of the bubbles jolted his perspective, and he lifted his head and saw that he was on his hands and knees in warm surf on a sunlit beach; the egg shapes had been grains of sand in the relative darkness of his shadow.

A middle-aged man in a modern, rumpled sport coat and a cravat was striding toward him down the dazzling sand slope; the man’s face was pouchy and tired, but it creased in a jovial smile as the mouth opened—from the man’s arrogantly casual Marks & Spencer–style clothes Hale almost anticipated a plummy Oxbridge drawl—

But it was a shrill piping like the cries of birds that came skirling out of the open mouth, and Hale flinched at the savage rhythm of the harsh whistling—the mouth opened wider, cleaving the face vertically, and the division quickly extended down through the neck—and then the man had split down the middle, and it was two dressed men standing on the sand facing Hale. One was the
middle-aged original; the other appeared younger, but Hale had a sudden conviction that if he were to look into the face of that one, he would die.