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 attache 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 ile de la Cite 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!"
Elena stared at him in surprised embarrassment, then shook her head. "Oh, you are a beast!" She began snuffling and turned back toward the broad lanes of the Pont-Neuf.
Hale turned too and strode after her, not glancing back at the men. "Did I misunderstand you, somehow? God knows I'm trying to be cooperative here! I-"
She took his arm and shook it as they hurried below the statue of Henri IV. "That's enough," she said quietly. "And that was clever, very naturally in media res-we couldn't simply have turned in our tracks and walked away without a word after we saw them, and the rudeness of it was a completely convincing touch." She smiled at him, again looking very young. "You are angry that I love the Soviet State, and not you."
"You love the Soviet State more than you love me," said Hale, "was how I understood it." He shrugged. "Actually."
"We must try to get another wireless set," she said. "It's likely that the local Communist Party has at least a couple that they are afraid to use, or even admit to. I wish I still had the automobile." She was snapping her fingers as she thought. "I must assume that my own agents are sound. I will get black market passports for us, the clumsy things known as gueules cassees, worthless to show the Gestapo but good enough to fool the concierge at a pension somewhere, so that we can get rooms; we don't dare try to get good new passports, for I believe all the networks have used the pass-apparat services of Raichman"-she glanced at Hale-"another man from Palestine, and our best cobbler of forged passports and supporting cover documents-and he might be the agent who has gone over to the Germans."
Hale nodded and helped himself to some of the nuts in the newspaper sheaf she carried. "And we must find some lunch," he said.
She shook her head. "Breakfast was too expensive, now, and I have to buy two gueules cassees, and we can't be certain of my meeting the courier with our pay tomorrow. We'll eat after sundown-cheaply."
Elena found rooms for them in the attic of a house in the Latin Quarter, on a street that, at least for the moment, had continuous electrical current. She made Hale wait in the empty, slant-ceilinged chambers while she went out to meet the courier and then try to establish contact with the Communist Party-she knew the names of two Party members and where they lived, and she was confident that she could get a radio through them if they knew of one to be had.
Hale sat on the gable windowsill overlooking the medieval street, scanning the roof and gutters and chimney pots for good places to string an aerial and an earth wire, and late in the afternoon he saw her appear in the apricot sunlight for a moment from around the corner by the Pantheon, then come striding forward into the shadow of the ranked housefronts as she forced a perambulator over the cobblestones rapidly enough to scramble the brains of any baby in it; but he was bleakly sure that it concealed a new radio, and he hoped she was breaking the filaments and leads by shaking it up. He hurried down to the street door to help her carry the baby carriage up the four flights of stairs.
There was indeed a new radio in the carriage-along with, somehow, a Dutch book on architecture-but there was also bread and cheese and a bottle of Italian grappa, and Elena sat down on the room's bare floorboards and pulled the cork out of the bottle and took several deep swallows before she spoke.
"I got our money, right at the first meeting place," she gasped, holding the bottle out toward him, "but it was a different courier-and he spoke to me."
Hale took several gulps of the brandy himself. "So?" he said, exhaling. "Don't they usually speak?"
"Not more than the password phrases. He gave me that book and said it contains some messages that need to be sent off to Moscow immediately. The money courier isn't supposed to have any access to intelligence. And when he gave the book to me it was wrapped in bright red paper!"
"Ah!" The book wasn't wrapped now, and of course the colored paper would have been a vivid aid for any Gestapo agent assigned to follow her. "You must have taken a very roundabout route to your friends' houses," he said, "after you ditched the wrapping paper."
She nodded, reaching out and flipping her fingers for the bottle. "I bought another book," she said after she had drunk some more brandy, "and in a lavatory I wrapped the red paper around it, and then gave it to a girl who looked somewhat like me; I gave her twenty francs to deliver it to the Sorbonne library. Meanwhile I shoved this book under the waistband of my skirt and spent an hour going up and down apartment stairs, and out the kitchen doors of restaurants, and hiding among a crowd of Moslem women who were leaving La Mosquee de Paris. They were short, I had to crouch."
Hale frowned at this intrusion of Islam into her story, though at the same time it seemed to him that it had been a particularly good evasion move, or...related to a good evasion move. He tried to trace the thought, but could only think of the vagaries of the nighttime Heaviside Layer.
Elena got wearily to her feet and lifted the book from the perambulator. "Comrade Charlotte is going to have to carry her baby around town for a while," she remarked idly as she riffled through the pages. "She probably would have given me the baby too, if I'd insisted-she was so relieved to get the set out of her house. There have been a lot of arrests, apparently." Then she lifted out four sheets of paper that had been laid between the pages, and scanned them. "German troop movements, battle plans." She waved the sheets at him. "These might be real, you know. The red paper might have been innocent."
Hale took the sheets from her and glanced at them-ROMMEL, 15TH PANZER DIVISION, HALFAYA PASS -they could be real, or not. "Assuming the radio works and I can get Centre on the air," he said thoughtfully, "I'll rephrase these, and send them with a lot of dummy code groups mixed in." He nodded toward the window and the city outside. "That's in case it's a Gestapo trap and they've got their monitors listening for messages of these particular lengths to be sent. If I sent the verbatim texts, they could easily recognize them and then derive my enciphering numbers."
Elena nodded. "Which might not be as unique as they're supposed to be."
"Right. Any other agent using the same pad might as well be sending en clair." He looked at the window, calculating how he would attach the earth wire to the drain pipe he had noted earlier. He would string the aerial so as to get a low angle of radiation, good for long skip distances, and hope for clear receptions and a brief time on the air.
Beyond the frame of the window the eastern sky had darkened to deep indigo. Elena switched on the electric wall lamps, and Hale tore the blank endpapers out of the architecture book and spent twenty minutes enciphering an explanation of their current circumstances and of the dubious messages Elena had got from the courier; and then he paraphrased the message texts, adding a lot of xs and ys which Centre would recognize as null groups.
"Let's look at Comrade Charlatan's apparatus," he said, getting to his feet.
"I really should report you for spontaneity," she sighed. "Do you want some of this cheese and bread?"
"We can eat as I work. Don't get crumbs in the mechanism."
Hale lifted the radio case out of the perambulator, laid it on the floor, unlatched the lid and flipped it open. The radio inside was equipped with a cord for alternating current, and earphones and a telegraph key and a coiled aerial wire were tucked neatly into a gap at the side. There was even a packet of sharpened pencils. "It does appear to be a radio," he allowed. He used a centime coin from his pocket to unscrew the facing plate and look at the works.
The set had a regenerative hookup powered by a high-voltage battery to maintain oscillation and amplify weak signals, with a Hartley oscillator instead of a crystal for transmitting on a broad range of bandwidths, and a Bradleystat resistor to prevent key-click sparks, which might otherwise interfere with radio reception for a mile around.
"Not bad," he said. He turned the condenser and rheostat knobs, noting a gritty tightness in their action. The set had apparently never been used.
"So how soon can you be on the air? We need instructions."
"As soon as I string the aerial and the earth, and-" He glanced around the plaster walls of the bare room for an electrical outlet, and saw none. "And figure a way to hook the plug into one of the light sockets."
At last Hale sat on the floor with the headphones on and several of the book's endpapers laid out in front of him, and he turned up the set's rheostat until the valve glowed yellow; then he turned the condenser knob, and the set began oscillating-he could hear the rushing sound in the phones, and when he touched the wire between the grid condenser and the secondary coil he heard a satisfactory thud. For a few seconds he could hear a faint high-speed clicking that would be caused by the sparks in the distributor of some nearby automobile, a problem he had seldom had on the ile St.-Louis, but it soon faded.