“Since June we are at war,” she reminded him, “we Communists. In war one takes outlandish risks, isn’t that right? We have agents in many factories and businesses, even in the German military, and what they bring us must be transmitted fully and immediately; Moscow will be listening at your bandwidth twenty-four hours a day now.”
“Oh.” He was numb—this seemed like suicide.
“But don’t worry too much. We have watchers, and they will warn us if the Abwehr vehicles come within a few blocks of us— their trucks always have a meter-wide circular aerial swiveling on the roof, for direction-finding to locate black transmitters, as they call our sets. And even if the Abwehr should manage to get very close, their standard procedure when the radio source is in a block of houses is to cut off the current to each house in turn and note which house loses its lights in the same moment that the radio stops sending; and your radio is wired to the current of the house next door.” She smiled. “If you should lose power in your heater circuit and fall off the air, and we see police breaking into that house, we’ll know it is time to relocate.”
“I hope they’re in the habit of leaving some lights on all night, next door,” said Hale, “just so that the Abwehr will clearly see which place to hit.” His eyes were stinging with lack of sleep, and the wine was a weight on the top of his slightly bobbing head. His brain wanted a rest from translating and composing French sentences.
“We keep a light on in the foyer of this house. Now I must go to Paris to meet a cut-out, who will relay messages between me and one of the parallel networks,” she said, “and—”
“Aren’t we in Paris?”
“We’re on the Île St.-Louis. Louisiens say they are going to Paris when they cross one of the bridges. You are a Louisien now. But I must go meet an ignorant message carrier, who doesn’t know what I look like and who will ideally assume that I’m only a cut-out myself. It may take time to make contact, with possible fallbacks. You can sleep on the sofa here for a few hours.”
“That does sound splendid,” sighed Hale, glancing at the sofa and looking forward to forgetting all these distressing concerns for a while.
She reached across the table and shook his shoulder. “Don’t sleep yet. Listen with your full attention, comrade. I am your contact with Moscow Centre, and my code name is the Latin phrase ‘Et Cetera’—remember it. ETC is our group’s radio call-sign, though if we are fortunate you will meet none of the others. You or I or both of us may have to relocate from time to time, at a moment’s notice—I’ve only been here for a week, and might be somewhere else tomorrow—and if you lose contact with me for more than three days and have no access to a wireless set, you must go to some unoccupied country, Switzerland probably, and get in contact with the Soviet military attaché there. Are you following this?”
“If I lose track of you, I go to the military attaché in Switzerland,” Hale recited. He could not imagine how he would get to Switzer-land, if the need should arise.
“You must see the attaché personally, alone, and if anyone else tries to deflect you, you must threaten them with reprisals from the NKVD; that’s the Soviet secret police, the threat should scare them if you deliver it in a mild voice. Don’t show your passport to anyone, not even the attaché—give all of them only your code name, which is ‘Lot’—and get the attaché to send a message to Moscow saying that Lot has lost contact with ETC and needs to get in touch with the director. The attaché will let you wait there until a reply comes, with instructions for you. What’s your code name?”
“Lot.”
“And my code name?”
“Et Salinae.” He shook his head. “Et Cetera.”
“That was Latin—and salina is ‘salt mine’ in Spanish, probably the same. You were thinking of Lot’s wife, who was changed to a pillar of salt, in the Book of Genesis.”
Hale was embarrassed, for the name Lot had put him in mind of the Biblical Lot, and so he probably had been thinking of this girl in terms of Lot’s wife. But what business did a young Communist have knowing Bible stories?
She had stood up, and now she crossed to the hat stand by the door and pulled her black sweater back on. “Just you work at being worth your salary”—the French word was salaire—“to the Party. You will be paid a hundred and fifty United States dollars a month, plus justifiable expenses. The Red Army never pays in any other currency—”
Hale had stood up too and started for the sofa, but now he paused. “The Red Army? I thought we were working for the Comintern.”
She bit her lip. “No, we are working for the secret service of the Red Army—Razvedupr, or GRU, both terms are short for Glavnoe Razvedyvatelnoe Upravlenie—the Chief Intelligence Administration.”
“Oh.” I should have known, he thought, that Theodora wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble just to set me spying on the Communist International.
From her pocket she dug out a brass key and tossed it to him. “That is a duplicate key to this apartment. You are to use it only in an emergency having to do with our Party work, understand?”
“Yes,” he said humbly.
“If we should ever meet accidentally on the street, don’t acknowledge me—if I’m working I might be under surveillance, by either side.” She had her hand on the doorknob, but paused and looked back at him. “And—if we should find ourselves in a situation where the motivations and identities aren’t clear—there is a code phrase which means, Things are not what they seem—trust me. It is ‘Bless me.’ Have you got that?”
“Bless me,” Hale echoed.
She nodded, and her stern manner relaxed for a moment as she grinned and made a cross in the air with her forefinger. Then she was gone, and the tall door closed behind her, and he heard her steps tapping away down the stairs. Many years later he was to learn that they had not even really been working for the Red Army, or not entirely.
If a perfectly oscillating radio circuit is connected to an aerial, it becomes a transmitter, sending a uniform whistle out over the airwaves on its particular frequency; and if a telegraph key is wired into the leads from the high-voltage battery that maintains the oscillation, the key can break the steady carrier wave into the dots and dashes of International Morse. A receiving set tuned to a point just short of oscillation on the same frequency will pick up the stuttering whistle at great distances—as long as the Heaviside Layer isn’t curling and flexing in the vagaries of les parasites.
But it often was. On many nights, hunched under a bare lightbulb in the ammonia reek among the brooms and buckets in the custodian’s closet on the roof, with sweaty earphones clamped to his head, Hale would be hearing the signal from Moscow on the 39-meter band—ETC ETC ETC—but be unable to get them to acknowledge his answering signal—KLK KLK KLK DE ETC—on the prescribed 49-meter band or any bandwidth near it. Sometimes he would get weird ghost-echo responses, old signals of his own from the day or week before, as if they had been stuck quivering in the sky until his present agitation of the airwaves had shaken them loose, distorted in their rhythms now and riding a signal as faint as an electromagnetic sigh.