“Elena,” he said softly—and then froze, for when she sat up he heard the snap-and-click of an automatic pistol being chambered.
“Bless me,” he said clearly, recalling that she had said the phrase was code for Things are not what they seem—trust me. “It’s Lot,” he went on, keeping his voice level. “Or Marcel Gruey,” he added, giving his cover name.
In the thick silence he heard the snick of the safety catch being pushed up, and then the gun clunked faintly on the bedside table. She glanced around quickly, as if to make sure this was her own room, and he realized that she was still half-asleep. “What have I—” she muttered in Spanish. “Lot? Yes, it is you. What have I said to you here? I did say—” She was clearly confused, and he opened his mouth to explain that he had only this moment stepped into the room, and that she had not said anything to him, when she spoke again, in a hoarser voice: “Oh, but do take off your clothes.”
Hale’s breath caught in his throat. Yes, he thought; the compromising message is three weeks old!—and if the Abwehr had broken it we would have been arrested by now. “I—love you, Elena,” he stammered, stepping toward the bed. He would tell her about the message afterward, in the morning.
And what would she think of him then, when she learned that he had kept her ignorant in mortal danger for several extra hours? Or even for half an hour?
Still in Spanish, she whispered, “And I know I have said I love you.” She shifted in the bed, clearly to make room for him.
He could pretend to find the message later today…
… Thus not only keeping her in unknowing danger but lying to her as well. What would he think of himself, if he did that?
“Ah God,” he wailed softly. “Remember that I love you. I’ve deciphered a message that was sent to one of the other Razvedupr networks—you understand?—it was enciphered with a one-time pad that Centre used more than once. The message”—Will we ever be in this position again? he thought despairingly—“refers to our network and gives the address of this house.”
She was out of bed in an instant, and he glimpsed her naked body in the moonlight only for as long as it took her to scramble into her skirt and blouse.
“You should have run, with the radio set,” she said in clipped French as she buttoned the skirt and stepped into her shoes.
“And left you to the Gestapo,” he said in a shaky voice. “Yes, of course.”
“I’ll have to report your dereliction of duty, once we’re clear,” she panted, stuffing the gun into her purse. “We are loyal to each other only in service to the Party.”
“I’ll add a postscript to your report, when I send it,” he said giddily. “ ‘I did it because I love her.’ ”
“Oh, you fool.” She kissed his cheek as she stepped past him into the drawing room. “I won’t make a report. Let them imagine that I was with you when you deciphered it, and we will both forget foolish things said while half-asleep in the middle of the night. That’s the radio set? Good. Come on, we leave now. Peculiar evasion measures are called for, and it’s high time you got practice at them—though you will never speak of them again after the sun comes up this morning, not even to me.”
They descended the stairs to the ground floor, and then paused in the dark entry hall just inside the street door while she explained how they were to walk. Two people, she explained, even a young couple, risked drawing suspicious attention; so they would emulate the clochards, the homeless gypsies who slept under the bridges and bathed in the Seine. “The boche do not like to trouble the clochards,” she said nervously, “even during the day, when they can see them. I learned this from a Hungarian agent named Maly, who had been a Catholic priest before the Great War, and they say that a man ordained as a Catholic priest can never divest himself of that status. He was later sent to run agents in England, and then recalled to Moscow.”
Her voice was sad. Hale knew that she hated Catholic priests, and he had gathered that a recall to Moscow by Centre was often a summons to execution; but he couldn’t tell which of these facts it was, if indeed it was either of them, that grieved her.
“You are from Palestine,” she went on, “and you had the sending difficulties people from there often have, and then all unaided you found out the sending rhythms that placate—that overcome those difficulties and ultimately make for the best DX sending of all. They can’t be taught—one needs to discover them unaided, from one’s own heartbeat.”
DX meant long-distance, and Hale nodded uncertainly. “Poor Maly made a study of those rhythms,” Elena went on as she stared out through the glass at the empty street, “with the idea of achieving some sort of immortality: that is, a way to evade God’s judgment. He did not, I think, achieve that—in the end I think he chose not to avail himself of it.”
“I—I was born and baptized in Palestine,” said Hale, “but I left there well before I was two years old. I really don’t think this—”
She waved him to silence. “We will be doing an imitation as we walk,” she said. “We will walk one behind the other down the gutter in the center of the street, our footsteps combining into one of these rhythms, like two hands on the keys of a piano; later I will show you how a single person walking can do this nearly as well. You will pick it up quickly, I think. The sound of our footsteps will be likely to… confuse anyone who hears it and tries to locate us; they will look the wrong way, or imagine that it is a noise from the sky like an airplane, or even forget that they had looked for something.”
Hypnosis again, he thought defensively; or plain superstition.
“We will be doing an imitation of ‘nothing right here,’ you see?” she went on. “If the street were a painting, we would be a semblance of a blank shadowed spot. I can walk to the Quai d’Or-leans stairs and the riverbank without looking up from my feet, and you too must keep your eyes downcast, watching nothing but my feet ahead of you. Do you understand? Above all you must not look up into the sky.”
Hale was uncomfortably reminded of his childhood end-of-the year dreams—nightmares—and he realized that his breathing had become rapid and shallow. “Whatever you say,” he told her gruffly.
“We go,” she said, pulling open the door. Cold air sharp with the sea smell of the river fluffed Hale’s hair and chilled his damp chest between the buttons of his shirt. “Watch my feet,” she said as she stepped out onto the sidewalk, “and complement my pace.”
They hurried out across the dark cobblestones to the sunken cement-lined gutter that ran down the middle of the Rue le Regrattier, and as she started south, toward the quai, Hale was following at her heels, the heavy radio case swinging beside his right knee. He was acutely aware of how vulnerable he was to arrest, carrying an illicit short-wave set and a bundle of one-time pads.
The heels and toes of her shoes were tapping out a hesitant, skipping beat that echoed between the close housefronts and batted away into the open sky above, as if dancing around some absent or inaudible bass line, and with the practice he had got from playing the telegraph key he quickly found himself stepping along in a choppy rhythm that made arabesques around her pace but still avoided placing a toe-tap squarely on the implicit metronomic thudding that he almost imagined he could hear.
“Good,” she said softly over her shoulder. “You were born to this.”
“Oh, thanks—very much,” he said, breathing and speaking only sketchily, from the very tops of his lungs. The dark sky behind his lowered head seemed ponderous with momentum.