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.”