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 attaché 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 Île de la Cité 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 cassées, 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 cassées, 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 Panthéon, 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.”