A roar in the sky that Hale had thought at first was thunder grew louder and droning, and then he flinched and glanced up as a trimotor Junkers 52 sailed heavily across the gray sky several hundred feet overhead, its broad silver wings rocking as it banked in for imminent touchdown at Orly.
“The verse from Job,” he said too loudly, embarrassed at having been startled by the plane. “Well, it means nothing to me, besides Yahweh telling Job, rudely, that if the world is run according to any rules at all, those rules are beyond Job’s comprehension. Let’s move along faster here, we’re getting soaked.”
“If the belt is a recognition signal,” she went on doggedly, almost pleadingly, “I don’t think we need to worry about its being one that would be recognized by any mere Razvedupr or Gestapo agents.”
“Except Cassagnac,” Hale objected, “and whoever told him about it; and the man in London who told me to say I’d bought a belt in an ironmonger’s shop in Paris, as a password phrase.” He smiled and reached out and squeezed her shoulder under the sodden sweater. “Your angel will be able to recognize it even in my pocket.”
“Eyeless in Gaza!” she burst out in English, suddenly very angry. Hale stepped back from her in bewilderment; this was another quote from an English poem—Milton? Samson Agonistes?—and Gaza was a town in Palestine. Elena turned away from him and strode on ahead, and Hale thought her voice was choked with tears when she called back to him, “You be sure to quote the Catholic version, when they shoot you.”
Hale splashed hurriedly through the puddles at her heels, not at all sure of what she had meant; did she suspect that he too was a member of the British secret service? Surely not—he had almost forgotten it himself, until Cassagnac’s talk today had made him consider fleeing back to England, and he was certain that she would instantly turn him in if she ever suspected that he was a spy. No, she had simply seen him as one of these hypothetical agents who unwittingly begin to… what, operate in a higher category, like her friend Maly, and perhaps like herself.
The thought made him consider again the idea of running, of finding his way back to England. If it had been one of the big Focke Achgelis helicopters, instead of a plane, with big rotor blades turning slowly enough to be seen … Resentfully, he thought of his year’s-end childhood nightmares, which Theodora had been so interested in; and then he remembered his and Elena’s predawn clochard walk ten days ago, which had somehow transported them from one island in the Seine to the far end of the other—You were born for this, she had said that night—and he recalled the terrible near-music in the earphones the next night, and the weirdly scorched floor…
The implications of all this were simply too morbid and medieval to be true, or at least to be consistently true—he had been vaguely hoping that all these things would recede without consequence or sequel, and he had convinced himself that the emotion he had felt, when the radio had gone mad and the wind had been rattling the shingles outside the apartment window on that night, had not been fearful eagerness.
To wear the belt would be to voluntarily participate in this filthy old business… which, really, he had started to do when he had begun tapping out his wireless signals in the insistent, pulsehopping rhythm.
Recognition, he thought bleakly as he pulled the belt out of his pocket and slung it around his waist; and perhaps some awful sort of protection, by God knew what means, from God knew what threat.
He sprinted through the rain to catch up with her, and after tapping her on the shoulder he pointed to the ankh buckle cinched at his waist. She gave him a broad, relieved smile, and they walked back to the apartment arm-in-arm.
The radio behaved normally that night, and once again Moscow did not respond.
SIX: Paris, 1941
There was a Door to which I found no Key:
There was a Veil past which I could not see:
Some little Talk a while of ME and THEE
There seemed, and then no more of THEE and ME.
—Omar Khayyám, The Rubáiyát, Edward J. FitzGerald translation
On the last day of 1941 Centre sent orders that both Hale and Elena were to report in person to Moscow immediately, and that the ETC network was to be retired.
Radio contact with Moscow Centre had been reestablished for a month by that time, and right away Elena had been ordered to take over half of the radio duties, while at the same time resuming her job of meeting the furtive couriers and sources. And at the end it was Elena who deciphered the summons order—probably only moments before the Gestapo broke down the front door of the latest of the Rive Gauche pensions in which she and Hale had been renting rooms.
Moscow Centre had not come back on the air until November 29. During the two weeks preceding that, Elena had got work as a typist at the Simex offices in the Lido building on the Champs-Élysées, while Hale had developed a rudimentary network among the unemployed and alcoholic clochards.
Neither of them had accomplished much in that interlude.
Though she was given only innocuous clerical work to do, Elena had learned that Simex was the main procurement firm working for the German occupation authorities—Simex executives were allowed free access to Wehrmacht installations, and the Abwehr actually consulted Simex engineers on secret German construction projects, and of course the company had a sophisticated radio system—and she guessed that Simex, and its sister corporation Simexco, in Brussels, were the perfect hermetic Soviet network she had speculated about to Hale, the intelligence source that was so secure and omniscient that Centre could afford to, and therefore arguably would be shrewd to, give the Gestapo the delusive satisfaction of rolling up all the other networks. Elena had begun carrying her little automatic pistol with her in her purse after she had deduced that, and Hale had known it was for killing herself if she should be captured, lest her conclusions should be wrung out of her by Gestapo interrogators.
And Hale had become a drinking companion of the ragged old riverside clochards. Their language was a mix of French and something that might have been Gypsy Romany, but he picked it up quickly, and his custom of always bringing a bottle of grappa or burgundy to their makeshift bridge shelters endeared him to them. Among them he felt as though he had drifted into a lower order of secret service—they were largely indifferent to last year’s shift in government, and the only secrets they had were their modest thefts of food and clothing and liquor, and the locations of the best pools along the riverbanks for catching trout. But they flew kites with pinwheels on them on moonless nights, and somehow always knew to reel the kites down when a formation of German planes was within half an hour of passing overhead; and one morning in the middle of November one of them told Hale, as he passed him a bottle in the shade under the Pont St.-Michel, “They were stopped at Vyasma, the boche were, that’s a hundred and sixty kilometers west of Moscow—the weather’s better right now, no rain to turn the roads into mud, and today their trucks and tanks are moving east again—tanks move better than trucks through mud, being on tracks instead of wheels, though all their provisions are in the trucks—but the rain and snow will be back on them within a day or two, and they know it; they’re all reading Caulaincourt’s Memoires, about Napoléon’s failed siege in 1812.” The old man could have had no way of knowing any of this—unless, as the clochards claimed, their kites sometimes gave them true dreams— but Hale would have been tempted to encipher it and send it as unconfirmed rumor anyway, if Moscow had been on the air then.