A moment later she had climbed up beside him on the roof. He was able to croak the word “Run.”
But she got her arm under his shoulders and dragged him with her across the roof to the side away from the street, steering wide around a dusty skylight and the insulators at the mooring of a high-voltage cable. Hale pushed himself along with his feet and hands, but his vision was dissolving in rainbow glitters, and he wished she would just drop him and run away on her own.
Another brick house abutted this one, the gutter of its roof hanging a yard over the surface of the one they were on; and when they had limped and scuffled over to it, Elena pulled Hale upright and shoved him onto the slope of the adjoining roof, then hopped up onto it herself and dragged him up the shingled incline. Hale was able to climb along beside her now, and once they had hoisted themselves over the roof peak of this house and down the other side, they were on a hidden slope, facing the canyon of a street that was not connected at all to the house they’d started from.
She let him lie then, while she slithered down to this gutter and peered over it; after a few seconds she climbed back up to where he lay spread-eagled on his back.
“Gestapo?” she panted.
Close enough, and he was able to nod. His heaving chest was beginning to draw breath into his lungs, and each exhalation blew bloody spray; a few drops spotted her taut face, but she didn’t blink.
“There’s a drainpipe,” she said; “follow me. We’ve got to climb down it, or slide. Just keep your hands on it, right?”
“Right,” he croaked.
Her face was pale as she crawled backward down the roof on her stomach, and when her legs were below the edge, she slowly let her weight go over, while her white hands clutched the gutter. She disappeared by cautious inches, but she gave him a strained smile before her head receded out of his sight.
His pulse was roaring in his ears so that he could not tell if there was any commotion yet on the street side of their own building, or on the rooftops behind him, and as he rolled over to face the shingles and begin to slide down, scrabbling with his feet to know when he had reached the roof gutter, he became aware that he was panting in the pulse-counterpoint rhythm he had learned to use in working the telegraph key.
Ten minutes later they were sitting at a table in a café in the Mouffetard Market, sipping a second couple of brandies after having gulped the first two.
After they had shinnied and slid down the drainpipe to the street and hurried across it and through the next building to the sidewalk of a broader boulevard, Elena had looked at Hale in the gray daylight and then pulled him into a recessed shop doorway, where she lifted her sweater to wipe his face with her blouse and used her fingers to push his blond hair back into some order. His nose had stopped bleeding, and at her suggestion he reluctantly took off his own blood-spotted sweater and folded it under his arm, shivering in the chilly wind. “Now you merely look as if you got into a fight,” she had told him as they resumed their deliberately leisurely walk, “and not as if you’d been dragged behind a car.”
Elena now clanked her glass down on the wooden tabletop with more force than she probably had intended. “Thank you,” she said quietly.
His nod was jerky. “You’re—welcome.” He touched his glass. His hands had stopped shaking in the warm, tobacco-scented air of the café, and he hoped he would get a third drink. “Can we even pay for these? I mean, can you? All I’ve got—if it didn’t fall out of my pocket—”
“We’re fine,” she told him. She glanced around the room; the tile walls and floor echoed with clatter from the kitchen, but no one was sitting near the two of them. “The radio began roaring like a lion trying to sing, and then a second later you hit the roof—that was you, wasn’t it? You sounded like a sack of coal dropped from an airplane—and I thought all the devils and Gestapos in the world were about to break into the room.” She patted her skirt pocket and sat back and gulped more brandy. “I grabbed my gun, and the one-time pads and the papers, and the money, and that’s when you broke the window. The machine is gone, but we’re still mobile and nothing is compromised.”
He exhaled more air than he had thought was in his lungs. The radio began roaring like a lion, she had said. And something, some inertial force, had undeniably held him up and spun him around in his jump to the pension roof. He opened his mouth to tell her about it, but found that he could not; in this moment he was sure that she would believe it, but he was stopped by embarrassment, or shame, as if the gaudy, outré event was proof of some moral failing on his part. “So what do we do now?” he said instead, dully. “Find another machine?”
She was looking away, toward the street door.
“No,” she said, after a pause. “The last message I deciphered was an order, for both of us.” Very quietly, still without looking at him, she went on, “We are ordered to report in person to Moscow, using our old Vichy-issue St.-Simon passports—going by way of neutral Lisbon, via an Air France flight to Istanbul and then by railway to Samsun on the Black Sea coast; none of these trips is out of character for employees of Simex, but in Samsun there will be a cigarette smuggler’s boat waiting to take us to Batumi in the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic. Russian Intourist railway tickets will be waiting for us in Tbilisi, two hundred miles east of Batumi.” Her voice was tense, even frightened, and she blinked rapidly. “They don’t like agents to travel by Intourist; the in is short for inostranets, which is Russian for foreign—it brands the holder of the passport as a foreigner in good favor with the Soviet state. Passports with Intourist visas in them can’t be used again. Delphine and Philippe St.-Simon will have to be retired.”
Hale’s heartbeat quickened. This was the opportunity for escape, for both of them, from the frightening mysteries, natural and unnatural, of wartime Paris.
He reached out and took hold of her cold hand on the tabletop. “We won’t go,” he said. She was frowning, clearly about to interrupt, so he went on in a fast whisper, “You know what a summons to Moscow means; you know what it meant for your friend Maly, in spite of his filthy clochard rhythms. ‘Retired’ is right. Listen, in the entire rest of your natural life you’ll surely be able to do something for the Communist cause, something you wouldn’t be able to do if you let them kill you now. Cassagnac said that this generation of the Soviet secret services will be killed in their own turn before long, and that the next lot is likely to be more reasonable. Wait for them, with me. I love you. Come to England with me.” His voice was shaking, and for the first time in three months he thought of her again as Lot’s wife. “Don’t look back.”
Now tears spilled down her cheeks; she cuffed them away. “ ‘Come to England’! You might find it difficult getting to England yourself, as Marcel Gruey the embusqué Swiss student. Answer me honestly, once and for alclass="underline" will you come with me?”
“I won’t go to Moscow.” He tried to sound confident when he added, “I really think you won’t either.”
Tears still streaked her face, but her expression was blank. “I would sooner try to… live on the river bottom, and breathe water like the fishes, than disobey my masters. If it is their will that I be shot in the Lubyanka cellars in Moscow, then that is my will too. You and I will not see each other again, I think.”