“Rien a declarer, Monsieur St.-Simon?” she said with a tight smile as she took his elbow and led him through the crowded terminal.
“Uh, non,” agreed Hale in a voice that was only now beginning to shake. He certainly had nothing to declare, and the infinitive verb had no significance to him beyond the concerns of Customs.
She led him to a tiny right-hand-drive Citroen in the car park, and as soon as Hale climbed in on the left side and she pressed the starter, she said in her lively French, “If the police stop us, you are my brother, understand? We are both fair, it is believable. My name during this drive is Delphine St.-Simon. Say something quickly now, in French.”
Nervously but smoothly, and with a sincerity that surprised him, Hale recited the first several lines of Ghelderode’s Death of Doctor Faust, in which the frightened old mage complains that everything in the modern world is so false that one can blunder into one’s own self in the darkness; Hale even managed to mimic her Castilian accent. “Is that good enough for our purposes, sister Delphine?” he added in Spanish, feeling all at once absurdly pleased with himself. His shirt was damp with sweat, and he had to restrain himself from giggling.
She laughed delightedly as she clanked the car into gear and steered toward the exit. “Good! Your accent is peculiar, but not British at all. We grew up in Madrid, you and I, with our aunt Dolores…”
In a few quick sentences she gave him the outline of their immediate family history. “You work for the company Simex, where I have friends working, as a buyer of Portuguese cork, which is used for engine gaskets. Simex provides most of the construction materials to the Todt Organization, which is the branch of the German occupation force involved in building barracks and fortifications.”
The little car was roaring north in one of the right-hand lanes of a highway that passed between green forests of beech and oak, and the sun was just clearing the fringe of treetops off to his right. Hale cranked down his window to take deep breaths of the fresh air and let the chilly breeze sluice through his hair.
“Four months ago,” she went on, “you would have been sent to a special school in Moscow, to learn about things like microphotography and secret inks, and-oh, arson, and bomb construction and placement, and guns. But there is no time for any of that now. None of us ever believed that the non-aggression pact between Germany and Russia was anything more than cunning realpolitik, buying us time to prepare; and now the fascist beasts have invaded Russia, as expected, and preparation has given way to enactment.”
Hale nodded, but he detected guilty relief in her voice, and he guessed that in fact the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact had for a while shaken her faith in the Communist cause. Hitler’s invasion of Russia in June, violating and ending the pact, must have been a welcome return to virtue for devout Communists everywhere; and Hale wondered how this earnest girl’s faith would survive if Stalin should again find it efficacious to align himself with fascism.
“A Soviet network has been in place for some time,” she went on, “in Paris-perhaps several have been, unknown to one another-but apparently there is a shortage of radio sets. Certainly the Soviet military attaché in Vichy fled to Moscow in June without providing a single one. The established networks are not allowed to ask the local Communist parties for help in this, as they are considered insecure; but new, parallel networks may get this help from the local parties without compromising any others. You and I are members of one such independent network. We needed a wireless telegrapher who had no local acquaintance at all, and you are what Moscow Centre has finally delivered to us. When we get to my apartment we will pack up all records of St.-Simon, and you will become someone fresh.”
“Am I still to be a cork buyer?” asked Hale in French. “At…Simex?”
“You are only that if the police stop us in the next half hour. Once we’re at my apartment, you and I will forget everything about St.-Simon and his job, and Simex too, until such time as you may need to leave the country. In your new name you will be a Swiss student lying low in Paris -an embusqué, a shirker of your national duty.” She glanced away from the traffic to give him a quizzical look. “Centre may ask you to pose as a homosexual. You do look like a Romantic poet, with your blond hair and cheekbones, and it would bolster your embusqué status.”
“The Romantic poets weren’t homosexuals, and neither am I,” said Hale in alarm, barely remembering to keep speaking French. He scowled at her. “Cheekbones or no cheekbones.”
She was looking ahead through the windscreen and she didn’t quite smile, but Hale saw a dimple appear in her cheek. “Oh, you like girls?”
“D’un tumulte,” said Hale with dignity.
“D’un tumulte!” She laughed and added, in English, “Oh my!”
Traffic slowed and the air was fumy with automobile exhaust as they entered the city of Paris in a tangle of cars and horse-drawn carriages and bicycle traffic at the Porte de Gentilly. Hale saw a cluster of guards in tan uniforms with swastika armbands standing alertly in the back of a muddy flatbed truck by the side of the highway, and he must have flinched, because in her exotic French the girl told him, “The ones to fear, the Gestapo, aren’t so obvious.” She licked her lips and nodded at the shiny black truck that was idling ahead of them. “You see the license plate? WL is Wehrmacht Luftwaffe. They, and the Gestapo and the Abwehr, are the ones who come after us, tracking our wireless transmissions with direction finders.”
“Bloody hell,” said Hale in English. After that neither of them said anything until they were on the Boulevard St.-Michel, driving past the Luxembourg Gardens; and even then she only spoke to tell him, in a subdued voice, more about their imaginary childhoods in Madrid, though according to her he was just about to abandon that identity.
Most of the traffic on the boulevards appeared to be green military trucks with the black German cross on the hoods.
But Hale peered up curiously at the tall nineteenth-century building fronts, and when the girl steered the car into a right turn onto the Boulevard St.-Germain and passed the open-air market at the Place Maubert, already crowded in the bright morning sunlight, he was as forcibly cheered by the plain fact of being in Paris as he would have been by a fast pint of champagne. And he couldn’t repress a delighted yelp when she swung the car left and drove across a bridge over the Seine onto what was obviously a little island city in the middle of the river. She smiled and rocked her head in a gesture that acknowledged the charm of the place.
She drove to a narrow street off the six-block Rue St.-Louis-en-Île that was the center line of the island, and after she switched off the engine Hale got out and obediently helped her lift the front end of the car and swing it toward the curb; they stepped around to the back bumper and did the same there, then returned to the front to do it again, and within a minute they had walked the tiny car crabwise until its right-side wheels were up on the curb in a gap between two old panel trucks. Not good for a fast escape, Hale thought; but perhaps a car wouldn’t be much good for fleeing in anyway, in the narrow streets on this little island.
The street was the Rue le Regrattier, and the girl’s apartment was a couple of high-ceilinged rooms on the third floor of a subdivided seventeenth-century town house. The first thing she did when they were inside was to take from him every bit of paper that had to do with St.-Simon, including the passport, and give him instead a set of documents that identified him as Marcel Gruey, a Swiss student. Then, over a kitchen table breakfast of bread, garlic sausage, scallions, and a rough red wine, his hostess told him that he would have an apartment in this same building, but that he would be spending most nights in a locked custodian’s closet on the roof, transmitting and receiving signals from midnight until sometimes dawn or later. “Of course a high-voltage battery is used to get oscillation of the set,” she went on quickly, “but the set is equipped with a cathode-type vacuum valve heated by an alternating current for better distance reception, so you’ll be using household current in the heater circuit.”