But he was shivering, and he couldn’t make himself ask Elena about what they had just experienced.
“Really?” he said instead, in a brittle voice. “‘The last time’? Easy work for the Abwehr and Gestapo, just wait for Moscow to hand over her spies again.”
Elena too seemed to be distracted. “ Moscow works in ways that needn’t be explained to us.”
“Her wonders to perform,” agreed Hale in English.
“Marcel,” she said in what struck him as an inordinately angry tone, “I have no choice but to report your-flippancy! Can’t you-”
“What’s that?” he interrupted.
Looking past the radio set, he had noticed a shadowy delta of spots on the floor, fanning out toward the window; and when he walked over on his knees to look at it more closely, he saw that it was hundreds of hair-thin rings scorched into the polished boards. Some of the faint rings could be traced to be a yard across, but most were no bigger than a penny, and some were such tiny black pinpricks that he assumed a magnifying glass would be needed to see that they were actually rings. He swiped at a patch of them with the damp palm of his hand, and they had been so lightly burned in that the blackness rubbed away almost completely.
Elena had stood up and crossed to the window. “It’s on the sill too,” she said humbly. “Some kind of electrical discharge…?”
“Ball lightning, probably,” he agreed almost shrilly, crawling back to where they had left the bottle. It could have been ball lightning, he told himself as he pulled out the cork. It could have been.
“I think we sleep in our clothes tonight,” she said, stepping away from the window and tugging the frames shut over the aerial wire and latching them. Clearly she was wishing there were curtains to pull across the view of the darkening sky. Still facing the glass, she said, “I think we should sleep together, with the light on.” She exhaled sharply. “Once I would have prayed.”
Hale glanced at the faint black soot marks on the palm of his hand-and he thought he understood why Adam and Eve had hidden from Yahweh, in the Garden, for he wouldn’t be praying tonight either. I heard Thy voice in the Garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself. “Once I would have too,” he said. It occurred to him that she probably assumed that because he was British he had been brought up as an Anglican. “I was a Roman Catholic,” he said, barely loud enough for her to hear.
“Oh, you are a bad influence!” She turned and looked at him. “You do understand in our clothes, don’t you?”
I was naked, and I hid myself. “Yes, Elena.” In this half-light, with her hair pulled back and her rumpled skirt and blouse looking too big for her, and the eyes in her narrow face wide with uncertainty, she looked twelve years old; and Hale himself was wishing that he was back in Chipping Campden and could climb into the old upstairs box bed.
“Dawn, be sudden,” she said in English as she lay down next to where he sat.
Hale thought it was a quote from a poem he had read, but suddenly he was too exhausted to ask her about it.
Next day they bought fresh clothing at a black market stall by the river and moved into a different apartment, and that night Hale gingerly strung his antenna and aerial again, and plugged in the radio set-but though they braced themselves for another bout of wind and scorched floors and idiotically accelerated signal, or contrarily for the disappointment of finding that the set had been wrecked, in fact it was a session just like the ones he had experienced during the last ten days in the Rue le Regrattier house-the radio worked perfectly, but his call-sign drew no response from Centre.
Elena composed a note to the agent Cassagnac, proposing a meeting, and she went off by herself to put it in what she called a dubok, which she told Hale could be any agreed-upon space that was not likely to be disturbed-a gap behind a loose brick in a quiet alley, a knothole in a remote tree, a flap of loose carpet in a cinema. Duboks were generally used only once, and the recipient often hired some random passerby to walk ahead and make the pickup. The best duboks, she told him, were often to be found in the ornate, dusty vestibules of churches, which led Hale to believe that wherever the security-minded girl was going to put the note, it would not be in a church.
At the end of the week they moved again, and on the following Monday morning they went to meet with the agent Cassagnac. When Hale asked how she had learned where and when to meet the man, he was told that of nine broken windows in an abandoned convent in Montparnasse, three had been repaired with cardboard.
To meet Cassagnac they bought an electric torch and then passed through a low door in the Rue de la Harpe, which Elena said was the oldest street in Paris; and when by the torch’s beam they had picked their way down a zigzag succession of worn stone stairs, their hair fluttering in the cold clay-scented breeze from below, they found themselves in a cavernous chamber lit only in sections by paraffin lanterns hung on pillars that flanked gaping arches. The yellow glow of the lanterns disappeared far overhead in stray gleams on a concave stone ceiling, and wooden tables were arranged on the broad flags of the floor.
A man’s voice spoke-“Et Cetera!”-and in spite of the echoes Hale was able to locate a figure sitting at one of the farther tables. The man went on, in French, “And Monsieur Lot.” He pronounced it Low, which nettled Hale. “Join me, please.”
Hale and Elena shuffled forward across the uneven floor, and from the cold drafts Hale got the impression that a number of tunnels extended out of this chamber, perhaps even under the river-and he was sure that this floor was Roman architecture, if not older. Catching a nimble fugitive down here would be impossible.
A bottle sat on the man’s table, and after they had sat down on a bench opposite him, he poured two glasses full of what proved to be a vaporously aromatic cognac. He appeared to be about forty, with graying brown hair curled back over his ears and falling onto his forehead, and his lean face was lined with Gallic humor and melancholy. He wore a gray sweater under a battered dark jacket.
“You are adrift,” he said, “and the relocation apparat isn’t working.”
“Centre seems to be abandoning us,” Elena said, and she told him about their address having been broadcast insecurely, and described the disorder at the place of conspiracy in front of St.-Sulpice. Hale noted that she did not mention the weirdly accelerated signals and the burned floor of a week ago.
“Call it a testing,” Cassagnac said, “or a distillation. Survival of a few, which will include an increased percentage of the most genuinely committed. Before he himself was executed, Yezhov of the NKVD used to say, ‘Better that ten innocent people should die than that one traitor should go undetected.’”
“I met Theo Maly,” Elena said in a cautious voice, “the Hungarian illegal agent, the ex-Catholic priest. He knew he was going to his death, when he obeyed the NKVD summons back to Moscow.”
“You were a child, and Maly had great charm.” Cassagnac sipped his brandy. “Charm, wit-intelligence, even-these are I think preliminary catalysts, like picture books for children: useful ladder rungs for awakening people, but not things for the people to cling to, once they’ve been awakened. I believe Russia has a…a primitive guardian angel, which must be denied at every turn; and those who persist in loving the angel, and merit her special assistance, must be killed-ideally after they have given their full measure of acceptable benefits to the Party, and not one benefit more.”