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.”
“Elena,” he burst out, “the jump from the house to the pension roof was too far-I would have fallen into the alley, but”-he took a deep breath and looked away from her-“Cassagnac’s damned belt-didn’t fall. It kept moving in a straight line, like a gyroscope resisting a sideways pull. Your radio was going mad, right?” He was sweating. “Something was paying attention to us ten minutes ago, something like what burned the floor of the garret in the house by the Panthéon. If you go to Moscow, you’ll be getting more deeply involved in this, this God-damned stuff!”
She was pale, and her head swung back and forth wearily. “ Moscow found it efficacious to ally herself with Germany,” she said, “for a while. If realpolitik requires that she ally herself with other abominable forces now, it is not my place to be…scrupulous, fastidious.”
Put it off, Hale thought. “Very well.” He sighed shakily. “But we can travel a little way together. To hell with Marcel Gruey-I can travel with you, as far as Lisbon, as Philippe St.-Simon the cork wholesaler. He’s an established business traveler, a collaborator, traveling with his sister-he’ll have no problems.”
Her momentary control broke, and now she was sobbing softly. “Oh, Marcel!-Lot-but you should have lied to me, pretended to be willing to obey the order, and then just run away from me in Lisbon. Now I cannot possibly give you the St.-Simon passport.”
He stared at her, his mouth open. Her determination was as obviously genuine as her distress. It didn’t even occur to him to be angry-he had known from the first that she was as deeply committed to communism as he was to England, as he had once been to Roman Catholicism.
“What chance,” he asked slowly, watching his pulse jog his relaxed hand on the brandy glass, “do you think Marcel Gruey has of getting a flight to Lisbon?”
The padded shoulders of her sweater jerked up and down in a shrug. “He’s a citizen of a neutral country, wanting to visit another. Buy a round-trip ticket, it will look better, if you are able to afford it. You’ve studied your Swiss cover well enough to get through any interrogation they’re likely to bother with. At worst, you’ll have to stay in France -live with your clochards until Russia defeats the fascists.” She brushed splinters of roof shingle from her hair onto the tabletop, and her blue eyes stared at him miserably. “You’re a bad man, I think-no, a good man but a bad agent, a bad Communist-but nevertheless I hope you don’t hate me.”
He drained his glass, hoping that the alcohol would maintain a perspective that he feared he wouldn’t have when he was sober. “I love you, Elena,” he said hoarsely when he had clanked the glass back down. “And I’m-glad that I didn’t lie to you.” About that one thing, at least, he thought.
She nodded, and stirred herself to pull the old mirror out of her pocket. She turned it toward him and asked softly, “Do you want to see a monkey?” The glass had been cracked at some point since the last time, probably during her climb down the drainpipe, and Hale saw two reflections of himself. “We have not got to know each other, you and I,” she said. Then she sighed and blinked around at the corners of the high ceiling. “Centre did not allow for today’s intrusion by the Gestapo; the Lisbon tickets being held at the Orly Air France desk are for tomorrow. This is the very last day of the year-if we can find a room to rent somewhere, we can spend this very last night together.” She smiled sadly as she tucked the broken mirror away. “For once, we will not have to find an arrondissement that’s scheduled for round-the-clock electricity.”