Declare

Page 14

 

  She did say that she was eighteen years old, which seemed plausible. The only lines on her face were a crease underlining each lower eyelid, implying habitual humor or skepticism, and the summer sun had brought out a scatter of freckles across her smooth cheeks, and Hale never saw her broad mouth touched with lipstick; but her walk had the careless balance of a woman's hips and shoulders, and after his third glass of vin bouche he would find himself uncomfortably aware of her breasts under the invariably loose blouse.

  In spite of her lack of any make-up, she always had a small tortoise-shell-backed mirror in her pocket, and with uncanny perception she would pull it out whenever his gaze drifted below her face, and turn it toward him and say, merrily, "Want to see a monkey?" With repetition it had become daunting, if not actually annoying.

  The faintly flirting tone he thought he had detected in their first conversation was certainly absent these days. She was generally cheerful, but there was no extra interest in her blue eyes when she listened to him, and their talk was either oblique references to the material she got from the couriers and cut-outs she met during the day, or speculative gossip about their neighbors, or heated arguments about modern poetry and painting. She admired the work of Picasso and Matisse, while Hale considered that painting had reached its zenith with Monet and had been rapidly deteriorating since; and Hale had thought he was progressive in liking Eliot and Auden, but her favorite poets were obscure Spanish and South American modernists like Pedro Salinas and Cesar Vallejo. Sometimes she brought him books and magazine articles about Switzerland, and at dinner he would often recite for her details of his ever-more-rounded cover identity. He and Elena both kept track of police activity in their neighborhood and cautioned each other about suspected Gestapo agents, but though the messages she relayed to him from her agents generally had to do with the German offensive against the Soviet Union, somehow she and Hale nearly never discussed the war itself.

  After dinner the sky would be some dark shade of purple behind the chimneys, with Hale's radio set waiting for him on the roof of their old town house. Elena would gather the cat to her bosom for the stroll back, and Hale, beginning to be nervous about the perilous hours of concentration now stretching ahead of him, would puff on a cigarette and make aimless small talk and try not to think about the cat's position. At least he was beginning to get used to the vertigo effects of sending with the newer, faster beat.

  Because his work frequently involved encoding and transmitting bulletins about German bombing flights, Hale quickly noticed that the periods when Moscow Centre abruptly went off the air corresponded to scheduled air raids over that city; and when Centre's transmission ceased in the middle of a message during the night of October 19 and had still not resumed after a week, he guessed that the Razvedupr communications headquarters was being relocated to some site away from Moscow.

  Elena nervously agreed with his guess, and by relaying inquiries through her furtive contacts she established that all the networks had lost the radio link with Centre. All any of them could do was remain in place and monitor the airwaves, she said.

  Hale continued to listen dutifully to the busy ether, but none of the inscrutable messages skipping across the underside of the night sky gave any indication of being from Centre; and for half-hour periods he would monotonously and perilously tap out his call signal, with no reply to justify the risk of detection.

  During his first week at the rooftop post, he had spent the occasional idle hour listening to broadcasts not addressed to the ETC network, and he had maintained his copying proficiency by making sure he could transcribe the indecipherable numbers as fast as they were sent; now, with nothing at all being broadcast around the 40-meter band, he unfolded those old lists of numbers and studied them. During the stretches when the tense work had filled whole nights he had not always remembered to burn or eat the used pages from his one-time pads, and so he was able to dig a few of these out of the waste bin now and test his deciphering speed by idly subtracting the pad numbers from the unknown code groups, of course getting random nonsense results.

  But late one night at the end of October he was chilled to find one three-week-old message whose numbers visibly corresponded to the numbers on a couple of his discarded one-time pad pages, and after a moment's work he found that the pad pages could actually decipher the message. This was a violation of protocol on Moscow's part, for the whole point of one-time pads was that they were to be used one time only-if Centre was using the same pad more than once, for more than one network, it gave the Abwehr a sporting chance to deduce what the pad's numbers were, and thus at least in theory enabled them to render out the basic substitution-code, which in turn could be broken easily.

  The message was evidently addressed to another network somewhere in France, and it proved to be a complaint about him. Its text ordered the recipient to find out why the ETC network apparently wasn't broadcasting-this must have been sent before he had figured out the efficient sending rhythm-and it gave the full address of the house in the Rue le Regrattier.

  Hale reread the text, his face suddenly cold. How many other messages had been sent using this particular one-time pad? And had he now stumbled by chance across the one message that had given the address of this house, or was this message just one of several, addressed to all of the other networks, as seemed more likely?

  This was a clear breach of security. The carelessness of some overworked cipher clerk in Moscow had irretreivably compromised the location of the ETC network-three weeks ago!-and Hale knew that the rules now required him to pack up the radio set and instantly escape across the rooftops and make his way alone to the military attache in Switzerland; Centre would eventually send someone to escort Elena to safety, if the Abwehr had not broken the code and arrested her in the meantime. And Gestapo soldiers with socks over their boots to muffle their footsteps might be stealing up the stairs at this very moment.

  Without pausing for thought he tucked the earphones and telegraph key into the set's carrying case, unplugged the power cable and stuffed it in beside the earphones, and closed and latched the case; he swept all his papers into the waste bin and shook them all into the chute that led down to the building's furnace, but carefully tucked his rubber-banded deck of still-unused one-time pads into his pants pocket. Then he paused, looking out through the little window at the moon hanging low in the dark western sky. Daylight and all its dangers couldn't be more than a couple of hours away. He glanced for one yearning moment at the slanted roof door, then shook his head and unlocked the bigger door that led to the interior stairs.

  He hurried down the unlit carpeted stairs to Elena's apartment on the third floor and unlocked her door with the brass key she had given him, and which he had carried with him ever since, more for sentiment than for security concerns.

  The lights were out in her apartment, and at least there were no uniformed figures ransacking her bookcases yet; in the moments until his eyes adjusted to the darkness he just stood still and sniffed the warm air, but smelled only her soap and the stale reek of her Gauloises cigarette butts. Hale lowered the radio onto the drawing room rug and tiptoed to her bedroom door.

  She didn't awaken when he turned the knob and pushed the door open on silent hinges-he could dimly see her long body in the bed, lying on her side facing him, and he could hear her regular breathing. The window was open to the autumn night breeze, and the blanket was down around her waist; moonlight faintly highlighted her bare shoulders, and he knew that he would be able to see her breasts if the electric light were on.

  "Elena," he said softly-and then froze, for when she sat up he heard the snap-and-click of an automatic pistol being chambered.

  "Bless me," he said clearly, recalling that she had said the phrase was code for Things are not what they seem-trust me. "It's Lot," he went on, keeping his voice level. "Or Marcel Gruey," he added, giving his cover name.

  In the thick silence he heard the sn
ick of the safety catch being pushed up, and then the gun clunked faintly on the bedside table. She glanced around quickly, as if to make sure this was her own room, and he realized that she was still half-asleep. "What have I-" she muttered in Spanish. " Lot? Yes, it is you. What have I said to you here? I did say-" She was clearly confused, and he opened his mouth to explain that he had only this moment stepped into the room, and that she had not said anything to him, when she spoke again, in a hoarser voice: "Oh, but do take off your clothes. "

  Hale's breath caught in his throat. Yes, he thought; the compromising message is three weeks old!-and if the Abwehr had broken it we would have been arrested by now. "I-love you, Elena," he stammered, stepping toward the bed. He would tell her about the message afterward, in the morning.

  And what would she think of him then, when she learned that he had kept her ignorant in mortal danger for several extra hours? Or even for half an hour?

  Still in Spanish, she whispered, "And I know I have said I love you. " She shifted in the bed, clearly to make room for him.

  He could pretend to find the message later today. . . Thus not only keeping her in unknowing danger but lying to her as well. What would he think of himself, if he did that?

  "Ah God," he wailed softly. "Remember that I love you. I've deciphered a message that was sent to one of the other Razvedupr networks-you understand?-it was enciphered with a one-time pad that Centre used more than once. The message"-Will we ever be in this position again? he thought despairingly-"refers to our network and gives the address of this house. "

  She was out of bed in an instant, and he glimpsed her naked body in the moonlight only for as long as it took her to scramble into her skirt and blouse.

  "You should have run, with the radio set," she said in clipped French as she buttoned the skirt and stepped into her shoes.

  "And left you to the Gestapo," he said in a shaky voice. "Yes, of course. "

  "I'll have to report your dereliction of duty, once we're clear," she panted, stuffing the gun into her purse. "We are loyal to each other only in service to the Party. "

  "I'll add a postscript to your report, when I send it," he said giddily. "'I did it because I love her. '"

  "Oh, you fool. " She kissed his cheek as she stepped past him into the drawing room. "I won't make a report. Let them imagine that I was with you when you deciphered it, and we will both forget foolish things said while half-asleep in the middle of the night. That's the radio set? Good. Come on, we leave now. Peculiar evasion measures are called for, and it's high time you got practice at them-though you will never speak of them again after the sun comes up this morning, not even to me. "

  They descended the stairs to the ground floor, and then paused in the dark entry hall just inside the street door while she explained how they were to walk. Two people, she explained, even a young couple, risked drawing suspicious attention; so they would emulate the clochards, the homeless gypsies who slept under the bridges and bathed in the Seine. "The boche do not like to trouble the clochards," she said nervously, "even during the day, when they can see them. I learned this from a Hungarian agent named Maly, who had been a Catholic priest before the Great War, and they say that a man ordained as a Catholic priest can never divest himself of that status. He was later sent to run agents in England, and then recalled to Moscow. "

  Her voice was sad. Hale knew that she hated Catholic priests, and he had gathered that a recall to Moscow by Centre was often a summons to execution; but he couldn't tell which of these facts it was, if indeed it was either of them, that grieved her.

  "You are from Palestine," she went on, "and you had the sending difficulties people from there often have, and then all unaided you found out the sending rhythms that placate-that overcome those difficulties and ultimately make for the best DX sending of all. They can't be taught-one needs to discover them unaided, from one's own heartbeat. "

  DX meant long-distance, and Hale nodded uncertainly.

  "Poor Maly made a study of those rhythms," Elena went on as she stared out through the glass at the empty street, "with the idea of achieving some sort of immortality: that is, a way to evade God's judgment. He did not, I think, achieve that-in the end I think he chose not to avail himself of it. "

  "I-I was born and baptized in Palestine," said Hale, "but I left there well before I was two years old. I really don't think this-"

  She waved him to silence. "We will be doing an imitation as we walk," she said. "We will walk one behind the other down the gutter in the center of the street, our footsteps combining into one of these rhythms, like two hands on the keys of a piano; later I will show you how a single person walking can do this nearly as well. You will pick it up quickly, I think. The sound of our footsteps will be likely to. . . confuse anyone who hears it and tries to locate us; they will look the wrong way, or imagine that it is a noise from the sky like an airplane, or even forget that they had looked for something. "

  Hypnosis again, he thought defensively; or plain superstition.

  "We will be doing an imitation of 'nothing right here,' you see?" she went on. "If the street were a painting, we would be a semblance of a blank shadowed spot. I can walk to the Quai d'Orleans stairs and the riverbank without looking up from my feet, and you too must keep your eyes downcast, watching nothing but my feet ahead of you. Do you understand? Above all you must not look up into the sky. "

  Hale was uncomfortably reminded of his childhood end-of-the year dreams-nightmares-and he realized that his breathing had become rapid and shallow. "Whatever you say," he told her gruffly.

  "We go," she said, pulling open the door. Cold air sharp with the sea smell of the river fluffed Hale's hair and chilled his damp chest between the buttons of his shirt. "Watch my feet," she said as she stepped out onto the sidewalk, "and complement my pace. "