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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."
They hurried out across the dark cobblestones to the sunken cement-lined gutter that ran down the middle of the Rue le Regrattier, and as she started south, toward the quai, Hale was following at her heels, the heavy radio case swinging beside his right knee. He was acutely aware of how vulnerable he was to arrest, carrying an illicit short-wave set and a bundle of one-time pads.
The heels and toes of her shoes were tapping out a hesitant, skipping beat that echoed between the close housefronts and batted away into the open sky above, as if dancing around some absent or inaudible bass line, and with the practice he had got from playing the telegraph key he quickly found himself stepping along in a choppy rhythm that made arabesques around her pace but still avoided placing a toe-tap squarely on the implicit metronomic thudding that he almost imagined he could hear.
"Good," she said softly over her shoulder. "You were born to this."
"Oh, thanks-very much," he said, breathing and speaking only sketchily, from the very tops of his lungs. The dark sky behind his lowered head seemed ponderous with momentum.
Born to this, he thought; had childhood dreams about this, nightmares. He was too tense and exhausted to sustain long thoughts, and these phrases echoed loudly inside his head. Born to these nightmares. Born in Palestine, found out the rhythms that placate. And then simply the phrase Born to this was pounding over and over again in his thoughts, weaving itself into his compulsively rhythmic pace.
Elena had mentioned two hands on a piano keyboard. Hale's mind now separated into two attentions, as if a pianist's hands had diverged to pursue separate scores, or as if the pianist himself had devoted one mind to following the notes perfectly and a second mind to catching every syllable of a backstage conversation.
- sign the Official Secrets Act, for six hundred pounds a year, new banknotes in a blank envelope, no taxes-hurrah-and no pension either!-but I'm free to make pension arrangements with the service's own Drummond's in Admiralty Arch, am I? No, thank you, when I retire it will be to the place where nobody needs money.
It was a voice in Hale's head, but not his customary one. Even mentally, this one had a much more pronounced Oxbridge drawl, and it was deeper, older, than Hale's. The challenge of following Elena's tricky footsteps down the Rue le Regrattier fully occupied Hale's own attention.
- Iberian sub-section of Section V, exposing German agents by buying the passenger lists from Aero Portuguesa and Trafico Aero Espanol, and then matching the Enigma-traffic code names and itineraries to the passengers who consistently took the same flights that were specified in the traffic, Madrid to Barcelona, Madrid to Seville, and alerting Lisbon Station to them. Have to work from out here in the British countryside in St. Albans it's true, War Station XB, nineteen miles north of London...The alien thoughts were accompanied by the warm, roofing-tar taste of Scotch whisky, and Hale felt drunk from the hallucinated fumes.
He took several deep breaths of the chilly river air, mostly to establish to himself that he was still in Paris. The world was spinning and he clung desperately to the grip of the radio case, and he was afraid he would somehow lose Elena before they got to the river and were able to look into each other's eyes again. "Elena!" he called unsteadily, without looking up from her heels. "Marry me."
- Marry me? mused the other voice in his head. Well, she's taken my name by deed-poll, advertised it in the London Gazette. Still, with a child now, and more to come, I ought to do it properly, for them. I can think of nothing more rewarding than the sight of a row of descending heads at the breakfast table.
Hale was uncomfortable with the other attention's image. Children...? A very personal duty, voluntarily undertaken...
- volunteer for night duty in Broadway, drive down to London once or twice a month and get to read freshly deciphered telegrams from Heads of Station all over the world-stop in at 58 St. James's Street to say hullo to the MI5 lads, give Dick White a peek at the latest Enigma-Ultra decrypts, in exchange for some gossip-but-
The emotion that now smoked in Hale's head was frustrated rage, and his sudden panting through clenched teeth threatened to interfere with his complicated pace.
- am I even now in the Secret Service, the real one? The SIS Registry is right here in St. Albans, but the German incendiary bomb a year ago supposedly burned up all the old SIS files, all the way back to when the service was called MI- 1C. Really? All of them? Even the microfilm copy? Or has a deeper or higher secret service used the bomb as a plausible pretext to spirit those files away to some more secret registry somewhere? How far in have I got to get, to know what Lawrence knew?
The voice faded, and immediately Hale found its thoughts as hard to remember as the details of a dream, once one has awakened. Lawrence? Something about Drummond's? He was relieved to see that the Seine embankment was only a few steps ahead of Elena, for he was sure that the clochard effect of their footsteps had ceased and that he could safely look up into the sky now if he cared to-and in fact Elena's pace had subsided to a normal walk.
How long have we been walking? he wondered as he finally allowed himself to breathe deeply. I asked her to marry me, at some point! Has she answered yet? Did I even speak the words out loud?
He opened his mouth to say it again, but in that instant she stepped onto the grass between the riverside chestnut trees and turned around. The moon was behind her, just over her shoulder, and so her face was in darkness.
"I am glad you ask," she said, "because you need to understand that I am married to the Communist Party. The Soviet State is my husband, and I am a devoted, obedient wife. In Madrid I made my vows, after my deluded father and mother were killed by the fascists and my aunt Dolores took me in, and showed me the engine of human history, the real salvation, the real adventurous surrender to a supreme power. It is not just for the duration of this war-my life will always revolve around Moscow, and I will always take what Moscow gives me."
