Tim Powers - Declare

Accuracy was more important than speed here, and the students were constantly warned against the danger of losing their place on the flimsy pages, or turning two pages at once, as this would put the signal out of correspondence with the receiver’s deciphering, and the message would be lost in gibberish. Oddly, the instructors sometimes called such nonsense results les parasites too.

His photograph was taken at the end of the first week, and when he left the Norfolk farm he was given a Swiss passport in the name of LeClos, with his picture in it. He was driven in a closed van down to Gravesend, where it turned out that LeClos was listed as a passenger aboard a Portuguese merchantman bound for still-neutral Lisbon.

At the dock he nearly bolted-he had not been abroad since the uncomprehending age of two, and now he was apparently expected to enter some Nazi-occupied country, pretending to be a Comintern spy. A British prison seemed infinitely preferable…until he remembered his haggard mother taking him to the ship-like rooftop building in Whitehall Court. These are the people who got us home from Cairo…And they’re the King’s men. They deserve our obedience. And he remembered his resolve at seeing the ruins around St. Paul ’s…

In the end, with the aid of some whisky provided by one of his sympathetic escorts, he had got aboard the ship.

Immediately on his arrival in Lisbon, after having spent the four-day voyage mostly secluded in his cabin with a stack of ragged old Belgian newspapers, he was met on the dock by a Soviet agent carrying an orange and taken to a crowded hotel across town near the Sintra Airdrome; Hale surrendered the LeClos passport and was given a Vichy-government French passport in the name of one Philippe St.-Simon, who was a cork buyer for a Paris-based company called Simex and who had airline tickets to Paris on the next weekly flights of both Air France and Luft-Hansa. As St.-Simon, bewildered and disoriented and wearing a secondhand European business suit, Hale had wound up taking the Air France flight at midnight on the thirtieth of September-and she had met him in the chilly dawn of the first day of October in the terminal at Orly Airport.

With no luggage besides a briefcase full of assorted cork washers and gaskets, and a thoroughly stamped passport that indicated a business traveler who had been checked and cleared many times before, Hale had been passed through Paris Customs without a second glance. His mouth had been dry and his ears ringing with the knowledge that he was all alone in an enemy-occupied foreign country now, and the loudspeaker announcements in flat, German-accented French had seemed to batter at him physically, but he had managed to keep a steady, distracted frown on his face and to answer the routine questions in relaxed French-though the interior of his head had been echoing with unvoiced, astonished British curses.

When the thin girl caught his eye and nodded to him outside the Customs shed, he assumed that the Comintern was using schoolgirls as inconspicuous couriers, for she appeared to be no more than eighteen years old, if even that, and the loose gray skirt and blouse and black sweater could have been a convent school uniform. Until she spoke to him he thought she might be of Irish descent, with her auburn hair and blue eyes, but her French was animated with the full vowels and razory consonants of Spain, and when she pronounced St.-Simon it was with the back-of-the-teeth lisp of Castile.

“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.”