Tim Powers - Declare

“The Romantic poets weren’t homosexuals, and neither am I,” said Hale in alarm, barely remembering to keep speaking French. He scowled at her. “Cheekbones or no cheekbones.”

She was looking ahead through the windscreen and she didn’t quite smile, but Hale saw a dimple appear in her cheek. “Oh, you like girls?”

“D’un tumulte,” said Hale with dignity.

“D’un tumulte!” She laughed and added, in English, “Oh my!”

Traffic slowed and the air was fumy with automobile exhaust as they entered the city of Paris in a tangle of cars and horse-drawn carriages and bicycle traffic at the Porte de Gentilly. Hale saw a cluster of guards in tan uniforms with swastika armbands standing alertly in the back of a muddy flatbed truck by the side of the highway, and he must have flinched, because in her exotic French the girl told him, “The ones to fear, the Gestapo, aren’t so obvious.” She licked her lips and nodded at the shiny black truck that was idling ahead of them. “You see the license plate? WL is Wehrmacht Luftwaffe. They, and the Gestapo and the Abwehr, are the ones who come after us, tracking our wireless transmissions with direction finders.”

“Bloody hell,” said Hale in English. After that neither of them said anything until they were on the Boulevard St.-Michel, driving past the Luxembourg Gardens; and even then she only spoke to tell him, in a subdued voice, more about their imaginary childhoods in Madrid, though according to her he was just about to abandon that identity.

Most of the traffic on the boulevards appeared to be green military trucks with the black German cross on the hoods.

But Hale peered up curiously at the tall nineteenth-century building fronts, and when the girl steered the car into a right turn onto the Boulevard St.-Germain and passed the open-air market at the Place Maubert, already crowded in the bright morning sunlight, he was as forcibly cheered by the plain fact of being in Paris as he would have been by a fast pint of champagne. And he couldn’t repress a delighted yelp when she swung the car left and drove across a bridge over the Seine onto what was obviously a little island city in the middle of the river. She smiled and rocked her head in a gesture that acknowledged the charm of the place.

She drove to a narrow street off the six-block Rue St.-Louis-en-Île that was the center line of the island, and after she switched off the engine Hale got out and obediently helped her lift the front end of the car and swing it toward the curb; they stepped around to the back bumper and did the same there, then returned to the front to do it again, and within a minute they had walked the tiny car crabwise until its right-side wheels were up on the curb in a gap between two old panel trucks. Not good for a fast escape, Hale thought; but perhaps a car wouldn’t be much good for fleeing in anyway, in the narrow streets on this little island.

The street was the Rue le Regrattier, and the girl’s apartment was a couple of high-ceilinged rooms on the third floor of a subdivided seventeenth-century town house. The first thing she did when they were inside was to take from him every bit of paper that had to do with St.-Simon, including the passport, and give him instead a set of documents that identified him as Marcel Gruey, a Swiss student. Then, over a kitchen table breakfast of bread, garlic sausage, scallions, and a rough red wine, his hostess told him that he would have an apartment in this same building, but that he would be spending most nights in a locked custodian’s closet on the roof, transmitting and receiving signals from midnight until sometimes dawn or later. “Of course a high-voltage battery is used to get oscillation of the set,” she went on quickly, “but the set is equipped with a cathode-type vacuum valve heated by an alternating current for better distance reception, so you’ll be using household current in the heater circuit.”

But Hale’s attention had snagged on her previous statement. “Midnight until dawn?” he said uneasily. That couldn’t be right. “Are you sure? That’s…quite a bit more air-time than I was told there would be, at the school in Norfolk.” In fact, his instructors there had told the students that uninterrupted sending for more than an hour at a time was asking for detection and arrest; the operator’s job as they had described it involved a couple of scheduled evening times a week for two-way traffic, with several designated hours on other days when Moscow would be listening for possible urgent reports, and other hours when the operator would be expected to monitor the Moscow band for instructions addressed to his call-sign.

“Since June we are at war,” she reminded him, “we Communists. In war one takes outlandish risks, isn’t that right? We have agents in many factories and businesses, even in the German military, and what they bring us must be transmitted fully and immediately; Moscow will be listening at your bandwidth twenty-four hours a day now.”

“Oh.” He was numb-this seemed like suicide.

“But don’t worry too much. We have watchers, and they will warn us if the Abwehr vehicles come within a few blocks of us-their trucks always have a meter-wide circular aerial swiveling on the roof, for direction-finding to locate black transmitters, as they call our sets. And even if the Abwehr should manage to get very close, their standard procedure when the radio source is in a block of houses is to cut off the current to each house in turn and note which house loses its lights in the same moment that the radio stops sending; and your radio is wired to the current of the house next door.” She smiled. “If you should lose power in your heater circuit and fall off the air, and we see police breaking into that house, we’ll know it is time to relocate.”

“I hope they’re in the habit of leaving some lights on all night, next door,” said Hale, “just so that the Abwehr will clearly see which place to hit.” His eyes were stinging with lack of sleep, and the wine was a weight on the top of his slightly bobbing head. His brain wanted a rest from translating and composing French sentences.

“We keep a light on in the foyer of this house. Now I must go to Paris to meet a cut-out, who will relay messages between me and one of the parallel networks,” she said, “and-”

“Aren’t we in Paris?”

“We’re on the Île St.-Louis. Louisiens say they are going to Paris when they cross one of the bridges. You are a Louisien now. But I must go meet an ignorant message carrier, who doesn’t know what I look like and who will ideally assume that I’m only a cut-out myself. It may take time to make contact, with possible fallbacks. You can sleep on the sofa here for a few hours.”

“That does sound splendid,” sighed Hale, glancing at the sofa and looking forward to forgetting all these distressing concerns for a while.

She reached across the table and shook his shoulder. “Don’t sleep yet. Listen with your full attention, comrade. I am your contact with Moscow Centre, and my code name is the Latin phrase ‘Et Cetera’-remember it. ETC is our group’s radio call-sign, though if we are fortunate you will meet none of the others. You or I or both of us may have to relocate from time to time, at a moment’s notice-I’ve only been here for a week, and might be somewhere else tomorrow-and if you lose contact with me for more than three days and have no access to a wireless set, you must go to some unoccupied country, Switzerland probably, and get in contact with the Soviet military attaché there. Are you following this?”

“If I lose track of you, I go to the military attaché in Switzerland,” Hale recited. He could not imagine how he would get to Switzerland, if the need should arise.