Tim Powers - Declare

One afternoon a week ago he had walked all the way out to the northwest end of the Île de la Cité. Trudging along like an idle embusqué but at the same time watching for Nazi police as he made his way up Baron Haussmann’s broad, beech-lined avenues, he had avoided a couple of motards, motorcycle policemen, by ducking through a pair of open iron gates into what had proved to be the courtyard of the Palais de Justice; then, realizing with poker-faced horror that he was standing directly between the police headquarters and the courts, he had turned his steps sharply left through a driveway tunnel into a crowded parking lot surrounded on all four sides by government offices-and found himself looking upward from the roofs of the cars to the gray gothic columns and high arches of Sainte-Chapelle against the blue sky.

He had recognized it immediately from a picture in a history book he’d studied at St. John’s, and then he wondered if he might subconsciously have come this way on purpose. The towering thirteenth-century chapel had been built by St. Louis, the only canonized French king, to house the relics he had brought back from Venice during a crusade: Christ’s crown of thorns, a nail from the cross, and several drops of Christ’s blood. Hale was skeptical about the genuineness of the relics, and he supposed that the Catholic Church must have spirited them away to the Vatican as soon as the German Panzers had crossed the Meuse River in May of last year, and he still considered himself an agnostic, if not an outright atheist-but he had shivered at the thought that these evidences of God’s redeeming death had perhaps actually reposed behind the tall stained-glass windows not twenty steps in front of him.

He had quickly fled out through another arch to the riverfronting pavement of the the Quai des Orfèvres, and hurried on northwest across the broad lanes of the island-transecting Pont-Neuf to the cobblestone lanes and chestnut-shaded groves of the narrow Square du Vert-Galant, where fishermen sat in the grass on both sides of the lane, trailing lines in the water. Standing above the sloped cement piling at the very tip of the island on that recent afternoon, it had been easy for Hale to imagine that he was at the bow of a vast stone ship pointed downriver toward the distant sea, and that the Île St.-Louis on which he lived was a barge towed behind.

Leaning now on the roof of the house in the Rue le Regrattier with the sun coming up behind the steep shingles at his back, it occurred to him that the Seine was flowing in the direction he was looking-it was the barge that was cutting the water, and the grand ship with Notre-Dame and Sainte-Chapelle on it was just wallowing along in its wake. The thought disturbed him-and he could still see a couple of bright stars in the gray sky-and so he hurried back inside to shuffle downstairs to his bed.

He generally met for an early twilight dinner with the girl whose code name was Et Cetera. Their favored spot was a restaurant called Quasimodo on the Quai d’Orléans around the corner from their apartment building, and she sometimes brought the concierge’s big black Persian cat, who would sit in the third cane chair at their window table; the golden-eyed beast would wait, silently, through their soup and omelettes and the eventual lighting of the table candle, and its patience would be rewarded with bits of cheese at the end of the meal. The girl’s cover name was Elena, and Hale thought it might be her real Christian name too, since she responded to it naturally and it fit with her Spanish accent. She never spoke of her past, and he was left helplessly thinking of her as having grown up in Madrid with her aunt Dolores, which was the cover story she had told him during the drive from Orly Airport on that first morning, when her cover name had been Delphine.

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.