Tim Powers - Declare

And he was surprised now by all the bicycles. He had seen bicycles in the traffic jam at the Porte de Gentilly and on the island boulevards, but in this square and the adjoining streets of St.-Germain he saw people riding in the perambulator baskets of bicycle rickshaws, and groups of businessmen in suits and ties pedaling soberly across the cobblestones, and elegant ladies whose wide skirts were clearly designed to project out away from spokes and sprockets.

One man’s bicycle had a green kite or paper flag rattling on an upright pole behind the seat-and Hale realized that it was a paper fish, ribbed with wooden dowels. The man was just riding in a big circle around the fountain.

“There’s a fish,” Hale said softly to Elena.

“I see it,” she said-but she was looking back toward the pillars at the church entrance. Hale followed her gaze and saw on the steps a woman whose broad skirt had a big red-flannel sunfish stitched onto it.

They both saw the next one, a portly little man only a dozen steps away, carrying a dead trout like Elena’s slung in a newspaper.

“Is it a coincidence?” whispered Hale.

The little man halted to stare at the fish Elena was carrying, and then he looked up at her and Hale with an expression of alarm.

Elena slid her hand behind her and dropped the trout and handkerchief into the fountain water. She stood up away from the coping and said softly to Hale, “Bless me!”

Things are not what they seem-trust me.

He nodded and followed her as she stepped away from the fountain.

They walked away north up the Rue des Canettes, in the first block passing several more people carrying fish emblems, and Elena didn’t say anything until she paused below the Romanesque tower of a church on the north side of the Boulevard St.-Germain.

She turned an anxious glare on him then, but he knew she was thinking of all the fish in the square by St.-Sulpice. “Does Centre want their networks rolled up? They obviously gave the same place of conspiracy-even the same recognition sign!-to-it might be dozens of agents! Of what use is that? Is the watcher supposed to go down into the square with a notebook at noon, have them all line up and give their code names? It’s even worse than reusing the one-time pads, and that was blatantly bad security. How alert would a Gestapo officer need to be to wonder about the…this fish festival at St.-Sulpice?”

Hale pushed away the memory of a voice from his childhood nightmare: O Fish, are you constant to the old covenant? “Can it be normal,” he said, “for that many people to be at their place of conspiracy at the same time?”

In his head echoed the ritual answer to the dream’s challenge: Return, and we return; keep faith, and so will we…

She blinked. “Good point. No. All those agents on the run at once! There must have been a big reverse, perhaps some centrally informed agent has joined sides with the Gestapo. There is not supposed to be any such agent, but after these last hours nothing would surprise me.” She shook her head and resumed walking north, toward the river. “We don’t dare try to get my automobile, but we’ve got to get our radio set back. This isn’t Centre’s fault, entirely.”

Hale trotted up beside her and matched her pace; and when she glanced at him he raised his eyebrows inquiringly.

“Hitler didn’t care about Spain,” Elena said. “The Spanish Civil War was just a practice ground for him. Among other things, he learned there how to do the Blitzkrieg, and thus he was able to sweep through France much faster than anyone had allowed for. The networks used to send information as microphotographs carried by couriers from Berlin here to Paris, where the Soviet attaché could send the information on to Moscow by the consulate wireless. But with the overnight fall of France that became impossible, and all the weight of intelligence-relaying fell onto the illegal networks. Arrangements had to be made in haste.”

“And agents are expendable.”

She nodded, apparently choosing to ignore his irony. “Individually; even networks, individually. But not- everything!”

A Great Dane in a gated courtyard barked at them as they hurried along the sidewalk, and for a moment Hale was surprised that the dog was barking in the same dialect as English dogs.

“Perhaps,” Elena went on, nodding at her own thought, “ Moscow has established a perfect hermetic network in Europe, with some sanctum sanctorum intelligence access, and can afford to let the Gestapo roll up all the others.”

“Can afford to deliberately betray all the others,” suggested Hale cautiously.

“It is realpolitik, Marcel,” she said in an almost pleading tone. “You are one of us, you know that the outcome is what matters. One day the peace of worldwide communism will be here, will be real. Until that day-”

“We are expendable,” he said again.

“Yes,” she said emptily.

They crossed the river by the Pont des Arts just downstream of the islands, and in the embankment street below the Louvre they bought roasted chestnuts wrapped in newspaper. Elena told Hale not to start eating them until they had crossed back to the Île de la Cité and were back in the Square du Vert-Galant. “It is cover,” she said. “Spies don’t generally bring treats along when they’re doing risky work.”

The sun was above the crenellations of the Louvre castle, and Hale no longer wished for a sweater. Scents of fresh-baked bread warmed the morning breeze, and he hoped they would get a more substantial breakfast, and some wine, before long.

“Where would you watch from, to catch anyone retrieving the radio?” asked Hale quietly as they approached the spot where they had waited for dawn. “If you were the Gestapo.”

“I would have a boat out in the river,” she said; and then she peered between the trees at the water. A rowboat floated out there, apparently at anchor, and the man in the boat wore a big straw hat, which would be very noticeable if he were to wave it. Thoughtfully she cracked a chestnut and chewed the hot nut. “And I’d,” she mumbled around it, “have men in ordinary clothes sitting close by.”

Two burly men were sitting on a low wall playing chess only a few yards ahead of them, and Hale glanced at the board as he and Elena strolled past. Both red bishops were on black squares. Three other men were squatting on the grass farther away, passing a bottle of white wine back and forth. All of them looked younger and healthier than the fishermen and clochards Hale had seen so far.

He turned to Elena and said, in a loud and irritated voice, “Very well! I love you! God!”

Elena stared at him in surprised embarrassment, then shook her head. “Oh, you are a beast!” She began snuffling and turned back toward the broad lanes of the Pont-Neuf.

Hale turned too and strode after her, not glancing back at the men. “Did I misunderstand you, somehow? God knows I’m trying to be cooperative here! I-”

She took his arm and shook it as they hurried below the statue of Henri IV. “That’s enough,” she said quietly. “And that was clever, very naturally in media res -we couldn’t simply have turned in our tracks and walked away without a word after we saw them, and the rudeness of it was a completely convincing touch.” She smiled at him, again looking very young. “You are angry that I love the Soviet State, and not you.”

“You love the Soviet State more than you love me,” said Hale, “was how I understood it.” He shrugged. “Actually.”

“We must try to get another wireless set,” she said. “It’s likely that the local Communist Party has at least a couple that they are afraid to use, or even admit to. I wish I still had the automobile.” She was snapping her fingers as she thought. “I must assume that my own agents are sound. I will get black market passports for us, the clumsy things known as gueules cassées, worthless to show the Gestapo but good enough to fool the concierge at a pension somewhere, so that we can get rooms; we don’t dare try to get good new passports, for I believe all the networks have used the pass-apparat services of Raichman”-she glanced at Hale-“another man from Palestine, and our best cobbler of forged passports and supporting cover documents-and he might be the agent who has gone over to the Germans.”