Tim Powers - Declare

Hale thought it was a quote from a poem he had read, but suddenly he was too exhausted to ask her about it.

Next day they bought fresh clothing at a black market stall by the river and moved into a different apartment, and that night Hale gingerly strung his antenna and aerial again, and plugged in the radio set-but though they braced themselves for another bout of wind and scorched floors and idiotically accelerated signal, or contrarily for the disappointment of finding that the set had been wrecked, in fact it was a session just like the ones he had experienced during the last ten days in the Rue le Regrattier house-the radio worked perfectly, but his call-sign drew no response from Centre.

Elena composed a note to the agent Cassagnac, proposing a meeting, and she went off by herself to put it in what she called a dubok, which she told Hale could be any agreed-upon space that was not likely to be disturbed-a gap behind a loose brick in a quiet alley, a knothole in a remote tree, a flap of loose carpet in a cinema. Duboks were generally used only once, and the recipient often hired some random passerby to walk ahead and make the pickup. The best duboks, she told him, were often to be found in the ornate, dusty vestibules of churches, which led Hale to believe that wherever the security-minded girl was going to put the note, it would not be in a church.

At the end of the week they moved again, and on the following Monday morning they went to meet with the agent Cassagnac. When Hale asked how she had learned where and when to meet the man, he was told that of nine broken windows in an abandoned convent in Montparnasse, three had been repaired with cardboard.

To meet Cassagnac they bought an electric torch and then passed through a low door in the Rue de la Harpe, which Elena said was the oldest street in Paris; and when by the torch’s beam they had picked their way down a zigzag succession of worn stone stairs, their hair fluttering in the cold clay-scented breeze from below, they found themselves in a cavernous chamber lit only in sections by paraffin lanterns hung on pillars that flanked gaping arches. The yellow glow of the lanterns disappeared far overhead in stray gleams on a concave stone ceiling, and wooden tables were arranged on the broad flags of the floor.

A man’s voice spoke-“Et Cetera!”-and in spite of the echoes Hale was able to locate a figure sitting at one of the farther tables. The man went on, in French, “And Monsieur Lot.” He pronounced it Low, which nettled Hale. “Join me, please.”

Hale and Elena shuffled forward across the uneven floor, and from the cold drafts Hale got the impression that a number of tunnels extended out of this chamber, perhaps even under the river-and he was sure that this floor was Roman architecture, if not older. Catching a nimble fugitive down here would be impossible.

A bottle sat on the man’s table, and after they had sat down on a bench opposite him, he poured two glasses full of what proved to be a vaporously aromatic cognac. He appeared to be about forty, with graying brown hair curled back over his ears and falling onto his forehead, and his lean face was lined with Gallic humor and melancholy. He wore a gray sweater under a battered dark jacket.

“You are adrift,” he said, “and the relocation apparat isn’t working.”

“Centre seems to be abandoning us,” Elena said, and she told him about their address having been broadcast insecurely, and described the disorder at the place of conspiracy in front of St.-Sulpice. Hale noted that she did not mention the weirdly accelerated signals and the burned floor of a week ago.

“Call it a testing,” Cassagnac said, “or a distillation. Survival of a few, which will include an increased percentage of the most genuinely committed. Before he himself was executed, Yezhov of the NKVD used to say, ‘Better that ten innocent people should die than that one traitor should go undetected.’”

“I met Theo Maly,” Elena said in a cautious voice, “the Hungarian illegal agent, the ex-Catholic priest. He knew he was going to his death, when he obeyed the NKVD summons back to Moscow.”

“You were a child, and Maly had great charm.” Cassagnac sipped his brandy. “Charm, wit-intelligence, even-these are I think preliminary catalysts, like picture books for children: useful ladder rungs for awakening people, but not things for the people to cling to, once they’ve been awakened. I believe Russia has a…a primitive guardian angel, which must be denied at every turn; and those who persist in loving the angel, and merit her special assistance, must be killed-ideally after they have given their full measure of acceptable benefits to the Party, and not one benefit more.”

“Is that the way?” asked Elena forlornly.

“The angel will always be there, my dear,” Cassagnac said kindly, refilling her glass. “Five years ago Centre purged all the great illegals, the non-Russian Communists who could work outside the diplomatic channels and who in times of trouble could be disowned with no risk. They were educated Europeans, men and women who came to communism through literature and philosophy and the wounds of atheism, and they served their intercessory purpose, and then Yezhov killed them all lest their intercession proceed to become invocation; each morning the NKVD executioners were given their rifles and their vodka, and after they had shot their dozens and bulldozed them into pits dug by convict labor, they went back to the guardrooms and drank themselves insensible. The present generation in both the Razvedupr and the NKVD are correspondingly less attractive, to people like you and me, and even less tolerant of the guardian angel. But they will be summoned to the Lubyanka basement in their turn, and the ones who will follow them will perhaps be a little more to our liking; or else the ones who follow them will be.”

“For three weeks we haven’t been able to raise Centre on the radio,” put in Hale, who wanted only concrete advice from this man. Somehow Hale couldn’t help liking Cassagnac-the man’s sad eyes and humorous mouth, and his rich voice, seemed vibrant with humane wisdom, but Hale thought his statements were damnable, and it hurt him to see Elena bravely trying to assimilate them.

Cassagnac turned his warm eyes on Hale. “They will respond, my friend, as soon as they are set up in the new provisional capital at Kuibyshev. Keep listening until they do. And in the meantime-” He laughed gently. “You two are not malleable playback material. Elena, you must suspend contact with all agents and couriers and cut-outs; if you do establish wireless contact with Centre, change your address as frequently as you can, using cheap gueules cassées. A month ago Centre sent a message to the head agent in Belgium, giving the addresses of three of the Brussels agents; that message will be deciphered by the Abwehr, and that network will inevitably be rolled up, and then played back against Moscow. It is almost certainly Centre’s intention that this occur now, deliberately rather than accidentally. If you are not in a position to be used in this way, Centre will not ask it of you.”

“ Moscow,” said Elena, and Hale remembered her saying, I will always take what Moscow gives me. “Moscow Centre wants this to happen, this ‘playback’?”

“Does a fencer want to be disarmed or break his blade when he does the passata sotto, the low pass? It is the common event. Playback is the natural last stage of any spy network. At first a couple of agents are arrested, and their motive for cooperating with the Gestapo at this stage is simply fear of torture and death, and the hope that cooperation will buy them mercy; so they use the security passwords and signals to lure other agents into capture. And these newly captured agents follow the example of their duplicitous companions, with uncanny ease, and soon the whole network, though unchanged in its routines and codes, has switched polarity-the network goes on with its radio work uninterrupted, but now it is conducted by the Gestapo, intending to deceive Moscow and discover her secret urgencies. In the agents a mood of mocking cynicism quickly replaces, or evolves from, their previous principles and ideals. And for the agents who have switched sides, for the best of them, at least, the governing passion now is no longer ideology but a disattached, professional pride in the art itself. If they survive, such agents can be reclaimed at a later date, can still be useful, in limited ways.”