Tim Powers - Declare

“What are we… hoping for?” asked Hale. Dutifully he tried to assess what information he had learned in these five weeks abroad, for clearly the time had come for him to get out of France and find a way to return to England-but Elena would never accompany him on that trip, and so he was hoping that Cassagnac would provide him with some justifiable reason to stay on in France, to stay with her.

“You are a radio operator who was born in Palestine.” Cassagnac’s pouchy eyes were merry. “Deny it as they will, Moscow does value the assistance of a few people like yourself, albeit on the old illegal basis-with the left hand, at arm’s length, unacknowledged and deniable. If you stay out of the action in this current wave of purges, Centre will certainly go on using you…for at least another couple of years. And if by then you are alert enough to see the next purge coming, you may hide through that one as well. I am one of the old illegals, reduced now to working in my own country; but I hope to live to see real communism achieved in the world, and to that end I disappear from time to time, and I see to it that my skills are never indispensable-it is the indispensable agents who are always the first to be purged, because their very existence proves an inadequacy in the Party as a homogenous whole.”

Hale blinked at the man. “You’re saying don’t trust the Party,” he said levelly, hoping Elena was paying attention and that her faith in her corporate “husband” might be shaken.

“Not at all, comrade, don’t misquote me. I’m saying the Party can be trusted absolutely to do what’s best for humanity-and if you can find no way within the rules to avoid a death-sentence, you should trust the Party to be doing the best thing, and cooperate. Maly agreed with this, and obediently assented to his own death.”

“That’s right,” said Elena slowly, nodding. “If I’m to die for the Party, I would prefer that it be at the Party’s hand. So Lot and I will be obedient but not evident for a while.”

Hale realized that he couldn’t run back to England now, and abandon poor idealistic Elena in this insane chess game. “I’m glad to understand you correctly,” he said. “That’s what we’ll do.” But he drained his brandy and poured himself another full glass, understanding for the first time in his life something of what drunkards sought in alcohol.

Cassagnac rapped the table with his knuckle, and he said abruptly to Elena, “Thistles, flowers-plants; did Maly ever talk about such things with you, my dear?”

She stared at him. “I don’t think so. He cooked a dinner for us once, he might have talked about herbs.”

Cassagnac crinkled his eyes and nodded, then turned his penetrating gaze on Hale. “You were recruited in a garden. Why were you there?”

“I was in Piccadilly Circus -oh! the woman, before that. The botanical garden at Oxford.” I was naked, and I hid myself, he thought. “I don’t know. It was across the road from my college.” He wondered helplessly if a new secret chemical weapon were based on a plant extract, the way some medicines were; he had read that aspirin was derived from willow bark.

Cassagnac stared from one of them to the other for a few seconds, then exhaled a laugh and tossed back his head. “Forgive me, I was instructed weeks ago to ask you both this at the earliest opportunity. And now I have.” He pulled an envelope from inside his jacket and slid it across the table to Elena. “I have received no other instructions regarding you,” he said, “so I certainly have no reason not to give you this lot of American dollars and French francs and deutschmarks; it should sustain you for several weeks. When I may next be in contact with Centre, I will relay your ignorance of botanical matters, and your request for instructions, and no doubt I will at that time be given orders having to do with you.”

“I think it would be best if we-did not meet with you again,” said Hale.

Cassagnac shrugged and smiled. “The arch directly to your right will lead you up a set of stairs to the basement of an ironmonger’s shop in the Rue de Savoie. No one will be surprised to see you appear. Buy a belt there, before you go out onto the street. You won’t forget?”

Through steamy windows at the back of the shop, Hale could see that it was raining outside, and water plunked into pails on the wooden floor. Hammers and shovels and tool kits crowded most of the racks under the dim electric bulbs, but when Hale asked about belts he was directed to a bin up by the street windows, next to a stack of rusty lightning rods. Elena lifted a belt from the bin and handed it to him.

Aside from pictures of the Egyptian looped cross in history books, this black iron belt buckle was the first ankh that Hale had ever seen. It looked too crude and bohemian even for his neglected embusqué cover, but it was the only sort of belt the shop sold, so he obediently bought it; and he wasn’t pleased to look at it out in the lowering gray daylight and see that a stylized pattern of circles had been burned decoratively into the leather strap. Thunder rumbled away on the north side of the river.

“You should be the one to wear it,” he told Elena as they paused on the sidewalk under the shop’s awning; rain was drumming loudly on the canvas over their heads and tapping rings in the puddled gutter. “I’ll bet it’s a woman’s belt.”

“No,” she said, “look at it, it buckles right over left-it’s a man’s belt.”

Hale nodded and shrugged irritably, and only when he glanced at her a moment later, and saw her deadpan expression, did he realize that of course the belt could be worn either way.

“I don’t think either of us should wear it,” he said, his breath steaming away in the cold fresh air. “It’s conspicuous-and since he insisted on it, it must be some kind of recognition signal, and he said himself that we don’t want to be recognized for a while.”

Elena stepped quickly out into the rain, and Hale followed, stuffing the belt into his coat pocket. She started to say something, then paused; finally she squinted back at him and said, “The guardian angel he mentioned-did you get the impression that it was real, or a figure of speech?”

“A figure of speech,” he said tightly. Implicit in his tone were the words, of course.

“Oh.” His answer seemed to have disconcerted her. She stopped in the rainy street and turned around to take hold of his shoulders and stare straight into his eyes; and, in English, she said, “‘Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hast understanding.’”

“I’m missing this,” he said helplessly, in French. He blinked away cold water that was dripping from his eyebrows. “That’s from the Book of Job-and not the Catholic Douay Version. It doesn’t say ‘Declare’ in the Catholic version.” He pushed a lock of sodden blond hair back from his forehead with his free hand, while she just kept frowning up at him. “We should have bought an umbrella back there,” he said at last, awkwardly. “Though probably all they had were iron umbrellas.”

She let go of his shoulders and resumed trudging across the wet pavement toward the Boulevard St.-Germain and their current home. Amber lights glowed behind the leaded glass of shop windows, but there were no other pedestrians out on the street. “It was an Englishman,” she said over her shoulder, “no doubt a Protestant, who quoted it to a group of us in Albacete. He’d been pretending to be a Comintern recruit in the International Brigades, but actually he was a spy, a member of the British secret service. The Party had caught and exposed him, and Andre Marty shot him through the forehead a moment after he quoted that Bible verse; Marty used to be the leader of the Party here in France, before he went to Spain to command the Brigades. Nine-millimeter Luger. Blood flew forward as well as back, and some got on my dress. I was twelve…or thirteen or so, and I was a wireless telegrapher for the Brigades.”