To wear the belt would be to voluntarily participate in this filthy old business…which, really, he had started to do when he had begun tapping out his wireless signals in the insistent, pulse-hopping rhythm.

Recognition, he thought bleakly as he pulled the belt out of his pocket and slung it around his waist; and perhaps some awful sort of protection, by God knew what means, from God knew what threat.

He sprinted through the rain to catch up with her, and after tapping her on the shoulder he pointed to the ankh buckle cinched at his waist. She gave him a broad, relieved smile, and they walked back to the apartment arm-in-arm.

The radio behaved normally that night, and once again Moscow did not respond.

SIX

On the last day of 1941 Centre sent orders that both Hale and Elena were to report in person to Moscow immediately, and that the ETC network was to be retired.

Radio contact with Moscow Centre had been reestablished for a month by that time, and right away Elena had been ordered to take over half of the radio duties, while at the same time resuming her job of meeting the furtive couriers and sources. And at the end it was Elena who deciphered the summons order-probably only moments before the Gestapo broke down the front door of the latest of the Rive Gauche pensions in which she and Hale had been renting rooms.

Moscow Centre had not come back on the air until November 29. During the two weeks preceding that, Elena had got work as a typist at the Simex offices in the Lido building on the the Champs-Élysées, while Hale had developed a rudimentary network among the unemployed and alcoholic clochards.

Neither of them had accomplished much in that interlude.

Though she was given only innocuous clerical work to do, Elena had learned that Simex was the main procurement firm working for the German occupation authorities-Simex executives were allowed free access to Wehrmacht installations, and the Abwehr actually consulted Simex engineers on secret German construction projects, and of course the company had a sophisticated radio system-and she guessed that Simex, and its sister corporation Simexco, in Brussels, were the perfect hermetic Soviet network she had speculated about to Hale, the intelligence source that was so secure and omniscient that Centre could afford to, and therefore arguably would be shrewd to, give the Gestapo the delusive satisfaction of rolling up all the other networks. Elena had begun carrying her little automatic pistol with her in her purse after she had deduced that, and Hale had known it was for killing herself if she should be captured, lest her conclusions should be wrung out of her by Gestapo interrogators.

And Hale had become a drinking companion of the ragged old riverside clochards. Their language was a mix of French and something that might have been Gypsy Romany, but he picked it up quickly, and his custom of always bringing a bottle of grappa or burgundy to their makeshift bridge shelters endeared him to them. Among them he felt as though he had drifted into a lower order of secret service-they were largely indifferent to last year’s shift in government, and the only secrets they had were their modest thefts of food and clothing and liquor, and the locations of the best pools along the riverbanks for catching trout. But they flew kites with pinwheels on them on moonless nights, and somehow always knew to reel the kites down when a formation of German planes was within half an hour of passing overhead; and one morning in the middle of November one of them told Hale, as he passed him a bottle in the shade under the Pont St.-Michel, “They were stopped at Vyasma, the boche were, that’s a hundred and sixty kilometers west of Moscow-the weather’s better right now, no rain to turn the roads into mud, and today their trucks and tanks are moving east again-tanks move better than trucks through mud, being on tracks instead of wheels, though all their provisions are in the trucks-but the rain and snow will be back on them within a day or two, and they know it; they’re all reading Caulaincourt’s Memoires, about Napoléon’s failed siege in 1812.” The old man could have had no way of knowing any of this-unless, as the clochards claimed, their kites sometimes gave them true dreams-but Hale would have been tempted to encipher it and send it as unconfirmed rumor anyway, if Moscow had been on the air then.

Hale missed the vinous company of the eerie old men when he had to resume his all-night radio duties at the end of November; he had been listening as usual on the 49-meter bandwidth on the night of the twenty-ninth, and after all this time of dead air he had been hugely startled when Centre’s signal had abruptly started chattering in his earphones, in fact completing a sentence that had been interrupted six weeks earlier. And in spite of her Party stoicism he could tell that Elena was unhappy to be ordered to take half of the radio work in addition to her old duties, and to quit the Simex job. The six weeks of radio silence from Moscow had been a vacation, and this new pace was more strenuous than early October’s had been, with even more hours spent at the telegraph key and the perilously live, oscillating transmitter.

By Christmas both Hale and Elena had been short-tempered and absentminded from lack of sleep, frequently hungover and hungry, and clumsy in darkness and dazzled by daylight. Hale had begun meeting some of Elena’s contacts in her stead-wearily trudging to the meeting places, speaking the password phrases she gave him and pocketing the illegal reports to take back to whatever garret they were occupying on that day, and begin enciphering the texts-and any sluggish thought he gave to the Abwehr direction-finders was by this time in fatalistic terms of when rather than if. Hale’s only remaining goal was a cold determination to somehow get Elena away when the inevitable arrest occurred.

At noon on the last day of the year, Hale was hurrying back to the pension at which they’d been staying for the last two nights; he had been to a boulangerie by the ruins of the Roman Arena off the Rue Monge, and he was carrying baguettes and a terrine of goose liver pâté wrapped in newspapers. Elena was sending on that morning, and she would be hungry when she could finally take off the earphones and switch off the set’s power. There had been no snow yet in Paris that year, but cold winds and rain had set the two miserable young spies to stuffing papers and scraps of cloth into the gaps between the window frames, and huddling together in coats and scarves during the few hours when they both had time to sleep, and now the cold wind at his back made Hale trot along more quickly.

As always, he glanced quickly around at the pedestrians in front of the boardinghouse-and his frail attention was caught by the odd sight of a man whose briefcase was connected to his ear by a thin wire.

Direction-finding was done with trucks, Hale believed; it needed heavy machinery and big rotating aerial rings. Not yet suspicious, he nevertheless glanced at the nearest vehicle, a grocer’s lorry that was even now driving up onto the curb and squeaking to a halt, and though the men levering open the doors and climbing out were dressed in grimy coveralls, the license plate bore only two letters: WL. Hale’s face and hands stung with sudden heat even in the instant before he remembered what Elena had told him they stood for.