She nodded, reaching out and flipping her fingers for the bottle. “I bought another book,” she said after she had drunk some more brandy, “and in a lavatory I wrapped the red paper around it, and then gave it to a girl who looked somewhat like me; I gave her twenty francs to deliver it to the Sorbonne library. Meanwhile I shoved this book under the waistband of my skirt and spent an hour going up and down apartment stairs, and out the kitchen doors of restaurants, and hiding among a crowd of Moslem women who were leaving La Mosquée de Paris. They were short, I had to crouch.”
Hale frowned at this intrusion of Islam into her story, though at the same time it seemed to him that it had been a particularly good evasion move, or… related to a good evasion move. He tried to trace the thought, but could only think of the vagaries of the night-time Heaviside Layer.
Elena got wearily to her feet and lifted the book from the perambulator. “Comrade Charlotte is going to have to carry her baby around town for a while,” she remarked idly as she riffled through the pages. “She probably would have given me the baby too, if I’d insisted—she was so relieved to get the set out of her house. There have been a lot of arrests, apparently.” Then she lifted out four sheets of paper that had been laid between the pages, and scanned them. “German troop movements, battle plans.” She waved the sheets at him. “These might be real, you know. The red paper might have been innocent.”
Hale took the sheets from her and glanced at them—ROMMEL, 15TH PANZER DIVISION, HALFAYA PASS—they could be real, or not. “Assuming the radio works and I can get Centre on the air,” he said thoughtfully, “I’ll rephrase these, and send them with a lot of dummy code groups mixed in.” He nodded toward the window and the city outside. “That’s in case it’s a Gestapo trap and they’ve got their monitors listening for messages of these particular lengths to be sent. If I sent the verbatim texts, they could easily recognize them and then derive my enciphering numbers.”
Elena nodded. “Which might not be as unique as they’re supposed to be.”
“Right. Any other agent using the same pad might as well be sending en clair.” He looked at the window, calculating how he would attach the earth wire to the drain pipe he had noted earlier. He would string the aerial so as to get a low angle of radiation, good for long skip distances, and hope for clear receptions and a brief time on the air.
Beyond the frame of the window the eastern sky had darkened to deep indigo. Elena switched on the electric wall lamps, and Hale tore the blank endpapers out of the architecture book and spent twenty minutes enciphering an explanation of their current circumstances and of the dubious messages Elena had got from the courier; and then he paraphrased the message texts, adding a lot of xs and ys which Centre would recognize as null groups.
“Let’s look at Comrade Charlatan’s apparatus,” he said, getting to his feet.
“I really should report you for spontaneity,” she sighed. “Do you want some of this cheese and bread?”
“We can eat as I work. Don’t get crumbs in the mechanism.”
Hale lifted the radio case out of the perambulator, laid it on the floor, unlatched the lid and flipped it open. The radio inside was equipped with a cord for alternating current, and earphones and a telegraph key and a coiled aerial wire were tucked neatly into a gap at the side. There was even a packet of sharpened pencils. “It does appear to be a radio,” he allowed. He used a centime coin from his pocket to unscrew the facing plate and look at the works.
The set had a regenerative hookup powered by a high-voltage battery to maintain oscillation and amplify weak signals, with a Hartley oscillator instead of a crystal for transmitting on a broad range of bandwidths, and a Bradleystat resistor to prevent key-click sparks, which might otherwise interfere with radio reception for a mile around.
“Not bad,” he said. He turned the condenser and rheostat knobs, noting a gritty tightness in their action. The set had apparently never been used.
“So how soon can you be on the air? We need instructions.”
“As soon as I string the aerial and the earth, and—” He glanced around the plaster walls of the bare room for an electrical outlet, and saw none. “And figure a way to hook the plug into one of the light sockets.”
At last Hale sat on the floor with the headphones on and several of the book’s endpapers laid out in front of him, and he turned up the set’s rheostat until the valve glowed yellow; then he turned the condenser knob, and the set began oscillating—he could hear the rushing sound in the phones, and when he touched the wire between the grid condenser and the secondary coil he heard a satisfactory thud. For a few seconds he could hear a faint high-speed clicking that would be caused by the sparks in the distributor of some nearby automobile, a problem he had seldom had on the Île St.-Louis, but it soon faded.
“So far so good,” he said. “Let’s see if Moscow is back on the air yet.”
He tuned the condenser knob to the 49-meter bandwidth and tapped out KLK KLK KLK DE ETC on the key, then reset the dial to the 39-meter bandwidth for receiving. Even transmitting for only a few seconds had misted his forehead with sweat—the current he was using was not wired in from a neighboring house anymore, and the Abwehr and SS direction-finders were supposedly always noting illicit broadcasts and laying out direction lines on street maps; already if they were quick they might have triangulated this block.
Abruptly he was getting a strong Morse signal over the phones, and he lunged for the pencil to begin copying.
ETC ETC ETCETCCCTTTEEE. The dits and dahs were coming so quickly that they were nearly a rattle. He could only lift the pencil from the paper and wait for the signal to slow down.
“It’s crazy,” he said in a tight voice. “It’s clear, but he’s sending like a lunatic.”
“That tube is glowing purple,” said Elena softly, pointing.
Hale glanced at the alternating current valve through sweat-stung eyes—there was a purple glow in the glass, which generally meant ionized air in the vacuum; that would weaken the signal, though, and in fact the signal was coming through with razor clarity—
—but so rapidly now that it was just a rough buzz, and so painfully loud that he clawed off the headphones and tossed them onto the floor. Even so he could hear the noise clearly.
It wasn’t musical, but it seemed to be pulsating in a deliberate rhythm—and both Hale and Elena inhaled audibly as they recognized the drop-and-double-beat measure they had patterned their footsteps on last night. Hale’s pulse was twitching the collar of his shirt, and so he could see that the rhythm was in perfect counter-point with his heartbeat, and he guessed that Elena’s heart was pounding in exact synchronization with his, and with the barbaric drumbeat or inorganic chanting that was shaking out of the headphones. His ears popped as if with increased air pressure, and he was irrationally sure that something out of a nightmare had come down from the stars to hang over the house, filling the sky.
Hale flinched and dropped the pencil, and from the corner of his eye he saw Elena start back too, at the clear impression of attention being paid to them. It knows me, he thought, and now it knows where I am.
Horizontal beams of light moving across the dark face of the sea like spokes of a vast turning wheel…
How far in have I got to get, to know what Lawrence knew?