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.”
“Good God.” Hale shivered, and not just because of the cold rainwater that was battering his face, as he lengthened his stride to catch up to her. “I’m—that must have been horrible. But why quote that verse to me now?”
“I can work a radio,” she said. “I can copy and send International Morse, and I’ve been the assigned WT agent in several Soviet networks before this: here, and in Belgium, and back then, in Albacete. But in this current configuration I’m the one who travels around and meets couriers, and Centre wants each network to have one agent whose sole job is to manage the ciphers and the radio, and they don’t want anyone else besides that person to do any sending; their operators in Moscow quickly learned the characteristics of your ‘fist,’ as they call it, your particular style on the telegraph key, and they’d get suspicious if I or anyone but you was to do any of the sending for our network now. But I could. And I think—I’m certain—that, if I’d been working the radio a week ago, we wouldn’t have got the accelerated signal and the burned floor.”
Hale nodded nervously, not wanting to discuss that night. “And that’s why you quoted Job to me.”
“Marty killed hundreds of Comintern agents in Spain, on the pretext that they had Trotskyite sympathies. But I think he was trying to weed out agents who had gradually become members of a transcendent order, a category so subtle and secret that the agents themselves didn’t even know they were in it—that is, didn’t know that they were in it too. I think there are more than one of these higher orders, I think there are partisan divisions. That English agent that Marty killed had been driving around the airfield at Guadalajara in a jeep, taking photographs—but it seemed he was taking pictures away from the airfield! Guadalajara was a Moorish city once, Moslem—its old name was Wadi al-Hijarah, Arabic for River of Stones, and the campesinos say black basalt stones walk in those hills at night. The Englishman may not even have known he was involved in something bigger than the British secret service … though he did seem to mean something when he quoted the verse from Job.”