"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 ile St.-Louis, but it soon faded.>Things are not what they seem-trust me.
He nodded and followed her as she stepped away from the fountain.
They walked away north up the Rue des Canettes, in the first block passing several more people carrying fish emblems, and Elena didn't say anything until she paused below the Romanesque tower of a church on the north side of the Boulevard St.-Germain.
She turned an anxious glare on him then, but he knew she was thinking of all the fish in the square by St.-Sulpice. "Does Centre want their networks rolled up? They obviously gave the same place of conspiracy-even the same recognition sign!-to-it might be dozens of agents! Of what use is that? Is the watcher supposed to go down into the square with a notebook at noon, have them all line up and give their code names? It's even worse than reusing the one-time pads, and that was blatantly bad security. How alert would a Gestapo officer need to be to wonder about the...this fish festival at St.-Sulpice?"
Hale pushed away the memory of a voice from his childhood nightmare: O Fish, are you constant to the old covenant? "Can it be normal," he said, "for that many people to be at their place of conspiracy at the same time?"
In his head echoed the ritual answer to the dream's challenge: Return, and we return; keep faith, and so will we...
She blinked. "Good point. No. All those agents on the run at once! There must have been a big reverse, perhaps some centrally informed agent has joined sides with the Gestapo. There is not supposed to be any such agent, but after these last hours nothing would surprise me." She shook her head and resumed walking north, toward the river. "We don't dare try to get my automobile, but we've got to get our radio set back. This isn't Centre's fault, entirely."
Hale trotted up beside her and matched her pace; and when she glanced at him he raised his eyebrows inquiringly.
"Hitler didn't care about Spain," Elena said. "The Spanish Civil War was just a practice ground for him. Among other things, he learned there how to do the Blitzkrieg, and thus he was able to sweep through France much faster than anyone had allowed for. The networks used to send information as microphotographs carried by couriers from Berlin here to Paris, where the Soviet attache could send the information on to Moscow by the consulate wireless. But with the overnight fall of France that became impossible, and all the weight of intelligence-relaying fell onto the illegal networks. Arrangements had to be made in haste."
"And agents are expendable."
She nodded, apparently choosing to ignore his irony. "Individually; even networks, individually. But not-everything!"
A Great Dane in a gated courtyard barked at them as they hurried along the sidewalk, and for a moment Hale was surprised that the dog was barking in the same dialect as English dogs.
"Perhaps," Elena went on, nodding at her own thought, " Moscow has established a perfect hermetic network in Europe, with some sanctum sanctorum intelligence access, and can afford to let the Gestapo roll up all the others."
"Can afford to deliberately betray all the others," suggested Hale cautiously.
"It is realpolitik, Marcel," she said in an almost pleading tone. "You are one of us, you know that the outcome is what matters. One day the peace of worldwide communism will be here, will be real. Until that day-"
"We are expendable," he said again.
"Yes," she said emptily.
They crossed the river by the Pont des Arts just downstream of the islands, and in the embankment street below the Louvre they bought roasted chestnuts wrapped in newspaper. Elena told Hale not to start eating them until they had crossed back to the ile de la Cite and were back in the Square du Vert-Galant. "It is cover," she said. "Spies don't generally bring treats along when they're doing risky work."
The sun was above the crenellations of the Louvre castle, and Hale no longer wished for a sweater. Scents of fresh-baked bread warmed the morning breeze, and he hoped they would get a more substantial breakfast, and some wine, before long.
"Where would you watch from, to catch anyone retrieving the radio?" asked Hale quietly as they approached the spot where they had waited for dawn. "If you were the Gestapo."
"I would have a boat out in the river," she said; and then she peered between the trees at the water. A rowboat floated out there, apparently at anchor, and the man in the boat wore a big straw hat, which would be very noticeable if he were to wave it. Thoughtfully she cracked a chestnut and chewed the hot nut. "And I'd," she mumbled around it, "have men in ordinary clothes sitting close by."
Two burly men were sitting on a low wall playing chess only a few yards ahead of them, and Hale glanced at the board as he and Elena strolled past. Both red bishops were on black squares. Three other men were squatting on the grass farther away, passing a bottle of white wine back and forth. All of them looked younger and healthier than the fishermen and clochards Hale had seen so far.