"Centre seems to be abandoning us," Elena said, and she told him about their address having been broadcast insecurely, and described the disorder at the place of conspiracy in front of St.-Sulpice. Hale noted that she did not mention the weirdly accelerated signals and the burned floor of a week ago.
"Call it a testing," Cassagnac said, "or a distillation. Survival of a few, which will include an increased percentage of the most genuinely committed. Before he himself was executed, Yezhov of the NKVD used to say, 'Better that ten innocent people should die than that one traitor should go undetected.'"
"I met Theo Maly," Elena said in a cautious voice, "the Hungarian illegal agent, the ex-Catholic priest. He knew he was going to his death, when he obeyed the NKVD summons back to Moscow."
"You were a child, and Maly had great charm." Cassagnac sipped his brandy. "Charm, wit-intelligence, even-these are I think preliminary catalysts, like picture books for children: useful ladder rungs for awakening people, but not things for the people to cling to, once they've been awakened. I believe Russia has a...a primitive guardian angel, which must be denied at every turn; and those who persist in loving the angel, and merit her special assistance, must be killed-ideally after they have given their full measure of acceptable benefits to the Party, and not one benefit more."
"Is that the way?" asked Elena forlornly.
"The angel will always be there, my dear," Cassagnac said kindly, refilling her glass. "Five years ago Centre purged all the great illegals, the non-Russian Communists who could work outside the diplomatic channels and who in times of trouble could be disowned with no risk. They were educated Europeans, men and women who came to communism through literature and philosophy and the wounds of atheism, and they served their intercessory purpose, and then Yezhov killed them all lest their intercession proceed to become invocation; each morning the NKVD executioners were given their rifles and their vodka, and after they had shot their dozens and bulldozed them into pits dug by convict labor, they went back to the guardrooms and drank themselves insensible. The present generation in both the Razvedupr and the NKVD are correspondingly less attractive, to people like you and me, and even less tolerant of the guardian angel. But they will be summoned to the Lubyanka basement in their turn, and the ones who will follow them will perhaps be a little more to our liking; or else the ones who follow them will be."
"For three weeks we haven't been able to raise Centre on the radio," put in Hale, who wanted only concrete advice from this man. Somehow Hale couldn't help liking Cassagnac-the man's sad eyes and humorous mouth, and his rich voice, seemed vibrant with humane wisdom, but Hale thought his statements were damnable, and it hurt him to see Elena bravely trying to assimilate them.
Cassagnac turned his warm eyes on Hale. "They will respond, my friend, as soon as they are set up in the new provisional capital at Kuibyshev. Keep listening until they do. And in the meantime-" He laughed gently. "You two are not malleable playback material. Elena, you must suspend contact with all agents and couriers and cut-outs; if you do establish wireless contact with Centre, change your address as frequently as you can, using cheap gueules cassees. A month ago Centre sent a message to the head agent in Belgium, giving the addresses of three of the Brussels agents; that message will be deciphered by the Abwehr, and that network will inevitably be rolled up, and then played back against Moscow. It is almost certainly Centre's intention that this occur now, deliberately rather than accidentally. If you are not in a position to be used in this way, Centre will not ask it of you."
" Moscow," said Elena, and Hale remembered her saying, I will always take what Moscow gives me. "Moscow Centre wants this to happen, this 'playback'?"
"Does a fencer want to be disarmed or break his blade when he does the passata sotto, the low pass? It is the common event. Playback is the natural last stage of any spy network. At first a couple of agents are arrested, and their motive for cooperating with the Gestapo at this stage is simply fear of torture and death, and the hope that cooperation will buy them mercy; so they use the security passwords and signals to lure other agents into capture. And these newly captured agents follow the example of their duplicitous companions, with uncanny ease, and soon the whole network, though unchanged in its routines and codes, has switched polarity-the network goes on with its radio work uninterrupted, but now it is conducted by the Gestapo, intending to deceive Moscow and discover her secret urgencies. In the agents a mood of mocking cynicism quickly replaces, or evolves from, their previous principles and ideals. And for the agents who have switched sides, for the best of them, at least, the governing passion now is no longer ideology but a disattached, professional pride in the art itself. If they survive, such agents can be reclaimed at a later date, can still be useful, in limited ways."
"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 embusque 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?"