Declare

danger of losing their place on the flimsy pages, or turning two pages at once, as this would put the signal out of correspondence with the receiver’s deciphering, and the message would be lost in gibberish. Oddly, the instructors sometimes called such nonsense results les parasites too.
    His photograph was taken at the end of the first week, and when he left the Norfolk farm he was given a Swiss passport in the name of LeClos, with his picture in it. He was driven in a closed van down to Gravesend, where it turned out that LeClos was listed as a passenger aboard a Portuguese merchantman bound for still-neutral Lisbon.
    At the dock he nearly bolted—he had not been abroad since the uncomprehending age of two, and now he was apparently expected to enter some Nazi-occupied country, pretending to be a Comintern spy. A British prison seemed infinitely preferable… until he remembered his haggard mother taking him to the ship-like rooftop building in Whitehall Court. These are the people who got us home from Cairo… And they’re the King’s men. They deserve our obedience. And he remembered his resolve at seeing the ruins around St. Paul’s…
    In the end, with the aid of some whisky provided by one of his sympathetic escorts, he had got aboard the ship.
    Immediately on his arrival in Lisbon, after having spent the four-day voyage mostly secluded in his cabin with a stack of ragged old Belgian newspapers, he was met on the dock by a Soviet agent carrying an orange and taken to a crowded hotel across town near the Sintra Airdrome; Hale surrendered the LeClos passport and was given a Vichy-government French passport in the name of one Philippe St.-Simon, who was a cork buyer for a Paris-based company called Simex and who had airline tickets to Paris on the next weekly flights of both Air France and Luft-Hansa. As St.-Simon, bewildered and disoriented and wearing a secondhand European business suit, Hale had wound up taking the Air France flight at midnight on the thirtieth of September—and she had met him in the chilly dawn of the first day of October in the terminal at Orly Airport.
    With no luggage besides a briefcase full of assorted cork washers and gaskets, and a thoroughly stamped passport that indicated a business traveler who had been checked and cleared many times before, Hale had been passed through Paris Customs without a second glance. His mouth had been dry and his ears ringing with the knowledge that he was all alone in an enemy-occupied foreign country now, and the loudspeaker announcements in flat, German-accented French had seemed to batter at him physically, but he had managed to keep a steady, distracted frown on his face and to answer the routine questions in relaxed French—though the interior of his head had been echoing with unvoiced, astonished British curses.
    When the thin girl caught his eye and nodded to him outside the Customs shed, he assumed that the Comintern was using school-girls as inconspicuous couriers, for she appeared to be no more than eighteen years old, if even that, and the loose gray skirt and blouse and black sweater could have been a convent school uniform. Until she spoke to him he thought she might be of Irish descent, with her auburn hair and blue eyes, but her French was animated with the full vowels and razory consonants of Spain, and when she pronounced St.-Simon it was with the back-of-the-teeth lisp of Castile.
    “Rien à déclarer, Monsieur St.-Simon?” she said with a tight smile as she took his elbow and led him through the crowded terminal.
    “Uh, non,” agreed Hale in a voice that was only now beginning to shake. He certainly had nothing to declare, and the infinitive verb had no significance to him beyond the concerns of Customs.
    She led him to a tiny right-hand-drive Citroen in the car park, and as soon as Hale climbed in on the left side and she pressed the starter, she said in her lively French, “If the police stop us, you are my brother, understand? We are both fair, it is believable. My name during this drive is Delphine St.-Simon. Say something quickly now, in French.”
    Nervously but smoothly, and with a sincerity that surprised him, Hale recited the first several lines of Ghelderode’s Death of Doctor Faust , in which the frightened old mage complains that everything in the modern world is so false that one can blunder into one’s own self in the darkness; Hale even managed to mimic her Castilian accent. “Is that good enough for our