Declare

can never divest himself of that status. He was later sent to run agents in England, and then recalled to Moscow.”
    Her voice was sad. Hale knew that she hated Catholic priests, and he had gathered that a recall to Moscow by Centre was often a summons to execution; but he couldn’t tell which of these facts it was, if indeed it was either of them, that grieved her.
    “You are from Palestine,” she went on, “and you had the sending difficulties people from there often have, and then all unaided you found out the sending rhythms that placate—that overcome those difficulties and ultimately make for the best DX sending of all. They can’t be taught—one needs to discover them unaided, from one’s own heartbeat.”
    DX meant long-distance, and Hale nodded uncertainly. “Poor Maly made a study of those rhythms,” Elena went on as she stared out through the glass at the empty street, “with the idea of achieving some sort of immortality: that is, a way to evade God’s judgment. He did not, I think, achieve that—in the end I think he chose not to avail himself of it.”
    “I—I was born and baptized in Palestine,” said Hale, “but I left there well before I was two years old. I really don’t think this—”
    She waved him to silence. “We will be doing an imitation as we walk,” she said. “We will walk one behind the other down the gutter in the center of the street, our footsteps combining into one of these rhythms, like two hands on the keys of a piano; later I will show you how a single person walking can do this nearly as well. You will pick it up quickly, I think. The sound of our footsteps will be likely to… confuse anyone who hears it and tries to locate us; they will look the wrong way, or imagine that it is a noise from the sky like an airplane, or even forget that they had looked for something.”
    Hypnosis again, he thought defensively; or plain superstition.
    “We will be doing an imitation of ‘nothing right here,’ you see?” she went on. “If the street were a painting, we would be a semblance of a blank shadowed spot. I can walk to the Quai d’Or-leans stairs and the riverbank without looking up from my feet, and you too must keep your eyes downcast, watching nothing but my feet ahead of you. Do you understand? Above all you must not look up into the sky.”
    Hale was uncomfortably reminded of his childhood end-of-the year dreams—nightmares—and he realized that his breathing had become rapid and shallow. “Whatever you say,” he told her gruffly.
    “We go,” she said, pulling open the door. Cold air sharp with the sea smell of the river fluffed Hale’s hair and chilled his damp chest between the buttons of his shirt. “Watch my feet,” she said as she stepped out onto the sidewalk, “and complement my pace.”
    They hurried out across the dark cobblestones to the sunken cement-lined gutter that ran down the middle of the Rue le Regrattier, and as she started south, toward the quai, Hale was following at her heels, the heavy radio case swinging beside his right knee. He was acutely aware of how vulnerable he was to arrest, carrying an illicit short-wave set and a bundle of one-time pads.
    The heels and toes of her shoes were tapping out a hesitant, skipping beat that echoed between the close housefronts and batted away into the open sky above, as if dancing around some absent or inaudible bass line, and with the practice he had got from playing the telegraph key he quickly found himself stepping along in a choppy rhythm that made arabesques around her pace but still avoided placing a toe-tap squarely on the implicit metronomic thudding that he almost imagined he could hear.
    “Good,” she said softly over her shoulder. “You were born to this.”
    “Oh, thanks—very much,” he said, breathing and speaking only sketchily, from the very tops of his lungs. The dark sky behind his lowered head seemed ponderous with momentum.
    Born to this , he thought; had childhood dreams about this, nightmares. He was too tense and exhausted to sustain long thoughts, and these phrases echoed loudly inside his head. Born to these nightmares. Born in Palestine, found out the rhythms that placate. And then simply the phrase Born to this was pounding over and over again in his thoughts, weaving itself into his compulsively rhythmic pace.
    Elena had mentioned two hands on a piano keyboard. Hale’s mind now separated into two attentions, as if a pianist’s hands had diverged to