Declare

salvation, the real adventurous surrender to a supreme power. It is not just for the duration of this war—my life will always revolve around Moscow, and I will always take what Moscow gives me.”
    Hale nodded, and didn’t speak. Since abandoning the religious faith of his youth he had had no such sun to fix the orbits of his whirling philosophies, but loyalty to England was secure in the central orbit. “I—follow you,” he said miserably.
    He saw the profile of her head turn to look up and down the embankment, and then again, more quickly; and she sighed deeply. “You follow me,” she said in a new voice, flat and controlled. “I wonder what we both followed. We are in the Square du Vert-Galant, at the far end of the Île de la Cité. Look! This is where the old men fish, that is the Louvre across the river, we”—her voice was shaking— “must have walked right past the Palais de Justice, with you carrying an illegal radio! Past the police station!” Perhaps seeing his blank look, she said almost angrily, “We are on the other island now.”
    “We—” Hale glanced around, trying to identify landmarks by the moonlight.
    She was right. This was the spot where he had stood on a recent afternoon and imagined that this island was a ship pointed downriver, and that the island on which they lived was a barge being towed behind. Somehow the two of them must tonight have walked north instead of south from their house, and across the short metal bridge that connected the islands, and past Notre-Dame.
    The wind from off the river suddenly felt chillier, and he found that he had sat down in the damp grass. What had happened to him, when his mind had seemed to split into two? There had been another voice in his head, he remembered that much—
    “You are a trouble to me, Marcel,” Elena said remotely. “You make me unfaithful to my husband… for I believe I will not put this event into my report either.”

FIVE

    Paris, 1941
“How am I to fear the absolutely nonexistent?” said Hurree Babu, talking English to reassure himself. It is an awful thing still to dread the magic that you contemptuously investigate — to collect folklore for the Royal Society with a lively belief in all the Powers of Darkness.
—Rudyard Kipling, Kim
    They were alone in the windy moon-streaked darkness at the tip of the island—the furtive clochards must all have been clustered on the smaller island, or been frightened away by the approach of this particular semblance of “nothing right here” —and for a while during the hour or so before dawn Hale and Elena debated in whispers what to do with the radio.
    Hale, still angry that Centre had broadcast their address to agents using duplicated one-time pads, was for throwing the machine into the river; Elena objected that it might be one of only a few sets in Paris available to the Party, perhaps in fact the only set, though she did think that carrying it through the city streets was unconscionably risky; it looked like a typewriter case as much as it looked like a valise, and even a typewriter was a suspicious thing to be carrying around in occupied Paris. In the end they groped among the leafy chestnut trees overhanging the river until they found a branch with a three-pronged crotch above eye level, and with Elena standing on tip-toe to help they wedged the case there, hoping that daylight wouldn’t make it conspicuous. Hale was glad to get rid of it for now, and his step was a good deal springier as they walked away from the incriminating set.
    When dawn had fully claimed the sky and the sparrows were a chattering noise in the leafy branches, Hale and Elena took one last anxious glance at the tree in which the radio was hidden—they could see nothing suspicious from up on the path, and Elena said they shouldn’t approach that tree now that they could be seen from the south bank—and then they dutifully assumed the cover of a pair of early-rising lovers and strolled arm-in-arm across the Pont-Neuf to the south side of the river.
    “We need a fish,” she said when they had reached the broad pavement of the Quai de Conti on the southern shore. Seeing his blank look, she went on, “Anything obvious that one would call a fish—a real one, a toy, a painting of a fish.”
    “A recognition signal,” hazarded Hale, and she nodded impatiently.
    It took an hour. No shops were open yet, but after walking a hundred yards down the embankment, and approaching several of the old