Declare

fishermen who looked as if they had been trailing their lines in the river all night, they at last found one old fellow who had actually caught something, and they bought a thoroughly dead trout from him. Elena slung it in a handkerchief and carried it with the fish’s silvery head and tail hanging out at either side.
    Then at an aimless-seeming pace that led them several times back across their own trail, they walked through the drafty narrow streets of the St.-Germain district, and after an expensive but suspicion-deflecting petit déjeuner at Aux Deux Magots—rolls and ersatz tea served by waiters in black waistcoats and long white aprons—Elena led him south to the gray stone fountain in the square in front of the Church of St.-Sulpice, which she described as her place of conspiracy.
    “Ideally,” she told him quietly as they leaned on the side of the coping that was not wet from wind-flung spray, “the place of conspiracy would be in a neighboring country—probably Belgium, if the Germans had not occupied it, or Switzerland, if the Germans had given Centre time to plan thoroughly.” She sighed and brushed the disordered auburn hair back from her forehead, and Hale’s heart ached at how young she looked. “But this is probably secure enough. Someone is assigned to watch this fountain until noon every day, and when they see us, with the fish, they’ll refer the fact of us up the chain of command; we’ll get a room somewhere tonight, and then come back here again tomorrow. And then, or the day after, or the day after that, a return message will have been sent back down the chain, and someone will approach us with instructions.”
    “Tomorrow’s the first of November. Can you still meet the courier who’ll have our pay?”
    “Oh, certainly, that’s in the afternoon. And I have to, don’t I? Anyway, I don’t see any reason to think the courier would be compromised.”
    Hale nodded and squinted curiously around at the Parisians who were beginning to populate the slantingly sunlit square. On the Îsle St.-Louis he had generally slept until noon, and made lunch of whatever bread and cheese and wine Elena had bought on the black market the day before; she would return from her clandestine meetings late in the afternoon, and after a shared glass or two of wine Hale would begin encoding the material she had brought home. Aside from their dinners at Quasimodo and occasional furtive walks to glance at the gargoyles and flying buttresses and ranked saints of Notre-Dame, he had not seen much of Paris at all.
    And he was surprised now by all the bicycles. He had seen bicycles in the traffic jam at the Porte de Gentilly and on the island boulevards, but in this square and the adjoining streets of St.-Germain he saw people riding in the perambulator baskets of bicycle rickshaws, and groups of businessmen in suits and ties pedaling soberly across the cobblestones, and elegant ladies whose wide skirts were clearly designed to project out away from spokes and sprockets.
    One man’s bicycle had a green kite or paper flag rattling on an upright pole behind the seat—and Hale realized that it was a paper fish, ribbed with wooden dowels. The man was just riding in a big circle around the fountain.
    “There’s a fish,” Hale said softly to Elena.
    “I see it,” she said—but she was looking back toward the pillars at the church entrance. Hale followed her gaze and saw on the steps a woman whose broad skirt had a big red-flannel sunfish stitched onto it.
    They both saw the next one, a portly little man only a dozen steps away, carrying a dead trout like Elena’s slung in a newspaper.
    “Is it a coincidence?” whispered Hale.
    The little man halted to stare at the fish Elena was carrying, and then he looked up at her and Hale with an expression of alarm.
    Elena slid her hand behind her and dropped the trout and handkerchief into the fountain water. She stood up away from the coping and said softly to Hale, “Bless me!”
    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